Category Archives: Mahāyāna

What the Kharoṣṭhī fragments don’t imply for us

12 Sunday Jun 2011

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Early Factions, Mahāyāna, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion

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There’s been a lot of talk among Buddhism-related bloggers lately about an article in Tricycle, by Linda Heuman. Heuman recounts the discovery, in 1994, of some very old scrolls – known as the Kharoṣṭhī fragments – in the the old Buddhist land of Gandhara, in what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan. Richard Salomon of the University of Washington has spent a great deal of time poring over these manuscripts. And what might we get out of them now? What difference might they make to Buddhists today?

Salomon argues that the manuscripts disprove an earlier model of Buddhist history – according to which there was an original council of Buddhists which established the first Buddhist canon, transmitted to disciples more or less verbatim. Instead, they show us that very different Buddhist texts were transmitted in very different places from very early on; the evidence doesn’t give us a first text that we can come back to.

The question is: what does that point imply? Heuman quotes Salomon to the effect that “none of the existing Buddhist collections of early Indian scriptures—not the Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese, nor even the Gandhari—’can be privileged as the most authentic or original words of the Buddha.’” (The first part of the quote, with the italics, is Heuman’s.) Heuman uses this claim to argue against Buddhist sectarian disputes: “Sectarian authority claims assume solid essentialist ground. That type of ground is just not there.” Let us assume for the purposes of this post that Salomon’s historical conclusions are correct. Does Heuman’s critique of sectarianism really follow? Continue reading →

New Books in Buddhist Studies podcast

10 Friday Jun 2011

Posted by in Confucianism, Mahāyāna

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As I mentioned in this week’s post, I’ve just taken up a position conducting podcast interviews for New Books in Buddhist Studies at the New Books Network. My first interview is now up! Have a look. I’m speaking to Jason Clower of Cal State U Chico about his book on Mou Zongsan, which I riffed on earlier this week. As I mentioned, Mou’s ideas are of significant interest to cross-cultural philosophers, and few Westerners know much about him yet.

While you’re there, you may also be interested in checking out the previous interview conducted with Clower’s Chico colleague Daniel Veidlinger, by my co-host Scott Mitchell. (If that name sounds familiar to longtime readers, it could be because I’ve briefly engaged with Scott on this blog before.)

Mou Zongsan’s theories across cultures

05 Sunday Jun 2011

Posted by in Confucianism, Deity, East Asia, Judaism, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Sufism, Vedānta

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I have recently taken on a position as interviewer for the New Books Network, an exciting new project to hold podcast interviews with the authors of recently published scholarly books. I will be interviewing for New Books in Buddhist Studies, a position I share with Scott Mitchell. I’ve completed a first podcast which is not yet available online, but I’ll let you know when it is.

I mention this now because that first podcast is with Jason Clower on his The Unlikely Buddhologist, the study I recently mentioned of 20th-century Confucian Mou Zongsan. The podcast is there to explore Clower’s ideas; here I’d like to add my own.

The book asks why Mou, a committed Confucian, spent a great deal of time thinking and writing about Buddhism. Its answer is that Mou found East Asian Buddhists expressing metaphysical distinctions with a clarity that the Confucians had not. Mou is deeply concerned with the metaphysics of value – specifically, the relationship between ultimate value and existing things. One might refer to this as the relationship between goodness and truth, or between God and world, even creator and creation. Continue reading →

Buddhist human nature from India to China

22 Sunday May 2011

Posted by in Confucianism, East Asia, Human Nature, Mahāyāna, South Asia

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The translation of a small passage can turn out to tell us a great deal. Consider section 4B12 of the Mencius. Mencius says in this section that the great man is one who retains, or does not lose, chizi zhi xin 赤子之心. This Chinese phrase translates literally as something like “heart/mind of baby.” Most translators have followed the interpretation of the great Neo-Confucian synthesizer Zhu Xi, which dovetails smoothly with the optimistic view of human nature generally attributed to Mencius: in D.C. Lau’s translation, “A great man is one who retains the heart of a new-born babe.” We are born naturally good as babies, and become bad only if something intervenes to impede our natural development. (Contrast Augustine in the first chapter of the Confessions, who observes babies as creatures of desire and envy.)

