Author Archives: Amod Lele

The Buddhist critique of hope

26 Sunday Jul 2009

Posted by in Buddhism, External Goods, Happiness, Hope

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In her class on Buddhist ethics, Janet Gyatso once described Buddhism as a “critique of hope.” The statement has two flaws. First, of course, it’s an overgeneralization, like any statement about Buddhism as such; more importantly, it misses the hope for liberation, awakening, nirvana. Nevertheless, it strikes me as being basically true in many respects. This is perhaps another way of putting the critique of external goods: most Buddhist thinkers tell us to avoid hoping that the external conditions of our lives will get better, focusing instead on improving ourselves and making ourselves better able to deal with those conditions. On old BBSes I remember a message tagline saying “I feel so much better ever since I’ve given up hope.” In a certain sense, Buddhists urge us to be hopeless.

The problem is that in English this is not at all what “hopelessness” means. This kind of hopelessness is an arguably positive state; but normally “hopelessness” simply means despair, a terribly negative state. The reason, it seems to me, is that the word “hope” means two things at once: first, the strong desire that things be different than they are, and second, the expectation that they will become so, or at least have a chance of becoming so. Despair – hopelessness in the normal sense – is the first of these without the second. But the Buddhist critique is that it’s the first one that causes our problems, whether or not we have the second. Let go of the first, and the second doesn’t matter anymore.

It’s a self-help commonplace that we will never be happy as long as we tell ourselves “I’ll be happy when…” But that “I’ll be happy when” requires hope. If we give up the hope that we might have the things we want, it pushes us into contentment with the life we already have.

My story: finding Buddhism

23 Thursday Jul 2009

Posted by in Attachment and Craving, Early and Theravāda, Flourishing, Happiness, Modernized Buddhism

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My previous post examined the problems that led me to move away from utilitarianism, including its Rawlsian variant. Happily, I also found solutions.

Wat ThammamongkhonWhile working at the UN in Bangkok, I spent a lot of time at Thai Buddhist temples, because I thought they were the most beautiful places I’d ever seen – such incredible feasts of colour. I didn’t just go to the biggest and glitziest, the main tourist attractions; as an urban geographer I wanted to explore the city, and I kept heading to temples way off the beaten track. This attracted a lot of curiosity from monks who rarely saw foreigners, so I had a lot of conversations with monks – people who, having started with very little, chose to have even less. I got fascinated by Buddhism – both from my encounters with monks, and from the idea of a nontheistic religion. So I kept heading back to the used bookstores on Khao San Road, devouring whatever I could find about Buddhism – finding the likes of Walpola Rahula’s What the Buddha Taught.

But Buddhism hadn’t yet made a difference in my life, while I was working in Bangkok. That would come later, as I travelled through Laos and upcountry Thailand, keeping philosophical journals as I went.

In my journals, I came to reflect on the fact of my own dissatisfaction. In my times at McGill I had felt very unhappy because I lacked a good job and a girlfriend. In Bangkok I had a girlfriend, but the relationship made me even more unhappy. I also had a well paying job opportunity that many would envy, but in an environment so charged with politicking that I couldn’t wait to get out. Finally, of course, the job did end, and I had the chance I’d been waiting for, to travel for fun upcountry. But I was lonely, travelling all by myself; what I wanted was some people to talk to. Then I met some Thai people at a guesthouse who wanted to talk, but they didn’t speak much English so the conversation was limited. So I wanted to find some fellow foreigners to talk to in English – and I did, but I didn’t like them very much.

I took some stock of this situation in my journals. These events sounded to me like some sort of Buddhist parable; I just wished I could figure out what the point was. But eventually I did. I thought especially of the Second Noble Truth from the Pali suttas, that suffering comes from craving. Maybe, I thought, the problem isn’t with me not getting the things I want. Maybe the problem is with me. At age 21, especially for someone who’d grown up frequently being treated as if he was the smartest person on the planet, that’s the kind of realization that can change your world. It did change mine.

And yet, all the Western philosophy that I’d learned before didn’t just go away. I’d learned important, powerful, beautiful things that seemed true – and often seemed opposite to the Buddhism I’d found myself in. Is there a way to reconcile the two? One way or another, that question has been central to my life ever since.

