Author Archives: Amod Lele

The scientific self is not reductionist

08 Sunday Dec 2024

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Biology, Early and Theravāda, Metaphysics, Modernized Buddhism, Philosophy of Science, Self

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Any serious contemporary Buddhist intellectual needs to think through the connection between Buddhist ideas and the relevant claims of natural science. Many of us, too, are expressive individualists: we believe that there is something valuable in the project of discovering one’s true self. The expressive individualist view of self-discovery and self-expression – put perhaps in most recent terms as “let your freak flag fly” – is that’s an uncomfortable fit with a tradition that has proclaimed for millennia that there is no true self.

There are at least three different metaphysical understandings underlying each of Buddhism, natural science, and expressive individualism, and at least at first glance they all appear to be in conflict. Resolving this conflict is not easy, and recently my views on how to do it best have significantly changed. I often find I get the best sense of what’s important in other people’s philosophies by figuring out what they changed and why, so I thought it would be helpful to show the changes in my own.

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Nondualism without monism

01 Sunday Dec 2024

Posted by in Deity, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Roman Catholicism, Vedānta

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Monism is the idea that everything is, or is ultimately reducible to, one. This is not quite the same as nondualism, a term increasingly common in mystical circles. Nondualism is the idea that everything is not two or more – not more than one. Nondualism and monism are very similar concepts, but they’re not exactly the same.

I’m speaking here of each term’s deepest metaphysical meaning, where it refers to the ultimate nature of the universe (each term can be used in other ways as well). The general core idea of nondualism is quite widespread: that is, that the most ultimate reality should not be identified with the many plural distinct things we typically observe and the distinctions between them. The ultimate is not dual or plural, and especially, at the ultimate level there is no distinction between subject and object. Yet all of that still doesn’t necessarily mean that the ultimate is one.

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“It is God’s will that I should have sinned”

24 Sunday Nov 2024

Posted by in Action, Anger, German Tradition, Morality, Roman Catholicism, Serenity, Shame and Guilt

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It’s not hard to see why the Catholic Church condemned Meister Eckhart for heresy. One of his teachings, in particular, is shocking even today: the good or blessed man, properly “poor in spirit”, is

so much of one will with God that he wills everything that God wills, and in the fashion in which God wills it. And therefore, because in some way or another it is God’s will that I should have sinned, I should not want not to have done so, for in this way God’s will is done “on earth,” that is, in misdeeds, “as it is in heaven,” that is, in good deeds. (Book of Benedictus section 2, pp. 216-17 in Meister Eckhart)

Or, as Eckhart’s accusers put it in the papal bull accusing him of heresy, “A good man ought to so conform his will to the divine will that he should will whatever God wills. Since God in some way wills for me to have sinned, I should not will that I had not committed sins; and this is true penitence.” (p. 77)

That’s a pretty extraordinary thing to be saying: it sounds like Eckhart is saying it’s good to be doing evil. That idea is as alarming to us as it would have been to the medieval Church.

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The Buddhist critique of shame

17 Sunday Nov 2024

Posted by in Disgust, Early and Theravāda, Fear, Humility, Shame and Guilt

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It doesn’t sit very well with many modern readers, including myself, to put a high value on shame. We often find shame to be something that cripples us, makes us burn with embarrassment in a way that inhibits our doing good. Too often I look to some minor misdeed of mine, sometimes even just a joke that failed to land, and instinctively beat myself up for it. Yet detailed introductions to Pali Buddhist texts will often note that these texts prize the mental states of hiri and ottappa, two Pali terms which are both often translated “shame”. It is important to pay attention to the parts of a tradition we disagree with, especially if it’s our own tradition; they can be the ones we learn from the most. So I don’t want to dismiss the texts’ valuation of what looks like shame.

And yet one day while looking through the suttas for something unrelated, I chanced upon something that is much less commonly remarked on: the Pali texts also contain a critique of shame. Or at least of something that could be translated as “shame” just as reasonably as hiri and ottappa can be. That something is kukkucca.

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Happiness from politics, or, mourning in America (again)

10 Sunday Nov 2024

Posted by in Anger, Attachment and Craving, Compassion, Despair, Gratitude, Grief, Happiness, Mahāyāna, Patient Endurance, Politics, Serenity

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This is the first time I’ve ever reposted an old Love of All Wisdom post, because, despite its being nearly twenty years old now, I think it’s timelier than ever.

I first posted the following piece in 2016 when Trump won the first time – but I wrote it in 2005, after George W. Bush won the second time. I had been furious at Bush’s endorsement of torture and devastation of the climate throughout his first term I had been able to comfort myself with the thought that he didn’t really win: after all, even leaving aside all the voting irregularities, his opponent had also got more votes than he did. But in 2004 no such comfort was available to me; that disaster of a president had won a decisive victory including even the popular vote, and I had to find some way of coming to terms with the awful world he was going to keep building. I wrote this piece in my personal journal, for myself, and I have kept its original stream-of-consciousness style, reflecting my raw thought process as I processed.

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Improving on the Buddha

03 Sunday Nov 2024

Posted by in Attachment and Craving, Death, Disgust, Early and Theravāda, Faith, Foundations of Ethics, Hermeneutics, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modernized Buddhism

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Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart is a beautiful and valuable work on dealing with difficult circumstances. What strikes me in it is how Chödrön – despite being a monk herself – takes a position so deeply at odds with traditional Indian Buddhism.

