"Call any vegetable, call it by name, and the chances are good, that a vegetable will respond to you."

- Frank ZAPPA

The question is whether a vegetable is a sentient being, equal to the question as to whether one can be, in the Buddhist sense, reborn as a vegetable.

Perhaps someone who is more knowledgeable than I can clear me up on the Buddhist notion of sentient being.

It starts with a human being, but I think some people, Buddhists or otherwise, then generalize it to animals so that Bad People can be reborn as cockroaches.

But why not plants? They seem to have a biological *telos*, and in a deep ecological sense we feel Compassion for individuated members of higher phyla, such as that Banyan tree between Brother's store and the tennis court that was cut down opposite the trash can.

And, the Paris climate report having said that by 2050, the Great Barrier Reef will be dead, the only name adequate to what we then must feel would be mourning as if it were for a sentient being, but the GBR is a colony of sentient beings, admittedly not a "colony" administered by chaps in feathered hats.

But we of course feel collective sorrow for "higher" collectives such as the victims of the Hiroshima raid.

But then, suppose we graciously extend (as if it lies in our power!) the notion of "sentient being" to all biological individuals.

We'd have to take the next step, which would be to ask whether a rock is a sentient being, and here, the relatively simpler structure of rocks, even rocks such as mountains which we name, would to the reflective pose the question, perhaps the rock is an assemblage of sentient beings, a parliament of pieces of rocks, a rock colony, a bee bop a lula rock group.

Here the Buddha would say "does not profit" because it is only of academic interest how we divide up the world with language in a pure nominalism.

Or is it? Naming a person distinct from his relations or ethnic group is a moral choice. The original act of naming is a religious and spiritual act perhaps even in the case of "inanimate" objects: but perhaps it is not given to us to be able to always recognize the boundaries of sentient being.

All we may know is that there is a finite or infinite number of pure souls, consciousnesses, which inhabit people, animals, plants, perhaps even things.

But I am genuinely puzzled about Buddhist ontology. I did get a copy of Tscherbatsky's Buddhist Logic on the animal shelter table and I gotta read it. Any thoughts are welcome.

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Frank Zappa was a vegetable

there's a pretty good reading list on the topic located here:
http://www.formalontology.it/buddhist-philosophy.htm
and if you're really interested, HKU has a Centre for Buddhist Studies, which offers many interesting courses:
http://www.buddhism.hku.hk/

I have a pretty well-stocked library and wouldn't mind dusting it off for a bit of sharing - especially if this became the basis for some interesting shared dialogue and inquiry.

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Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
----- Margaret Mead

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Publish and be damn'd

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Publish and be damn'd

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Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like bananas

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Publish and be damn'd

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Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
----- Margaret Mead

Amen to that, Tavis!

One of the best, insightful and very-well-communicated posts in this forum so far this year!

As there's such a wealth of diverse writing talent on our island, a literary forum is always a possibility, if somebodyt would like to moderate it?

But as the "savages from the Fight Club" are free to roam anywhere in these forums, even outside their "natural habitat", how to keep them away from a future potential literary forum? It's quite illuminating that several of these "savages" are actually professional writers...

P.S. As always, everybody's right of free speech will be protected on this site, even when the moderator completely disagrees with you. As pointed out many times before, there's no direct censorship here, just occasional (very rare) moves of offensive posts (especially personal attacks) to the private, members-only Fight Club.

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Lamma Gung and Tavis, thanks for your thoughtful comments on this recurrent issue of my prose style. I left off posting for a while since I just didn't have time to continue the discussion, but will take the time now.

Much more than the medium, the message is the message. I don't choose to communicate what I think are banal, received, ideas to assert my membership in the herd *du jour*. I am only interested in ideas in the process of being formed, since fully-formed ideas reduce to tautology.

One thing that does concern me is the complete breakdown of human communication in the USA, where everyone is so certain that they communicate so terribly simply and where ideas (usually on the right, sometimes on the left) are considered so above question that Dave Letterman has only to mention a noun (like that astronaut crapping in her pants) to get the audience to laugh, and that Bush's eroding base has only to hear about WMDs or the unborn to tear up.