My story: a break with utilitarianism

21 Tuesday Jul 2009

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Foundations of Ethics, Happiness, Politics, Social Science, Work

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I’ve noticed that the “About me” page on this blog has so far got more views than any other. So I hope it won’t be overly narcissistic of me to wax autobiographical for a moment, and expand (in this post and the next) on the story that I tell there, of how I came to the kind of philosophy I have now.

Philosophy intrigued me a lot in high school. My first real exposure to it was in grade 9, in 1990, in a mini-course at Queen’s University offered to precocious high-school students in my home town; I came to really enjoy it in a philosophy course that my high school offered in grade 12. What appealed to me most at the time was ethics, in a conventional sense (as opposed to the expanded sense that matters to me now): explanations of why we should do what we should do. But what those courses taught me above all was that I was a committed utilitarian; everything came down to acting for the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. Mill’s Utilitarianism was the first philosophical book I ever read in the original. It’s no coincidence that I was also a dedicated political activist at the time, participating in every left-wing cause I could get my hands on.

I started having philosophical qualms about utilitarianism soon afterwards, as I began my undergrad years studying sociology and urban geography at McGill; I couldn’t find a satisfying philosophical justification for it. I hadn’t read John Rawls at the time, but if I had, I probably would have become a worshipful devotee of his. (As I noted last time, while Rawls isn’t a utilitarian as such, and devotes much of his energy to attacking utilitarianism, the resulting worldview looks very much like utilitarianism’s: a life spent in political action to uplift the most deprived people.)

But while I saw problems with a utilitarian worldview, there wasn’t much to replace it, and during those years I remained more or less a utilitarian by default. Things really changed after graduation, when I went to work for the United Nations in Bangkok, trying to edit works that would help coordinate efforts for people with disabilities in Asia and the Pacific: a supremely utilitarian or Rawlsian job, aiming to help out millions of people in the direst of physical conditions.

And I found there was that I was terribly unhappy. Small things, like paper jams on printers, drove me to desperation. I wasn’t all that much more unhappy than I’d been in the previous years, but I was noticing it more. My unhappiness posed a significant problem for a utilitarian worldview, a problem that standard critiques of utilitarianism usually don’t get at. Namely: in the name of the greatest happiness, I was trying to help ensure that all these poor and deprived people could have the kinds of opportunities I’d had in my own privileged upbringing. But what good is it do to that, if someone with all these opportunities and privilege can still end up miserable?

Rawls the utilitarian

19 Sunday Jul 2009

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Economics, Happiness, Morality, Politics

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John Rawls is widely recognized as one of the most important critics of utilitarianism. In some respects he is; utilitarianism per se became much less popular in analytic philosophical circles after the publication of Rawls’s work. Yet in another respect, Rawls’s work is fundamentally a continuation of the utilitarian project – softening John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism in something very much like the way that Mill had softened Bentham’s. Continue reading →

Yavanayāna Buddhism: a defence

16 Thursday Jul 2009

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

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In my last post I spoke of Yavanayāna Buddhism, the new modernized, Western-influenced Buddhism (including Engaged Buddhism) that focuses on meditation and denies the supernatural. Many contemporary Buddhologists look at Yavanayāna with barely concealed disdain. Donald López’s article on belief in the volume Critical Terms for Religious Studies, for example, is a prolonged sneer toward the views of Henry Steel Olcott, the nineteenth-century reformer who made much of Sri Lankan Buddhism what it is today.

I’ve heard several fellow academics look at a Buddhism like Olcott’s or Walpola Rahula’s or even S.N. Goenka’s and snort “That’s not Buddhism!” And certainly, as noted, Yavanayāna Buddhism turns out quite different from what the Buddha actually taught. But few of these same academics are willing to turn around and say about East Asian Buddhism: that is not Buddhism. And yet, I would argue, East Asian Buddhist tradition has (at least at times) gone even further than North American Buddhism from anything that could be identified as the Buddha’s teaching. It’s not just Mahāyāna that I’m concerned about here; Mahāyāna Buddhism as such has its origins in the j?taka stories of the Buddha’s previous lives, which are some of the oldest Buddhist texts we know of. Rather, I think of doctrines like the Tiantai view that material things have a permanent and enduring nature – contradicting not only the classical Buddhist metaphysical view of non-self and non-essence, but also its ethical implications that material things are not worthy of our pursuit. If we’re willing to grant that Tiantai is legitimately Buddhist, I would argue, we cannot but do the same for Yavanayāna.