Bryan Van Norden’s recent translation of Mencius challenges this interpretation. He translates 4B12 as “Great people do not lose the hearts of their ‘children.'” And he notes that in this he is following the early commentator Zhao Qi – for whom “children” refers to the subjects of a ruler, whose hearts must be won over. Nothing here about babies or children being naturally good.

Van Norden could be right about Mencius to this point; I’m far from a Mencius scholar and wouldn’t be able to tell. What struck me as far more surprising, though, is what Van Norden says next. Continue reading →

Is compassion a virtue?

20 Sunday Mar 2011

Posted by in Christianity, Compassion, Confucianism, Greek and Roman Tradition, Mahāyāna, Pleasure, Virtue

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Thill makes an important point in response to my recent post on virtue and pleasure (as well as to a commenter named Bob). The post articulated the view, attributed to Aristotle via Julia Annas and Lorraine Besser-Jones, that the fully virtuous person will take pleasure in virtuous action. Against this position, Thill claims: “Even if you want to kill a dog or a horse in order to put it out of misery and you do it skillfully, it would still be a gross distortion to describe this act as one which gives pleasure to the agent.”

Thill is, I think, getting at an important philosophical debate here: over the value of compassion. Most of us, were we to be faced with the necessity of euthanizing a horse, would feel a painful emotion occasioned by its suffering – that is, compassion. The same would happen if we needed to discipline a child – even if, in either case, we had all the best reasons to believe that this action was the best action to take. But there is still a question: is this feeling a good thing? Continue reading →

Of anātman and altruism

06 Sunday Mar 2011

Posted by in Foundations of Ethics, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Metaphilosophy, Self

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The new Journal of Buddhist Ethics has an interesting article up on Śāntideva, by Stephen Harris, a grad student at U of New Mexico. Harris is a colleague of Ethan Mills, who gave the APA talk about skepticism that I discussed in late December (and who has since made thoughtful contributions to this blog’s comments); Harris also gave a talk about Śāntideva on Mills’s panel.

Harris’s article returns us to the most famous passage in Śāntideva’s work: the meditation on the equalization of self and other in Bodhicaryāvatāra chapter VIII, in which Śāntideva takes metaphysical arguments for the nonexistence of self (Buddhist anātman) and uses them as a premise to argue for altruism, ethical selflessness. He asks: “Since both others and myself dislike fear and suffering, what is special about my self that I protect it and not another?” The self that I was three minutes ago is a different entity from the self I will be three minutes from now; the present self has as much reason to protect others as it does its future self. He adds: if you object that suffering should be prevented only by the one it belongs to, well, your foot’s suffering does not belong to your hand, so why should the hand do anything to protect the foot?

The Catholic Buddhologist Paul Williams has criticized this passage in depth, arguing that altruism makes no sense without selves. I’ve discussed Williams’s criticisms twice before, though I haven’t taken a position on the debate yet. I will note that several Buddhologists have already come to Śāntideva’s defence on these arguments – with varying degrees of success.

Harris is the first writer I’m aware of to defend Williams’s position (other than Williams himself). Continue reading →

Skepticism in two directions

29 Wednesday Dec 2010

Posted by in Cārvāka-Lokāyata, Epistemology, Mahāyāna, Prejudices and "Intuitions", South Asia

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I attended a great panel yesterday at the Eastern APA. Two of the presentations addressed each other directly on a topic I’ve discussed before: skepticism in Indian thought. The presenters, Ethan Mills and Laura Guererro of the University of New Mexico, had clearly been engaged in a longstanding debate with each other on the subject beforehand, which I think helped sharpen their thoughts nicely for the talk.

