Author Archives: Amod Lele

The virtue of laziness

29 Sunday Apr 2012

Posted by in Self-Discipline, Work

≈ 14 Comments

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I’m really enjoying my new job at the intersection of academia and technology, and it’s made me want to improve my technology skills. So I’m now preparing for a Master’s degree in computer science, learning to program in modern computer languages. I’ve been trying to think about how to be a good programmer, and looking up some advice on the web. Of course people’s assessments of good programmers are widely different, but there’s one surprising claim that comes up quite a lot: a good programmer is a lazy programmer.

This is the point where programming becomes philosophically interesting. Continue reading →

The monk’s independence

22 Sunday Apr 2012

Posted by in Attachment and Craving, Death, Early and Theravāda, External Goods, Generosity, Jainism, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Monasticism, Sāṃkhya-Yoga, Self, Serenity, Social Science

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It’s often said that “individualism” is an invention of the modern West – meaning the approach that defines human beings as independent and autonomous from their social context. The French sociologist Louis Dumont made this claim directly in contrast to India, seeing India as a highly communitarian place where an individual’s community and social status much more. Dumont applied this communitarian view not only to Indian society at large but to its theoretical thought.

Many students of other cultures soon come to see individualism as a Western conceit – a bizarre peculiarity of an eccentric society that went wrong with Descartes. If indeed the modern West is a complete solitary exception to the rule, then there would seem to be something to this view.

I wrestled with it for a while myself. I used to believe Dumont’s classification of India was correct. It certainly resonated with my personal experiences, seeing how much more my Indian family cared about family and community ties. But those experiences, combined with the communitarian stereotype of India found in the likes of Dumont and Max Weber, blinded me to things I read every day in graduate school for years without actually noticing. Continue reading →

Poisonous Buddhist gifts

15 Sunday Apr 2012

Posted by in Attachment and Craving, External Goods, Generosity, Jainism, Karma, Mahāyāna, Modern Hinduism, Monasticism, Social Science

≈ 13 Comments

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I admire Maria Heim‘s research on gift-giving in classical India. There’s one point that I think her work misses, however – a topic I had intended to cover in my dissertation on Śāntideva but never had room for. It’s not a constructive philosophical point – I’m not taking any ideas of my own from the ideas I discuss here – but it’s helpful to think about in order to understand philosophies like Śāntideva’s that I do draw significantly from. (And it will be relevant to next week’s post.) Continue reading →

Good karma as eudaimonia

08 Sunday Apr 2012

Posted by in Epicureanism, External Goods, Flourishing, Karma, Mahāyāna, Stoicism, Supernatural, Virtue

≈ 16 Comments

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One of the first posts I made on this blog examined Dale Wright‘s methodological approach of naturalized karma. This is a way of continuing to use the concept of karma, and thereby remaining more closely in dialogue with classical Buddhist (and Jain and brahmanical) texts – without relying on the supernatural connections usually implied by the concept, especially rebirth. (By “karma” here I refer above all to the referents of Sanskrit pāpa and especially puṇya, best translated respectively as “bad karma” and “good karma”.) I’d like to explore this idea in more detail here.

Wright’s basic approach is to read karma as meaning something like an Aristotelian virtue ethic: good actions are rewarded with a good, flourishing life, in this life irrespective of future ones (and bad ones correspondingly punished). This much is not a Yavanayāna innovation; plenty of Buddhist texts make it clear that good action is rewarded in this life as well as in future ones. Continue reading →

Translating puṇya and pāpa

01 Sunday Apr 2012

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Karma, Mahāyāna, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Roman Catholicism

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Classical Indian Buddhist texts rely a great deal on two concepts: puṇya (Pali puñña) and pāpa. The former is good, something to pursue; the latter is bad, something to avoid. They have something to do with our actions and their results: punya comes out of our good actions and brings good results for us, pāpa comes out of our bad actions and brings bad results. We find these concepts all over the place in pretty much any Indian Buddhist text we might pick up. Next week I’ll explore in more detail what they are and how we might best think about them. This week I want to start with something more basic: how should we translate them into English? Absolutely not, I would argue, with the two words that Buddhism scholars most commonly use for them: namely “merit” and “sin” respectively. Continue reading →

On trying

25 Sunday Mar 2012

Posted by in Family, Flourishing, Honesty, Work

≈ 20 Comments

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This morning LinkedIn pointed me to an article in a business magazine entitled 3 Words That Guarantee Failure, written by one Geoffrey James. What are the words that, according to this article, guarantee failure? They are “I will try”:

People who say “I will try” have given themselves permission to fail. No matter what happens, they can always claim that they “tried.”

