Friday, May 15, 2020

I'm getting a Buddhist headache

Inspired by my last post, referencing animal suffering, I googled the question "what does Buddhist say about animal suffering?" which led to this lengthy post at the ABC Religion and Ethics website:  Buddhism and moral status of animals. 

It has given me the urge to make a few comments about this religion:

*  it annoys me how I don't enough even know how to pronounce many of the words for the different branches of the religion and some of the concepts, as this makes it harder for my tiny brain to remember after anything other than the shortest reading break what many of the different terms mean.   

*  I know it is indisputable that Christianity has undergone a massive amount of splintering over interpretation of it foundational scriptures and theology, but I think Buddhism, with the added complication of undergoing a large amount of syncretism as it moved into different regions, is even worse. 

*  Moral reasoning within the Christian faith - or any faith really - is simplified somewhat by having the concept of an ongoing entity (a discrete human soul, or resurrected body) that is going to be around to carry the consequences of its actions.   The arguments within Buddhism over moral action are undoubtedly more complicated by the "no self" idea.  Take these paragraphs  from the above article, for example:
Most agree, however, that the Buddha denies that there is an essential self that persists through time and that underlies all our changing physical and psychological properties. This idea might lend support to the following argument: Egoistic self-interest presupposes that there is a self whose interests should be privileged over others with respect to moral consideration. This presupposition is mistaken; there is no self that could be privileged in this way. Psychological states exist but no selves who own those states. If suffering should be removed, given some interest, then all sufferings should be removed, given some interest. Killing and harming animals causes them to suffer. Animals have an interest not to suffer. So, we should not kill or harm animals.

Versions of the no-self equality argument can be found throughout the Indian Buddhist philosophical tradition. A famous version appears in Chapter 8 of Śāntideva's Bodhicaryāvatāra. It is susceptible to objection, however. One might, for instance, challenge the premise that psychological states exist but no selves who own those states. Paul Williams argues that it does not make sense to speak of free-floating concerns, cares and sufferings without a subject undergoing those states. This is a subtle issue. The premise is making a metaphysical claim ― there is no ontological entity, self, that stands in an ownership relation to psychological events. This is different to the phenomenological claim that psychological events, ordinarily and constitutively, involve the subjective experiencing of their own content. Both claims as well as their consistency are accepted by leading proponents of Yogācāra and Yogācāra-Svātantrika-Madhyamaka Buddhism.
 It has the lot - long, unfamiliar words which won't stick in my memory easily; metaphysics which are complicated and not intuitive;  conflict between different schools of thought. 

As I say, it gives me a bit of a headache, really...

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