Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

THE AXIAL AGE 243
Materialism II:
Substance
As in the near presence of death, despise
poor flesh, this refuse of blood and
bones, this web and tissue of nerves and
veins and arteries.
-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2.2
Taking pity on the hungry wolf, Wenshuang
announced, "I do not covet this
filthy bag of meat. I give it over to you
that I may quickly acquire a body of
more enduring strength. This donation
will help benefit us both."
-Discourse on the Pure Land 2I.I2
As I've already observed, China was unusual because philosophy there
began with debates about ethics and only later turned to speculations
about the nature of the cosmos. In both Greece and India, cosmological
speculation came first. In each, too, questions about the nature of the
physical universe quickly give way to speculation about mind, truth,
consciousness, meaning, language, illusion, world-spirits, cosmic intelligence,
and the fate of the human soul.
This particular maze of mirrors is so complex and dazzling that
it's extraordinarily difficult to discern the starting point-that is, what,
precisely, is being reflected back and forth. Here anthropology can be
helpful, as anthropologists have the unique advantage of being able to
observe how human beings who have not previously been part of these
conversations react when first exposed to Axial Age concepts. Every
now and then too, we are presented with moments of exceptional
clarity: ones that reveal the essence of our own thought to be almost
exactly the opposite of what we thought it to be.
Maurice Leenhardt, a Catholic missionary who had spent many
long years teaching the Gospel in New Caledonia, experienced such
a moment in the 1920s, when he asked one of his students, an aged
sculptor named Boesoou, how he felt about having been introduced to
spiritual ideas: