Author Archives: Amod Lele

The tragedy of Johannes Kepler

25 Sunday Oct 2026

Posted by in Aesthetics, Deity, German Tradition, Metaphysics, Physics and Astronomy, Protestantism, Roman Catholicism

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The early 17th century, the time of Galileo, was a golden age for astronomy. One of its leading figures was the German Johannes Kepler, who made successful mathematical models of the planets’ orbit around the sun. Kepler also reacted strongly against something we now take for granted: the idea that the universe is infinite, with many solar systems rather than everything orbitting the sun. Kepler thought that the evidence didn’t support an infinite universe, and he was very grateful for that. For when Kepler thought of an infinite universe he said:

This very cogitation carries with it I don’t know what secret, hidden horror; indeed one finds oneself wandering in this immensity, to which are denied limits and center and therefore also all determinate places. (from De stella nova)

And here’s the thing: Kepler was right to be horrified.

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The significance of General Tso’s chicken (and pizza)

18 Sunday Oct 2026

Posted by in Food, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modern Hinduism, Modernized Buddhism

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Photo by Evan Joshua Swigart (TheCulinaryGeek), CC-BY 2.0 licence.

For longer than I’ve been alive, restaurants in North America that call themselves “Chinese” have typically served dishes that would not be recognized in China: chop suey, sweet and sour pork. This North American Chinese food is not one of my favourite cuisines, but I am fond of one of its unhealthier highlights: General Tso’s chicken, chicken deep-fried to a crisp then covered in a sweet and spicy sauce.

In the past two decades there have been a number of essays and articles explaining the history of General Tso’s chicken: how it began with a Hunan-American chef who wanted to make a new dish reminiscent of Hunan court cuisine, which had neither the crisp batter nor the sauce’s sweetness, but then quickly got taken up by other American chefs into something that delighted the American public and became taken up as a typically Hunan dish even though it was nothing of the sort. Perhaps most strikingly, according to one such article, “General Tso’s chicken is now being adopted as a ‘traditional’ dish by some influential chefs and food writers in Hunan”: some people back in Hunan now claim the dish as theirs.

And what this all reminds me of is a significant metaphor used in the study of Indian religions.

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Is delusion a modern institution?

20 Sunday Sep 2026

Posted by in Biology, Early and Theravāda, Epistemology, Modernized Buddhism, Politics, Social Science, Supernatural

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My upcoming book is devoted to the theme that suffering doesn’t come primarily from bad external situations (like political ones), but from the interaction of those bad situations with our mental states of craving and resistance. One might ask: is it possible to split the difference? Could it be that our suffering comes from our mental states but that the institutions make things worse?

Mindfulness critic Ron Purser and Zen teacher David Loy think so. Referring to the traditional “three poisons” of craving (rāga), anger (dosa) and delusion (moha), they claim:

today the three unwholesome motivations that Buddhism highlights—greed, ill will, and delusion—are no longer confined to individual minds, but have become institutionalized into forces beyond personal control.

The emphases are mine, to show what a strong claim is being made here: that our institutions today encourage craving, anger, and delusion in a way that previous societies and institutions did not. Once the problems were confined to individual minds, but they no longer are. Purser and Loy don’t explain their claim in that post, but Loy did so in an important 2004 piece called “What’s Buddhist about socially engaged Buddhism”, no longer available at its original site but thankfully still available through the wonders of archive.org.

I examine Loy’s arguments about institutions encouraging craving and anger in the book. (Overall I don’t think they work, though he’s got more of a case on craving than on anger.) But Loy’s claims about delusion take us far enough afield from the book’s argument that I abbreviated the book’s response to them. Here, I can now give that response in full. Is it true that delusion is “no longer confined to individual minds”, but has become “institutionalized into forces beyond personal control”?

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Do stop thinking about tomorrow

13 Sunday Sep 2026

Posted by in Certainty and Doubt, Epicureanism, Fear, Food, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Phenomenology, Pleasure, Work

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Modern mindfulness meditation is helpful in a great variety of ways. Most importantly, it trains you to notice when your mind is distracted. Once you’ve done it for a while, the benefits go further. Especially, you can notice how your mind is distracted.

Some of Andy Puddicombe’s more advanced Headspace meditation series ask you to notice the kinds of distractions your mind faces: starting with whether it’s a thought or a feeling, and then examining the kind of thought or feeling it is. Once you’ve done this enough, you start to notice patterns: what it is that your mind tends to do in the moment. In my case, I noticed that my mind returns over and over to future plans.

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Christians can have neutral supernatural beings

23 Sunday Aug 2026

Posted by in Deity, Morality, Place, Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, Supernatural

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Back when I was a TA at Harvard, possibly my favourite student was an evangelical Christian. He was an economist, so his written work wasn’t as good as some of his other students, but his participation was essential to my seminar discussion, within Diana Eck‘s world-religions class. Many of the students were at Harvard Divinity School and drawn to a view that the “world religions” were all basically the same and all basically good. This student was having none of it: to claims that Christians and Muslims worship the same god, he would insist “Either God had a son or he didn’t! That makes a difference!” The discussion was far richer for that counter-perspective.

