“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Saturday, February 4, 2012

Buddhism and Kant

Someone wrote me insisting that what some translate as "transcendental" was precisely Kantian.

Well maybe for Schopenhauer, in his darkly inverted way--we can't get our paws on the will that structures the world.

But "transcendent" is a translation of paramita. Paramita means "reaching the other shore," the other shore being enlightenment. You can reach it. It's not transcendental. It has empirical, even physical qualities.

Paramita means beyond ego, but not beyond altogether.



1 comment:

Petrus said...

Bravo. That's more than enough work for one day! Now hows about… if we can only ditch that old persistent nugget "supernatural" once and for all… what could they have possibly been thinking with that one? And: could it survive any contextual translation (hope not)…

Consider the "super": If everything has its own nature -- and especially regardless of whether that would even show up on our radar -- then what can possibly transcend nature, or suchness… and would that be taking it with itself or beyond itself?

At this point, enter enlightening superhero TATHAGATA -- who proclaims: "Suchness only" (which, admittedly, he does perhaps to qualify Dogen's two cents, "Arising only"… (Now, enough from me.)