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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Category Archives: Health

The light is coming

20 Sunday Dec 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, God, Happiness, Health, Hope, Judaism, Politics, Rites

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Charles Taylor, Christmas, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Francesco Sizzi, Hanukkah, Joe Biden, United States

Tomorrow is the winter solstice: the shortest, darkest day of the year. After that, everything will slowly start getting lighter and brighter. And never in my lifetime has that felt like more of a perfect metaphor.

Christmas is perhaps the festival that most obviously commemorates the light in the darkness at this time of year, but it is not the only festival to acknowledge the darkest days and prepare for the light. Hanukkah is a smaller part of the Jewish ritual year than North Americans typically make it out to be – it is not nearly as important as Passover – but it is a real Jewish festival of light at the darkest time of the year. So too, Westerners mark a new year beginning just as the old year is at its darkest.

All these events happen every year. But this is a year like no other.

Continue reading →

Why I am a Buddhist

07 Sunday Jun 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Buddhism, Faith, Family, Health, Humility, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Science, Prayer, Reading and Recitation, Therapy

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, autobiography, Evan Thompson, identity, Mañjuśrī, religion, Śāntideva, Seth Zuihō Segall

On Facebook, Seth Segall commented in response to my posts on Evan Thompson:

I agree with all the arguments you have made, but I think there is one maining major issue that divides you from Evan that transcends all the other issues. That is, as a “lover of all wisdom,” why would you define yourself as a Buddhist as opposed to someone who is informed by many wisdom traditions but holds a special place in his heart for Buddhism—in another words, how is your stance different from a more cosmopolitan one that is Buddhist-friendly, but not, strictly speaking, Buddhist?

I think I have answered this question before, but there is more to say on it. For a long time – including the first six years of writing this blog – I defined myself in just such a way, as Thompson does. Like Thompson, I went so far as to say I don’t identify as a Buddhist.

Continue reading →

Is mindfulness meditation a problem for Christians?

29 Sunday Sep 2019

Posted by Amod Lele in Christianity, Early Factions, Health, M.T.S.R., Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Physical Exercise, Politics, Psychology, Self

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

law, Origen, religion, S.N. Goenka, Śāntideva, United States

As mindfulness meditation practices become ever more popular and widespread, their claim to be a “non-sectarian technique” takes on progressively greater importance, just as it does with yoga. By claiming their practices to be secular techniques, teachers not only can promote the practices to adherents of Abrahamic traditions; they can also aim to avoid the legal restrictions placed on “religion” –though they can then also be taxed, and even treated as a competitive sport.

But that’s not the only problem. Continue reading →

Podcast interview on qualitative individualism

06 Monday May 2019

Posted by Amod Lele in Early and Theravāda, Economics, Foundations of Ethics, Health, Human Nature, Politics, Psychology, Self, Virtue, Work

≈ Comments Off on Podcast interview on qualitative individualism

Tags

20th century, academia, Catharine MacKinnon, Friedrich Nietzsche, gender, generations, Georg Simmel, Hans-Georg Gadamer, identity, Immanuel Kant, interview, John Locke, Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger, Monty Python, music, qualitative individualism, race, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Romanticism, Stefani Ruper, United States, virtue ethics

Stefani Ruper interviewed me for her video podcast a while ago, and the interview is now live. It focuses on the topic of qualitative individualism, elaborating on ideas from my earlier series of posts. It gets into some topics that are a bit more intense than I’ve covered on the blog in recent years, but I’m pleased with it. Thanks to Stefani for this opportunity.

I’ve embedded the video above, so you can watch it here, and I also highly recommend you check out Stefani’s excellent philosophy podcast in general:

iTunes: http://stefaniruper.com/listen

Spotify: http://stefaniruper.com/listenspotify

Youtube: http://stefaniruper.com/watch

Stream & other outlets: http://stefaniruper.com/podcast

 

 

The psychological case for disengaged Buddhism

05 Sunday Aug 2018

Posted by Amod Lele in Anger, Early and Theravāda, External Goods, Fear, Happiness, Health, Mahāyāna, Politics, Psychology

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Aśvaghoṣa, Boston University, Candrakīrti, Disengaged Buddhism, Donald Trump, Nick (Nattavudh) Powdthavee, Pali suttas, Philip Brickman, Richard Easterlin, Śāntideva, Steven Collins

My project on disengaged Buddhism has now been submitted to a journal. It’s undergone several revisions by this point. One of the most important such revisions was suggested unanimously by BU’s magnificent CURA seminar. In an earlier draft I had attempted to emphasize the contemporary constructive significance of disengaged Buddhism by noting how its ideas were corroborated by some contemporary psychological research. The seminar participants thought that discussion of psychology did not strengthen the paper because I didn’t have the space to defend them fully; the paper would stand best discussing disengaged Buddhists’ claims in their historical context and letting those claims stand on their own.

I think they were right, and I removed the psychology discussion from the paper – a little sadly, as I thought the psychological case for disengaged Buddhism was worth making. Fortunately, I have another place to make it: here. Continue reading →

What’s eating Michael Pollan?

06 Sunday Aug 2017

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Biology, Food, Health, Pleasure, Politics

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Leon Kass, Michael Pollan, United States

One of my greatest passions in life is food, trying out new cuisines and spices in unusual restaurants. In a certain way, a love of food was central to my philosophical development; part of the reason I went to work in Bangkok, where I discovered Buddhism, was my love of Thai food.

