Category Archives: Buddhism

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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Announcing my book: After Anger

19 Sunday Jul 2026

Posted by in Anger, Buddhism, Flourishing, Mahāyāna, Mindfulness, Patient Endurance, Serenity

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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.

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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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“In praise of negativity”: Now

22 Sunday Feb 2026

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, External Goods, Flourishing, Gratitude, Happiness, Health, Hope, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Monasticism, Pleasure, Politics, Psychology, Work

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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.

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Do you need anger for respect and accountability?

04 Sunday Jan 2026

Posted by in Action, Analytic Tradition, Anger, Free Will, Mahāyāna, Morality, Psychology

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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.

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In praise of alcohol

28 Sunday Dec 2025

Posted by in Aesthetics, Early and Theravāda, Food, Friends, Health, Judaism, Place, Pleasure, Rites, Zest

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Alcohol is further out of fashion these days than at any time in living memory. Even American Prohibition just made people try harder to get alcohol. Today, though, alcohol drinking in the US has fallen to record lows, with only 54% of Gallup survey respondents saying they consume it. Nearly every cocktail-serving restaurant or even bar I visit these days has non-alcoholic mocktail options, often with sophisticated bartending flair – something barely imaginable twenty years ago.

The reasons for this are not too hard to imagine. On the one hand, the medical studies about alcohol’s harms keep piling up, often indicating that even moderate drinking – the kind touted as beneficial to health a couple decades ago – may now have many negative health consequences. On the other, alternative mind-altering substances are now easily available – most obviously cannabis, legal in many American jurisdictions and across Canada, which is a clearly healthier alternative. All in all, all things considered, the downward trend in drinking is probably not a bad thing. And there’s plenty of traditional precedent for being suspicious of alcohol: the fifth of the Five Precepts, guiding lay people, enjoins refraining from alcohol on the grounds that it causes heedlessness.

That said, there are reasons why alcohol has remained so enduringly popular in human history. And we do ourselves a disservice by disregarding them. Alcohol is not for everybody – many people find it takes control of their lives in a harmful way. But even for those people, there’s usually a reason it got so powerfully appealing in the first place. In many human lives, ones where one can control its consumption well, alcohol plays a very positive and valuable role. And as we approach the one festival in the North American ritual calendar where the drinking of alcohol typically plays the largest role, it’s worth thinking a bit about alcohol’s positives.

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