[MD] Nagasena & King Milinda - part 3

[118]

Well Marsha,
Buddha followed his interest to get where he got.  The author is putting the chariot before the horse.  It is how one gets there, not what it is.  Perhaps this is what he is trying to do; hard to tell from the quote.  The overall contex can not be discerned.

We create symbols because that is what we do.  A tree creates apples.  This serves most people.  However, if one is suffering, there are plenty of alternatives, Buddhism being one, IMO.

Sent laboriously from an iPhone,
Mark

On Dec 25, 2011, at 9:30 AM, MarshaV <valkyr at att.net> wrote:

> 
> At this point. You might be thinking, 'Well, of course.  We only have a single word for the parts when they are put together in a way that serves our interests.  This is no doubt why Nagasena calls the word 'chariot' a convenient designator.  Because it's convenient for us to have a way to designate the parts when they're assembled in that way.  That configuration is one we're likely to encounter frequently (if we live in a society that uses chariots).  And it's one way we're likely to want to be able to refer to.  It's much easier to tell your servant to fetch a chariot than to ask that they bring a rim, attached to some spokes attached to a felly attached ...  By contrast it's much less likely that we'll ever need to refer to the set of parts when it's arranged in the strewn-across-the-battlefield way.  And there are only so many words we can use before our brains begin to clog up.  If we had to learn a different word for every possible arrangement of those parts our minds 
> would melt.  So we only have a single word in the case that serves our convenience.  This all makes good sense.  But why is it supposed to show that the chariot isn't really real?
> 
> The answer is that our ontological attitude should not be dictated by our interests.  Common sense says that the chariot is a real thing.  Suppose we simply followed common sense.  We would then be thinking of the chariot as one thing, but the same parts arranged in a different way as many things, because it was more convenient for us to think that way.  We would be letting our interests dictate what we take to be reality to be like, and we know where that can lead.  Assessing your finances that way can lead to disaster.  This is why strictly speaking the chariot is not a real thing.  It is just what Abhidharma will call 'conceptual fiction': something not ultimately real that is nonetheless accepted as real by common sense because of a convenient designator.  Here are some other examples of conceptual fictions: a house, a lute, an army, a city, a tree, a forrest and a column of ants.  The list could be extended indefinitely.  Our common-sense ontology is full of things that 
> we think are real, but are also wholes made up of parts.  The early Buddhists view is strictly speaking none of these things is really real.
> 
> Notice, though, that the word 'chariot' is not a 'mere empty sound'.  Nagasena sees a difference between that status and a word's being a convenient designator.  To call a word a mere empty sound is to say it has no meaning.  And in this context that would mean that there is nothing that it refers to.  So if chariots are not really real, why isn't the word 'chariot' a mere empty sound?  We already gave the answer, but it is worth repeating and elaborating on.  'Chariot' does refer to something, but not to what it appears to refer to.  Its reference is misleading, for it seems to be the name of a single thing, a chariot, and there really is no such thing.  It is, though, a useful way of talking about a set of parts when arranged in a certain way.  So when we use the word correctly, there is something in the world that we are talking about.  This is different from the case of a word that refers to nothing whatever, such as 'sky-flower' or 'son of a barren woman'.  So there is n
> othing that the word is a name of.  Using the word 'chariot' might help us get what we want, but 'son of a barren woman' never will.  The chariot might be a fiction, but it isn't an utter fiction, like the son of a barren woman.  Instead it's a useful fiction.  
> 
> In this respect the chariot is like the average college student.  Just looking at the form of the expression 'the average college student', we might be misled into thinking that it refers to a flesh-and-blood person.  It does not.  There is no such person as the average college student.  So it doesn't make sense to ask what school they go to, what their major is, or who their parents are.  But this does not make the concept useless.  For there are facts that back up what is said about the average college student, facts about all the flesh-and-blood college students.  Those facts are very complex, for they involve details about the lives of many people.  So for certain purposes it is useful to be able to express them in simplified form.  This is just what happens when statisticians come up with the facts about the average college student.  The average college student is a fiction, but a useful one.  The concept helps fulfill certain interests, like those of college loan office
> rs and credit card companies.  And the same goes for the chariot, but not for the son of a barren woman.  
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> Plain laboriously type...  
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