here Did the First Light in the Universe Come From? Astrophysicists Now Know This is a photograph showing the first light ever-present in the universe,
Proletariat Blogging in the Heart of (UK) Predatory Capitalism! Exploring the Interface between Matter and Perception, Chinese Buddhism, Daoism, Hakka Ethnography, and All Aspects of Radical Politics, History, Psychology and Philosophy – 全世界无产者联合起来!
here Did the First Light in the Universe Come From? Astrophysicists Now Know This is a photograph showing the first light ever-present in the universe,
Marx rejected the mechanistic view because it suggested nothing could be changed, and he rejected metaphysical view because he recognised the existence and purpose of a human consciousness – even if it is generated from the brain and conditioned by outer circumstances and events.
Chinese transliterations and translations are useful as the early Chinese scholars had to understand the Indian Pali and Sanskrit terms before they could be rendered effectively into the Chinese language. Obviously, some of the early transliteration of Indian Buddhist terms are purely ‘phonetic’ in nature and in themselves do not convey much meaning as ideograms. This represents an initial process of a slow, careful and gradual building-up of knowledge in China about a thoroughly ‘foreign’ Indian philosophy that had to develop an ‘interface’ with existing Chinese culture.
Dear N Thank you for your very interesting Plotinus quotation and Nagarjuna-related question. The tetralemma of the Indian Buddhist monk Nagarjuna states: 1) All exists.
Today, through the use of advanced technology and mathematics we know that this is scientifically correct. This would suggest that Democritus had an experience no less important than the enlightenment of the Buddha, as it radically redefined humanity’s perception of reality and existence, and yet generally speaking, there are no temples containing statues of Democritus, or people applying a meditative method to replicate his mode of thought.
Whatever the case, I suspect Plotinus fully understood that the world of matter was primary for biological life, and that through this biological existence, the rarefied state of conscious awareness that Plotinus undoubtedly experienced, could only be realised if the physical body (and the mind it contains) was trained in the right way.