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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: authenticity

Eudaimonist Buddhist modernism and the norm of authenticity

02 Tuesday Jun 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Attachment and Craving, Foundations of Ethics, Modernized Buddhism, Self

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

authenticity, Charles Taylor, Evan Thompson, existentialism, modernism, qualitative individualism, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha)

I now finish my present reply to Evan Thompson’s response. Let us return to Thompson’s general critique of Buddhist modernism. He doesn’t “reject using Buddhist ideas in the project of ameliorating suffering and promoting human flourishing.” On that, it seems, we are in agreement. Rather, what he objects to is “the rhetoric and logic that Buddhist modernists typically use in pursuing this project.” So let’s revisit what he takes issue with in this rhetoric and logic:

Continue reading →

McMindfulness and Engaged Buddhism: the twin innovations

22 Sunday Dec 2019

Posted by Amod Lele in Foundations of Ethics, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Politics

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Amanda Ream, authenticity, Buddhist Peace Fellowship, Disengaged Buddhism, Engaged Buddhism, Ron Purser, William Edelglass

Ron Purser’s critique of McMindfulness is in line with William Edelglass’s critique of the “happiness turn” in Western Buddhism. Purser and Edelglass are both right to note that something new, less traditional, is going on in modern mindfulness. For there are parts of Buddhism that secular mindfulness leaves out, intentionally. Purser is right about that: right mindfulness (sammāsati) is only one part of the traditional Noble Eightfold Path, and mindfulness practices often leave out the rest. And so he is also right to ask the question:

what is mindfulness for? Is it merely to attain better health, higher exam scores, focused concentration at work, or “self-compassion?” Is it a medical form of self-improvement? In a way, posing the question is tantamount to asking what constitutes “the good life,” the traditional basis of philosophy. (79)

Indeed it is. And that is of course a difficult question. But it is important that the traditional Buddhist answers to that question are no closer to Purser’s anti-capitalist activism (or to Edelglass’s concern to alleviate “deprivation, violence, illness, racism, and environmental degradation”) than they are to secular mindfulness. I suspect they are further away from it. Continue reading →

Naming the “be yourself” ideal

28 Sunday Oct 2018

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, German Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Self, Social Science

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, Andrew Warren, authenticity, Charles Taylor, Georg Simmel, Immanuel Kant, Isaiah Berlin, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, qualitative individualism, Romanticism

What name should we give the ethical ideal I spoke of last time, the pervasive idea that you should “be yourself, no matter what they say”? The answer to that question isn’t easy.

I initially started thinking of this ideal simply as “Romantic”. But “Romantic”, with a capital R let alone a small one, refers to a range of ideals considerably wider than this. I asked my friend Andrew Warren, a Romanticism expert, to define Romanticism, and he responded that Romanticism resists definition. (I recall him once having given the stronger answer that “Romanticism is that which resists definition”, though that isn’t his own recollection.) Continue reading →

Farewell to “Yavanayāna”

22 Sunday Jan 2017

Posted by Amod Lele in Humility, M.T.S.R., Mahāyāna, Modernized Buddhism, Politics

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Anagarika Dharmapala, authenticity, B.R. Ambedkar, David McMahan, Engaged Buddhism, identity, Jim Wilton, modernism, modernity, race, Richard K. Payne, Sulak Sivaraksa, Tibet

Late last year I was delighted to see a post from Richard Payne retracting his earlier post on “White Buddhism”, motivated at least in part by my critique. It is all too rare to see a human being change his or her mind, especially on politically charged issues where passions run high and it is all too easy to develop attachment to views. I commend and thank Payne for his thoughtful retraction. On my end, he has provoked me to make a retraction of my own. Continue reading →

The double standard of misinterpretation

31 Sunday Aug 2014

Posted by Amod Lele in Hermeneutics, M.T.S.R., Modern Hinduism, Modernized Buddhism, Vedas and Mīmāṃsā

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Annie Besant, authenticity, Herman Tull, Max Müller, Sāyaṇa, Theosophy

