Amaros
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Joined: 7/25/2005
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quote:
ORIGINAL: hisannabelle
In textual accounts of monks that appeared in collections
of hagiographies under the rubric of self-immolation, we find a
range of acts such as allowing insects to feed on one’s blood, slicing
flesh from the body, and burning the fingers or arms. Not all of
these necessarily resulted in death.
- from "Fire and the Sword" by Benn, in The Buddhist Dead, edited by Cuevas and Stone. This article is primarily concerned with the politics of self-immolation in Buddhist China, but as the quote shows, also mentions instances of amputation, burning of fingers or limbs, and other forms self-harm that did not result in death.
on page six of "Self-Immolation in Buddhist China" by Jan Yun-Hua, she mentions that after the 10th century, some changes in textual emphasis led to a growing tendency to replace immolation of the entire body with the sacrifice of an arm, a few fingers, or just one finger. This article is located in History of Religions vol. 4 no. 2 (Winter 1965) pp. 243-268
if you would like more sources regarding suicide in buddhist practice or the tantric practice of visualizing cannibalism (which may or may not have been practiced in actuality in the past - this is debated among scholars - but is a really widespread practice among tibetan buddhists today - i am actually initiated into it), i'd be happy to help. if you or anyone would like to discuss more about buddhist death and dying (or buddhism in general) i'm always available by message on the other side.
respectfully,
a'ishah.
Who knew Buddhists were so kinky? Considering that Buddhism centers around self denial, it makes certian amount of logic - they realy aren't worried about earning a living or being sexually atrractive - still, those can pretty much be considered the primary motivations of all but a handful of humans on the planet, for fairly obvious evolutionary reasons.
On a more abstract level, I still would not wish this to be mistaken for the argument that if everybody is doing it, it must be sane and vice versa - one of the signal defining characteristics of humans is our behavioral diversity, our success in rising to the top of the food chain is due largely to three things.
In no particular order: the ability to formulate higher level abstractions, including models of cause and effect, and communicate them symbolically - I lump these together, because it isn't exactly clear where one ends and the other begins - language is a process of abstract logic and reasoning, and it's quite likely that they arose more or less in tandem, and use much the same process - language is the external representation of internal abstract symbolic/cognitive processes, and language itself in turn affects cognition - a Christian doesn't see the world the way a Buddhist does, and neither of them see the world the same way a physicist does, etc. - they have different constructs of reality, internal models that they use to make predicitions and explain cause and effect.
There are essentially four different realities we deal with: objective reality, the current state of all energy in the universe at any given moment, which is beyond the cognitive capacity of humans to percieve, subjective reality, how we model the world in our own minds based on our perceptions of energy pehenomona in action, subjective consensus reality, which is a model of things we agree on, "the sky is blue", and objective consensus reality, which is often a formal exercise in logic, science, law, etc., which is things we agree on but are required to demonstrate as stable in terms of cause and effect: the sky is blue due to refraction of photons in the atmosphere, which cases light to be percieved by the human eye on a wavelength that results in the perception of a color that we call "Blue".
Abstract logic and language is a unique attribute of humans - other animals communicate, some in quite sophisticated ways, but we have no evidence any of them are capable of forming higher level abstractions, catagories for example - humans form catagories incessently, "mentally ill" is catagory, kinky is another one - if these two becoem associated linguistically, it forms a model of cause and effect that becomes a matter of consensus reality.
The second attribute is very simply, our high degree of social co-operation: facilitated by abstract conceptualization, we are more social than any other mammal and most species in general, outside a few species of insects - this gives us a great deal of flexibility in terms of adaptive behaviors, division of labor, defensive responses, economics, etc.
The third thing is the behavioral diversity I mentioned, and this is almost a contradiciton of the second thing in that behavioral diversity often goes against the grain of a given cultures abstract paradigm of reality, their subjective consensus reality - in this case, cannibalism, outside of abstract ritualization, is generally considered a form of either desperation or madness.
