Karin Meyers’s work on the “damned topics” of Buddhist philosophy is most powerful on the topic of rebirth. Because that’s the place where there’s actually some reasonably powerful evidence for the “damned topic”. Where I think she goes too far with that evidence is in the title of her unpublished paper on the topic, which is “Against naturalizing Buddhism”. I think we need to naturalize – that is, to put in non-supernatural terms – one of Buddhism’s most important ideas, namely karma. And I think we need to do that even if the evidence convinces us that rebirth is real.
American University philosopher Karin Meyers made an important contribution to Buddhist philosophical studies with her 2016 essay “The damned topics of Buddhist philosophy“. The essay (available free online) has never been formally published, though it clearly deserves to be: when I met Meyers recently, she noted that people have already discussed and commented on it more than any other piece she ever wrote. While I disagree with Meyers’s substantive conclusions, I think she takes an often methodologically wrong-headed field and points it in the right direction.
Meyers calls “damned” those Buddhist topics that would typically be called “supernatural” (a term that she dislikes but I have no problem with myself). That is, “topics such as rebirth, karma, non-human beings and realms, siddhis, devotional and contemplative practices, and even aspects of Buddhist soteriology.” And she claims:
Although such topics are described and analyzed by textual historians and anthropologists, they tend to be avoided or dismissed by philosophers. This is not because they are inherently immune to rational scrutiny or lack philosophical relevance. Instead, I suspect it is because of an implicit and often unacknowledged allegiance to certain modernist assumptions—namely, physicalism and epistemologies that privilege a cognicentric empiricism restricted to the five senses, as well as rationalistic and disembodied ways of knowing. Basic Buddhist doctrines and traditional forms of Buddhism directly challenge these assumptions.
You probably know the story: Once upon a time, human beings evolved in Africa, looking much like the black people we know today, and then gradually spread out into the rest of the world over a few million years, evolving to look different in each place. This geographical spread created the different groupings we now know as races, each a branch off the human evolutionary tree: white people in Europe, people with similar facial features but brown skin in South Asia, people with narrower eyes in East Asia, and so on. Once each kind of people evolved in each place, they mostly stuck around there, mixing mainly with their own kind, over the millions of years – until the ages of sail and of transport innovations allowed them to move around the world, creating an era where the formerly separate races newly began to mix.
This post is about a difficulty with email subscriptions that occurred over the past year or so. If you’ve been consistently receiving Love of All Wisdom blog posts in your inbox more or less every week over 2025-6, you can safely ignore it. However, a significant number of my subscribers unfortunately did not receive posts starting at some point last year. If you’re one of them – if you only started receiving LoAW posts again a couple weeks ago – then please read on.
My father’smemorial service was last weekend. The event was wonderful, bringing together friends and family I hadn’t seen in decades. It was heartwarming to see colleagues, neighbours, Canadian family, Indian family, American family share their fond recollections of him. That evening, colleagues, my uncle, my childhood best friend and I got into a discussion of Greek antiquity so spirited that it felt like my father Jayant was still in the room.
Jayant’s ashes mixed with rose petals, scattered over Milk Lake. (Photo by author.)
I was asked to deliver readings for the event. I was happy to do it; the challenge was finding something right for him, in his spirit. We scattered his ashes over Milk Lake, the small lake he loved where we had a cottage and I spent many weekends of my childhood. There, I chose a reading from Dnyaneshwar: a medieval poet-saint from Jayant’s home state of Maharashtra, whose devotional (bhakti) poetry was foundational for Jayant’s native Marathi language in the way that Dante was for Italian or Shakespeare for English. (“Dnyaneshwar” is the phonetic spelling of his name in modern Marathi; it means “lord of knowledge” and in Sanskrit would be transliterated “Jñāneśvara”. For English-speakers it can roughly be pronounced “nyah-NAY-shwar”.) Jayant grew up with Dnyaneshwar and came to write about him more as an adult. I found a beautiful passage from Dnyaneshwar’s main work, a commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā, which felt like it had the right feeling for scattering ashes on the water:
I’ve been using Anthropic’s Claude.ai in a work context relatively often lately – to produce graphic illustrations, write summaries and so on. (I’m not crazy about referring to it as just “Claude”. That’s my grandfather.) One thing has struck me in those interactions: I’ve found myself saying “please” in the requests I make to it.
