From: Mark Crosby (crosby_m@rocketmail.com)
Date: Tue Sep 02 1997 - 08:36:25 MDT
Eric Watt Forste wrote:
<I do know there was at least one materialist school of philosophy
within early Indian Buddhism, but I've forgotten the name.>
I am sure others, including you are MUCH more knowledgeable of
Buddhist philosophy than me. But, I was skimming through a book by
Amit Goswami, _The Self Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the
Material World_ (which tries to promote 'idealism' over
'materialism'), and he mentions the Buddhist parable of King Malinda
(a 'material monist'), who claims "there is no self-nature in objects
apart from the ultimate reductive components that make them up"
(Goswami's description), who watches the monk Nagasena (a 'monistic
idealist') disassemble his chariot, asking, as he does, where the
chariot is.
That the chariot disappears when taken apart is perhaps supposed to be
a parable of eliminative materialism. But, this is destruction rather
than description so I'm not sure what the point is.
Mark Crosby
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