Category Archives: Applied Philosophy

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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On being from Canada (and not India)

12 Sunday Jul 2026

Posted by in Indigenous American Thought, Modern Hinduism, Place, Politics

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Stan Rogers. Picture taken originally from Toronto.com, used under fair use.

The great Canadian folk singer Stan Rogers – taken from us far too soon at a mere 33 – has inspired me in many ways. I first encountered him through his modern (and very Canadian) sea chantey “Barrett’s Privateers“, a staple of folk singers at pub nights for drunken Canadian undergraduates like myself (and which has more American admirers than you’d think). The joy of singing along to that song was part of what led me to join McGill’s Folk Music Society club, and eventually become its president for a year. It wasn’t long after that that I had my life-changing Buddhist epiphany in Thailand – yet even there, Rogers’s “Mary Ellen Carter” played a major role. His “The Idiot” was a great comfort at the times I expected a tenure-track job would leave me in a long-distance relationship from the woman I loved on the East Coast. When I married her, “Forty-Five Years” was the last dance at our wedding.

Lately, though, there’s a much lesser known song of his that has been going through my mind repeatedly. It is the closing song of From Fresh Water, his posthumous 1984 album about Ontario – where, despite his well known ties to the Maritime provinces, Rogers (like me) was born and raised. This song is called “The House of Orange”.

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Against nostalgic ecology

28 Sunday Jun 2026

Posted by in Biology, Politics, Serenity

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When we think about the natural environment and how to treat it, we often assume by default that what we’re trying to do is return the nonhuman world to where it was before we started seriously messing with it. That impulse is very understandable. The world’s ecosystems functioned better, in the way that they had evolved to do and a way that was helpful to us, before we started clear-cut logging and making vast pits full of plastic waste and so on. It would be great if we could get the natural world back to where it was in 1800.

The problem is we can’t do that. Extinction is forever, as they say – with a very significant exception that I’ll get to. The garbage dumps are there; we have no way of turning all the plastic in them into something not-plastic. As Alan Weisman vividly reminds us in The World Without Us, if humans were to disappear entirely from the planet tomorrow, our products – from ceramics to radioactive waste – would remain for millions of years. We can certainly take steps to diminish the impact of our future actions, but the effects of our past actions are going to remain with us. The natural world, now and in the future, is the natural world impacted by our actions.

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You still have to naturalize karma

21 Sunday Jun 2026

Posted by in Consciousness, Death, Flourishing, Karma, Mahāyāna, Modernized Buddhism, Philosophy of Science, Psychology, Supernatural

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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.

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On the damned topics of Buddhist philosophy

14 Sunday Jun 2026

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

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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.

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The Gnostic aesthetics of leg waxing

31 Sunday May 2026

Posted by in Aesthetics, Biology, Daoism, Deity, Human Nature, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Politics

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A couple weeks ago I had my annual leg wax. I only get my legs waxed once a year – in the spring, when baring one’s legs becomes newly possible – because the process is expensive and painful. After that I just shave them, which doesn’t leave them as smooth for as long. (I’m bemused by the association of women with weakness when beauty treatments are so metal: you rip out your hair with hot wax, or even literally get shot with lasers.)

I’ve noted before how feminine beauty is deserving of attention in philosophical aesthetics. So we might well pause on how remarkable it is that so many of us do pay money to have our leg hairs ripped out with hot wax.

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Passages of death and hope

24 Sunday May 2026

Posted by in Bhakti Poets, Death, Family, Hope, Rites

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My father’s memorial 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:

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Should we be polite to AIs?

10 Sunday May 2026

Posted by in Anger, Consciousness, Emotion, Foundations of Ethics, Gentleness, Morality, Patient Endurance, Play, Psychology, Serenity, Virtue

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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?

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