Category Archives: Modernized Buddhism

On being Buddhist and distinctively Buddhist

19 Tuesday May 2020

Posted by in Anger, Death, Faith, Metaphilosophy, Modernized Buddhism, Stoicism

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At the start of my replies to Evan Thompson’s response, I noted that there are two core ways in which my eudaimonist Buddhist modernism differs from a great deal of premodern Buddhist tradition. I will first address the one that I take to be a deeper modification to the tradition, in admitting goals beyond the removal of suffering. Thompson doesn’t speak of this modification in quite these terms, but I think many of his comments speak directly to it. Especially, Thompson says:

I submit that the driving engine—historically and philosophically—of Buddhist thought is the following set of propositions: All conditioned and compounded things are impermanent, unsatisfactory, and not-self (the so-called three marks of existence); and nirvāṇa is unconditioned peace. Another formulation is the so-called four seals (which, according to Tibetan Buddhism, minimally identify a view as Buddhist): everything conditioned and compounded is impermanent; everything contaminated (by the mental afflictions of beginningless fundamental ignorance, attachment, and anger) is suffering; all phenomena are devoid of self; and nirvāṇa (unconditioned cessation of affliction) is peace.

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On the challenging aspects of tradition

17 Sunday May 2020

Posted by in Hermeneutics, Mahāyāna, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modernized Buddhism

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Evan Thompson has made a wonderfully detailed response to my earlier two posts that critique his stimulating Why I Am Not A Buddhist. It is a dialogue I am excited to continue. First a logistical note: I have a great deal to say in response, but I generally think that blog posts work better as relatively self-contained but relatively short pieces, so I’m going to space out my own long reply over eight posts. (All this is perhaps in keeping with Simon Critchley’s claim that the philosopher is one who takes time.) In order to stop the discussion from dragging on for too long, I will post these posts at a much more frequent interval than I usually do – three times a week, on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays.

To begin, I thank Thompson for his careful and thoughtful response. Its title – “Clarifying Why I Am Not A Buddhist” – is extremely apt. It shows me that there are points where I misunderstood the book’s claims, and I think the clarifications in his response make for a more fruitful debate. Above all: the book frames its critique of “neural Buddhism” in ways that did not seem to me to apply to the eudaimonic Buddhism that I hold. (Mike Slott of the Secular Buddhist Network appears to have got the same initial impression I did.) Thompson’s response makes it much clearer that he does indeed intend his critique to apply to me, and to fellow eudaimonist Buddhists like Dale Wright, Seth Segall, Ken McLeod, and possibly Slott. As a result, I think we are now much better able to dive into the real issues at hand, which I take to be crucial ones for my own philosophical project.

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Endorsing and rejecting the views of the modern West

03 Sunday May 2020

Posted by in Foundations of Ethics, Hermeneutics, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modernized Buddhism, Supernatural, Western Thought

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Friend of this blog Seth Zuihō Segall has a new book out entitled Buddhism and Human Flourishing, which he kindly sent me a pre-print review copy of. There is much to like in the book and I am very sympathetic to it. Indeed, my first worry about the book was that I would be too sympathetic. For the basic idea of the book – a modern Buddhist ethics understood in roughly Aristotelian terms –  is quite close to the book I have been starting to work on writing myself. Did Segall scoop me?

Having read the book, I think this is not the case: my take on Buddhist ethics does turn out to be significantly different from his. Continue reading →

Why is Evan Thompson not a Buddhist? (2)

12 Sunday Apr 2020

Posted by in Flourishing, Karma, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modernized Buddhism, Natural Science, Psychology, Supernatural

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Last time I noted that Evan Thompson’s Why I Am Not A Buddhist does not establish a case against being a Buddhist in Asian traditions, including Asian Buddhist modernist traditions. His critique focuses instead on Western Buddhist modernists. I do count myself among the latter, so the critique is intended to apply to Buddhists like me. Yet I do not think it hits its target. Thompson’s critique, as described last time, focuses on a neuroscience-linked, supposedly empirical variety of Buddhism that he calls “neural Budddhism”, exemplified by Robert Wright and Alan Wallace. But neural Buddhism does not exhaust Western Buddhist modernism.

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Why is Evan Thompson not a Buddhist? (1)

29 Sunday Mar 2020

Posted by in Modernized Buddhism, Monasticism, Natural Science, Psychology, Self, Supernatural

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Recently Evan Thompson released a book with the provocative title Why I Am Not A Buddhist. The book is an interesting constructive exploration that draws heavily on Thompson’s long background in the mind sciences as well as a deep engagement with Buddhist studies and Indian philosophy and culture in general. As such it is well worth a read. Perhaps not surprisingly given my own identification, however, I do not think its case against being a Buddhist is strong. In a nutshell, Thompson makes at most a case against being one certain kind of Buddhist, and there is a lot more of Buddhism to consider.

Why is Thompson not a Buddhist? He answers succinctly:

Since I see no way for myself to be a Buddhist without being a Buddhist modernist, and Buddhist modernism is philosophically unsound, I see no way for myself to be a Buddhist without acting in bad faith. That is why I’m not a Buddhist. (19)

So Thompson identifies only two ways of being a Buddhist – and rejects both. But I don’t think either rejection is sound. In both cases, he provides reason to reject only a very small portion of what he actually rejects. On the first: why can Thompson not be a non-modernist Buddhist? A few pages before he dismisses the option in a sentence: “Since I didn’t want to join a traditional Theravāda, Zen, or Tibetan Buddhist monastery, the only way to be a Buddhist was to be a Buddhist modernist.” (16) But such a claim would be startling to the millions and millions of traditional Asian Buddhist laypeople who still constitute the majority of professed Buddhists worldwide – and always have. They are neither monks nor modernists. So not to join a monastery hardly means that one cannot be a non-modernist Buddhist. (It also seems a little question-begging to frame the decision in terms of not wanting to join a monastery, since so much of the tradition identifies our desires – our wants – as the heart of our problems.)

