DiscussWorldIssues - Socio-Economic Religion and Political Uncensored Debate - View Single Post

**RotsLoado** · 07-16-2011, 10:00 PM

Right.... and that's why there's so much twaddle and add-on surrounding the Buddha's teachings.

Perhaps so from a modern "Protestant Buddhist" perspective. But myth, parable and poetry are also found in the Pali suttas, not to mention an elaborate cosmology which defies literal interpretation. The historical Buddha apparently was willing to use the full palette of human discourse -- rational and imaginative, literal and metaphorical, philosophical and religious -- to convey the teachings.

As Rupert Gethin and others have suggested:

The overall paucity of scholarly materials dealing with Buddhist cosmology would seem to reflect a reluctance on the part of modern scholarship to treat this dimension of Buddhist thought as having any serious bearing on those fundamental Buddhist teachings with which we are so familiar: the four noble truths, the eightfold path, no-self, dependent arising, and so on. The effect of this is to divorce the bare doctrinal formulations of Buddhist thought from a traditional mythic context. This can result in serious distortions: the picture that has sometimes been painted of especially early Buddhism and Theravada Buddhism is somewhat one-dimensional and flat.

However, the principle that the study of the imagery employed in early Buddhist texts is a useful way of deepening our understanding of the more overtly conceptual teachings of the Nikayas has already been used to good purpose by Steven Collins in his discussion of house imagery, vegetation imagery, and water imagery in the context of the Nikayas' presentation of the teaching of "no-self."(7) Advocating an approach not dissimilar to Collins's, Stanley Tambiah has commented that the traditional Buddhist cosmological scheme "says figuratively and in terms of metaphorical images the same kind of thing which is stated in abstract terms in the doctrine. The basic doctrinal concepts of Buddhism . . . which are alleged to explain man's predicament and to direct his religious action, are also embedded in the cosmology (and its associated pantheon)"...

To ignore the mythic portions of ancient Buddhist texts is to fail in a significant way to enter into their thought-world.

07-16-2011, 10:00 PM	#9
RotsLoado Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 634 Senior Member	Right.... and that's why there's so much twaddle and add-on surrounding the Buddha's teachings. Perhaps so from a modern "Protestant Buddhist" perspective. But myth, parable and poetry are also found in the Pali suttas, not to mention an elaborate cosmology which defies literal interpretation. The historical Buddha apparently was willing to use the full palette of human discourse -- rational and imaginative, literal and metaphorical, philosophical and religious -- to convey the teachings. As Rupert Gethin and others have suggested: The overall paucity of scholarly materials dealing with Buddhist cosmology would seem to reflect a reluctance on the part of modern scholarship to treat this dimension of Buddhist thought as having any serious bearing on those fundamental Buddhist teachings with which we are so familiar: the four noble truths, the eightfold path, no-self, dependent arising, and so on. The effect of this is to divorce the bare doctrinal formulations of Buddhist thought from a traditional mythic context. This can result in serious distortions: the picture that has sometimes been painted of especially early Buddhism and Theravada Buddhism is somewhat one-dimensional and flat. However, the principle that the study of the imagery employed in early Buddhist texts is a useful way of deepening our understanding of the more overtly conceptual teachings of the Nikayas has already been used to good purpose by Steven Collins in his discussion of house imagery, vegetation imagery, and water imagery in the context of the Nikayas' presentation of the teaching of "no-self."(7) Advocating an approach not dissimilar to Collins's, Stanley Tambiah has commented that the traditional Buddhist cosmological scheme "says figuratively and in terms of metaphorical images the same kind of thing which is stated in abstract terms in the doctrine. The basic doctrinal concepts of Buddhism . . . which are alleged to explain man's predicament and to direct his religious action, are also embedded in the cosmology (and its associated pantheon)"... To ignore the mythic portions of ancient Buddhist texts is to fail in a significant way to enter into their thought-world.
	Quote