East Asian Buddhism is often seen as an “authentic” Buddhism in a way that Yavanayāna is not. But I’ve already posted my misgivings about the concept of authenticity. East Asian Buddhism seems authentic because people now are born into it, rather than choosing to join it as they do with Goenka; but we value what isn’t chosen because that’s what modern capitalism makes scarce. It doesn’t necessarily mean that that “authentic” Buddhism is a better path to follow; indeed, a certain romanticism may mislead us into thinking that nothing modern can possibly be good.

Yavanayāna Buddhism: what it is

14 Tuesday Jul 2009

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

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Academic scholars of Buddhism (often referred to by the ugly term “Buddhologists”) today spend a great deal of time and energy pointing out ways that particular features of contemporary Western-influenced Buddhism are not present in earlier or classical tradition. At least four features appear strikingly new: Engaged Buddhism and its concern with politics; the relative absence of monks; the strong emphasis on meditation; and the rationalistic denial (or minimizing) of supernatural forces.

It’s pretty clear that most of these features were not there in most premodern Buddhist traditions. So, for example, Walpola Rahula’s What the Buddha Taught, while taken from the Pali suttas’ record of what the Buddha supposedly taught, turns out to be an extremely selective reading. Even if we take the suttas as an accurate record of what the Buddha taught (which they probably aren’t), if you read the whole collection you would get a very, very different picture of Buddhism than the one Rahula gives you: a world inhabited by gods and spirits, focused on monks, with limited emphasis on meditation and almost none on politics. What people like Rahula did is a genuine innovation.

This innovation departs enough from earlier tradition that one could call it a fourth y?na, a new Buddhist “vehicle” or tradition. Traditionally there are held to be three y?nas: the Theravāda of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia which adheres to early, pre-Mahāyāna teachings; the Mahāyāna prevalent in East Asia; and Vajray?na, the tantra-influenced variant of Mahāyāna prevalent in Tibet. I like to call the new Buddhism Yavanayāna – after yavana, the Sanskrit and Pali term for Hellenistic Greeks, and by extension for Europeans. A four-y?na distinction makes for an easy mnemonic – to Theravāda in the south, Mahāyāna in the east and Vajray?na in the north, one adds Yavanayāna in the west.

Christopher Queen has recently been arguing that Engaged Buddhism itself constitutes a fourth y?na; but modernized Buddhist traditions share other characteristics as well, such as meditation and non-supernaturalism. Goenka vipassanā is not very political, but it is very different from the Theravāda of eighteenth-century Burma, and seems like it must be considered a part of fourth-y?na Buddhism. Queen has noted in conversation that Engaged Buddhism (and other forms of modernized Buddhism) are not just a Western invention; many of its most noted practitioners, including Rahula and Goenka and other luminaries like Thich Nhat Hanh, are Asians. This is certainly true, but it would also be hard to deny that their Buddhism owes a great deal to the influence of Western reformers (Christian, Theosophist and secular). Some take this point as a criticism: this so-called y?na is just a bastardization, a pandering to Western tastes. I strongly disagree with this criticism, but that’s a topic for my next post.

Taking back ethics

09 Thursday Jul 2009

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Buddhism, Flourishing, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Morality, Virtue

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In the past few years, especially since the publication of Damien Keown’s The Nature of Buddhist Ethics, there has been a small academic cottage industry devoted to the question of how one might best classify Buddhist ethics. Which of the three standard branches of analytical ethics does it fall under: consequentialism (à la J.S. Mill), deontology (à la Kant) or virtue ethics (à la Aristotle)? The debate has generally been a tussle between virtue ethics (Keown’s position) and consequentialism (Charles Goodman). My friend (and contributor to this blog) Justin Whitaker suspects that a deontological interpretation of Buddhist ethics is possible, but he’s a voice in the wilderness so far.

At the SACP, Michael Barnhart proposed a way of sidestepping this debate entirely. As far as ethics itself goes, he says, Buddhism is particularist; it doesn’t adhere to any real theory, it just responds to particular situations. Where it does have a theory isn’t in ethics at all, but in something else entirely: the question of what we care about, or should care about. (Specifically, he argues, Buddhists claim we should care above all about suffering.)