Chödrön refers to the traditional Buddhist “three marks” (tilakkhaṇa or trilakṣaṇa) of existence: everything is impermanent, suffering, and non-self. This idea goes back to very early texts. But Chödrön does with it is something quite different from the earlier idea:

Even though they accurately describe the rock-bottom qualities of our existence, these words sound threatening. It’s easy to get the idea that there is something wrong with impermanence, suffering, and egolessness, which is like thinking that there is something wrong with our fundamental situation. But there’s nothing wrong with impermanence, suffering, and egolessness; they can be celebrated. Our fundamental situation is joyful. (59)

Here’s the problem with this passage: the classical Indian Buddhist texts are quite clear that in fact there is something wrong with our fundamental situation. She is disagreeing with them, whether or not she acknowledges it.

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The return of Justice

27 Sunday Oct 2024

Posted by in Morality, Politics, Prejudices and "Intuitions"

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I was delighted to hear that this fall Michael Sandel has returned to teaching his Justice course at Harvard. He’d gone many years without teaching it, which I think was a shame, because that course does a better job than just about anything else I can think of at introducing people to philosophy. So it’s great to hear that it’s back.

I was twice a TA – or “TF”, for Teaching Fellow, as Harvard calls them – for Justice, now twenty years ago during my PhD. When Sandel interviewed me for the position, it was my favourite job interview I’ve ever had: the only interview where I was grilled on the finer points of Kant and Rawls. It was a proud moment for me because Sandel was skeptical about whether, as a religionist, I’d have the competence to teach the course, but I showed him how much moral and political philosophy I knew.

In those days at least, Justice was the most popular course at Harvard. It was held in the beautiful Sanders Theatre, Harvard’s largest audience space, and was so popular that the students who wanted to take it wouldn’t even fit in that space. That occasionally put us TFs in the position, not exactly standard for graduate students, of being bouncers: I told one student “I’m sorry, you’re not allowed in at the moment”, and she tried to go in anyway so I had to physically block her. Its popularity often made it a target for funny student pranks (see the picture).

A still from a video of Sandel teaching Justice twenty years ago. That’s me in the blue shirt in the back. (But I’m not the prank).
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Notes on a Jewish Sufi

20 Sunday Oct 2024

Posted by in African Thought, Islam, Judaism, Politics, Prayer, South Asia, Sufism

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I don’t wish at the moment to weigh in on the terrible current conflict in Israel and Palestine, save to offer my condolences to anyone whose loved ones are hurt by its horrors. I salute those on either side who are still striving, in the midst of it all, for a world where both Jews and Arabs can go about their lives in peace and freedom. But I have no idea how to get there; if there is a way, it will require the complex and difficult work of diplomats and politicians more than philosophers, and ones who know that situation far better than I do. What I hope I can offer today is merely a bit of historical perspective. That is: most of us alive today have only known a world where Jews and Muslims make headlines for being at each other’s throats. But it wasn’t always that way.

The years of the Abbasid caliphate‘s reign in Baghdad, from the 8th to 13th centuries, are often considered the Muslim golden age, where Muslim societies were the envy of the world for their civilizational achievements from poetry to medicine. 20th-century South Asian poets like Hali and Iqbal looked back with envy and nostalgia to that golden age, lamenting how far they had fallen from it under British colonialism.

What’s less frequently noted is that that era was also a Jewish golden age.

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Is it a racial crime for me to be myself?

13 Sunday Oct 2024

Posted by in Fear, Politics

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The prominence of Ibram X. Kendi in American institutions takes a further harmful turn with his ignorance of, and indifference to, the complex lives of people who are neither black nor white. The most egregious example is this passage, asserted with his book’s characteristic absence of argument: “It is a racial crime to be yourself if you are not White in America. It is a racial crime to look like yourself or empower yourself if you are not White.” (38)

I read those lines over multiple times and all I could think was:

What?

There’s no footnote, no further explanation. All Kendi gives you as reason to believe these statements is his say-so, as someone who is not “White”.

So, as someone who is also not “White” (by any standard actually in use), I am just as qualified as he is when I respond, from my own lived experience: these generalizations have no grounding in reality. They make no sense. They read like a fever dream.

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Of course “racist” is a pejorative

06 Sunday Oct 2024

Posted by in Morality, Philosophy of Language, Politics

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Consider what happens when you call someone an introvert. They may agree or disagree with you, but they will probably not feel particularly flattered or offended. That’s because, functionally, “introvert” is a merely descriptive term. We sometimes value extroversion more than introversion, but we get that introversion can be valuable in its own way and we don’t think it’s morally wrong.

Next, consider what happens when you call someone a liar. They are only likely to agree with you if you have caught them red-handed, and that agreement is going to be painful for them and have social consequences. More likely, they are going to deny it, and understandably so, because the act of lying is generally a bad thing, and to be a liar – being the kind of person who lies – is to have a moral character flaw.

Now consider in turn what happens when you call someone a racist. Are they going to react the way they do when you call them an introvert, or the way they do when you call them a liar?

They will react the way they do when you call them a liar, of course. As they should. Because we widely agree that being a racist, like being a liar but unlike being an introvert, is a moral failing. Racism is very bad. To call someone a racist is to seriously malign their moral character. Given all the disastrous harm that racism has caused over the centuries, you wouldn’t think that anyone would dispute that point. But it turns out that someone does, and that someone is Ibram X. Kendi.

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