But when I was trying to say, hey, all these oh, so very Politically Correct guys, like Martin Booth in Gweilo, they reject a military clerk of a Dad because he represents the (bad old empire) because Mum chilled with China and he did not: they may now be engaged, being responsive more than they would admit to the mental manipulation of the mass media, in rehabilitating SOME empire Dads, but only to the extent that these shadows be only the guys in the front, re-enacting on the BBC or on Sky what was and remains the ugliest human sacrifice of history (WWII) so that we can vicariously Relive and Regain a manhood that we rejected back in the Sixties, aren't they just stuck?

Didn't Martin Booth die having not in fact dealt with the fact that nearly all of us, in a real war, would be stuck in the rear with the gear, and thank our lucky stars for this, and spend the rest of our lives married, as was his father was, to a pathetic and outdated colonial existence, vastly preferable to dying like a dog on the Moulmein railway?

So why treat Dad like that in a book?

How dast he judge that man, as Uncle Charley said to Biff about our own American Willy Loman?

Even my head hurts, sure, but it's the thought and its nonbanal character to me.

The point being that being that I'm out of Ben and Jerry's, I often use the Internet to give birth in hopes that someone will adopt the poor little perisher of a thought in all its subordinate and superordinate complexity, said complexity being only just adequate to a life spent on several continents.

And the bare expression of such a thought seems to me to demand a complex syntax to avoid a binary rejection such as Martin Booth seems to have made.

If it is somehow Not Cool to do this according to the In Crowd on Lamma Island, well, too bad for me I guess. They have every right to post "Idiot", and I have in turn the right to turn a single word response into what I think is a more engaging riposte.

As to writers who write for publication and who would advise me to write like Hemingway, gruffly and more simply, all I can say is I've written for paid publication and have listened to more than my share of sermonettes on how people want simple writing and other forms of media.

The most representative being the sermonette given by the commercial film director in Denys Arcand's 1989 film, Jesus of Montreal, to the little lady who shows up for the shoot having studied classical dance, to the effect that the audience is a bunch of beer sodden yobboes who want to see her tits and who could give a toss about Art.

In other words: I ain't no spring chicken, and I have long been made aware by a series of long-suffering editors that to some extent in any paid writing gig, one is being paid to pander to the bear in the zoo, not to create something New. Having been from time to time a sodden yobboe myself looking for breast meat on lower State street, I am well aware that humanity is regressing at warp speed, having done not a small amount myself.

However, having been a Dead End Kid, I find some small redemption in the half formed thought that represents the smallest possible advance beyond the usual horseshit I find in the South China Moaning Pest, which is dialectic at a standstill as far as I can see. You lads happen to be fortunate to be in the delivery room, but can use the famous scroll bar at any time.

As I have said before, the irritation is having to parse a complex thought: mere pages of pasted text from another source simply don't create this anger, and given that you can just scroll, the frustration is in having to understand a thought, which may only seem portentious, from someone who appears to be a real Nowhere Man, having few links with anyone here.

The reader justifiably wonders, is it worth my time? And I here will wonder aloud, am I leading him on? What is the worth of even asking whether Martin Booth honored his father? Or pointing out that Frank Zappa was no vegetable, and to forget what really went down in the 1960s is amnesia?

All I can say is, onward, through the fog, and drink deep, or drink not, from this particular Pieran Spring, and don't reply "idiot" and expect no response.

Thank you for your hard work, Lamma the Gung, Jabba the Hut and the rest you guys, and your tolerance of free speech here. I realize that this site is a lot of unpaid work and I really appreciate that. If at any time my prolixity creates a problem, please let me know if I need to change my posting behavior.

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Publish and be damn'd

Sorry, Frank Zappa is a vegetable, who thought he had a sense of humour. I think his problem was he didn't take drugs.

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Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.

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Publish and be damn'd

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Publish and be damn'd

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Publish and be damn'd