Author Archives: Amod Lele

Śāntideva helps Lucretius

13 Sunday Sep 2009

Posted by in Buddhism, Death, Epicureanism, Fear, Greek and Roman Tradition, Happiness, Self

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In my post on marriage I wrote about Lucretius as offering something of an alternative to Buddhist views on death. There is a contrast in emphases: where Buddhists warn us of the terrible losses that come with death, Lucretius tells us death isn’t so bad and we should stop fearing it. But I think there is a way in which the two can go together.

The biggest problem with Lucretius’s advice is that it’s so hard to follow. Often those who don’t fear death simply don’t treat it as a real possibility. (The young, I think, are especially prone to this.) Once you really contemplate the possibility of your own death, the fear becomes much more real. You think you don’t fear death, but you really do.

The thing is, as long as your worldview focuses on yourself, your death is inevitably going to be a problem for you. You can live to improve the remaining moments of your life, but eventually those get fewer and fewer. Egoistic consequentialism, at least, seems to end in futility. This would seem a logical reason to fear death, against Lucretius – maybe not death itself, but the last moments that precede it, where everything you do means nothing.

Here, I think, a Buddhist view can help – especially Śāntideva’s. He takes the basic Buddhist doctrine of non-self and runs with it: claims that because the concept of a self makes no sense, we need to live for everyone and not just ourselves. I’m not sure I buy the metaphysical arguments, but there’s a lot to be said for their practical consequences. One of Śāntideva’s verses that has really stuck with me is BCA VIII.129: “All who are suffering in the world are suffering because of their desire for their own happiness. All who are happy in the world are happy because of their desire for others’ happiness.” Śāntideva doesn’t explain what he means by this, but I think this may be a part of it: getting over ourselves helps us to be happy, partially because it lets us live for things that extend beyond our deaths. (I’m reminded of this passage when I read of Jesus saying “Whoever tries to keep his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will preserve it.”) On this score, it seems to me, Śāntideva helps us to be better Lucretians.

“You’re no Buddhist!”

10 Thursday Sep 2009

Posted by in Mahāyāna, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modernized Buddhism

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Justin Whitaker’s blog pointed me to some interesting recent discussions of what it means to be a Buddhist, among Buddhist bloggers mostly of the Yavanayāna persuasion. Blogger Marcus (no last name provided) threw down a strongly worded gauntlet last week: “The fact is, if you are serious about Buddhism, you don’t drink. The Buddha’s words couldn’t be clearer.”

I have at least two objections to Marcus’s claim about alcohol. First, we fail at our chosen life goals all the time; we may be serious about following Buddhism, believe that therefore we shouldn’t drink, and still drink anyway. That may make us bad at Buddhism, but it doesn’t make us unserious. Second, matters are often not so cut and dried. It would be hard to say that Śāntideva was not serious about Buddhism – he became a lifelong monk and tried hard to live according to the words of the Buddha as he understood them. But he actually advocates (following the Mahāyāna Ugraparipṛcchā Sūtra, which at least claims to be the word of the Buddha) that one give alcohol to alcohol drinkers, as a way of winning their trust. (I discuss this point briefly the fourth chapter of my dissertation, and am writing an article on it in more detail.)

On the specific matter of alcohol, I tend to disagree with Marcus. But the discussion among Buddhist bloggers centred around bigger issues, where I think Marcus was quite right. Kyle of The Reformed Buddhist (who also appears to go without a last name) made a number of objections to Marcus, some of which I think are valid, some not so. But at the core of his reaction seems to be his first sentence: “Sigh the whole you’re no Buddhist thing again.” [emphases his] He seems in this post to take offence to the idea that someone could declare someone else to not be a Buddhist, or not be a serious Buddhist. In this he would seem to be agreeing with a slightly earlier post by Scott Mitchell of The Buddha Is My DJ. Mitchell opposes the claim made by some Buddhists (presumably including Marcus?) that their Buddhism is better or (or more “authentic”) than others’: “feel free to define yourself and your Buddhist practice. But stop doing it as a means to differentiate yourself from some “other” kind of Buddhist.”

Here I’ve got issues. Continue reading →

Why I’m getting married

08 Tuesday Sep 2009

Posted by in Attachment and Craving, Buddhism, Death, Epicureanism, External Goods, Family, Flourishing, Friends, Greek and Roman Tradition, Grief, Happiness, Jainism, Monasticism, Pleasure, Sex, Social Science, Virtue

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I’ll begin with happy news: I’m engaged! This weekend I proposed to my beloved Caitlin, and I’m delighted to say she accepted.

