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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Category Archives: Buddhism

Philosophy as psychedelic practice

15 Sunday Jun 2025

Posted by Amod Lele in Certainty and Doubt, Epistemology, French Tradition, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Practice, Self, Serenity

≈ 5 Comments

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Chan/Zen 禪, David J. Blacker, drugs, Madhyamaka, mystical experience, Oxherding Pictures, Pierre Hadot, René Descartes, Śāntideva

David J. Blacker’s recent Deeper Learning with Psychedelics is a valuable attempt to think through the implications of psychedelics for philosophy and education. One passage in particular caught my imagination: Blacker points out the similarities between a psychedelic experience and René Descartes’s passage of radical doubt.

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Is Asian philosophy footnotes to the Buddha?

01 Sunday Jun 2025

Posted by Amod Lele in Confucianism, Daoism, East Asia, Greek and Roman Tradition, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Metaphilosophy, South Asia, Vedānta

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Alfred North Whitehead, Confucius, Livia Kohn, Plato, Śaṅkara, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha), Upaniṣads, Zhu Xi, Zhuangzi

Recently I wanted to explore a fascinating passage of the Daoist founder Zhuangzi, where the text recommends “sitting in oblivion” or “sitting and forgetting” (zuòwàng 坐忘). That passage bears striking similarities to mystical practices and experiences from around the globe.

To help figure it out, I turned to Sitting in Oblivion by the Daoism scholar Livia Kohn, which shows how “sitting and forgetting” was developed as a practice and taken up at great length by later Daoist thinkers. One passage of Kohn’s particularly struck me:

The most important aspects of the rather extensive Buddhist imports into Daoism for sitting in oblivion include the organizational setting of meditation practice in monastic institutions, the formalized ethical requirement in the taking of precepts and refuge in the Three Treasures, the doctrines of karma and retribution, the five paths of rebirth, and the various layers of hell, as well as the vision of the body-mind in terms of multiple aspects, defilements, hindrances, and purification. (107)

“Rather extensive” indeed! I knew that East Asian Buddhists had drawn a great deal from Daoism – I have sometimes uncharitably described Chan/Zen as “Daoists cosplaying as Buddhists” – but I hadn’t realized how much the influence went in the other direction. Karma, rebirth, meditation, monastic institutions, taking precepts, taking refuge? At that point you sure sound a lot like Buddhists without the name!

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Disengaged Buddhism in the second era of Trump

16 Sunday Mar 2025

Posted by Amod Lele in Despair, Early and Theravāda, Hope, Politics, Serenity

≈ 10 Comments

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21st century, Disengaged Buddhism, Donald Trump, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Pali suttas, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha), United States

Early in the first Trump administration, I preached the importance of disengaged Buddhists’ lessons: to refrain from anger, to remind ourselves that some things are more important than politics. I think that that was easier to do the first time round. For in the end, the main thing that distinguished the Trump administration from previous Republican administrations – until the various self-coup attempts at the end of his reign – was its hostile rhetoric. On policy, on running the government, Trump 1.0 was not all that different from a standard garden-variety Republican: the only major controversial piece of legislation he passed was to borrow money and hand it to the rich, just as Reagan and George W. Bush had done before him. Some of the policies that drew the biggest outrage – like putting children in cages – turned out to be the work of previous administrations, including Obama. While Trump’s bark did make the United States a more hostile place for everyone, it nevertheless remained far worse than his bite. That made it a lot easier to preach taking a chill pill.

I don’t think any of that is true this time around. After the election, my hope had been for a second Trump term mostly like the first, probably a little worse. But nothing of the sort has happened. As far as I can tell, Trump has done far more damage in the first month of his second term than he did in three and a half years of his first. The actions of Trump, and his unelected viceroy Elon Musk, have already killed thousands of African recipients denied aid, and wreaked havoc on the world from Ukraine through Canada to here in metropolitan Boston, where nearly everyone I know has had their job redefined – if not lost – as a result of cuts and freezes to science funding.

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The secret of mindfulness meditation

09 Sunday Mar 2025

Posted by Amod Lele in Emotion, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Psychology

≈ 9 Comments

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Headspace, Robert Sokolove, S.N. Goenka, Śāntideva

One of the things that really surprises me about contemporary mindfulness meditation is how rarely – especially at the beginning – they highlight what, as far as I can tell, is the most beneficial aspect of the practice. It’s not a “secret” in the sense of being concealed away somewhere, just that beginners are rarely told how important it is; I more or less had to figure it out for myself. This holds true for the practices I’m most familiar with – Headspace, Robert Sokolove’s medical mindfulness recording, Goenka vipassanā – but also seems to hold for other forms of modern mindfulness that I’ve listened to recordings of. Because of this, I think it’s easy for a beginner to misinterpret what mindfulness meditation is about.

Headspace’s meditation instructions usually involve focusing your attention on your breath – its inward and outward movement, the way your chest and stomach rise and fall with the breath. (Sokolove’s likewise.) Goenka vipassanā puts more emphasis on repeatedly scanning your attention up and down through your body. But it’s become clear to me that that focus, on the breath or the bodily sensations, is not the point of any of these exercises.

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Empiricism of the subtle body

23 Sunday Feb 2025

Posted by Amod Lele in Biology, Emotion, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Philosophy of Science, Supernatural

≈ 10 Comments

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Janet Gyatso, phenomenology, tantra, Tibet, Yangönpa Gyeltsen Pel

A public-domain illustration by Alex-engraver of the chakras and channels, taken from Wikipedia.