We remained in touch for a little while afterwards; he even interviewed me for an evangelism class. He went off to do missionary work in Brazil, and was struck by the role that folklore creatures like shapeshifting spirits play in local lives. “They may not be real in the US,” he said, “but they’re real here.”

What really sticks in my mind about that conversation, though, was what came next. He thought that if the locals were to become Christian, they would need to stop making offerings to the spirits. After all, the Christian God admits no competition, no idolatry, no “other gods before me”. But, I asked my former student, would offerings to spirits necessarily be idolatry? What if the interactions weren’t worship, but transactional? In many cultures, one leaves offerings to spirit beings in the hope that they will provide some sort of good fortune in return. That doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with worship. If one pays a doctor or a mechanic, that’s not idolatry, it’s just fee for service. Why would it be any different to pay a faerie or a river spirit?

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Marx and Mill: similar makers of the modern left

16 Sunday Aug 2026

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Economics, Flourishing, German Tradition, Place, Politics

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Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill have both done a great deal to shape modern political philosophy. Their differences stand out fairly easily: Mill the analytical English-language utilitarian enthusiast of capitalist progress, Marx the “continental” dialectical advocate of communist revolution. Yet what stands out to me is what they have in common.

Maybe their commonalities stand out to me because they’re the first two philosophers I ever seriously engaged with myself, back in high school. As I sought a deeper justification for my own activist political views, Mill’s Utilitarianism was the first primary philosophical text I ever read. And my father’s Marxism spurred me to do a paper on Marxism in a high-school economics class, for a teacher who was somewhat bewildered by it. Possibly as a result, both thinkers have shaped my own political philosophy considerably – though I have my disagreements with both. But in both my agreements and disagreements, I find their similarities more important than their differences.

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The Radical Buddhism Project

06 Thursday Aug 2026

Posted by in Modernized Buddhism, Politics

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My friend and colleague James Shields has just started a new site called the Radical Buddhism Project, “an independent digital humanities archive and research portal dedicated to recovering, preserving, and contextualizing the historical intersections of Buddhist doctrine with radical left-wing socio-political thought.” It collects information on Buddhist radicals in countries across Asia.

I’ve often been at pains to point out that classical Buddhism often opposed political engagement. (Others like Brian Victoria and Michael Jerryson have called attention to something that should have been obvious, that Buddhism has frequently been deployed in a right-wing direction as well.) That said, traditions flourish by being reinvented and extended in new ways, from Chinese Tiantai to medical mindfulness. I think the radical Buddhists on the site are creating an interesting form of modernized Buddhism that’s worth knowing about, and I’m excited that James has put the site together.

The present moment has no marshmallow

02 Sunday Aug 2026

Posted by in Action, Attachment and Craving, Food, Mahāyāna, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Pleasure, Psychology, Self, Self-Discipline

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Last year the Zen philosopher Seth Zuihō Segall invited me to speak to a course on seven universal virtues, on the topic of self-discipline or temperance. I want to return here to the point that I think was most important in that talk: there’s an apparent contradiction between the virtues of self-discipline and mindfulness (at least in the modern form of mindfulness) – but it is only apparent.

Specifically: self-discipline is all about delaying gratification – focusing on a future benefit that makes it worth avoiding the thing that seems appealing in the present. Whereas mindfulness – at least in its modern forms, which have more historic precedent than is sometimes supposed – is all about a focus on the present moment, letting the past and the future fall away. Aren’t these two supposed virtues then in contradiction with each other: the one telling you to focus on the future over the present, the other telling you to focus on the present over the future?

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The gap is not glorious

26 Sunday Jul 2026

Posted by in Daoism, Death, Deity, Early and Theravāda, Economics, Flourishing, Metaphysics, Mindfulness, Politics

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The Buddha’s encounter with unwelcome facts of life. Picture from Wat Preah Prom Rath, Siem Reap, Cambodia: Adobe Stock image copyright by Godong Photo.

The great Buddhist poet Aśvaghoṣa famously tells the story of the Buddha’s father, the king, who tried to keep his son as an heir rather than a monk by isolating him from all the bad things in the world. Of course the king’s plan doesn’t work: the Buddha-to-be sneaks out and sees an old man, a sick man and a dead man, reminding him that these fates will come to a king as surely as anyone else, and so he renounces the world and becomes a monk. The story shows us that there always remains a gap between what is and what should be: we will always face sad facts like illness and death. That gap is bad, it is always with us, and that is unfortunate; it is just the way things are, whether we like it or not. It provides a need and an impetus for us to improve our minds, to escape the suffering that comes from craving in the face of those sad facts.

A very different take on that gap comes from Jacobin senior editor Alex Caring-Lobel in the Springer Handbook of Mindfulness, which collects over thirty essays objecting to the modern mindfulness movemennt. These essays take particular objection to David Gelles’s claim that “stress emanates from a mismatch between our expectation of how things should be and the way things are”. (p85) Caring-Lobel, in particular, objects to Gelles’s view because it

dismisses that glorious gap between “how things should be and the way there [sic] are” as a kind of impediment to flourishing. This is, after all, the space of the social imagination. It is also the space in which democracy operates. (Caring-Lobel p209)

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