Category Archives: Buddhism

Defining ascent and descent

27 Sunday Apr 2014

Posted by in Buddhism, External Goods, Flourishing, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Self

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In the previous two posts I tried to show how I came to the best definition I could find for ascent and descent. Namely, ascent is an attempt to transcend the particular human condition, in the name of a higher and better universal; descent is the attempt to embrace the particular human condition without regard to such a universal. This time I’m going to try to spell out just what I mean by that. Continue reading →

The accidental Gītā

16 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by in Epics, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Modern Hinduism, Morality, Vedānta

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A strange coincidence surprised me as I designed this spring’s course in Indian philosophy – but one that I suspect is quite significant. The coincidence resulted from three of my primary concerns in selecting content for the course syllabus, and I’ll start with those. One of those was, whenever possible, to focus on primary texts – texts actually written by Indian philosophers.

A second primary concern was to stress the connections between theoretical and practical philosophy. Too often, Indian epistemology and metaphysics are seen as purely abstract activities with little relation to one’s ethical conduct or even one’s ultimate liberation, and Indian reflection on practical matters is taken to have little background in that theoretical work (as in Damien Keown’s needlessly pessmistic reflection that there is no such thing as Buddhist normative ethics). It is no wonder that Indian philosophy is so little studied when even those who study it sometimes think its questions tend not to edification.

My reading of Śāntideva convinced me that this is absolutely not the case. Metaphysics is a pervasive concern of his most celebrated text (and one of the most widely read works of Buddhist ethics), the Bodhicaryāvatāra – not only in the ninth chapter, which focuses on it, but in the other more widely read chapters as well. (I gave a talk on this topic at the SACP a few years ago, and am planning on expanding it into a paper for publication soon.) I have come to believe that this is the case more widely in Indian philosophy as well. It’s not always easy to see what the practical implications of Indian theoretical thought are, but I think that they are there, and it was hugely important to me that my course bring them out.

My final primary concern was to bring in modern Indian philosophy, in order to excite student interest and let them know it is not a dead tradition. Continue reading →

Acknowledging newness

02 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modernized Buddhism, Natural Science

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Readers may have noticed my expressing a certain ambiguity with respect to the new Buddhist movements I call Yavanayāna. I have often defended their value as legitimate traditions in their own right, but I have also repeatedly criticized them for their political activism, their embrace of “interdependence”, their reluctance to admit the significance of sectarian differences. Moreover, my ground for criticism in these cases is that they misrepresent traditional and especially early Buddhism. Some readers might well wonder whether there is a problem here: whether I am criticizing their innovation only when it is convenient to do so, which is to say only when I agree with it.

In response I would stress that I am not against innovation as such. Continue reading →

A synthesis beyond Orientalism

19 Sunday Jan 2014

Posted by in Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modern Hinduism, Modernized Buddhism, Vedānta

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[Cross-posted at the Indian Philosophy Blog.]

I am increasingly getting the impression that the debates over Orientalism in Asian traditions have taken a new turn, and one very much for the better.

Few books of the twentieth century have made as much impact as Edward Said’s 1978 Orientalism. It is particularly striking that even though Said’s book was entirely about the Middle East, it has been a major scholarly landmark in the study of South and East Asia. Until Said, Western scholarship on Asia was rarely viewed as having a hidden colonial agenda. The perennialism of élitist mystical schools like Theosophy was taken seriously by scholars. And the views of Asian traditions’ popular advocates – such as D.T. Suzuki, Walpola Rahula, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan – were widely accepted as accurate portrayals of those traditions.

After Said, all that changed. Continue reading →

The bodhisattva complex

01 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by in Anger, Attachment and Craving, External Goods, Friends, Health, Mahāyāna, Psychology, Self, Supernatural, Unconscious Mind

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There is a destructive pattern of behaviour I’ve observed too often which, in an amateur psychological diagnosis, I have come to call the bodhisattva complex. I thought of this term as a friend of mine – a young medical resident – described the behaviours she observed among her fellow medical residents and doctors, who think nothing of working 24- or even 48-hour shifts in order to help people in their care. One wonders: what kind of patient wants to be treated by a man or woman who hasn’t slept in 48 hours?

When I refer to the bodhisattva complex, I do not mean that actual bodhisattvas – ideal Mahāyāna Buddhist beings – are psychologically unhealthy. Some might make that argument (Martha Nussbaum has done so, more or less), but I would not at all. Rather, the bodhisattva complex refers to something which I think is far more common than actual bodhisattvas: you suffer it if you believe you are a bodhisattva, but aren’t. Continue reading →

Accounting for Hegel and the Pali

17 Sunday Nov 2013

Posted by in Compassion, Early and Theravāda, Emotion, Epistemology, German Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Language, Self

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My previous two substantive posts, on Thomas Kasulis’s intimacy/integrity distinction, went in opposite directions from one another. Two weeks ago I noted how the intimacy/integrity distinction seems to divide into two separate distinctions – an ontological one of internal vs. external relation between things, and an epistemological one of affective somatic “dark” knowledge vs. public self-reflective knowledge. Kasulis writes as if internal relation and affective somatic knowledge are all part of the same complex and vice versa, but Hegel and the Pali Buddhist texts seem to cross these divides, such that the Pali literature places external relation with affective somatic knowledge and Hegel the opposite.

