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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Burma/Myanmar

Karma in society

26 Sunday Jul 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Buddhism, Early and Theravāda, Karma, M.T.S.R., Modern Hinduism, Psychology, Social Science

≈ 2 Comments

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Burma/Myanmar, Cindel White, Evan Thompson, Melford Spiro, theodicy

Last time I explained why I think a constructive modern Buddhist philosophy should indeed focus on Buddhist philosophical texts as its sources for karma, and I stand by that. Yet ironically, even if we were to turn away from philosophy to karma’s functioning in society, as Thompson now recommends, we would then notice that even his sources for that point themselves do not establish what he claims they do: i.e. that “the concept is fundamentally a way to handle the problem of why bad things happen to good people and vice-versa”. Just as Obeyesekere never made that claim historically, these sources do not make the claim sociologically.

The sources in question are three articles about karma, all by his UBC colleague Cindel White with some coauthors. Contra Thompson’s claim, these studies do not indicate that the Buddhist concept of karma “is fundamentally a way to handle the problem of why bad things happen to good people and vice-versa”, even in the sociological context of everyday Buddhism. This is for two key reasons.

Continue reading →

Does the kammatic/nibbanic distinction fit the facts?

16 Sunday Feb 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Early and Theravāda, Karma, M.T.S.R., Monasticism, Self-Discipline

≈ Comments Off on Does the kammatic/nibbanic distinction fit the facts?

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Burma/Myanmar, Charles Taylor, Damien Keown, Henpitagedara Gnanavasa, Mahāvaṃsa, Melford Spiro, Pali suttas, rebirth

How helpful is Melford Spiro’s kammatic/nibbanic distinction in describing Buddhism? It can be tempting to line it up too closely with other dichotomies – to say that kammatic Buddhism is practised by householders and nibbanic Buddhism by monks, for example. Damien Keown (Nature of Buddhist Ethics 86) notes that in Spiro’s own survey of Burmese villagers, many laypeople say that they would prefer nirvana for their next life and most monks do not describe striving for nirvana as one of their main functions; so such a mapping of kammatic/nibbanic onto householder/monk would be false.

But Keown takes this point about laypeople and monks much too far when he draws the conclusion that therefore Spiro’s kammatic/nibbanic “theory does not fit the facts”. Continue reading →

Listening to contemporary disengaged voices

22 Sunday Jul 2018

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

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Aśvaghoṣa, Buddhist Peace Fellowship, Burma/Myanmar, Disengaged Buddhism, Engaged Buddhism, George Bond, Joseph Cheah, Judith Simmer-Brown, race, Thomas Tweed, United States

My upcoming paper on disengaged Buddhism focuses on classical Indian texts that engaged Buddhist scholarship has generally silenced. As I read more, though, I come to see that contemporary Asian and Asian-American Buddhists also have politically disengaged tendencies, which modern politically active scholarship – not only Buddhist – also tends to silence.

I first noted this tendency of silencing in Judith Simmer-Brown’s introduction to the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, the leading engaged Buddhist organization she helped found. The group, she says, “was concerned that Buddhist practice centers and groups had become entirely removed from the social and political issues of the day: some teachers and organizations were even actively discouraging political involvement.” (69) And that’s it for those “teachers and organizations”. Why were they discouraging political involvement? What did they say? What were their names? No answers are forthcoming; they receive no voice. What we hear instead is the story of how Simmer-Brown and her American fellows put together a politically engaged group in defiance of their teachers.

The tendency plays out in a different way in Joseph Cheah‘s Race and Religion in American Buddhism. Continue reading →

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