29 Sunday Oct 2017
Posted in Anger, Early and Theravāda, Gentleness, Mahāyāna, Politics, Tranquility
Tags
Aśvaghoṣa, conferences, Dalai Lama XIV, Engaged Buddhism, Frédéric Richard, IABS, Stephen Jenkins, Tibet, Tibetan Youth Congress
I presented about Disengaged Buddhism at the International Association of Buddhist Studies conference in August. My talk was paired with a presentation by Frédéric Richard on a topic that did not initially appear to be related: the Tibetan government in exile. As it turned out, the papers proved fascinating mirror images of each other. Continue reading
16 Sunday Apr 2017
Posted in Anger, Early and Theravāda, External Goods, Mahāyāna, Modernized Buddhism, Politics, Psychology, Tranquility
Tags
autobiography, conferences, Donald Trump, Engaged Buddhism, Four Noble Truths, George W. Bush, IABS, Pali suttas, race, S.N. Goenka, Śāntideva, United States
Cross-posted at the Indian Philosophy Blog.
Śāntideva’s anti-political views are very commonly missed by Buddhist scholars today, especially constructive or theological ones, who are excited by the Engaged Buddhist embrace of political action. He is hardly alone among classical Indian Buddhists in expressing them. So last September I proposed a presentation to the International Association of Buddhist Studies (IABS), which I intended to turn into a paper, explaining the importance of these anti-political views and entitled “Disengaged Buddhism”.
I was expecting Hillary Clinton to win the American election. Continue reading
18 Sunday Dec 2016
Posted in Anger, Compassion, Despair, Gratitude, Grief, Happiness, Mahāyāna, Patient Endurance, Politics, Practice, Tranquility
Tags
Donald Trump, early writings, George W. Bush, Martha Nussbaum, Prabhupada, Śāntideva, Treya Killam Wilber, United States
I will be taking a break from blogging as I travel in the next couple weeks. In the meantime I would like to leave you with this.
The results of the 2016 American election came as a surprise, and for many of us it was a horrifying shock. (One survey indicates “shocked” was the most common word Democratic supporters used to describe their reaction.) For me, though, this was not an unfamiliar shock. For the 2004 election had shocked me in a very similar way. In 2000 I had comforted myself with the idea that Bush didn’t legitimately win, and I was confident the people of the United States would reject him after horrors like Abu Ghraib. I was wrong. They did not. He even won the popular vote. Those results shook me to the core, filling my every moment with rage and frustration.
I had to learn ways of dealing with a world that so plainly rejected my values. A year or so after the fact, Goenka’s karmic redirection helped me a lot. But in the immediate aftermath of 2004, what helped was writing in my personal journals, thinking through ways to come to terms with the terrible situation. Just as reading can be a spiritual practice, so can writing.
What follows is the journal entry that, I think, helped me most to deal with the situation at the time. Continue reading
25 Sunday Oct 2015
Tags
A.J. Jacobs, autobiography, David Chapman, Dean Esmay, Dhammapāda, George W. Bush, Jack Layton, justice, Śāntideva, Thich Nhat Hanh
Last time I began to propose an answer to David Chapman’s questions about what might be distinctively Buddhist about a modern Buddhist ethics. I mentioned the classical Buddhist critique of politics and activism, and noted that I agree with some of that critique. Let me now say more about what I mean by that.
What first excited me about Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra was not the widely read eighth chapter (with its meditations on self and other and the deconstruction of the body that repulses many). Rather, it was the sixth chapter, on anger and patient endurance – when I responded to a student’s question about the text by saying “in this text, there’s no such thing as righteous anger.”
I do not think this is a message a typical secular North American liberal is likely to accept. Continue reading
21 Sunday Jun 2015
Tags
academia, autobiography, Confucius, Dalai Lama XIV, Mañjuśrī, Pema Chödrön, S.N. Goenka, Śāntideva, Tibet
Buddhist practice of various sorts has helped me greatly in trying to deal with the frustrations of cancer care. I wrote already of the role of prayer to Mañjuśrī and Buddhist reading. Now I’d like to say more about what I learned from that reading – and how these practices all fit together. Continue reading
01 Sunday Feb 2015
Posted in Anger, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Free Will, Judaism, Karma, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Morality, Patient Endurance, Self
A while ago I referred to Śāntideva’s thought as “ethics without morality” – a deliberately provocative formulation based on Shyam Ranganathan’s eccentric definition of morality as that which conduces to anger. (I don’t agree with Shyam’s definition myself, but putting matters in those terms for the sake of argument helps us to make an interesting and important point.) The idea for Śāntideva is that because everything has a cause, no one is truly to blame for their actions, and therefore we should not get angry at them.