Mills presented on Jayarāśi, whose Tattvopaplavasiṃha (“The Lion that Afflicts Categories”) is the only extant full text attributed to a member of the Cārvāka-Lokāyata, the atheist and materialist school of ancient Indian thought. But Jayarāśi takes the Cārvāka school’s thought much further than it is usually thought to go. Whereas this materialist school is normally understood to merely deny the existence of gods and karma, Jayarāśi denies the existence of pretty much everything. Previous Cārvākas were said to believe that the world was made up entirely of the four elements; Jayarāśi says, “Even the view of world as elements is not well established. How much less are all the others?” He is, in short, a skeptic. Continue reading →

The inadequacy of primary theory

14 Sunday Nov 2010

Posted by in Greek and Roman Tradition, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Social Science, Vedānta

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Last time, I accepted that there were two reasonable ways to define “common sense.” One can identify it with prejudices, as I did the first time around, so that common sense is what is held to be common and taken for granted by a given group of people (usually one’s own). Alternately, one can identify common sense with Robin Horton’s “primary theory”: the kind of description or explanation of human experience that is basic enough to be mostly universal, such as plants requiring water to grow. Primary theory is opposed to more complex “secondary theory” like witchcraft or subatomic physics, referring to unseen phenomena, which explains events anomalous to primary theory and is not at all universal.

Now if common sense is defined as primary theory, what then is its philosophical significance? Far less, I would argue, than is often claimed for “common sense.” The problems with primary theory are twofold: first, it is relatively limited in scope; and second, it is often wrong. Continue reading →

Politics as ethical analogy: Plato and Candrakīrti

27 Wednesday Oct 2010

Posted by in Confucianism, Greek and Roman Tradition, Humility, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Politics

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Even if one accepts Śāntideva’s idea that political participation is harmful to a good life, that doesn’t mean that one must be finished with political thought. For there’s another key way that politics enters into reflection: as analogy. The politician has often appeared in ethical texts as a figure for the individual; we learn what is good or bad in a single human life by examining what is good or bad for a king or a state.

The most famous use of this analogy between individual and state is likely in Plato’s Republic. In Book II, Socrates reminds Glaucon that one can typically see bigger things more clearly than smaller things. Similarly it is easier to observe justice in a state than in an individual, so we should first ask what justice is in a state, and then we will be more able to see what it is in an individual. The city or state is larger than the individual; “perhaps, then, there is more justice in the larger thing, and it will be easier to learn what it is.” (368)

Plato’s approach, of using the state to illuminate the individual, is not obvious or natural; it was not taken by the Confucians, as far as I can tell. Confucius in Analects I.2 says that those who behave well toward their parents don’t start revolutions; Mencius argues for benevolence over profit by arguing that a state of benevolent people will flourish. Here – not so surprising given the early Confucians’ social context – the point seems to be to figure out how to run a state, and individual conduct is addressed for its relevance to that goal, rather than the other way ’round.

But one can find a similar approach to Plato’s in a more surprising place, where it plays a different role: the work of the Buddhist thinker Candrakīrti (whom I also discussed last time). Continue reading →

Can a Prāsaṅgika live his skepticism?

24 Sunday Oct 2010

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Epistemology, Flourishing, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Monasticism, Self, Serenity, Skepticism, Truth

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Last week I attended an interesting talk by Harvard PhD candidate (and fellow Canuck) Rory Lindsay, through the graduate Workshop in Cross-Cultural Philosophy – a workshop I’m proud to have played a part in founding (and I’m happy to say that its current leaders have made it exponentially more successful than it ever was under my stewardship). Lindsay was exploring the skepticism of the Indian Buddhist thinker Candrakīrti; he compared Candrakīrti to the Hellenistic capital-S Skeptic Sextus Empiricus, who held similar views, and examined the arguments made against Sextus by Myles Burnyeat. I want to discuss Lindsay’s talk by first giving some background to it, then recounting it, and finally offering a few of my reflections that came out of it.

Lindsay’s talk – I hope I will be interpreting it correctly – delved far enough into the technical details of Buddhist theoretical debates that some introductory remarks are in order. Those familiar with these debates should feel free to skip down a couple of paragraphs. Buddhist teaching deliberately and thoughtfully attacks certain aspects of common sense and common linguistic usage, and yet nevertheless needs to make some use of that linguistic usage. Continue reading →