Re: Son of a Gun
Posted by:
Scott Connors (IP Logged)
Date: 10 December, 2005 08:28PM
Kyberean Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Scott:
>
> Aside from Haas's own beliefs, and a possible
> tendency to project them onto CAS, do you have any
> particular reason to doubt Haas's account? I,
> myself, never accepted Haas's bald assumption that
> CAS "became a Buddhist", but that CAS would find
> Zen itself to be of interest and inspiration,
> comes as no surprise, at all.
I wouldn't say that I "doubt" Haas's account, in the sense that it was fabricated or in any sense fraudulent or deceitful. As any criminal investigator will tell you, eyewitness evidence is the least reliable type of evidence because of the mind's tendency to find patterns and meanings in what might otherwise be random clusters of data. All that I mean is that I don't read more into what any associate of CAS tells me than is actually there, which is that CAS had some awareness of Zen and found it not anathemical to his own views. Instead of saying that CAS "became a Buddhist," I'd say that he might have been a "fellow traveller."
> I would add parenthetically that there is really
> no dogma attached to Zen whatsoever, aside,
> perhaps, from that of those who yoke it to rigid
> Buddhist observations and suchlike. What makes Zen
> unique is that in its essence it rejects all
> dogma, dualism, opposites, and concepts, and thus
> it seems to me perfectly congruent with CAS's own
> thought and temperament.
The extent that any belief system possesses a recognizable dogma is inversely proportionate to its attractiveness to CAS, who found placing blind faith in any system, be it religious, philosophical, scientific, or political, most distasteful. At any rate, that is my reading, YMMV.
Scott
(Wishing you all a Merry Christmas/Chanukah/Solistice/Yuletide/Festival [pick one])