From a very old undergrad text I own, The Buddhist Religion: A Historical Introduction, we get the following:
In Gautama's view the materialists, who say that there is no afterlife and that there is no fruition of past deeds, are as wrong as the dualists, who hold that there is a soul separate from the body. What determines one's rebirth, though, is not sacrifice or mere knowledge, but the quality of one's entire life.
This passage seems partially to confirm my suspicion that a Buddhist probably wouldn't consider the whole mind/body debate all that relevant. When your focus is on the here and now, the living of life is more important than abstruse philosophical speculations about what it is to live.
(But that's not going to stop me from blundering drunkenly into the thickets of philosophy and leaving some piss and vomit there, now and again.)
_
No comments:
Post a Comment
READ THIS BEFORE COMMENTING!
All comments are subject to approval before they are published, so they will not appear immediately. Comments should be civil, relevant, and substantive. Anonymous comments are not allowed and will be unceremoniously deleted. For more on my comments policy, please see this entry on my other blog.
AND A NEW RULE (per this post): comments critical of Trump's lying must include criticism of Biden's or Kamala's or some prominent leftie's lying on a one-for-one basis! Failure to be balanced means your comment will not be published.