I suppose you could say that’s just me being Canadian – for decades the not-entirely-fictional joke has been that Canadians are so polite they say “thank you” to bank machines. But Canadian or not, I think the point raises an interesting question: should we humans act politely toward large language models (LLMs) like Claude.ai and ChatGPT?
A few years ago I argued that utilitarian and Kantian ethics, with the trolley problem as their framing question, were suited for programming robots but not for human beings. It turns out I was wrong — not about the human beings, but about the robots.
Unlike “progressive” Americans who embrace race, the caste reformer B.R. Ambedkar envisioned a world where race/caste distinctions were annihilated – and specifically by mixing, by intermarriage. The view of racial purity shared by the mainstream American left and right – where Barack Obama’s white ancestry counts for nothing – makes that annihilation more difficult. But not everyone in the Americas – or even in the United States – shares that view.
Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza is an eccentric book now often considered a classic of Chicana (Mexican-American) literature. It mixes essays and poetry, English and Spanish – perhaps appropriate for someone whose ethnic identity is itself mixed, the mestiza of the subtitle, as indeed are most Mexicans. In striking contrast to the life story Ibram X. Kendi tells, which struck me as generally comfortable and middle-class, Anzaldúa lived in a more clearly oppressed world, of the migrant workers of South Texas; the poetry paints a poverty-stricken picture of rapes, of lice, of cleaning shit from toilets, in the face of a racist Border Patrol. So she does often speak of her people in contrast to “the whites”, falling sometimes into the oppressed/oppressor binaries of standpoint theory on which she was an influence. Yet she also acknowledges and praises mixing in a serious way that moves beyond the binaries.
I recently read Shadi Bartsch‘s Plato Goes to China: The Greek Classics and Chinese Nationalism. The book’s topic is fascinating to me: the ways that modern Chinese intellectuals have taken up classical Greek philosophy. In some ways it made me feel oddly hopeful – that even under the totalitarian régime that has run China since 1989, it turns out that classical learning, even foreign classical learning, gets more respect than it does in the anti-intellectual United States. Unfortunately the book itself takes a highly unhelpful method of dealing with the topic: Bartsch spends a great deal of time telling you what’s wrong with the views of Chinese pro-government intellectuals. A Western audience really doesn’t need that: we’re already predisposed to be suspicious of that way of thinking. I wanted to learn about how the Chinese intellectuals themselves think – something I can’t get for myself, since my Chinese isn’t nearly good enough – and the book gives them very little time to speak in their own worlds.
But there was one thing the book sparked in me, which I don’t think was the author’s intent: an appreciation for the work of Leo Strauss.
The No Kings protest on Boston Common on March 28 was the first time in a long time that I’ve been to a protest march. I was moved by the joyful spirit of defiance there, and I thought especially of the Canadian anti-American anger that I wrote about a couple weeks before. I was moved to make a short video – amateurish by TikToker standards, no doubt, but sincere – aimed at Canadians, reminding them that we left-leaning Americans are as alarmed by Trump as they are. I shared it on Substack Notes as well as on Instagram, which posted it to Facebook in a way open to the public. The video went modestly viral (as in 600+ views on Facebook)… and of course, it drew many comments.
Meme created by author on imgflip, recreating an older meme I couldn’t find.
I am aware of the perils of open social-media comments sections, and as I read I was reminded of the attached meme. There were several heartwarming messages of support from both sides of the border, and at least as many juvenile trollish comments from Trump supporters – including many Canadian Trump supporters (a point that will be quite relevant to what follows). But I knew the Trump supporters were out there. The commenters who saddened me this time were other Canadians.
