[MD] Some historical perspective

[Matt Kundert]

John said:

I've never heard or considered such a thing before Ron. 

VERY interesting.



Thank you for your courage in once again braving such 

extreme social disapproval in the interest of sharing truth.



Matt:

Wait, are you making a joke about Ron's very odd denial 

of telling people the authority he's quoting?



OH, no, I'm sorry, it was about the East/West semiosis 

thing.  



Whatever flak Ron was talking about, I imagine was 

caused by people with a larger investment in the idea 

that there are two cultures called "East" and "West." 
The 

funny thing, of course, is that this idea was largely 

created by Western colonialists.  But now, in our 

latter-day post-colonial clean-up, the idea is working in 

reverse, as some people (particularly some around here) 

have a large investment in the counter-idea that the 

East--as distinctive entity--can _clean up_ the West and 

its horrible, horrible horribleness.  I don't think this 

counter-idea is in Pirsig, but my guess is that many people 

attracted to him have this investment, despite the ironic 

fact that the general idea is for a rapprochement between 

the two, a bridging, but when you talk about how they 

were never really as split as we had made up, that gets 

frowns.



But why should we think, given the proximity of the 

ancient civilizations of and surrounding the Fertile 

Crescent, that there wasn't a _lot_ of exchange going on?



I imagine the change in Western attitudes was something 

like this: the re-rise of Greek thought in Europe coincided 

with their ascension to dominion over the seas and global 

expansion--this could be symbolized in the recovery of 

"Western" thought from the "Moorish infidels" who'd 

captured it (and kept it in great shape); as colonialism 

expanded and solidified Crusader-like attitudes that 

began with the break between the Eastern (Greek) 

Orthodox church and the (Western) Roman Catholic, so 

did the notion that what the West has was rooted in 

classical Greece--civilization; the break in the authority of 

the Catholic Church precipitated by the Reformation led 

to the burgeoning of atheistical ideas in the 

"Enlightenment," like d'Holbach and Reimarus, and these 

led eventually to the onslaught signified by the Tubingen 

School and the search for the "historical Jesus" of the 

19th century; the break in religious dogma and the rise 

of history led to historical re-considerations, which at first 

attempted to stem the tide attempting to overtake the 

cool, blue reason of Greek rationalism by attributing it's 

icky religious parts, not to Paganism anymore (which had lost its 

thrust) but to the East (witness Eduard Zeller's massively 

influential Outlines of the History of Greek 

Philosophy--Orphism was an Eastern contamination of 

pure Hellenism); but the damage was done, and once 

you countenance transference, the doors are open for 

later generations with less and less baggage attached to 

the West being the West, and the East the East, led by 

the anthropological infestation of the classics; until we get 

to now, when _the_ living authority on Greek Religion, 

Walter Burkert, writes a book called The Orientalizing 

Revolution, what he calls an amateur attempt (by a 

Hellenist working outside his field) to show how the Near 

East influenced Hellenism; in fact, the book was originally 

published in 1984, and by '92 Burkert was writing that the 

thesis wasn't as provocative as it once was, as he says

"the classics" as a separate discipline was beginning to 

break up.



Would I be surprised if Eastern religions contained 

Western influence?  No, though I haven't read anything 

on the subject.  But my impression is that the cultural 

semiosis was pretty heavy back then, and the only 

reason we think the West, as distinctive, had more 

influence over the East than vice versa is because 

Alexander was the winner of the war of warriors.



Matt



p.s.  I might as well log my thoughts about Wikipedia here 

as well: while wikipedia might be a wonderful tool that 

isn't often "wrong," it has the same deficiency as any 

encyclopedia/dictionary--it might be "scholastically right," 

but it is thoroughly un-intellectual.  You might be able to 

corroborate the above pieces of my story with wikipedia, 

the individual facts laced together (and even correct some 

of them), but stories like the above do not come out of 

wikipedia--it comes from reading the facts woven together 

by other intellectuals and seeing alternate ways of weaving 

them.



Wikipedia might be great, but it can't replace the intellectual.

  

> Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:45:46 -0700
> From: ridgecoyote at gmail.com
> To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
> Subject: Re: [MD] Some historical perspective
> 
> I've never heard or considered such a thing before Ron.  VERY interesting.
> 
> Thank you for your courage in once again braving such extreme social
> disapproval in the interest of sharing truth.
> 
> You give me something to think and discuss today with Garth the chinese
> historian and mandarin speaker...
> 
> Garth... what a card.  His favorite joke is to go into a chinese restaurant
> and say something in chinese and when the waitress's eyes pop out of her
> head she always say, "you speak chinese!"  His reply, (in chinese) "I don't
> speak Chinese", always cracks 'em up.
> 
> 
> 
> On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 6:59 AM, X Acto <xacto at rocketmail.com> wrote:
> 
> >
> > 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.
> >
 		 	   		  
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