23 Sunday Nov 2025
Posted in Emotion, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Psychology
Modern mindfulness tends to urge us to stay in the present moment, learn to avoid getting distracted by wandering thoughts. A friend recently raised a thoughtful critique of this approach: aren’t there times when we want, even need, our thoughts to wander?
Continue reading16 Sunday Nov 2025
Posted in Consciousness, Deity, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Mindfulness, Prayer, Psychology, Roman Catholicism
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Andy Puddicombe, Brook Ziporyn, Headspace, John Dunne, mystical experience, nondualism, phenomenology, Śāntideva, Satan, Spain, Teresa of Ávila, Tiantai 天台, Zhiyi
The autobiography of (Saint) Teresa of Ávila is a most remarkable book. Its beginning sections on Teresa’s early life feel at once relatable (she recalls her youthful interest in making herself pretty) and utterly alien: she and her brother admired the Christian martyrs so much that in childhood they “agreed to go off to the land of the Moors and beg them, out of love of God, to cut off our heads there”, and felt very disappointed that they could not find a way to do this. (Section 1.4, page 3 of the Kavanaugh-Rodriguez translation) The later sections are the more famous ones, depicting Teresa’s vivid visions of angels.
In the middle, though, the book takes an unexpected detour – nearly a hundred pages – providing instructions for prayer. I don’t believe in Teresa’s God, let alone pray to him, which made it very tempting to skip these chapters. I’m very glad I didn’t, though, because I found important things in them that I recognized as a Buddhist.
Continue reading12 Wednesday Nov 2025
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Alex O'Connor, Aristotle, authenticity, autobiography, Charles Goodman, conventional/ultimate, expressive individualism, Frank Lawton, Friedrich Nietzsche, interview, Jeremy Bentham, Kāma Sūtra, Madhyamaka, phenomenology, Śāntideva, Thailand, utilitarianism, virtue ethics
I was interviewed by Frank Lawton on a recent episode of the Mindform Podcast on self-development and wisdom, associated with Ryan A. Bush’s Designing the Mind. We begin with my formative story in Thailand and the anti-politics associated with it, proceeding to a critique of utilitarianism, a discussion of my gradual movement from Theravāda to Mahāyāna Buddhism, and finally to an exploration of expressive individualism. All told, I think it’s a very nicely rounded introduction to my philosophical thinking – even if my growing hair is in its awkward phase and I stammer a little too much!
09 Sunday Nov 2025
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B.R. Ambedkar, caste, Elijah Muhammad, Four Noble Truths, identity, Maharashtra, Malcolm X, Nation of Islam, race, United States, upāyakauśalya, W.D. Fard Muhammad
It’s hard for me to view B.R. Ambedkar as a real Buddhist, when he threw out the Four Noble Truths after getting to Buddhism by a mere process of elimination. But then, to a real Buddhist, it shouldn’t matter – at least it shouldn’t matter much – whether you are a “real Buddhist”! Buddhism has no more essence, no more svabhāva, than anything else does. What really matters is relieving suffering. What’s more important than his status as a Buddhist is that Ambedkar’s rejection of the Four Noble Truths deeply inhibits the relief of suffering – or rather, it has the potential to. Yet things might be a bit more complicated than that.
Continue reading02 Sunday Nov 2025
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autobiography, B.R. Ambedkar, caste, Four Noble Truths, identity, Maharashtra, Narendra Modi, race
Dr. Ambedkar, the 20th-century leader of the lowest (“Dalit”, formerly “untouchable”) Indian caste groups, might be having a moment. In my Indian philosophy class in 2019, I wanted to have a segment on modern Indian philosophy, so I introduced the students to Gandhi and to Ambedkar as a critic of Gandhi – and was interested to see how the students absolutely loved Ambedkar. This year, I attended a fascinating workshop at Princeton on black Buddhist perspectives, where Ambedkar probably played a larger role than any other figure, even the Buddha himself. I’m glad to see black Americans discovering Ambedkar, since there are such close analogies between American race and Indian caste – already observed by Martin Luther King. A recent Economist article now mentions that even Narendra Modi is trying to proclaim Ambedkar as an ally for his militant Hindu agenda – a claim that should be laughable, given Ambedkar’s clearly expressed hostility to Hinduism, but an understandable attempt given Ambedkar’s huge popularity in India: there are now more statues of Ambedkar than any other Indian political figure, including Nehru, Gandhi and Aśoka.
I find Ambedkar overall a very admirable figure – both his personal story of rising through the ranks intellectually and becoming a leader, and his accomplishments. I also find his approach to caste more sensible than the American approach to race, one that Americans could learn a lot from. My late father admired him greatly. He is also a figure who makes me personally uncomfortable – perhaps in a good way.
Continue reading26 Sunday Oct 2025
One of the first things you’d learn in any Intro to Buddhism course is that most Buddhists alive today are part of the Mahāyāna tradition, in which one aspires to be a bodhisattva (and eventually become a buddha). Mahāyāna is the majority tradition because it’s the one practised in Japan, Korea, most of Vietnam, and China including Taiwan and Tibet. (Tibetans sometimes refer to their tradition as “Vajrayāna”, but they know that that’s still a form of Mahāyāna; there are no non-Mahāyāna Vajrayānists.) The name “Mahāyāna” (translated as “Great Vehicle”) is not in dispute; everybody agrees that that’s the preferred term. That part is easy.
