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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Category Archives: Health

Of mindfulness meditation, Buddhist and otherwise

31 Sunday Jan 2016

Posted by Amod Lele in Health, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Psychology, Serenity, Therapy

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

autobiography, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Justin Whitaker, Robert Sokolove, S.N. Goenka

Until I began my 9-to-5 job in 2011, I had only rarely had to get up before 8 or 9 in the morning on a regular basis, which suited me fine since I am a night person. Now I need get up at 6:45, and it is a struggle to get enough sleep – and so I started worrying ever more about how little sleep I was getting, which gave me insomnia.

Fortunately the job has a good health plan (essential in the USA), and I was able to seek treatment for my insomnia at the highly regarded Boston Medical Center. They suggested a number of interventions to deal with the insomnia, several of which slowly came to prove helpful. The most striking moment among these interventions, though, was when they prescribed – mindfulness meditation. Continue reading →

On tradition and observation in Tibetan medicine

02 Sunday Aug 2015

Posted by Amod Lele in Biology, Epistemology, Health, Hermeneutics, M.T.S.R., Mahāyāna, Natural Science, Philosophy of Science

≈ 2 Comments

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ascent/descent, Francesco Sizzi, G.V. Coyne, Galileo Galilei, Janet Gyatso, Phyllis Chiasson, pramāṇa, Richard Westfall, tantra, Thomas Kuhn, Tibet, Yutok Yönten Gönpo, Zurkharwa Lodrö Gyelpo

Two disclaimers are required for this week’s post. First, Janet Gyatso was on my dissertation committee and before that served as my doctoral advisor. Second, Columbia University Press offered to send me a free copy of her new book if I would review it on Love of All Wisdom, and I accepted on condition that the review could be critical. This is that review. Take it as you will.

Sometime during my doctoral studies I recall a student asking Prof. Janet Gyatso what she was currently researching, and she mentioned Tibetan medical literature. That couldn’t have been any later than 2007, when I graduated, and was probably before. Only now, at least eight years later, has Gyatso’s book on Tibetan medicine come out – and one can see why it took so long.

Being Human in a Buddhist World cannot have been an easy book to write. It is a detailed study of several different Tibetan works on medicine, none of which have been translated into a Western language, and all of which deal with highly technical questions of biology using a set of concepts very different from those familiar in the modern West – some in the form of “a dark, incomplete, and frequently illegible third-generation photocopy of a manuscript that is itself rife with spelling mistakes and smudges.” One does not find oneself eager to replicate such a study.

The title of this book is well chosen. Most Buddhism tends to be what I have called an ascent tradition; it is about transcending the condition of our everyday particular humanity, detaching oneself from what the texts Gyatso studies call “the horrible world”. But even if we were to grant that its most advanced practitioners have become in some sense superhuman (say Thich Quang Duc, who, eyewitnesses say, was able to remain perfectly at peace while setting himself on fire), the fact remains that everybody else is still human, all too human. Continue reading →

The practice of reading

07 Sunday Jun 2015

Posted by Amod Lele in Confucianism, Health, Hermeneutics, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Reading and Recitation, Self, Serenity, Therapy

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

academia, autobiography, Confucius, Paul J. Griffiths, religion, Śāntideva, Zhu Xi

Calling myself a Buddhist, it turns out, was only the beginning. Buddhism was there for me in this dark time, not only as a way of focusing prayer, and certainly not merely as the resource for a hypothetical chaplain. The Buddhist ideas that taught me so much before were still there and a great comfort. And there was more still: I have now begun to practise Buddhism as I see it, on a far deeper level than I ever had before. Continue reading →

I am a Buddhist

10 Sunday May 2015

Posted by Amod Lele in Christianity, Death, Early and Theravāda, External Goods, Family, Flourishing, Grief, Health, Modernized Buddhism, Politics, Prayer, Therapy

≈ 8 Comments

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autobiography, identity, justice, Mañjuśrī, Pali suttas, Ralph Waldo Emerson, religion, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha), Treya Killam Wilber, Unitarian Universalism

Last fall in my house we had some serious bad news: my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. (There have been a number of ways in which I have hoped to emulate Ken Wilber, but this sure wasn’t one of them.) The good news is it was not a particularly severe variety as cancers go; with proper treatment it would not be life-threatening. But those treatments have been rough, with an extended recovery period.

