[MD] Some historical perspective

[X Acto]

John:
I'd just like to chime in with Ian on this with an observation of my own in
my bare reading of the Chinese ancients who started the whole Zen thing in
the first place...

What I found therein, were powerful arguments AGAINST SOM.  The idea that
reality is composed of subject and object is held forth for examination and
refuted, in deep and meaningfully poetical ways.  So how can anybody think
that this objectivism that they railed against arose with Plato?

In fact, they were concurrent with Plato in making this realization and
wrestling with it, which seems to me evidence of a completely different
sort, that intellectual evolution takes place in some fashion independently
of "individual" societies.

But that's probably a whole 'nother thread... and honestly, how much can a
guy put on his plate from the buffet table?


Ron:
John, I got a raft of shit for mentioning this before,
but, here I go again...

Mahayana Buddhism is a cultural syncretism between Hellenistic culture and Buddhism.

"developed between the 4th century BCE and the 5th century CE 
in the area covered by modern Afghanistan, Pakistan and north-
western border regions of modern India namely western portions 
of Jammu and Kashmir. It was a cultural consequence of a long 
chain of interactions begun by Greek forays into India from the 
time of Alexander the Great, carried further by the establishment 
of Indo-Greek rule in the area for some centuries, and extended 
during flourishing of the Hellenized empire of the Kushans"
-wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhism

I think the Chan or "zen" as they are known in Nippon,
were influenced by Greek philosophy. I believe, that
western philosphical questions did not hold as much
power simply because  Chinese is a pictographic
language and does not lend to the power of abstractions
that a semetic language structure seems to do.

however, I do think that certain paradoxes arise in complex languages
by virtue of the reification of symbol for symbol as, the painting of a pipe
is not a pipe.




On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 12:28 AM, Ian Glendinning <ian.glendinning at gmail.com
> wrote:

> Bo said
> However, what SOM means by "intellect" is totally different by what
> the MOQ means.
>
> Ian says,
> Hopefully, otherwise we're all wasting our time.
>
> Good to see some debunking of the convenient, but simplistic,
> apocryphal, myth that the Greeks invented SOMism. Clearly the
> "take-up" of Plato and Aristotle led to SOMism being formalised and
> embedded in our received wisdom, but reality is more complicated than
> that. Such details matters to the narrative if not to "what MOQism
> is". Convenient myths have their uses.
>
> Regards
> Ian
>
> On Sun, Oct 25, 2009 at 3:47 PM,  <skutvik at online.no> wrote:
> > Hi Matt
> >
> > 24 Oct.
> >
> > Dr. Squonk I presume:
> Moq_Discuss mailing list
> Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
> http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
> Archives:
> http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
> http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
>
Moq_Discuss mailing list
Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
Archives:
http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/