No Preferences
July 20, 2005
The Canon tells us that the Buddha’s contemporaries fell into two main camps: what you might call absolutists and relativists. The absolutists were the ones who had a theory about the nature of reality, saying that their theory was true and everything else was false. “The world is made out of atoms”: That’s one of their theories. Or, “The world is infinite,” “The world is not infinite,” “The world is eternal,” “The world is not eternal”: a long list of views about the world outside. And what those views usually come down to is that it’s impossible for human action to have any real impact on things, because the nature of the world is fixed.