04 Sunday Aug 2019
Posted in Biology, Death, Early and Theravāda, Epicureanism, Hope, Modernized Buddhism, Psychology, Self, Supernatural
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Epicurus, Jan Westerhoff, Lucretius, Pali suttas, rebirth, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha), Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Halbfass
I am not entirely sure that I agree with the argument I am about to make. However, I do find it at least plausible and I have not seen it made before. I think this argument is worth somebody making, and I think it is worth doing here.
That is: I would like to make a Buddhist argument against rebirth. An argument against rebirth on Buddhist grounds. Continue reading
18 Sunday Mar 2018
Posted in Buddhism, Consciousness, Psychology, Therapy, Unconscious Mind
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Amos Tversky, Carl Jung, Daniel Kahneman, Kurt Danziger, Patrick O'Donnell, René Descartes, Sigmund Freud
In my previous post about the way the mind’s automatic processes get things wrong (and how that point is important to Buddhists), I turned to the experiments of Daniel Kahneman (and Amos Tversky) on false cognition. I claimed that the kind of automaticity they describe is a better explanation of what Freud would have called the unconscious mind, citing the quip that “the unconscious is unconscious not because it’s repressed but because it’s not conscious.”
Some excellent comments from Patrick O’Donnell took me to task for this claim. Patrick is pointing to the importance of the distinction between cognitivist approaches like Kahneman’s on one hand, and a very different kind of modern Western psychology on the other. Continue reading
04 Sunday Feb 2018
Posted in Consciousness, Early and Theravāda, Epistemology, Mahāyāna, Psychology, Unconscious Mind
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Amos Tversky, Aristotle, chastened intellectualism, Daniel Kahneman, David Burton, Franz Carl Müller-Lyer, mathematics, René Descartes, Śāntideva, Sigmund Freud, vinaya
Buddhist texts frequently stress the liberating power of prajñā or paññā, metaphysical insight. It is one of the three major components of the path in early texts, one of the six perfections in Mahāyāna. To know the truth about existence – its nature as impermanent, essenceless, unsatisfactory – is to liberate one’s mind and be unattached. In the Pali Vinaya, the Buddha’s first disciples Sāriputta and Moggallāna attain liberation from suffering as soon as they hear the Dhamma Eye: the phrase “Whatever can arise, can also cease.” Śāntideva at Śikṣā Samuccaya 264 says na śūnyatāvādī lokadharmaiḥ saṃhriyate: one who takes the position of emptiness will not be attached to worldly phenomena.
But something seems odd about these claims – perhaps especially to a beginning student of Buddhist philosophy. We might well acknowledge the tradition’s supposed truths as truths – and yet still be just as mired in suffering as we were before. I know I didn’t get liberated upon hearing that what can arise can cease, and you probably didn’t either. David Burton in his Buddhism, Knowledge and Liberation puts the problem well:
I do not seem to be ignorant about the impermanence of entities. I appear to understand that entities have no fixed essence and that they often change in disagreeable ways. I seem to understand that what I possess will fall out of my possession. I apparently accept that all entities must pass away. And I seem to acknowledge that my craving causes suffering. Yet I am certainly not free from craving and attachment. (Burton 31)
01 Sunday Dec 2013
Posted in Anger, External Goods, Friends, Health, Mahāyāna, Psychology, Self, Supernatural, Unconscious Mind
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chastened intellectualism, 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
04 Sunday Nov 2012
Posted in Early and Theravāda, Flourishing, God, Social Science, Supernatural, Vedas and Mīmāṃsā
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ascent/descent, Ken Wilber, Martha Nussbaum, Martin Southwold, Robin Horton, Sigmund Freud, Sri Lanka, Tattvārtha Sūtra
I’ve repeatedly returned on this blog to the concepts of Ascent and Descent, derived above all from Ken Wilber’s work and to a lesser extent from Martha Nussbaum’s. I have found that these concepts do a lot to help us understand the differences between philosophical traditions. I have not yet been precise about defining them, however, and I would like to think them through in some more detail.
The concept of Ascent has above all to do with transcendence; “transcendence” and “immanence” are close cousins to Ascent and Descent as I understand them. However, Ascent is not transcendence as such. Continue reading
03 Sunday Oct 2010
Posted in Death, Epicureanism, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, French Tradition, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Politics, Psychology, Self, Supernatural, Vedānta
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Advaita Vedānta, ascent/descent, consequentialism, Disengaged Buddhism, Epicurus, Eric Voegelin, French Revolution, Lucretius, rebirth, Śaṅkara, Śāntideva, Sigmund Freud, Simone Weil, Vladimir Lenin
A couple of my recent posts have explored the idea of anti-politics – the idea that concern with affairs of the state is typically detrimental to a good human life. The anti-political view is one for which I have great sympathy. Now, as the previous post might have suggested, I also reject the supernatural; I believe that natural science is our best guide to the causality of the physical world, and that we would do well to look with skepticism on belief in celestial bodhisattvas, the multiplication of tooth relics, or an afterlife.
But if one takes up the resulting position – neither supernatural nor political – then one has relatively little company in the history of philosophy. From Yavanayāna Buddhists to Unitarian Universalists, those who have sought to move beyond the supernatural have typically also believed in political engagement. The vast majority of political quietists like Śāntideva believed in a vast panoply of unseen worlds far beyond those supported by empirically tested evidence.