Now, I’ve tried to be explicit that this is a philosophy blog, not a personal blog – while a great deal here is autobiographical, the purpose of even those entries is to point to bigger questions, questions that I hope my life story can help illuminate in some way. So I’m going to talk today a little bit about my reasons for deciding to marry. The particular reasons, of course, are all about my sweetheart herself, a beautiful, smart, funny, playful, charming, sexy, adventurous, responsible, virtuous woman. But there are more general reasons that tie to the blog’s bigger concerns.

Above all, my action this weekend is not one that Śāntideva, or the Buddha of the Pali suttas, would view as a part of the highest, best, most fully virtuous life. They speak at length of the disadvantages of the household life, the life spent among family with a paid job in the everyday world. The life of a monk is a higher and better one to pursue. Eros keeps us mired in the suffering of everyday life, enslaved to the desires and craving that only cause us yet more suffering. The monk, by contrast, devotes himself or herself fully to the development of virtue, much more able to rise above craving and suffering.
Continue reading →

Inconsistency in the incest taboo

03 Thursday Sep 2009

Posted by in Disgust, Morality, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Psychology, Sex

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I’m often surprised by people who see gay rights as an entirely one-sided, good and evil issue – and then turn around and condemn incest, even consensual adult brother-sister incest, as sick, disgusting and therefore wrong. (The “therefore” is the most intriguing part.) I’ve always enjoyed Dan Savage‘s sex columns, but after his continued attacks on those who condemn gay sex as disgusting (such as ensuring that this (NSFW) is the first Google hit for Senator Rick Santorum‘s name), I lost a lot of respect for him when he repeatedly proclaimed incest to be wrong.

Savage’s arguments are startlingly poor. Continue reading →

Medicine as ethics

01 Tuesday Sep 2009

Posted by in Biology, Early and Theravāda, Flourishing, Food, German Tradition, Happiness, Health, Judaism, Politics, Psychology, Roman Catholicism, South Asia

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In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre once said that “it is the lawyers, not the philosophers, who are the clergy of liberalism.” That is, in modern societies – liberal in the broad sense – it is lawyers who do the work, and have the status, once given to the medieval European Christian priesthood.

On this point I think MacIntyre is half right – or perhaps three-quarters right. He is quite right to note the low status that the modern West accords philosophers; but he overemphasizes the role of lawyers, because his concept of the good is (to my mind) overly political. Lawyers do play the role of medieval clergy as the rulers’ intellectual assistants in determining what a good state will be in practice. When it comes to the good life itself, however, the intellectual heavy lifting is done by a very different group: namely doctors, and medical researchers. It is medicine, not law (and certainly not philosophy), that plays the greatest role in telling moderns how they should live.
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Lying to oneself about children and happiness

30 Sunday Aug 2009

Posted by in Family, Happiness, Honesty, Morality, Psychology

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In a previous post on happiness I noted that research tends to show people who have children are less happy than those who don’t. Yet, at the same time, most people who do have children will say that the kids make them happy, often even that their kids are their deepest source of joy in life.

Why? The answer seems obvious: if you don’t think that your children make you happy, if you resent them and regret them, you’re going to be a bad parent. By telling yourself your kids make you happy – even if they don’t – you are giving them a better life, doing something that will help them out. Surely that’s your duty as a parent, to think of your kids as your great joy and the centre of your life.

But there remains something unsettling here. Do we really want to say there’s a duty to lie to oneself, even for such a noble reason? If one allows oneself this kind of self-deception, surely it makes room for other, more harmful kinds of self-deception? I imagine this will be a difficult question to resolve – the kind that would require going down to the foundations – but I would like to hear your thoughts.

(For the record, I don’t have children and don’t plan on having them, so this is not a personal question for me.)

Reconsidering traditional masculinity

27 Thursday Aug 2009

Posted by in Buddhism, Emotion, Greek and Roman Tradition, Patient Endurance, Stoicism

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I’d like to push a bit further on the theme of the previous post, because I think it points to some important objections people have to Buddhism – and related philosophies.

A long time ago, I was talking to my friend Nic Thorne, a classicist, about Buddhism and virtue. I was explaining the characteristically Buddhist virtue of k??nti or patient endurance – taking unpleasant events with peace and equanimity. He said: “stoicism.”

The word just floored me. At that point I’d never studied the Stoics, and never imagined that there could be a connection between Buddhism and stoicism – whether with a small or big S. I associated the term “stoicism” with icons of old-fashioned masculinity, which seemed at the time almost comical: the British stiff upper lip, John Wayne. Men who refused to display emotion. I assumed such a posture was repression, leading to passive aggression – or perhaps to self-destruction. (Slash‘s autobiography is an interesting case study of a man who, unwilling to talk about or express his worries, instead turns to heroin for a release.)

