Essaying Out of the Thickets

Gethin

2 min read

The Foundations of Buddhism, on Archive here.

110, faith

The first indexed entry about faith seems to be describing ‘affection’ or ‘religious emotion’ ( pema) rather than the ‘reasoned conviction’ of saddhā.

Then going into page 111 he describes Melford Spiro’s anthropological observations of post-war Burmese Buddhism:

  • i) apotropaic;
  • ii) kammatic; and
  • iii) nibbānic,

where

  • i) is about mundane/daily ‘protective’ practices and the improvement of immediate worldly conditions;
  • ii) is about making merit to secure a better rebirth1; and
  • iii) practice aimed directly at nibbāna.

Spiro said

  • i) magic, amulates, chanting;
  • ii) dāna and sīla (with bhāvana noteably absent from the classic bases of merit); and
  • iii) meditation (there’s the bhāvana!)

126 - 127

‘Cosmology, folk religion, and modern science’

The psychological vs. literal interpretation of Buddhist cosmology, which is ‘old and to be regarded as intrinsic to the system’, not mere apologetics of Buddhist Modernism ‘to render a primitive, pre-modern understanding of the world palatable to contemporary tastes’.

This relates to metaphysics because there can be “different conceptions of the nature of “reality”’, reality being as subjective as it is objective, allowing both a ‘psychological and symbolic interpretation to coexist with a literal interpretation’.

165, faith in dependent liberation

‘The role of faith’

a section that refers to faith in the context of ‘the positive sequence of dependent arising’ dependent-liberation

166

description of Western discomfort around ‘religious faith and its devotional and ritual expression’.

167

Conze’s etymology of sraddhā makes/finds a connection with cor, ‘the heart’, and suggests a less-intellectual preoccupation when it comes to choosing to accept an idea. faith as ‘cognitive’/‘affective’

183

“Cosmology” (p.183), but wouldn’t the realms collapse along with the world contraction?

  • research whether this is true

Footnotes

  1. cf. Sri Lanka and the view that the sasana is old so we just need to study and memorise the scriptures to make merit ↩

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