I have recently welcomed the corrective force of books like Andrew Nicholson’s Unifying Hinduism, which remind us that modern appropriations of Indian tradition have their own continuity with the evolving past tradition. I now find myself regularly reminded just how much such a corrective is needed. I have noted plenty of examples before, as with respect to Gregory Schopen and Donald Lopez. But I recently found perhaps the most striking example in the works of the contemporary Sanskrit scholar Herman Tull. Continue reading →

Acknowledging newness

02 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by Amod Lele in Early and Theravāda, M.T.S.R., Modernized Buddhism, Natural Science

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

authenticity, Communism, conservatism, gender, Karl Marx, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha), Tiantai

Readers may have noticed my expressing a certain ambiguity with respect to the new Buddhist movements I call Yavanayāna. I have often defended their value as legitimate traditions in their own right, but I have also repeatedly criticized them for their political activism, their embrace of “interdependence”, their reluctance to admit the significance of sectarian differences. Moreover, my ground for criticism in these cases is that they misrepresent traditional and especially early Buddhism. Some readers might well wonder whether there is a problem here: whether I am criticizing their innovation only when it is convenient to do so, which is to say only when I agree with it.

In response I would stress that I am not against innovation as such. Continue reading →

In defence of White Hindu Converts

24 Saturday Nov 2012

Posted by Amod Lele in M.T.S.R., Modern Hinduism, Politics

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

authenticity, Deepak Sarma, identity, race, United States

[I wasn’t planning to update this week, but I wanted to post this while it was still topical.]

I have not had as much time as I would like to read Deepak Sarma‘s work in Indian philosophy. It intrigues me, and what little I have seen so far seems to be well researched and well thought out. I hope to be more involved with it in the future.

My reaction was considerably less favourable when I saw a recent short blog post of Sarma’s at the Huffington Post. (I found out about it through the RISA-L mailing list, and there has already been some discussion of the post there.) Sarma expresses discomfort with “White Hindu Converts”, those white Americans who claim to have “converted to Hinduism”. I agree that such a claim can be problematic, given that the recent term “Hinduism” typically covers such a wide and disparate range of meanings, and the concept of “conversion” does not adequately cover much of what happens in Indian traditions (where Muslims offer prayers to revered “Hindu” sites and vice versa). But Sarma’s post goes considerably further than this. Continue reading →

Aesthetics and ethics in Zanzibar Town

13 Sunday Mar 2011

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, African Thought, Food, Place, Politics

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Alain Finkielkraut, architecture, authenticity, David Harvey, Karl Marx, modernism, modernity, skholiast (blogger), Søren Kierkegaard, utilitarianism, Zanzibar

Skholiast has an interesting riff on my recent post about happiness, and I’d like to riff right back. Skholiast quotes from Alain Finkielkraut‘s La défaite de la pensée – a book I read long ago while backpacking through France, in the hope of beefing up my philosophical French. And Skholiast’s quote from Finkielkraut got me thinking of a much more recent trip, my honeymoon in Zanzibar two months ago.

As well as spectacular beaches, Zanzibar has a tremendously atmospheric old Stone Town, and crumbling palaces built in the nineteenth century by Sultan Said. On a tour of these palace ruins, our guide spoke mournfully about how the government had destroyed and misused these palaces after independence and revolution in 1964. It is surely worth mourning when a beautiful object from the past is lost forever. In addition to this destruction, the revolutionary government built most of Ng’ambo, the “other side” of Zanzibar town – the part that is completely non-atmospheric, full of concrete blocks designed by East German engineers. It is in Ng’ambo that the majority of urban Zanzibaris live. The tourist guidebooks tend to scoff at Ng’ambo if they mention it at all, which they rarely do – and no surprise, since it is utterly charmless to look at, a generic site that could be anywhere.

