Yeah, that's very true. - Edit 1
Before modification by Dan at 11/03/2012 03:35:07 PM
Conventionally, pretty much everything is on the table, but Ultimately it's swept right off. It really depended on how bullish a particular writer was in asserting the nonexistence of deities, or anything in question, really. I think the Theravadins were more reductionist than the Mahayanans, who increasingly took pains to includea a little something for everyone in their baroque cosmologies. To my mind this is by far the most interesting feature of their philosophy, and it's deployed incredibly cleverly. I read a Buddhist rejoinder to a Nyaya text that admitted the virtues of the Nyaya system, it's superior logic and more elegant cosmology, and went on to simply agree with it as superior to Buddhist's arguments on those matters and claimed it should be adopted wholesale. But of course, only as the best Conventional schema for Conventional Reality. Such a tactic manages to undercut the entire system of logic the poor Nyayika had developed as relevant to Ultimate Truth in any way at all. It must have been very, very annoying to argue against. I'm not surprised at all that people ended up kiling themselves over these debates.
On the subject of Akhenaton, I can only imagine you're correct, though I'm wondering if you have any recommendations on some of the broader religious and cosmological trends in Egypt. Anything from a metaphysical/philological perspective, like F.M. Cornford or even Martin Heidegger. Anything that precocious undergraduates and soft-headed graduate students get enthusiastic about. Also: anything that documents the extent and manner of Egypt's intellectual influence on Greece. All I've seen are black writers clutching their pearls and bleating about how there was once a mention of wisdom at some point in Middle Egyptian and so egyptians who are obviously black were really the originators and then being laughed at. They probably go to a poetry slam or something afterwards to get it all out. Anyway, recommendations from either would be great.
On the subject of Akhenaton, I can only imagine you're correct, though I'm wondering if you have any recommendations on some of the broader religious and cosmological trends in Egypt. Anything from a metaphysical/philological perspective, like F.M. Cornford or even Martin Heidegger. Anything that precocious undergraduates and soft-headed graduate students get enthusiastic about. Also: anything that documents the extent and manner of Egypt's intellectual influence on Greece. All I've seen are black writers clutching their pearls and bleating about how there was once a mention of wisdom at some point in Middle Egyptian and so egyptians who are obviously black were really the originators and then being laughed at. They probably go to a poetry slam or something afterwards to get it all out. Anyway, recommendations from either would be great.
They may be "atheolatrial", so to speak, but the existence of deities is not explicitly denied beyond the sense that the permanence and independent reality of anything within samsara is refuted. The "ultimate reality" may be impersonal, but that, if anything, fits with the concept of the divine that many in the present day have when they say the word "God". Few, if any, people these days picture God as a hoary, bearded old man sitting on a cloud and frowning (or smiling, take your pick) down at Creation.
The figure of Christ is actually strikingly similar to the figure of the Buddha. Both offer a way to salvation/enlightenment that involves a renunciation of material attachments, just acts and behavior and a reinterpretation of spiritual reality that makes the old temple cults obsolete and worthless. Both are universalist creeds that grew out of narrow ethno-religious traditions, and both influenced those narrow traditions and forced them to evolve to remain marginally relevant in modern society (though both are essentially relics of a bygone era).
I think that any reading you do on Akhenaten will disappoint you. His "monotheism" was really closer to the "national deity" concept that was present in the Near East in the Iron Age, where a polytheistic world was assumed but one god assumed primacy and was worshipped almost exclusively. The concept is similar to, but not exactly, henotheism. The development was what we would today call "political", though obviously in ancient Egypt the ideas of separate "religious" and "political" spheres would be an alien concept. The temples had grown powerful, and Akhenaten sought to wreck their power and consolidate the state cult around himself as the living expression of his prime deity, the Aten (probably actually a-t:'n based on Amarna transcriptions in Akkadian, the whole name almost certainly pronounced i:x-na-a-ti:'n, though in correspondence he is referred to by his Horus name, spelled "mery-aten" but in Amarna letters mai-ati:'n). It was sort of like the destruction of the monasteries in Reformation England combined with the Stalinist cult of personality, and very, very light on the philosophy from the extant records.
The figure of Christ is actually strikingly similar to the figure of the Buddha. Both offer a way to salvation/enlightenment that involves a renunciation of material attachments, just acts and behavior and a reinterpretation of spiritual reality that makes the old temple cults obsolete and worthless. Both are universalist creeds that grew out of narrow ethno-religious traditions, and both influenced those narrow traditions and forced them to evolve to remain marginally relevant in modern society (though both are essentially relics of a bygone era).
I think that any reading you do on Akhenaten will disappoint you. His "monotheism" was really closer to the "national deity" concept that was present in the Near East in the Iron Age, where a polytheistic world was assumed but one god assumed primacy and was worshipped almost exclusively. The concept is similar to, but not exactly, henotheism. The development was what we would today call "political", though obviously in ancient Egypt the ideas of separate "religious" and "political" spheres would be an alien concept. The temples had grown powerful, and Akhenaten sought to wreck their power and consolidate the state cult around himself as the living expression of his prime deity, the Aten (probably actually a-t:'n based on Amarna transcriptions in Akkadian, the whole name almost certainly pronounced i:x-na-a-ti:'n, though in correspondence he is referred to by his Horus name, spelled "mery-aten" but in Amarna letters mai-ati:'n). It was sort of like the destruction of the monasteries in Reformation England combined with the Stalinist cult of personality, and very, very light on the philosophy from the extant records.