Thank you for yours of yesterday. Thank you also for sending the extracts from Sartre. Though you actually copied out more than I really intended, it is none the less most welcome—the whole passage is of capital importance and so admirably lucid, and I have been glad to re-read it. My treatise on mind is not. As usual the ramifications grew and grew until I was intimidated by the vastness of the project, and I have been content merely to imagine it. One thing becomes more and more clear, however, and that is that in the Suttas the same word—mano, for example, or rūpa—has different meanings, sometimes within a single sentence; and these meanings correspond to different levels of understanding. This is the secondary reason why a method of interpretation—which, as a rationalization, depends upon logical argumentation, and thus upon each word's having one meaning and one only—cannot be applied to the Suttas. The only way to find out what a Teaching in the Suttas means is to refer to one's own experince. (The primary reason why method will not work is, of course, that all method depends upon the paṭiccasamuppāda—it is phassapaccayā—and cannot therefore be applied to the p.s., just as chemistry cannot deal with nuclear physics, upon which it depends.)
Koestler, as far as literature goes, is obviously right; and he demonstrates his own thesis by being himself thoroughly engaged—the article reeks of engagement. (It is incredibly parochial. Nobody in the West can think of anything worse—or anything else—than the Hydrogen Bomb. Why? Because it might destroy their precious civilization.) It provokes the reflexion that if all literature is engaged, then the Suttas are not literature, except superficially. Nibbāna, after all, is cessation of engagement, is it not? (I rather suspect he mistakes the Middle Way for the Way of Moderation—in other words, Sweet Reasonableness, or, as I read the other day, Reasonable Sweetness.) As regards the P.T.S. Aṇguttara—I have none of the five volumes here (except no. two in translation, which I can hardly bear to read), and should welcome any or all of them, the more the better. My reading is now more or less confined to the Suttas and I am glad of any addition to my library....
P. S. Koestler assumes that both the Buddha's Teaching and the Existentialist Philosophy are works of art, and that implicit in them are various assumptions about the nature of existence. Koestler is himself an artist, and cannot imagine anything beyond—indeed, it is probably true to say that the assumption that there is nothing beyond art is precisely the assumption about the nature of existence that is inherent in Koestler's own writing. Koestler is engaged according to his own definition—but he is engaged because he assumes the idea of engagement itself. And this dates him. He is a man of the XXth Century, obsessed with the idea of objectivity; for artistic objectivity—the refusal to preach your engagement, and merely to describe it as one amongst an infinity of possible engagements—is the brother of scientific objectivity—which is the refusal to admit your point of view, and merely to dismiss it as one amongst an infinity of possible points of view --, and it comes of a fear of being (in Kierkegaard's words) infinitely interested. When you are infinitely interested either you keep quiet (as the Buddha was inclined to do immediately after Enlightenment) or you preach (as the Buddha did after persuasion or invitation by Brahmā Sahampati). Of course the Existentialists are (or were?) enragés and not simply engagés, they never pretended to be anything else. Koestler may not be hostile to the Buddha's Teaching or to Existentialism, but this is because he has understood neither. Had he understood he would either be a Buddhist (or Existentialist) or else positively hostile. As it is he has neutralized both—or so he hopes—in the modern artistic no-point-of-view, which is "engagement" as he understands it. Do you agree?
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