And yet driving through Ng’ambo, I could also see what motivated the revolutionary government to build it that way; more than that, I was quite pleased to see it. Continue reading →

Newly authentic scriptures

09 Sunday May 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Christianity, Confucianism, Early Factions, Food, German Tradition, Human Nature, Humility, Judaism, M.T.S.R., Mahāyāna, Social Science, Truth

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Adhyāśayasaṃcodana Sūtra, Augustine, authenticity, chastened intellectualism, Gary Snyder, Jesus, Marcion of Sinope, New Testament, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha), Sigmund Freud, Xunzi

In my introductory religion class at Stonehill I was teaching about the Marcionite Christians, followers of the second-century Christian Marcion of Sinope, who wished to see a Christianity without any Jewish influence. This posed rather a tricky problem for Marcion, seeing as Jesus was born Jewish and seemed to claim the lineage of the Jewish prophets. That Jesus viewed himself as Jewish is not only the conclusion of modern biblical scholarship; it seems to have been the view present in the scriptures that Marcion himself encountered. Marcion, it seems, took the Gospel of Luke as known to him and edited out everything that looked Jewish.

Why did he do this? I suppose it could have been merely a cynical move to gain followers, but Marcionism had an appeal that lasted long after Marcion’s death; I don’t see much reason to believe that Marcion didn’t believe what he was writing. But this is still puzzling. To our eyes it seems like an awful sort of arrogance to edit historical writings according to one’s own theology. One might ask: how could he have believed any of this?

In trying to understand Marcion I can only think of the popular view expressed in the Mahāyāna Adhyāśayasaṃcodana Sūtra, that “whatever is well spoken is the word of the Buddha.” Continue reading →

Authenticity then and now

05 Wednesday May 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Buddhism, Early and Theravāda, M.T.S.R., Mahāyāna, Modernized Buddhism, Place

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

authenticity, Disneyland, Romanticism, Shrikant Bahulkar, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha), Tibet

A couple weeks ago Shrikant Bahulkar, an Indian scholar I studied Sanskrit with, gave a talk on language in Buddhism. During the questions and answers he said something that struck me: Tibetan Buddhists gave privilege to Sanskrit texts over Tibetan ones because the Sanskrit texts were more authentic.

He’s surely right, in the sense that Tibetans thought Sanskrit s?tras more likely to be the real word of the historical Buddha. But the wording intrigued me. For we use “authentic” as a term of praise all the time now, but in a strikingly different way.

The Tibetans cared that texts were authentically Indian because the Buddha was Indian, so such texts were more likely to have been the authentic word of the Buddha. They wouldn’t have given a toss whether texts were authentically Mongolian or authentically Persian, because the Buddha didn’t come from those places.

For us, by contrast, authenticity is a good in itself. Other things being equal, we treat blues music performed by an authentic Mississippi blues performer as better than the same music performed by some guy from Vancouver; authentic Mexican food made by Mexicans is better than Mexican food made by Bostonians. I once spoke to a friend’s relatives in Cambridge, UK, who were going to be visiting the US and were excited about going to Disneyland. I asked “Why go all the way – why not just go to Euro Disney?” They replied “No, no – we want to see the real Disneyland!” A startling response at the time to my urban geographer’s ears, to which nothing could be more fake than Disneyland – but even there, the original was valued much more highly than the imitation.

Some of this valuing of authenticity per se creeps into religious studies as well. I’ve spoken of the point before in the context of Yavanayāna Buddhism: it’s a recent creation involving Westerners and therefore seems less “authentically Buddhist,” and “less authentic” is equated in our minds with “bad.” I think this is why the “Protestant presuppositions” charge is bandied about so frequently and comes across as such a slur: the Yavanayāna emphasis on texts, on what seems to be the authentic word of the Buddha, is considered “less authentically Buddhist.”

But the Yavanayāna attitude, ironically, seems to me much closer to traditional attitudes than does this scholarly romanticism of authenticity. Scholars or otherwise, we today value a more generalized authenticity, in which everything should “be what it is.” Whereas for most premodern cultures, as I understand it, authenticity was merely a means to an end. The authentic word of the Buddha was better than an imitation because of the value of the Buddha’s word itself, not because of the value of authenticity per se.

So why this change? It seems above all an aesthetic phenomenon. We see beauty in things that are what they are, that don’t imitate. Why is this? I suggested before that it’s because authenticity is scarce under capitalism. Is that it? Is it because, as I added in the comments, so many of us want to take an oppositional posture against society at large, and so much of that society is satisfied with imitations? Or is there more to it still?

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