Traditional Indian and Tibetan tantric anatomy tells us that in the middle of the human torso there are three channels (nādis or “streams”), one each on the left, middle, and right, and that these proceed vertically upward through a number of circular centres (cakras in standard Sanskrit transliteration, chakras in modern English spelling). This account of the “subtle body” (sūkṣma śarīra) has become popular in modern yoga and other forms of alternative medicine or spirituality.

I don’t believe this account of the subtle body – but not primarily for the obvious reason.

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We need to see emotions as bodily

16 Sunday Feb 2025

Posted by Amod Lele in Anger, Compassion, Emotion, External Goods, Fear, Health, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Practice, Psychology, Stoicism, Unconscious Mind

≈ 3 Comments

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anxiety, Bodhipaksa, Bryce Huebner, Martha Nussbaum, phenomenology

The most important lesson I ever learned was back in Thailand in 1997: that the biggest contributor to my unhappiness wasn’t external problems like being single or unemployed, but my own mental states like craving. Fixing those mental states was a surer path to happiness and reducing suffering.

But the question that has played an ever-increasing role in the three ensuing decades has been: okay, but how? It is one thing to recognize that your craving and anger – or fear or self-pity or shame or other negative emotions – are the main thing keeping you down. It is quite another to do something about them. Our animal natures make those states quite recalcitrant.

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Trump is a BJP-wala

19 Sunday Jan 2025

Posted by Amod Lele in Islam, Modern Hinduism, Modernized Buddhism, Politics, Protestantism, South Asia

≈ 7 Comments

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20th century, 21st century, BJP, Donald Trump, fundamentalism, George W. Bush, identity, Martin Luther King Jr., religion, Tim Alberta, United States

When Donald Trump first rose to rapid popularity in American politics, many people were shocked and had no explanation. I was not among those people, for a couple of reasons. Among them: one way to make a new phenomenon comprehensible is analogy. And having watched Indian politics for a couple decades, I found it easy to say: Trump is a BJP-wala.

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Sketching an existentialist Buddhism

22 Sunday Dec 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Foundations of Ethics, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Modernized Buddhism, Physics and Astronomy, Self

≈ 5 Comments

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conventional/ultimate, existentialism, expressive individualism, George Grant, Madhyamaka, Nishitani Keiji, Śāntideva

If we take a modern Buddhist approach where the ultimate reality is emptiness, what then does that look like in practice? Especially as we think about the key question:how can you be yourself if there is no self?

In thinking through my Buddhism, I had once turned to a reductionist “Sellarsian solution” because it allows in some sense for selves as conventional (rather than ultimate) truth. I’ve now moved instead to a Buddhist view that is based on emptiness rather than reductionism – and, crucially, the emptiness view allows selves in that conventional sense too. For that reason, I think an emptiness-based approach may still be able to leave room for an expressive individualism, where we seek to be ourselves more fully.

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The physics of emptiness

15 Sunday Dec 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Consciousness, Early and Theravāda, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Modernized Buddhism, Physics and Astronomy

≈ 11 Comments

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Arthur Eddington, Buddhaghosa, Madhyamaka, Śāntideva, Wilfrid Sellars

How can we reconcile Buddhism with expressive individualism (“be yourself”) and with natural science? When I had previously turned to Wilfrid Sellars for help on this question, I had compared Sellars’s view to two Buddhist metaphysical positions on ultimate truth, which are quite different from each other. One of these was Buddhaghosa’s view that ultimate truth is reductionist, and I no longer find that comparison helpful. But I also turned to Śāntideva’s view that the ultimate is normatively inert, with no good or bad involved. Śāntideva’s view rejects Buddhaghosa’s in some very important ways – and I think that philosophically his metaphysics is considerably more powerful.

That’s a big deal for me because, having come to my Buddhism in Thailand, I have generally viewed myself as a Theravādin like Buddhaghosa. I’ve been skeptical of the most famous piece of Śāntideva’s metaphysics, his ethical deconstruction of self and other in chapter VIII of the Bodhicaryāvatāra. I’m not convinced by his or any other argument for a universal impartial altruism – a key Mahāyāna doctrine. Yet I do now find myself moving closer to a Mahāyāna or at least Madhyamaka view, because of a different aspect of Śāntideva’s metaphysics: the metaphysics of emptiness in chapter IX, which I think are considerably deeper.

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The scientific self is not reductionist

08 Sunday Dec 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Biology, Early and Theravāda, Metaphysics, Modernized Buddhism, Philosophy of Science, Self

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Buddhaghosa, Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, conventional/ultimate, expressive individualism, Wilfrid Sellars

Any serious contemporary Buddhist intellectual needs to think through the connection between Buddhist ideas and the relevant claims of natural science. Many of us, too, are expressive individualists: we believe that there is something valuable in the project of discovering one’s true self. The expressive individualist view of self-discovery and self-expression – put perhaps in most recent terms as “let your freak flag fly” – is that’s an uncomfortable fit with a tradition that has proclaimed for millennia that there is no true self.

There are at least three different metaphysical understandings underlying each of Buddhism, natural science, and expressive individualism, and at least at first glance they all appear to be in conflict. Resolving this conflict is not easy, and recently my views on how to do it best have significantly changed. I often find I get the best sense of what’s important in other people’s philosophies by figuring out what they changed and why, so I thought it would be helpful to show the changes in my own.

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