Mark Siderits, in a 2008 article in Sophia, has called this view “Buddhist paleo-compatibilism”: “compatibilism” meaning roughly that while Śāntideva thinks it morally significant that everything has a cause, he still thinks it appropriate to blame people for bad actions.
I don’t think that that is what Śāntideva means, based on a reading of the Sanskrit text of Bodhicaryāvatāra chapter six. I think Siderits reads a great deal into verse 32 that is not actually there, and that is at odds with Śāntideva’s explicit argument in verses 22-33. But I won’t expand on that particular point here, because overall I find the detailed textual argument less interesting than the more general constructive argument. Continue reading
11 Sunday May 2014
Posted in Anger, Emotion, External Goods, Flourishing, French Tradition, Humility, Mahāyāna, Neoplatonism, Patient Endurance
Tags
ascent/descent, Blaise Pascal, Jean Briggs, Martha Nussbaum, passive aggression, Pierre Hadot, Plotinus, Śāntideva
In his excellent little book on Plotinus, Pierre Hadot quotes a lovely maxim of Blaise Pascal‘s, of which I was not previously aware: qui veut faire l’ange fait la bête. Roughly: whoever wants to act like an angel, acts like a beast. The full quote from Pascal’s Pensées is: L’homme n’est ni ange ni bête, et le malheur veut que qui veut faire l’ange fait la bête. Man is neither an angel nor a beast, and the problem is that whoever wants to act like an angel, acts like a beast.
The maxim is a good word of caution for everyone, but particularly when considering those traditions I have described as ascent: the ones that aim to transcend our particular human condition for a higher and better state of being. Continue reading
01 Sunday Dec 2013
Posted in Anger, External Goods, Friends, Mahāyāna, Psychology, Self, Supernatural, Unconscious Mind
Tags
chastened intellectualism, health, Ken Wilber, passive aggression, Śāntideva, Sigmund Freud, Ugraparipṛcchā Sūtra
There is a destructive pattern of behaviour I’ve observed too often which, in an amateur psychological diagnosis, I have come to call the bodhisattva complex. I thought of this term as a friend of mine – a young medical resident – described the behaviours she observed among her fellow medical residents and doctors, who think nothing of working 24- or even 48-hour shifts in order to help people in their care. One wonders: what kind of patient wants to be treated by a man or woman who hasn’t slept in 48 hours?
When I refer to the bodhisattva complex, I do not mean that actual bodhisattvas – ideal Mahāyāna Buddhist beings – are psychologically unhealthy. Some might make that argument (Martha Nussbaum has done so, more or less), but I would not at all. Rather, the bodhisattva complex refers to something which I think is far more common than actual bodhisattvas: you suffer it if you believe you are a bodhisattva, but aren’t. Continue reading
06 Sunday Nov 2011
Posted in Anger, Emotion, Family, Friends, Gentleness, Mahāyāna, Mindfulness, Patient Endurance
Perhaps the most common term for a man who is not traditionally masculine is “sensitive.” The term is sometimes spelled out further so that such men are called SNAGs, “sensitive new age guys.” But what is it to be “sensitive”? And is it a good or a bad thing?
It seems to me that the term “sensitivity,” as popularly used, implies at least two different concepts. They are related; in both cases, if one is asked “what is one sensitive to?”, the answer would likely be: emotion. But they are not the same; for one is generally good, the other generally bad. Continue reading
11 Sunday Sep 2011
Posted in Anger, Buddhism, Patient Endurance, Politics, Tranquility
Ten years ago today, my first wife and I were in the process of moving into our new unfurnished student apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We had rented a moving truck and driven over to the house of a friend, who had generously offered us an old piece of furniture. My wife rang the bell and we waited a minute or two. Then my friend came running down the stairs, slightly flustered and dishevelled. “I’m sorry I took so long,” she said, panting a little. “I was watching the news.”
“The… news?” We looked at each other.
“Oh my God, you haven’t heard! Two planes crashed into the World Trade Center. It’s collapsed.”
“Two planes!” I said. “Then it must have been deliberate.”
“Yeah, they think it’s Osama bin Laden.”
“Huh,” I said. “Wow.” I paused for a few seconds, saying “Wow” and “Huh” a few more times. Then I shrugged my shoulders and said “Well, let’s get back to moving.”
This was not, I would soon learn, the way most Americans reacted to the same news. Continue reading