It has, as you may imagine, been a difficult time for both of us. I am happy to say that things are much better than they were, but the hard times are not yet over. My wife’s story is hers to tell, and she has told it magnificently. On my side, something major has happened that I did not expect: for the first time, I have come to consider myself a Buddhist. Continue reading →

First principles of paradigms

06 Sunday Jul 2014

Posted by Amod Lele in Dialectic, Economics, Epistemology, Health, Logic, Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Science, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Social Science

≈ 2 Comments

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Alasdair MacIntyre, Boethius, Neil deGrasse Tyson, pedagogy, René Descartes, Thomas Kuhn

There are two different ways to apply the distinction between dialectical and demonstrative argument, and it’s important to be aware of the difference. I draw the terms dialectical and demonstrative argument from Alasdair MacIntyre in Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry (pages 88-9), who in turn takes the distinction from Boethius‘s De topicis differentiis and ultimately from Aristotle’s Topics. The key point is that dialectical argument argues to first principles, and demonstrative argument from first principles.

But what are those first principles? Are they first principles for knowledge in general, or merely first principles within a single paradigm? Continue reading →

The bodhisattva complex

01 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by Amod Lele in Anger, Attachment and Craving, External Goods, Friends, Health, Mahāyāna, Psychology, Self, Supernatural, Unconscious Mind

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

chastened intellectualism, Ken Wilber, passive aggression, Śāntideva, Sigmund Freud, Ugraparipṛcchā Sūtra

There is a destructive pattern of behaviour I’ve observed too often which, in an amateur psychological diagnosis, I have come to call the bodhisattva complex. I thought of this term as a friend of mine – a young medical resident – described the behaviours she observed among her fellow medical residents and doctors, who think nothing of working 24- or even 48-hour shifts in order to help people in their care. One wonders: what kind of patient wants to be treated by a man or woman who hasn’t slept in 48 hours?

When I refer to the bodhisattva complex, I do not mean that actual bodhisattvas – ideal Mahāyāna Buddhist beings – are psychologically unhealthy. Some might make that argument (Martha Nussbaum has done so, more or less), but I would not at all. Rather, the bodhisattva complex refers to something which I think is far more common than actual bodhisattvas: you suffer it if you believe you are a bodhisattva, but aren’t. Continue reading →

Marx, Augustine and early Buddhism: diagnosis vs. prognosis

27 Sunday Mar 2011

Posted by Amod Lele in African Thought, Christianity, Early and Theravāda, Economics, German Tradition, Health, Hope, Human Nature, Politics, Work

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

Augustine, chastened intellectualism, Communism, Four Noble Truths, Fredric Jameson, Jesus, Karl Marx, Pali suttas, Paul LePage, Scott Walker, United States

The past couple weeks in the United States have been very congenial to a Marxist worldview. I don’t remember any time when the bourgeoisie has so clearly been waging war on the proletariat – or when that kind of language seemed an accurate description of contemporary society. The best known example of this is the ongoing conflict in Wisconsin, where the newly elected Republican governor, Scott Walker, attempted to strip public-sector workers of both their generous benefits and their rights to collective bargaining. With a limited grasp of the local situation (such as Margaret Wente demonstrates in this breathtakingly ignorant column), one might imagine that this is primarily a matter of shared sacrifice in a time of burgeoning government debt. That view is plausible, and entirely wrong. For not only did Walker recently enact corporate tax cuts in a volume comparable to the workers’ benefits, the unions agreed to let their costly benefits be cut if they could keep their right to collective bargaining. This action isn’t about reasonable budget cuts, but about union-busting, plain and simple.

