Re: Merging WST and complexity science

In a message dated 6/16/2003 12:06:09 AM Eastern Daylight Time, gunarat@mnstate.edu writes:

> At 11:55 PM 6/11/2003 -0400, Andre Gunder Frank wrote:
>
> > This is a materialist analysis of a materialist world. Where the Buddhist
> > concenpts mentioned in the questiin come in, I do not know, but would be
> > glad to be enlightened. Buddhism is materialist also, however.
> >
> > gunder frank 
>
> The view that Buddhism is materialist is not correct.  Please read the
> attachment for elaboraion.


The issue of materialism in Indian religion is better illuminated by considering the history of so-called Samkhya, and that in the context of the Lokayata tradition in Indian philosophy which was almost written out of existence by the great Hindu reaction against Buddhists. 
Materialism in the modern sense, and in the Samkhya sense are not really compatible. 
But the perspective of Buddhism, if one stops to reflect, must be 'materialist' in the sense that liberation must be 'from phenomenological existence', which implies that everything, religion included, must be part of the 'material'  phenomenological existence. 
The problem is that later thinkers rewrote Samkhya materialism as an idealism or a dualism, etc, etc, missing the point of the earlier tradition visible in the Jain tradition, a true evolutionary psychology. The whole game is a very confused history, but the later Hinduism hopelessly confuses the issue, and you see the remnants of Saivism, goddess religion, and the whole porridge even in current books on such people as Patanjali. We see everything through the lenses of the revisionist Hinduism of the Middle Ages where the influence of Islam is also very strong, if invisible, in the way that monotheism is grafted onto the old layers. 
Taken rightly a judicious 'materialist Samkhya' can deliver thinking from Cartesian confusions which beset Westerners, and beset 'materialist' secularists most of all, at the point where their own psyche is some kind of supernatural fiction--complete alienation from the normal psychology known anciently to man. 

John Landon
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World History and the Eonic Effect
http://eonix.8m.com
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