But through my appreciation for Buddhism, I came to a new appreciation of that traditional masculinity as well. There’s something to the idea that one should control one’s emotions – though, again, this is very different from repressing them. It’s good to be the kind of person who doesn’t get angry – even though it’s terrible to be the kind of person who gets angry inside and represses it outside.

I do think, though, that the association of small-s stoicism with masculinity is misguided. Harvey Mansfield tried to defend it in his book on manliness, and in a talk he gave on the subject at Harvard; but I couldn’t discern a single reason in his talk why this manliness should be a virtue limited to biological males. I asked him why it wouldn’t be a virtue for women too, and he said “well, that’s the gender-neutral society I’m attacking,” but nothing in his reply seemed at all persuasive in claiming there was anything wrong with such a society. I appreciated his attempt to revive the virtues associated with masculinity, but his attempt to maintain a gender link did those virtues no favours.

If anything, it seems to me that the opposite of Mansfield’s position is true. Men should be the ones trying to express their repressed emotions, since they’re so conditioned to repress them – that’s how we avoid ending up in Slash’s position. It’s women, conditioned to be emotional, who most need a healthy dose of Buddhist patient endurance.

Repressing and reducing anger

25 Tuesday Aug 2009

Posted by in Anger, German Tradition, Mahāyāna, Monasticism, Patient Endurance, Psychology, Unconscious Mind

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What first drew me to Śāntideva was his critique of anger. I had students read him for a tutorial course on comparative ethics, and one student was shocked by his almost total criticism of anger as an emotion. “What about righteous anger?” she asked. I replied: “according to this text, I don’t think there’s any such thing as righteous anger.” The more I thought about this teaching afterward, the more profound it seemed: the number of times in my life I’d been glad I got angry, I could count on the fingers of one hand.

I would still tend to agree with Śāntideva against that criticism; I don’t see the righteousness of any cause as justifying anger. But there’s another common modern criticism of Śāntideva’s position that I think has more force. Namely: is it even possible to get rid of anger, as Śāntideva recommends we do? Don’t you just wind up repressing it, so that it comes back as a passive aggression that’s ultimately more destructive than the original anger?
Continue reading →

Differences across traditions, or within them?

20 Thursday Aug 2009

Posted by in Faith, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion

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You can’t go very far in cross-cultural philosophy without quickly running into the category of “religion” – indeed it’s already come up a number of times on this blog. When I was deciding where to do a doctorate studying the questions of cross-cultural philosophy, the most appropriate places seemed to be departments of religious studies; the departments where I’ve taught after graduation were religious studies as well. (This was for a variety of reasons, but the most important and obvious is that very few philosophy departments make any room for non-Western philosophy.)

But to what extent does the category of “religion” help us think cross-culturally – especially the idea of “different religions”? My suspicion is that it hurts more than it helps, because it puts up unnecessary barriers to inquiry; it discourages conversations across the boundaries of traditions.

Now let me be clear: I don’t at all buy the view that all religions are the same – or as Kevin Smith had Chris Rock put it in Dogma, “It doesn’t matter what you have faith in; what matters is that you have faith.” This is a dangerously simplistic move; one can supply countless historical examples of people who have had faith in the wrong thing. (Wilfred Cantwell Smith took a more sophisticated version of this position, but still, to my mind, a wrong one.) The differences in people’s beliefs and practices matter, and they matter a lot.

Still, one should ask: which differences matter? We tend to focus on the differences across traditions – the boxes one checks on the census, the differences between Christianity and Buddhism, say. But the more important differences may be within traditions. It seems to me that on many of the most important questions – Should we live ascetic lives or worldly ones? Should we ever lie, or kill? Should we be politically active? Should we love our own families more, or the whole world? – most “religions” have members taking positions on both sides. The difference between a liberal Canadian Anglican and an Engaged Buddhist, for example, seems to me much smaller than the difference between that same Anglican and an anti-gay Anglican African who believes in magic.

No post this coming Sunday, as I’m moving to a new apartment then.

My article’s up!

19 Wednesday Aug 2009

Posted by in Blog Admin, Mahāyāna

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Just a quick note of celebration: the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has just published my article on Śāntideva! If you’ve been wondering what the deal is with this Śāntideva guy I keep talking about, the article should be a good introduction.

The IEP website looks like it’s just undergone a snappy redesign, too. If the last time you visited was several months ago, have another look.