Jul 31 2008
“Imagining Karma”, Part II–Talking Points
- I was struck by G.O.’s remarks in on the opacity of the circumstances of the composition of the Vedas and Upanishads, and the origins of Buddhism. I found the scenario of ignorance that he presents remarkably similar to the inscrutability of ancient Hebrew religion and the origins of Christianity. To what extent is this a necessary feature of vigorously evangelizing religions like Buddhism and Christianity? Do they necessarily devour and bury their early contemporaries? (Or is the parallel ignorance a function of similar lapses of time?)
- Aren’t there alternatives to the “Knowledge is power” explanation G.O. gives on p. 86? Could one not also explain the claim of the Ksatriya sages as meaning that their esoteric superiority resulted in their (re)birth into positions of rulership? (I think so.)
- G.O. uses the character of “Jesus” as a defining instance of the “ethical prophet” as contrasted with the “ethical ascetic.” In his The Christian Myth (2003), however, Burton Mack outlines “The Case for a Cynic-like Jesus,” in which the Jesus revered by some early Christians (as documented in Q1 and the pre-Markan Jesus chreiai and pronouncement stories) looks more like a Cynic sage, and thus an “ethical ascetic.” Is it possible that (in some cases, at least) the “ethical prophet” may arise from a transformation of an “ethical ascetic” figure, or vice versa? (I consider it feasible enough to ask.) Could this question give rise to a cross-cultural modeling enterprise likethe one in Imagining Karma? (It could, if the evidence were there.)
- G.O. asserts that celibacy creates a pathologized religious imagination working out its fantasies in sadistic hells, which subsequently serve as models for penal systems in this world (172-173). He gives a detailed and convincing Buddhist example, but with his mention of “the various Inquisitions,” is he perhaps not thinking more of Christianity? (Looks like it.)
- How does the term “eschatology” come to function in the sense that G.O. uses it? To what extent is G.O. (especially at the bottom of p. 260) engaging an idea of “Cosmos” in the sense presented in Eliade’s Myth of the Eternal Return. (I can’t quite tell.)
- G.O. several times says that Plato’s scheme has “people reborn with much the same character they had in previous existences,” (e.g. 274) but is this correct? (It seems wrong to me. In the Myth of Er, the lot-takers have been conditioned by their heavenly or hellish travels, so that the heaven-sent tend to be more foolish than before, and the hell-born to be wiser.)
- G.O. contrasts the epistemic shifts in religion to paradigm change in the physical sciences (per Thomas Kuhn). Is this a valid or useful distinction? (Over against his Newtonian/Einsteinian physics example, is Ptolemaic astronomy useful to understand modern astronomy? Is phlogiston chemistry “significant for understanding” modern chemistry? And what about the “paradigmatic” change of the original Druze community?)
- Beyond Good and Evil (Kaufmann trans.), aphorism 20:
“That individual philosophical concepts are not anything capricious or autonomously evolving, but grow up in connection and relationship with each other…keep filling in a definite fundamental scheme of possible philosophies. [Quoted by G.O. 359-360] Under an invisible spell, they always revolve once more in the same orbit; however independent of each other they may feel themselves with their critical or systematic wills, something within them leads them, something impels them in a definite order, one after the other—to wit, the innate systematic structure and relationship of their concepts. Their thinking is, in fact, far less a discovery than a recognition, a remembering, a return and a homecoming to a remote, primordial, and inclusive household of the soul, out of which thtose concepts grew originally: philosophizing is to this extent a kind of atavism of the highest order.
The strange family resemblance of all Indian, Greek, and German philosophizing is explained easily enough … [Quoted further by G.O. 353].” Now what about Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence”? What about Eliade again?