Last week, though, I aimed to show that the connection Kasulis assumes between these aspects is a real one. What I pointed out was that an internal relation between existent things implies an internal relation between knower and known, and that this implies an affective somatic kind of knowledge – as an external relation between things implies an external relation between knower and known, and therefore a public and self-reflective kind of knowledge.

But if this is so, what do we do with the exceptional cases of Hegel and the Pali literature, which seem to involve one but not the other? Continue reading →

New article on Śāntideva, gifts and politics

15 Friday Nov 2013

Posted by in External Goods, Mahāyāna, Politics

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I’ve just got a new article published in the Journal of Buddhist Ethics. It takes up a theme that emerged in my dissertation writing but didn’t quite fit with the broader idea of the dissertation. I’ve touched on it here a couple of times, especially in writing about Śāntideva’s anti-politics. In the article I go into more detail about Śāntideva’s rejection of political institutions, and why other writers have missed it – leading into it with the curious question of why Śāntideva advocates that his readers give gifts of sex, drugs and weapons.

One of the reasons I chose the online-only JBE for this publication is that they are, wonderfully, entirely open-access. That means absolutely anyone with an internet connection can read it, whether or not they have an academic affiliation. Have a look!

The different pieces of intimacy and integrity

03 Sunday Nov 2013

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Epistemology, German Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics

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Regular readers will have seen how fruitful I have found Thomas Kasulis’s distinction between intimacy and integrity worldviews. So it is worth interrogating that distinction further and seeing how well the categories stand up to more careful scrutiny. The next couple weeks’ posts will in some respects follow my own thought process in trying to understand how robust the integrity/intimacy distinction turns out to be.

In explaining the distinction between the two, Kasulis breaks down the intimacy-integrity distinction into five main characteristics or features of each worldview:

  1. Intimacy is objective but personal; integrity emphasizes objectivity as public verifiability.
  2. In an intimate relation, self and other belong together in a way that does not sharply distinguish the two; integrity emphasizes external over internal relations.
  3. Intimate knowledge has an affective dimension; integrity emphasizes knowledge as ideally empty of affect.
  4. Intimacy is somatic as well as psychological; integrity emphasizes the intellectual and psychological as distinct from the somatic.
  5. Intimacy‘s ground is not generally self-conscious, reflective, or self-illuminating; integrity emphasizes knowledge as reflective and self-conscious of its own grounds. (Kasulis, Intimacy or Integrity, pp. 24-5 and 32)

I have begun to think that one of these things is not like the others – but is also, perhaps for that reason, more important than the others. Continue reading →

The innovations of S.N. Goenka (1930-2013)

06 Sunday Oct 2013

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Meditation, Modernized Buddhism, Monasticism

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S.N. GoenkaI found out via Justin Whitaker the sad news that S.N. Goenka died this week. The name needs little introduction for Yavanayāna Buddhists, but others may wish some additional insight.

Goenka, born in Burma, was a pioneer – really the pioneer – of what is now known as vipassanā meditation. This term vipassanā (usually translated “insight”) is found in the classical Pali texts, and so is the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta from which Goenka originally drew the meditation technique. Notably, though, the term vipassanā does not show up in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta itself. And that detail, I think, is telling about Goenka’s whole project.

I recall Goenka claiming, like many other contemporary Buddhist teachers, that what he was teaching was not new; it was just the teaching of the Buddha. That statement is not false exactly, but it’s not the whole truth. Continue reading →

A journey to Buddhism with Hegel

14 Sunday Jul 2013

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Flourishing, Friends, German Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Modernized Buddhism, Social Science

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A few years ago I told what I thought of at the time as the story of my philosophy: how I left a utilitarian worldview and came to discover Buddhism in Thailand at age 21. I realize now that there’s something important missing from that story, and you can see it in the final paragraph of the second piece:

And yet, all the Western philosophy that I’d learned before didn’t just go away. I’d learned important, powerful, beautiful things that seemed true – and often seemed opposite to the Buddhism I’d found myself in. Is there a way to reconcile the two? One way or another, that question has been central to my life ever since.

That was the right ending: since then I have indeed been preoccupied with reconciling Buddhism and the Western philosophy I’d already learned. But if you only read those two pieces, you would come away with the impression that the Western philosophy I had learned, and would try to reconcile, consisted primarily of utilitarianism. And that would be completely wrong. Continue reading →