Medicine has been on the level of hit or miss, mostly miss, for centuries. It is only in the modern world that we have scientific validation of drugs and techniques. I do not know why you think the Egyptians were good at it, but if you could show me some real evidence, I would be interested. Whether Persia ended slavery or not, it was a common practice until a couple of centuries ago, and still exists in backwaters not much touched by modern sensibilities. Whatever enlightenment Buddha might have brought, it had to do with escaping the Wheel of Rebirth, and not much else..
I know nothing about Egyptian medicine or Persian slavery, but actually, more clearly stated, the Buddhas enlightenment had to do with escaping the cycle of birth and death. As for it being not much else Let me ask you something Neocon. Do you believe in God. Do you believe in Jesus and if so what do you think he was on about, do you think that not much else is an apt description. To call this not much else is a great slur on humanity imo. Your apparent ignorance of the non material dimension to life makes me wonder how you can ever have a straight thought about bin laden himself.
Science did not, per se, exist until about the 16th century. Science cannot be divorced from the scientific method…. What we call science was either part of philosophy, and mainly speculative, or it was part of natural history, and a fairly primitive collection of observations about the natural world.
If you’re going to only recognize science as starting with the western discovery of science then all this does is show how closed your mind really is. If you think that compartmentalizing things into science, medicine, philosophy, natural science etc makes it advanced just because, then so be it I probably can’t convince you otherwise except to say that that your conception at root is an artifact of symbolic culture, notably language. If you think that the only way to gain knowledge and understanding is through the application of a strictly materialistic worldview and thereby via a strictly materialistic science, then I sorry for you and urge you to expand your horizons. For example, forget about Egypt, but take what could broadly be called “Chinese Medicine”. 300 years before Christ these people has so much shit figured out that it’s taken the west all this time just to figure out a way of scientifically measuring it, from within our own paradigm, what those cats were going on about. I can assure you that if things like acupuncture and yoga did not work for people, ie were not true, then the market for them would not exist in the States on the scale that it does, but it does and it’s growing. Perhaps you could recognize now how thoroughly modern and scientific some things were even before the 16th cent, and it is the analytical thought that ST alludes to that made the discoveries and made the Empire in the first place, so for eg from 2000 years before the 16th cent you could ref The Yellow Emperors Classic of Internal Medicine, while on the other hand a few hundred years later, the Buddha, relinquished Empire, which he thought was not much, and gained freedom.
wrt your diss of the buddha's efforts, and the nexus between science and religion, one of the things that makes the Dalai Lama modern, and interesting to me is the fact that he is eagerly following western advances in medicine and in the various cognitive sciences, and has welcomed any scientific evidence that would run contrary to buddhist conceptions, for if something he believes is contradicted by modern science he wants to be the first to know about it. Instead what is happening is that many scientists are beginning to see the appropriateness and startling accuracy of buddhist metaphor as they discover how things work. To this end he has been supplying monks to testing facilities in the US and holding meetings in Dharamsala with top chaps from the west drawing them from various specialized fields to help discover and corroborate what is known, and what is known about how we see or describe or know things. The line you draw at the 16th cent is a purely theoretical, arbitrary construct, a division in your own mind. |
