Saturday, 9 June 2018

Is kaya, in Buddhism, complex?

Kaya means heap. Merchants heap up things to signal a profusion indicative of a lower price. So, by metonymy, kaya also means to purchase something in the open market. But this immediately raises the possibility of fraud. The merchant, who makes a great display of scooping up only what you point to, must be practicing some duplicitous legerdemain, such that what is actually weighed out to you is adulterated.

We know the very word 'butcher'- 'vyadha', as in the Vyadha Gita- was a synonym for fraud. How do you know the buffalo meat is not cow-flesh? Or the venison not bandicoot meat?

Suppose we all have a meal together and I say- 'Call this food? The paprika is nothing but powdered lead. The meat is that of a cat.' You reply, 'my dear fellow, the paprika was so pure it burned my tongue. The lamb was so tender its juices soothed my mouth. What on earth is wrong with you?'

To keep the peace, some fellow guest of  might say- 'what to do? Nowadays, the spice sellers mix lead dust with paprika. The butcher cunningly throws a few pieces of cat meat into the scales when no one is looking. Truly, ours is an age of decline and dissolution. In the same meal, some get the piece of genuine lamb properly flavoured. Others get cat meat reddened with lead. Even in the field of poetry we see that those whose trade it is to honestly assay worth and discriminate quality; they too behave like dishonest butchers and spice merchants. For a bribe, or out of perversity, they mix and adulterate everything. Alas! Such is the spirit of the Age!'

The Greek word for heap is 'sorites'. The sorites paradox has to do with how many items you can take away from a heap for it to remain one properly so called. The answer, of course, is that there is a tipping point- a non linear process arises. But this also means Stoicism's project of backward induction based 'regret minimization' is worthless. So is evidential decision theory- which can cash out as either 'managing the news' or involve backward causation or both.

Buddhism, however, has no dynamics and can take kaya as a body which is not essentially complex though it may be adulterated. This permits, for the Mahayana, both field theoretic as well as multiple body conceptions of Buddhahood arising out of the notion of inherent existence itself being a type of defilement.

The odd thing is, this concept of heap as possibly adulterated kaya succeeds whereas the Stoic conception of sorites fails. The latter is a question for mathematical physics- it has no philosophical content. The former- being batshit crazy and based on the notion that I can be eating cat while you are eating lamb though we were served from the pot of curry- is philosophically fecund. Categories or Types are a sorites type heap. They collapse and reconstitute themselves according to the rules of a fractal mathematics which is by no means univalent though it will always have witnesses which suggest otherwise. By contrast, Reverse Mathematics deals with kaya type heaps and Buddhism founded upon some similar Nagarjuna type heuristic can go forward, beckoned by virtual Oracles atop the shifting sand dunes of Compassion's fitness landscape, while Stoicism can but say something sour and shit its bed yet again.



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