People who hear “I will try” and don’t realize what it really means are fooling themselves, by thinking there’s a chance that the speaker will actually succeed. Continue reading →

The problems with ineffable ethics

04 Sunday Mar 2012

Posted by in Confucianism, Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, Philosophy of Language, Politics

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I think it’s fair to say that in my recent post on Wittgenstein and Heidegger, I got Wittgenstein wrong. (And one of the things I love about doing philosophy as a blogger is the ability to be wrong in writing, and then simply retract it. If one is seeking an academic career as a philosopher, that sort of thing could easily bring said career to an ignominious end. Here, I can simply offer my apologies and move on with a revised position.)

I characterized Wittgenstein there as having “an indifference to ethics and concerns about the good life…” Given the concerns that occupy the bulk of his writing, it’s very easy to get that impression; compared to his voluminous prose about epistemology and philosophy of language, the amount of published or unpublished writing that he devotes to ethics and the good life is almost negligible.

But as several respondents to the post pointed out – both in the comments and in private emails – it’s really not fair to characterize that lack of ink as indifference. (And though I am by no means well versed in Wittgenstein’s thought, I did know enough about him that I should have remembered that.) The things Wittgenstein said about ethics were certainly limited; but they did exist. And those relatively few remarks tell us in his own words why he said so little. Continue reading →

Monkhood as technique

26 Sunday Feb 2012

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Happiness, Meditation, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modernized Buddhism, Monasticism

≈ 33 Comments

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My former grad-school colleague Justin McDaniel recently ran into an interesting bout of media attention and controversy over a course he teaches at Penn, and an Associated Press article written about it. It is a comparative course on monasticism, entitled “Living Deliberately”. Nothing unusual so far; but what makes this course innovative is it contains a practicum. A practicum is relatively standard fare these days for many university courses on meditation, in which students are encouraged to meditate and thereby get a firsthand grasp on the course content. But McDaniel’s course is the first one I’ve heard of in which students attempt to get firsthand experience of being a monk.

What does that mean? As part of the class, students are required to live for various periods of time according to various restrictions, each one followed by an actual monastic order of some tradition or other. No technology beyond electric lights; no reading news from the outside world; no eating after dark; no caffeine or alcohol; no vegetables that grow underground (a nod to Jainism). Breaking the rules requires confession. Continue reading →

Overthrowing Indo-European tradition

19 Sunday Feb 2012

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Daoism, East Asia, German Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Modernized Buddhism, Self

≈ 8 Comments

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I have often found myself somewhat bewildered by the philosophy of the early- to mid-20th century, associated above all with the names of Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein. These two thinkers cast their shadow widely over the traditions of philosophy that followed – Heidegger over “continental” philosophy, Wittgenstein over analytic. (The split between the two traditions was not nearly as pronounced in their day; in many respects they helped create it.) They are far apart in many respects, but they do share at least two tendencies I have strongly disliked – an indifference to ethics and concerns about the good life, on one hand, and a rejection of the bulk of philosophy that came before them on the other. I have tended to view these two tendencies as going hand in hand – but do they?

I’ve been thinking anew about Heidegger and Wittgenstein from perhaps an unusual angle: Chad Hansen’s fascinating A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought. I don’t yet know early Chinese thought well enough to assess whether Hansen’s account of it is accurate. But I can at least say that Hansen, like Nietzsche, is more interesting and thought-provoking even when he’s wrong than most people are when they’re right. Continue reading →

MacIntyre against Wilber’s worldcentrism

12 Sunday Feb 2012

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Confucianism, Foundations of Ethics, Metaphilosophy, Morality, Psychology, Self

≈ 5 Comments

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While recently poring over Ken Wilber‘s works, I’ve thought repeatedly about his ideas in relation to Alasdair MacIntyre‘s. Wilber, ever since he identified the pre-trans fallacy, has been an arch-modernist: the world from the Enlightenment onwards has been far better than the traditional world that preceded it. His most recent phase has taken a more postmodern, relativistic turn, but even as a postmodernist he is still a modernist: for Wilber the pluralism of a postmodern worldview is a clear advance, a development, and a pretty unambiguous one.

This is not the worldview one finds in MacIntyre. Continue reading →