Readers, I’m delighted to announce that my first book is officially scheduled for publication! It’ll come out in November but you can preorder it now, and I would really like to encourage you to do so if you’re interested: preorder numbers encourage bookstores to order more copies, which will help the book do well. I am particularly delighted that the book is coming out with Shambhala Publications – the esteemed Buddhist publisher of Ken Wilber, whose work has inspired a ton of this blog’s reflection, and Pema Chödrön, whom I’ve increasingly found a powerful source of wisdom.
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”.
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 Where I think she goes too far with that evidence is in the title of her unpublished paper on the topic, which is “Against naturalizing Buddhism”.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.
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.
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 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.
Jürgen Habermas during a discussion in the Munich School of Philosophy. Photo by Wolfram Huke, CC-BY-SA 3.0 licence.
It’s not often that a philosopher makes the top entry of Wikipedia’s “In the news” page – I don’t recall that ever happening before – but that happened last week with the death of Jürgen Habermas. I think that status is well earned. Habermas was one of the few philosophers to earn respect from both the analytic and “continental” sides of the philosophical tradition, engaging in reciprocated debate with both John Rawls and Jacques Derrida. We might even say that his death marks the end of the great era of German philosophy, an era that begins with Immanuel Kant – for while through his early life there were other major German figures leaving an impact on philosophy, he was really the last remaining German philosopher to have made such a significant mark. I think the only later philosopher of arguably comparable stature who is carrying on the German philosophical tradition is Slavoj Žižek – who is not himself German but Slovenian.
There are plentyofobituaries appropriately reviewing Habermas’s overall contributions. But for me personally, Habermas’s death brings me back to an earlier time of my life, and makes me think of roads not taken.
I appreciate looking back on my 19-year-old self’s piece in praise of negativity because it highlights most the ways my views have changed since then. It’s not that I assess that specific situation differently: the Vector Marketing (Cutco) approach of getting desperate youth to sell knives to their families is an exploitative business model; working that job was bad and I don’t miss it one bit. But what’s in question is the lessons we draw from that situation.
Yes, we should be clear-eyed enough about the badness of our situations that we have an eye to changing them where possible. But what I didn’t realize then is the lesson of the Serenity Prayer: we also have to accept, and even be positive about, the bad things we cannot change. If we don’t do that – if we decide to see every 50% cup as half-empty – then we are undercutting our own goals.
I am delighted to announce the publication of my first book, this coming fall, with Shambhala Publications. It is a book project I have been working on for many years, and the topic has veered considerably from the version I discussed five years ago, becoming much more specific than the ambitious project I had imagined then. The title will be After Anger: What Buddhism Can Teach Us about Our Culture of Rage. As the title suggests, it will constructively address the Buddhist critique of anger – and then, afterwards, will turn to the deeper mental roots of our anger in craving and resistance. I’ll be saying more about the book in this space as we get closer to publication time.
In the meantime, I have a number of thoughts that had to be left out of the final version of the book, but that I think are nevertheless worthy of publication on this blog. As you can imagine, anger has many defenders, who have a variety of different reasons. I tried to deal with most of those sorts of reasons in the book, but there are a couple that didn’t quite make it in.