On the other hand we do a lot of mad things - is it sane to jump out of an airplane, or fly to the moon? Sometime about 75kya, a mutation occured in the human genome, the DRD7R4 allele mutated into soemthing like 7 different versions - this occured at roughly the same time as teh Toba supereruption and the theoretical MtDNA "bottlneck".
Shortly after, these mutations spread rapidly among the population through both selection and drift, and large and significant changes in human culture began to appear - the lithic revolution and an overall revolution in culture and artifact: art, probobly music, personal adorment, etc., and it has gradually accelerated until we come to post modern technological society.
This allele has been associated with behavioral disorders, ADHD in particular, and thrill seeking in general, and the theory is that this represents an increase in the population of people who are "easily bored", and thus prone to breaking out of abstract cultural restrictions and engage in innovative behaviors, and it is innovation that is the definitive driver of what we term "modern" behavior, which of course has resulted in modern techno-information culture.
Again, this tends to often run counter to what is often defined by a dominant culture as acceptable behavior. Their primary motives usually revolve around preserving status quo, and innovation is often threatening if it occurs in ways they cannot control. Nobody thought Microsoft was any threat to IBM in 1980, Bill Gates was nerd adapting a half assed operating system somebody wrote for their masters thesis in his garage. Ten years later, Gates had replaced IBM, and was screaming bloody murder about open source programs, i.e., nerds in their basements writing code that could conciveably topple his hegemony. (IBM, to their credit, played by the rules and stuck to basic capitalist competitive principles).
One example, but you can see the same basic pattern at work in every human culture or institution, religious, political, economic, social - once an idea has gained credence and people have staked their fortunes on it, they are required to defend it against the next idea and how they do that in turn reflects back on the original idea - i.e., it's how an ideal like Christianity: "love thy neighbor" can become "kill everybody who isn't a Christian".
We have tried, in our current institutions, the constitution, capitalism and the Anglo Saxon legal system to create a stable system of cultural values without allowing it to sclerotify into status quo feudalism - to keep it in flux, by basing it on competitive self interest - i.e. the only way to keep self interest in check is to counter it with something, and the best thing to counter self interest is more self interest - this creates a situation where people are forced to negotiate and compromise in order to get what they want - in this system, no single persons inherent self interest is any more important than anybody elses, theoretically.
This is kind of a long way of getting to the point: diversity is a thing worth preserving - whether I understand another persons behavior or not is irrelevant, it represents change, innovation, motion - all that concerns me is it's ethical implications - and ethics is simply a cost benefit analysis: who is bearing the cost of this behavior, and who is getting the benefit, or, if it isn't either or, how are the costs and benefits distributed.
In terms of the practice of spiritual cannibalism, it really doesn't affect me personally in any way I can discern - if it were to catch on and spread out in such a way that it might affect my childrens decisios, then it becomes my business, and if it happens that the boyfreind is good at talkign people into this sort of thing against their better self interest, then that too gives me some cause for concern - perhaps no worse than convincing and entire country to go to war for the sake of corporate profit, but that concerns me as well, and the one does not justify the other.
This is essentially the argument used in religious politics to oppose things like sex education and BDSM perhaps - but I don't see these things as any sort of threat to me personally, it's largely an abstract threat to religion, representing an opposition consensus concerning sexual behavior and it's "purpose", and reflects directly back to a particular socio-political paradigm with associated economic benefits attached for certain people, and neither do I really think cannibalism will catch on, although stranger things have happened, it bears watching.
We are a society obsessed with conspicuous consumption, a symptom of Narcissism, the consumption itself is an attempt to overcome feelings of social alienation and inadequacy - we really are very social animals on a biological level, and cannibalism is a way to achive intimacy on a symbolic level: you are what you eat, and by consuming the host in the Cathlic transubstration ritual for example, you are literally internalizing the vehicle of your salvation.
< Message edited by Amaros -- 7/4/2008 12:55:45 PM >
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RE: When does BDSM become unhealthy or destructive - 
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