Now here’s a question: what do you call all the other Buddhists?
Your typical intro Buddhism course gets around that question pretty easily, because there’s a simple answer if you’re exclusively talking about Buddhists today, in the modern era. As of about 1850, basically all the non-Mahāyāna Buddhists in the world identified as part of the Theravāda tradition, practised throughout Sri Lanka and mainland Southeast Asia. The only Buddhists who might identify as something else are more recent modernist Buddhists of one stripe or another – hippyish Western Buddhists who don’t want to be pinned down to specifics, or perhaps B.R. Ambedkar’s Navayāna – and they understand they’re doing something new and a little weird. (“Navayāna” means “new yāna”.) In general, it’s pretty reasonable to say that the Buddhism existing in the past thousand years or so has been divided into the two traditions of Mahāyāna and Theravāda.
But go back before that, and things look very different.
Continue reading28 Sunday Sep 2025
Posted in Certainty and Doubt, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Humility, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Self
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Candrakīrti, Charles Manson, drugs, Elon Musk, Ethan Mills, Jayarāśi, John Hick, Madhyamaka, MAPS, mystical experience, Nāgārjuna, narcissism, Roland Griffiths, Śāntideva
If Nāgārjuna, the great Madhyamaka Buddhist philosopher, is known for anything, it’s his doctrine of the emptiness (śūnyatā) of all things. But in his most famous work, Nāgārjuna warns his audience about emptiness: “Misperceived emptiness ruins a person of dull intelligence, like a snake wrongly grasped.” (MMK XXIV.11) If you know how to pick up a poisonous snake properly, you can move it to a place where it will do less harm, or even milk it to help produce an antidote. But if you don’t, then trying to grasp it will get you bitten and maybe killed. Likewise, if you perceive emptiness wrongly, that’s worse than not perceiving it at all.
22 Monday Sep 2025
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autobiography, Buddhaghosa, Canada, drugs, Elon Musk, interview, John Hick, MAPS, Meister Eckhart, mystical experience, nondualism, Osheen Dayal, phenomenology, religion, Roland Griffiths, Śāntideva, Teresa of Ávila, Thailand, Upaniṣads, Zhuangzi
Following up my talk on psychedelics and mysticism, Osheen Dayal of the Canadian branch of MAPS just interviewed me on the same subject for their video podcast. In the interview we talk about a wide range of subjects from my personal Buddhist story through St. Teresa’s angel to Elon Musk. Have a look!
21 Sunday Sep 2025
Posted in Aesthetics, Analytic Tradition, Food, Play, Pleasure, Psychology, Sex, South Asia, Zest
Daniel Pallies, a philosophy postdoc at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, recently wrote a blog post entitled “The inexplicable appeal of spicy food”. Pallies, from his bio, indicates that one of his key interests is the question: “What makes a feeling pleasant, or unpleasant?” And so he is puzzled by a phenomenon that he and I share: we enjoy eating food high in capsaicin, even though the sensation of eating these foods is painful. He adds: “And like most people, I think that pain makes your life worse. All else being equal, your life goes worse for you to the extent that it is painful. So why do I, and lots of other people, eat spicy food?”
Continue reading14 Sunday Sep 2025
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autobiography, gender, Harvard University, identity, Jeffrey Kripal, race, Ramakrishna, Sigmund Freud
It was thirty years ago, in 1995, that a then-unknown junior academic named Jeffrey Kripal published Kālī’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna. The book took a new look at the stories written about the revered 19th-century Bengali mystic Ramakrishna, from the then-current Freudian lens: it explored passages that it described as homoerotic, and argued that there was a connection between the homoeroticism and the mysticism. Kripal, who was raised Catholic and once attempted to enter the priesthood, always saw an erotic dimension in mysticism, and found that goddess traditions like Ramakrishna’s felt a more natural fit than Christianity with his own heterosexuality – so was surprised to find homoerotic elements in Ramakrishna, and realized that was something worth writing about.
Few, least of all Kripal, expected what happened next. Ramakrishna devotees in India found out about the book and became furious that anyone would dare treat Ramakrishna’s mysticism as having a sexual element. Hindu nationalists burned copies of the book, there were multiple attempts to ban it, and Kripal was no longer able to travel to India out of fear for his safety. It was the first in a series of attacks that Hindu nationalists came to make against Western scholars in the decades to come, outraged that scholars would point to aspects of their traditions that they didn’t like.
I had read a little about this story before I arrived at Harvard as a new PhD student in 2000. There were three scholars of South Asian religions – John Carman, Edwin Bryant, and especially Charles Hallisey – who I’d expected to study under when I got there… and all three of them had just left, for various reasons, without (yet) being replaced. So I felt a little adrift. But as I had a first walk through the hallway of a Harvard Divinity School building, there outside an open office door was the name plate of a visiting professor in South Asian religions whose name I did recognize: Jeffrey Kripal.
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