Paradoxes of Place and the Millet Seed

Ancient Greece much like Ancient India grappled on nature of "existence" "Being" "is" ,one such philosopher was Parmenides who speculated on What is or Being ontologically .
Buddhism though is more in sync with philosophy of process and nominalism, which heraclitus had opined in his theory of flux or becoming

Zeno,student of Parmenides, In the paradox of place he notes that every existing thing exists somewhere.
Whatever exists somewhere must exist in something else, namely, in a place. But a place is an existing thing and must exist in something other than itself. Therefore, a place must be in a place; this second place is itself an existing thing that must be in a place. 
This goes on without limit, which is impossible, so there is no such thing as the single place where a thing is. The paradox of the millet seed attacks the assumption that things are composed of parts.

A single millet seed does not make a noise when it falls. Yet a bushel of seed does make a noise. But because there is a ratio between the single millet seed (the part) and the bushel (the whole), there should be a similar ratio between the sound of a single seed and the sound of the bushel. The seed both does and does not make a noise when it falls. Thus it is unintelligible to think of a thing as composed of parts that are in a certain ratio with the whole. The argument is sometimes also taken as an attack on sense perception.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Indo-Muslim Culture in Hyderabad: Old City Neighborhoods in the 19th Century

Hyderabad city’s culture was Indo-Muslim or Mughlai, terms that need definition here. I use Indo-Muslim in preference to Islamic, Indo-Persian, Persianate, or Islamicate. I prefer Indo-Muslim to the other four commonly-used alternatives because, first, Muslim rather than Islamic emphasizes a civilizational and not a religious culture (Islamicate has the same meaning but probably not to the general reader). Certainly Hyderabad was not an Islamic state: the Nizams never tried to impose Islamic law or to convert people.Second, IndoMuslim puts the emphasis on the Indian location, although undeniably the Bahmani sultanate in the Deccan from the mid-fourteenth century, its five successor Deccani sultanates (Bijapuri, Golconda, Bidar, Berar, and Ahmednagar) from the early sixteenth century, and the Nizams, starting as Mughal governors after the conquests of Bijapuri and Golconda by the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb in 1686 and 1687, modeled their court culture on that of Persia. I use the term Mug...
Read more

Skull Imagery and Skull Magic in the Yoginī Tantras

The Buddhist tantras constitute a unique class of Buddhist literature. While developing from earlier trends in Buddhist thought and practice, they also constituted a serious challenge to Buddhist identity, largely due to the fact that many of them contain passages that appear to transgress the tenets of Buddhist morality.1 Tantric literature also departed, gradually, from the rhetorical norms of Mahayana Buddhism. While early tantras maintained the rhetorical style of the Mahayana sutras, later tantras, and most notably the Yoginī tantras, radically departed from this style.2 This essay will explore one small facet of the vast array of unusual elements that can be found in this literature, namely, the image of the skull, as well as the use of skulls in tantric ritual. Like other elements, this deployment of skulls in the tantras was disquieting to some, evoking as it does the uncanny atmosphere of the charnel ground. Through this exploration, I will argue that skulls are multifaceted...
Read more

Fate (Buddhism)

In Buddhism, the concept of destiny or fate is called  niyati. Niyati  refers to predetermined, inevitable, and unalterable events. In some religious traditions of India, such as the Vedanta school of Hinduism, an external or divine power or outside agency is seen to be able to influence one’s fate. However, in Buddhism, which is doctrinally an atheistic religion, there is no supreme being or force which is seen to control or influence the course of an individual’s life, and essentially, the concept of  niyati  plays only a minor role compared to the concept of karma (Sanskrit; Pali:  kāmma ). The Buddha did make a distinction between karma and  niyati , in the sense that some events are not karmically determined but are rather the result of  niyati.  For the most part, however, individuals are viewed to possess the capacity to manipulate future events through interventions to karma. The law of karma is seen to determine the conditions of rebirth ...
Read more