Barnhart based this idea on Harry Frankfurt’s essay, “The importance of what we care about.” I didn’t comment on his paper right after the SACP, because I wanted a chance to read Frankfurt’s piece first. Having read it, I would now say that Barnhart and Frankfurt both run into a common problem: an unreasonably narrow definition of ethics. Continue reading →

Ethics without morality

02 Thursday Jul 2009

Posted by in Anger, Free Will, German Tradition, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Morality

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There’s been a debate in the past couple of years between Mark Siderits and Charles Goodman over Śāntideva’s attitude toward free will. In his chapter condemning anger, Śāntideva says a number of things that sound completely determinist:

Even though my stomach fluids and so on make great distress, I have no anger toward them. Why do I have anger toward sentient beings? Even their anger has a cause…. Certainly, all the different crimes and vices arise out of causes; we can’t find an independent one…. Therefore, when one sees an enemy or a friend doing unjust acts, one should think “it has causes,” and remain happy. (Bodhicary?vat?ra verses VI.22-33) Continue reading →

Neither career nor hobby

30 Tuesday Jun 2009

Posted by in Family, German Tradition, Social Science, Work

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I wanted to link here to a wonderful post I just found on Livejournal, though it appears to be a couple months old. The author, an artist, has written eloquently on something I’ve been finding vitally important but had not yet managed express. Namely, there is a concept missing in our vocabulary about work: we have a serious blind spot for what is between “career” and “hobby.” A career is what you do for money; anything you don’t do for money, gets relegated to the status of an indulgent pastime, a mildly pleasant but unserious way to while away the hours until your real work begins anew.

There’s a hidden, and I think pernicious, assumption underlying such a dualism: that anything not done for money is just not that serious. Feminists have rightly criticized the effects of such an assumption when it comes to childrearing and homemaking; but I think we’ve yet to seriously think about its effects for other kinds of unpaid work.

I do not plan on this blog ever making me any money. Nor do I plan on it advancing my academic career. If either of those happens, great. But those are not the point; I feel an inner drive to do a kind of writing that I can’t make money off of, and that’s more important to me than the kind of writing that does pay. This is something central to my life, and it makes no sense to relegate that to the category of “hobby.”

The original post’s author (who goes by the alias haikujaguar) suggests that we should refer to our meaningful unpaid work with the honourable names of “vocation” and “calling.” I’m less certain about this, because for so long these terms have had the connotation of paid work. The term “calling” comes from the German Beruf, which now simply means paid work. (Was sind sie von Beruf? is German for “What’s your job?”) Continue reading →

In defence of hypocrisy

28 Sunday Jun 2009

Posted by in Morality, Politics, Virtue

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Recent news of South Carolina governor Mark Sanford’s affair provides an appropriate occasion to discuss a topic that’s been on my mind lately: hypocrisy. When social conservatives like Sanford or Bill Bennett get caught in vice, the charge immediately hurled at them is hypocrisy; this is said to make their crimes far worse than those of, say, Eliot Spitzer, who wasn’t that kind of moralizer in the first place. But I want to make the case here that hypocrisy is really not so bad.

A defence of hypocrisy is not original to me. There are plenty of right-wingers who’ve defended hypocrisy in these sorts of situations: William Vallicella blogged about it a while ago, Jeremy Lott wrote a whole book about it, and most recently James Matthew Wilson‘s defence of hypocrisy at Front Porch Republic was where I heard about Sanford’s adultery in the first place. But these men do not share the ideals of those who usually attack hypocrisy, and I think the point might be more persuasive coming from a left-leaner like me. I oppose Sanford’s and Bennett’s sexual politics, and I think their behaviours were unjustifiable; but I want to claim that these two criticisms are and should be mostly separate.

Put it this way. Suppose a man preaches anti-racism, tells all his friends they must avoid racism, donates to anti-racist causes; but himself refuses to hire black people or associate with them professionally. Now imagine a man who acted the same way toward black people but advocated doing so — a man who said that black people are unreliable and should not be hired or associated with. The first man is a hypocrite, the second man is absolutely not; the second man is sincere, and true to himself. But is the second man then better than the first? I don’t think so. In both cases the serious wrongdoing is the racism, not the hypocrisy. I might say, actually, that the hypocrite who preaches anti-racism is at least a bit better than the consistent man who doesn’t; the first is doing some good. Moreover, one can point out the inconsistency between his behaviour and his ideals, in a way that helps his behaviour change for the better. It’s much harder to change the man whose bad ideals match his bad behaviour.