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Naturalized kammatic Buddhism

01 Sunday Mar 2020

Posted by in Death, Early and Theravāda, External Goods, Faith, Flourishing, Generosity, Humility, Karma, Modernized Buddhism, Supernatural

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I think I’ve shown that the kammatic-nibbanic distinction should matter to the historian, textual scholar, or anthropologist trying to figure out what Buddhism has meant in other times and places. Contra Damien Keown, it is a helpful ideal type to understand how Buddhists have thought about their tradition to date. But should it matter constructively, to us, now?

Yes, it should – at least to us Buddhists, and to anyone trying to think philosophically with Buddhism today. Because, I would argue, there are things valuable about worldly life – and it turns out that there have always been Buddhists who agreed that there are, in practice if not in theory. At least some forms of the dichotomy turn out to reprise the key constructive problem of my dissertation – the role of external goods in a good human life – from an intra-Buddhist perspective. The Buddhism of the suttas, of Buddhaghosa and Śāntideva, turns out to be single-minded: only liberation is important. Buddhists will often identify that austere Buddhism as normative, the ideal to aspire to – and yet live a life remarkably different from that ideal. And I think that they are, at least to some extent, right to live such a life. Continue reading →

McMindfulness and Engaged Buddhism: the twin innovations

22 Sunday Dec 2019

Posted by in Foundations of Ethics, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Politics

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Ron Purser’s critique of McMindfulness is in line with William Edelglass’s critique of the “happiness turn” in Western Buddhism. Purser and Edelglass are both right to note that something new, less traditional, is going on in modern mindfulness. For there are parts of Buddhism that secular mindfulness leaves out, intentionally. Purser is right about that: right mindfulness (sammāsati) is only one part of the traditional Noble Eightfold Path, and mindfulness practices often leave out the rest. And so he is also right to ask the question:

what is mindfulness for? Is it merely to attain better health, higher exam scores, focused concentration at work, or “self-compassion?” Is it a medical form of self-improvement? In a way, posing the question is tantamount to asking what constitutes “the good life,” the traditional basis of philosophy. (79)

Indeed it is. And that is of course a difficult question. But it is important that the traditional Buddhist answers to that question are no closer to Purser’s anti-capitalist activism (or to Edelglass’s concern to alleviate “deprivation, violence, illness, racism, and environmental degradation”) than they are to secular mindfulness. I suspect they are further away from it. Continue reading →

In defence of McMindfulness

08 Sunday Dec 2019

Posted by in Anger, Attachment and Craving, Early and Theravāda, Economics, External Goods, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Politics

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The mainstreaming of mindfulness meditation continues at a rapid clip. According to the Center for Disease Control, in the years 2012 to 2017 the percentage of adults meditating in the United States more than tripled, to 17%. The American market for provision of meditation-related services is now worth $1 billion and growing.

With any phenomenon this mainstream, one expects a backlash. Sure enough, there have been a number of pieces appearing recently that chastise programs like BU’s under the name “corporate mindfulness”, or more pithily, “McMindfulness”. Continue reading →

Disengaged Buddhism article is published

18 Monday Nov 2019

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Mahāyāna, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modernized Buddhism, Politics

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It’s been a long time in the making, but my article on disengaged Buddhism is finally published. It’s at the free online Journal of Buddhist Ethics, so you can go read it for yourself.

I’ll say a bit here about what you can expect to find. Some of the article goes over territory I’ve already covered on Love of All Wisdom and the IPB: I discuss Aśvaghoṣa’s worries about severity, Śāntideva’s rejection of external goods, the Cakkavatti Sīhanāda Sutta’s detached attitude to time. The article does this in more detail than the blogs have, and I also show similar ideas in other suttas and jātakas and from Candrakīrti.

The article also responds more directly to existing engaged Buddhist scholarship. Engaged Buddhist scholars have, so far, been the people actually doing constructive Buddhist ethics. They are not merely describing what Buddhists happen to believe but prescribing a Buddhist way of life, and that much is something I think we need more of. What I don’t think they do nearly enough is think about or respond to the points made by the likes of Śāntideva and Aśvaghoṣa. The article explains why they should.

So the article isn’t itself a work of constructive Buddhist ethics; I’m not taking a position on engagement or disengagement there. What I am doing is reminding other people doing constructive Buddhist ethics about a large body of ideas that they ignore or silence, and urging them to take those ideas more seriously. My own constructive position on these questions is complicated. I’ve started to take some of it up on the blog – for example, I think there is some empirical confirmation for the Disengaged Buddhists’ psychological claims. That isn’t the whole story, though, and you can expect to hear more about my constructive views in the years to come. I am proud of the article as a starting point.

Cross-posted at the Indian Philosophy Blog.

Is mindfulness meditation a problem for Christians?

29 Sunday Sep 2019

Posted by in Christianity, Early Factions, Health, Meditation, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Physical Exercise, Politics, Psychology, Self

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As mindfulness meditation practices become ever more popular and widespread, their claim to be a “non-sectarian technique” takes on progressively greater importance, just as it does with yoga. By claiming their practices to be secular techniques, teachers not only can promote the practices to adherents of Abrahamic traditions; they can also aim to avoid the legal restrictions placed on “religion” –though they can then also be taxed, and even treated as a competitive sport.

But that’s not the only problem. Continue reading →