Meanwhile, a couple of related recent American events you might not have heard of. In Maine, newly elected Republican governor Paul LePage has ordered the removal of a mural in the state Department of Labour depicting the state’s labour history, along with the renaming of conference rooms named after César Chávez and other labour organizers. The governor’s spokesman proclaimed that these symbols are “not in keeping with the department’s pro-business goals.” At the symbolic level too, the government has explicitly picked a side in a class struggle. Continue reading →

Can philosophy be a way of life? Pierre Hadot (1922-2010)

12 Wednesday May 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Christianity, Epicureanism, Faith, French Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Health, Metaphilosophy, Mindfulness, Monasticism, Natural Science, South Asia, Stoicism, Therapy

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Epicurus, Hebrew Bible, Megasthenes, obituary, Pierre Hadot, religion, skholiast (blogger), Stephen Jay Gould

Skholiast recently pointed to a sad event that I’d been unaware of until he mentioned it: the death of Pierre Hadot. Skholiast’s involvement with Hadot, from the look of things, is deeper than mine – I’ve read some of his work and referred to him a couple of times on the blog, but I don’t think that he has (yet) had a deep effect on my thinking. Still, I find myself very much in sympathy with Hadot’s approach, and I think his loss is a real one, so I’d like to offer a few musings in memoriam.

The idea that I always associate with Hadot is encapsulated in the translated English title of one of his major works: philosophy as a way of life. Hadot, a scholar of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, treats this philosophy as a way of life, a set of “spiritual practices,” and in so doing he helps remind us of the distance between ancient and modern philosophy. And I don’t just mean that he gives us yet another reason to critique contemporary philosophy departments, which (whether analytic or continental) typically seem far from any ancient ideal of the love of wisdom. I mean also that he reminds us why philosophy has so little place in contemporary Western culture. Continue reading →

On Body Ritual among the Nacirema

17 Sunday Jan 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Health, M.T.S.R., Rites, Social Science

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Christmas, Horace Miner, religion

[UPDATE: This has become my most frequently read blog post of all. I’m guessing that’s because a large number of undergraduate students come here wondering what Body Ritual among the Nacirema means. If that’s you, welcome! I would just ask two things of you: first, please do read Body Ritual and try to figure it out for yourself first before reading this post, and second, once you have read the post below, don’t spoil it for everyone else.]

One of the most important anthropological studies to be conducted in the past century is Horace Miner’s (very short) 1956 classic Body Ritual among the Nacirema. If you haven’t read it, you owe it to yourself to follow the link now and examine Miner’s penetrating insights into one of the most unusual cultural groups yet to be studied by ethnographers. Please do read the essay before you read the rest of this blog post, as the post won’t be very helpful without it. Continue reading →

Cross-cultural anorexia

13 Wednesday Jan 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in African Thought, French Tradition, Health, Patient Endurance, Psychology, Rites, Social Science, Therapy

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

academia, anorexia, DSM, Ethan Watters, Juli McGruder, relativism, Robin Horton, schizophrenia, Simone Weil, Sing Lee, United States, Zanzibar

Great article by Ethan Watters in the New York Times last Friday, called The Americanization of Mental Illness, which deals with questions at the heart of cross-cultural philosophy. (Watters also has a book on the subject coming out, and a blog.) The article notes how “mental illness” remains a category far more culture-bound than psychological studies are typically willing to admit. The DSM, American psychologists’ scripture, has a seven-page appendix (pp. 897-903 in the DSM-IV-TR edition) for “culture-bound disorders,” such as amok (a condition in Malaysia where men get violently aggressive and then have amnesia) or pibloktoq (an Inuit condition involving a short burst of extreme excitement followed by seizures and coma). It’s telling that few of the disorders in this section are culture-bound to the United States; and those which are, are quite telling: “ghost sickness” is “frequently observed among members of many American Indian tribes”; locura, nervios and susto are found among Latinos; sangue dormido is found among Cape Verde Islanders and their immigrants to the US; “rootwork” and “spell” are “seen among African Americans and European Americans from the southern United States.” That is, the only “culture-bound disorders” to be found among white Americans are found among those weird Southern hillbillies who live beside black people. Normal white Americans, the kind who live in Cambridge, MA or in Manhattan, don’t get “culture-bound disorders.” Their disorders are just part of the universal human condition.
Continue reading →

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