I continue to wonder: is there something I’m missing? Is there some reason why so many in the end tend to supernaturalism, politics, or both? Continue reading
09 Wednesday Jun 2010
Posted in African Thought, Christianity, Epics, Faith, Free Will, God, Human Nature, Judaism, Morality, Prayer, Vedānta
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20th century, Adolf Hitler, Augustine, Bhagavad Gītā, chastened intellectualism, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Hebrew Bible, hell, Krishna, Mahābhārata, Mañjuśrī, Pol Pot, Rāmānuja, Sigmund Freud, theodicy, Vishnu, Xunzi
I once heard someone – I don’t remember where – criticize humanism (however defined) in the following manner: “The problem with humanism is it leads you to deify man, and the evidence seems to be that man is not worthy of being deified.” The point resonates with me as I think about chastened intellectualism, the idea – which I associate with Freud as well as Augustine and Xunzi – that human beings tend naturally toward wrong behaviour. Individually, despite good intentions, I find it a constant struggle to be a good and happy person; collectively, the history of the 20th century is a dark litany of what happens when – as is too often the case – people’s intentions are less than good. It is difficult to have faith in humanity when humanity has not earned it.
The argument to this point is, I think, in perfect sympathy with Augustine. Human beings for him are invariably and inevitably flawed, in a way that makes them unworthy of our trust. Instead, Augustine wants to argue, we must place our trust in a truly perfect being, God. Augustine’s argument here underlies a great deal of conservative Christianity: even if church institutions and/or biblical scripture appear wrong to us, they are a better guide than our own weak and easily misled intellects.
For the moment, let us leave aside the question of how we know Church or Bible embody God, or even whether God exists. I think there is a far deeper question at issue here: even assuming he exists, how can we trust God? Continue reading
30 Sunday May 2010
Posted in Buddhism, Christianity, Consciousness, Death, East Asia, Family, German Tradition, Judaism, Psychology, Self, Social Science, Supernatural, Vedānta
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Advaita Vedānta, Hebrew Bible, Lucretius, Max Weber, Mozi, nondualism, Plato, rebirth, Śaṅkara, Sigmund Freud, Stephen Walker
Few phenomena lead people to philosophy (as the love of or search for wisdom, not necessarily as an academic discipline) like the fact of our own deaths. Most of the things we might seek in life – especially happiness – we will cease to have when we die, or so it seems. This fact is sobering; our choice is to be aware of it (and therefore be in some sense philosophical) or to be caught unawares, die unprepared and miserable. For that reason Plato said that philosophy is the practice of death; today, we don’t have enough of a culture of death, enough to prepare us for this fact.
What then should we do about our impending death? The most common answers typically involve the supernatural, with belief in an afterlife. Christians will speak of an afterlife in heaven, Buddhists of rebirth. So all we have to do is be good in this lifetime (or ask forgiveness for our sins), and we’ll be able to continue “living” well after death. Such a view is comforting. Unfortunately, I don’t have any reason to believe it true. I’ve heard it argued that we really don’t know enough about consciousness to say that it ends with death. That may well be so. But we also don’t know enough to say that anything else happens to it, either – certainly nothing like the graphic hells that, according to Śāntideva, await those with sufficiently bad karma. In terms of any sort of survival of the self after death, it seems to me, the very best we can do is agnosticism, and perhaps not even that.
But if death really is – or might be – the end of each individual, then what? Continue reading
09 Sunday May 2010
Posted in Aesthetics, Christianity, Confucianism, Early Factions, Food, German Tradition, Human Nature, Humility, Judaism, M.T.S.R., Mahāyāna, Social Science, Truth
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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
11 Sunday Apr 2010
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blo sbyong, consequentialism, Hans Vaihinger, James Maas, Jesus, Neil Sinhababu, New Testament, Peter Railton, Śāntideva, Sigmund Freud, utilitarianism
By far the most famous portions of Śāntideva’s work are his meditations on the equalization and exchange of self and other, found in chapter VIII of the Bodhicary?vat?ra. They appear in Western introductory readers on ethics, and are considered the foundation for an entire genre of Tibetan literature, blo sbyong or “mental purification.” Personally, these are not generally my favourite parts of Śāntideva’s work; his arguments against the existence of the self do not convince me, and the meditative exercises strike me as potentially damaging. That said, they do contain one line that sticks with me, that strikes me as extremely profound and valuable: All those in the world who are suffering are so because of a desire for their own happiness. All those in the world who are happy are so because of a desire for the happiness of others. (BCA VIII.129, my translation)
I discussed this claim once before but want to return to it. The claim is, I think, overstated for rhetorical effect. Even in Śāntideva’s eyes, merely desiring others’ happiness will not make you happy – especially if you are misguided about the causes of their happiness, so that you try only to provide them with external goods rather than addressing the inner mental causes of their suffering. And yet from my experience, I would still say the claim is more true than not. There’s something self-defeating about searching after one’s own happiness itself. If one keeps one’s eye on this goal above all, one becomes too acutely aware of failures at it, too focused on one’s lack of happiness – “I’m trying so hard to be happy and yet I’m not; something must be wrong with me” – and the goal is inhibited. (In his book Power Sleep, psychologist James Maas noted a similar problem with respect to sleep: subjects offered $20 if they fell asleep quickly would take longer to fall asleep than subjects who were not offered the money.) Continue reading