So I’m interested in philosophical treatments of food. Recent treatises on the subject, though, have proved disappointing. One of the worst is Leon Kass’s The Hungry Soul, a work that tries to think through just about every aspect of eating except for the pleasures of taste. He mentions them very briefly on pp. 90-91, where he dismisses them as ephemeral, disappearing once enjoyed, and therefore “closed to the permanent or the eternal” – just like music or drama, though this parallel goes curiously unmentioned. Kass admits that he “cooks little” and “has unsophisticated tastes” – basically, it would seem, he doesn’t enjoy food very much. Which makes The Hungry Soul comparable to a treatise on music written by the tone-deaf.

But Kass may be a bit too easy a target. He has already been the target of much ridicule on the Internet for his pompous pronouncements on food etiquette, most notoriously his condemnation of the act of licking an ice cream cone, as “a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive.” I know few who take him seriously.

Far more of a hearing is given to Michael Pollan, whose recent work seems to echo Kass’s puritanism in language more acceptable to educated left-wingers. Especially, his work In Defense of Food seems rather to be an attack on it. Continue reading →

Why philosophy departments have focused on the West

22 Sunday May 2016

Posted by Amod Lele in Asian Thought, Health, Hermeneutics, Islam, Metaphilosophy, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Western Thought

≈ 37 Comments

Tags

academia, Alasdair MacIntyre, APA, āyurveda, Bryan Van Norden, Canada, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jay Garfield, mathematics, pedagogy

Jay Garfield and Bryan Van Norden have a widely circulated article in a recent New York Times, chastising American philosophy departments for paying insufficient attention to non-Western traditions of thought. It will surprise nobody that I sympathize with them, since I’ve been trying to get non-Western thought a hearing for years. But in part for that reason, I’ve also been thinking a lot about why it hasn’t got that hearing so far. The reasons for this are not all bad ones, and anyone working to change the situation needs to understand what those reasons are. Perhaps most importantly, they need to ask a vital question that I don’t see asked in Garfield and Van Norden’s article: why should we study philosophy? Continue reading →

Of mindfulness meditation, Buddhist and otherwise

31 Sunday Jan 2016

Posted by Amod Lele in Health, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Psychology, Serenity, Therapy

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

autobiography, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Justin Whitaker, Robert Sokolove, S.N. Goenka

Until I began my 9-to-5 job in 2011, I had only rarely had to get up before 8 or 9 in the morning on a regular basis, which suited me fine since I am a night person. Now I need get up at 6:45, and it is a struggle to get enough sleep – and so I started worrying ever more about how little sleep I was getting, which gave me insomnia.

Fortunately the job has a good health plan (essential in the USA), and I was able to seek treatment for my insomnia at the highly regarded Boston Medical Center. They suggested a number of interventions to deal with the insomnia, several of which slowly came to prove helpful. The most striking moment among these interventions, though, was when they prescribed – mindfulness meditation. Continue reading →

On tradition and observation in Tibetan medicine

02 Sunday Aug 2015

Posted by Amod Lele in Biology, Epistemology, Health, Hermeneutics, M.T.S.R., Mahāyāna, Natural Science, Philosophy of Science

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

ascent/descent, Francesco Sizzi, G.V. Coyne, Galileo Galilei, Janet Gyatso, Phyllis Chiasson, pramāṇa, Richard Westfall, tantra, Thomas Kuhn, Tibet, Yutok Yönten Gönpo, Zurkharwa Lodrö Gyelpo

Two disclaimers are required for this week’s post. First, Janet Gyatso was on my dissertation committee and before that served as my doctoral advisor. Second, Columbia University Press offered to send me a free copy of her new book if I would review it on Love of All Wisdom, and I accepted on condition that the review could be critical. This is that review. Take it as you will.

Sometime during my doctoral studies I recall a student asking Prof. Janet Gyatso what she was currently researching, and she mentioned Tibetan medical literature. That couldn’t have been any later than 2007, when I graduated, and was probably before. Only now, at least eight years later, has Gyatso’s book on Tibetan medicine come out – and one can see why it took so long.

Being Human in a Buddhist World cannot have been an easy book to write. It is a detailed study of several different Tibetan works on medicine, none of which have been translated into a Western language, and all of which deal with highly technical questions of biology using a set of concepts very different from those familiar in the modern West – some in the form of “a dark, incomplete, and frequently illegible third-generation photocopy of a manuscript that is itself rife with spelling mistakes and smudges.” One does not find oneself eager to replicate such a study.

The title of this book is well chosen. Most Buddhism tends to be what I have called an ascent tradition; it is about transcending the condition of our everyday particular humanity, detaching oneself from what the texts Gyatso studies call “the horrible world”. But even if we were to grant that its most advanced practitioners have become in some sense superhuman (say Thich Quang Duc, who, eyewitnesses say, was able to remain perfectly at peace while setting himself on fire), the fact remains that everybody else is still human, all too human. Continue reading →

The practice of reading

07 Sunday Jun 2015

Posted by Amod Lele in Confucianism, Health, Hermeneutics, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Reading and Recitation, Self, Serenity, Therapy

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

academia, autobiography, Confucius, Paul J. Griffiths, religion, Śāntideva, Zhu Xi

Calling myself a Buddhist, it turns out, was only the beginning. Buddhism was there for me in this dark time, not only as a way of focusing prayer, and certainly not merely as the resource for a hypothetical chaplain. The Buddhist ideas that taught me so much before were still there and a great comfort. And there was more still: I have now begun to practise Buddhism as I see it, on a far deeper level than I ever had before. Continue reading →

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