Category Archives: Buddhism

Précis of “Beyond enacted experiences”

30 Sunday Sep 2012

Posted by in Buddhism, Christianity, Consciousness, Dialectic, Judaism, Meditation, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Natural Science, Vedānta

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I’ve been wanting to refer on the blog to the article I recently wrote for the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice. Out of respect for the journal’s hardworking editors (and the law!), I will not post the article or its text on the site. But I’d like to give a summary of what I said there, so that blog readers without access to JITP will know what I’m talking about. The argument here is not as precise or careful as that in the article, and readers will need to find a copy of JITP 7(2) to get those details.

The article is above all a critique of Ken Wilber’s method in cross-cultural philosophy, a method that Wilber himself describes as a form of empiricism. Continue reading →

The trouble with phenomenological similarities

23 Sunday Sep 2012

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Meditation, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Philosophy of Language, Roman Catholicism

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This week’s post is a slightly abridged version of a paper I wrote eleven years ago for Robert Gimello’s class on Buddhist meditation traditions. I’m posting it now for a couple of reasons: because I still enjoy its punchy rhetoric, because it’s a useful corrective to Wilberian and similar perspectives that assume “religion” is fundamentally about mystical experience, and because I think it’s likely to be relevant to posts I want to make in the months ahead. I also still agree with it to at least some extent, but I am not entirely sure what that extent is, and that is something I hope to be sorting through.

In his chapter “What would Buddhaghosa have made of the Cloud of Unknowing?”1, Ninian Smart argues that “there are phenomenological similarities between the differing practices despite the contrast in language and style between Buddhaghosa and the author of the anonymous 14th-century Christian text The Cloud of Unknowing.” Although Smart never defines “phenomenological”, I believe from the context of the article that he uses the term to refer to similarities of experience, and specifically mystical experience.

To what extent does Smart’s chapter succeed in its project? Continue reading →

My mother’s meditations

09 Sunday Sep 2012

Posted by in Confucianism, Family, Gratitude, Meditation, Modernized Buddhism, Serenity

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Over the past little while I have been reading more Confucianism, and becoming more sympathetic to it for a variety of reasons. I’ve hardly converted to Confucianism, which is probably just as well; I sometimes think I’d be the world’s worst Confucian – not having children, living far from my parents, and having grown up regularly challenging their authority. To be fair, my parents – a Marxist and a child of the sixties – effectively encouraged me to challenge their authority. Still, in recent years and months I have come to sympathize with Confucianism a lot more. And it feels like the very least I can do is honour my parents in this forum.

I chose this week to do so because my mother, Dorothy Lele, just celebrated her birthday, and I will start by speaking of her. Continue reading →

In praise of questions which tend not to edification

12 Sunday Aug 2012

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, German Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Monasticism, Social Science

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The Shorter Māluṅkya Sutta, in the early Pali Buddhist sutta texts, opens with the Buddhist monk Māluṅkyaputta meditating and thinking as follows:

These positions that are undeclared, set aside, discarded by the Blessed One [the Buddha] — ‘The cosmos is eternal,’ ‘The cosmos is not eternal,’ ‘The cosmos is finite,’ ‘The cosmos is infinite,’ ‘The soul and the body are the same,’ ‘The soul is one thing and the body another,’ ‘After death a Tathagata exists,’ ‘After death a Tathagata does not exist,’ ‘After death a Tathagata both exists and does not exist,’ ‘After death a Tathagata neither exists nor does not exist’ — I don’t approve, I don’t accept that the Blessed One has not declared them to me. I’ll go ask the Blessed One about this matter. [Majjhima Nikāya i.426, Thanissaro Bhikkhu translation]

The absence of answers to these questions frustrates Māluṅkyaputta enough that he is ready to leave the monkhood and become a layman if the Buddha doesn’t answer him. Continue reading →

How intellectual conversion happens (and elephants)

01 Sunday Jul 2012

Posted by in Certainty and Doubt, Deity, Early and Theravāda, Jainism, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Roman Catholicism, Truth

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One of the reasons I’ve enjoyed reading about Leah Libresco‘s conversion is it’s such a clear, current and vivid illustration of a phenomenon whose existence many would fervently like to wish away, would like to declare impossible. Namely, Libresco is demonstrably intelligent, with an actively questioning mind, and young; and she once actively declared herself belonging to the atheism that she has now rejected in favour of Catholicism. Many people find the existence of such a person really hard to take.

The clearest example of this is JT Eberhard, a young atheist blogger who remains a young atheist blogger. In his reaction, Eberhard proclaims: “I’m reading through all her posts and I’m floored. Leah’s really smart. I cannot believe the things she’s writing are coming from her mind.” Continue reading →

Converting to theism through the problem of good

24 Sunday Jun 2012

Posted by in Deity, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Roman Catholicism

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A startling thing happened last week on Patheos, a website for conversation about “religion”. Atheist blogger Leah Libresco wrote a post entitled “This is my last post for the Patheos atheist portal”. Not for the reason you’d normally expect – that she had no time for blogging and was moving on to other ventures in life. No, Libresco wrote this because she was now going to start writing for the Catholic portal. Continue reading →

The monk’s independence

22 Sunday Apr 2012

Posted by in Attachment and Craving, Death, Early and Theravāda, External Goods, Generosity, Jainism, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Monasticism, Sāṃkhya-Yoga, Self, Serenity, Social Science

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It’s often said that “individualism” is an invention of the modern West – meaning the approach that defines human beings as independent and autonomous from their social context. The French sociologist Louis Dumont made this claim directly in contrast to India, seeing India as a highly communitarian place where an individual’s community and social status much more. Dumont applied this communitarian view not only to Indian society at large but to its theoretical thought.

Many students of other cultures soon come to see individualism as a Western conceit – a bizarre peculiarity of an eccentric society that went wrong with Descartes. If indeed the modern West is a complete solitary exception to the rule, then there would seem to be something to this view.

I wrestled with it for a while myself. I used to believe Dumont’s classification of India was correct. It certainly resonated with my personal experiences, seeing how much more my Indian family cared about family and community ties. But those experiences, combined with the communitarian stereotype of India found in the likes of Dumont and Max Weber, blinded me to things I read every day in graduate school for years without actually noticing. Continue reading →

Poisonous Buddhist gifts

15 Sunday Apr 2012

Posted by in Attachment and Craving, External Goods, Generosity, Jainism, Karma, Mahāyāna, Modern Hinduism, Monasticism, Social Science

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I admire Maria Heim‘s research on gift-giving in classical India. There’s one point that I think her work misses, however – a topic I had intended to cover in my dissertation on Śāntideva but never had room for. It’s not a constructive philosophical point – I’m not taking any ideas of my own from the ideas I discuss here – but it’s helpful to think about in order to understand philosophies like Śāntideva’s that I do draw significantly from. (And it will be relevant to next week’s post.) Continue reading →

Good karma as eudaimonia

08 Sunday Apr 2012

Posted by in Epicureanism, External Goods, Flourishing, Karma, Mahāyāna, Stoicism, Supernatural, Virtue

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One of the first posts I made on this blog examined Dale Wright‘s methodological approach of naturalized karma. This is a way of continuing to use the concept of karma, and thereby remaining more closely in dialogue with classical Buddhist (and Jain and brahmanical) texts – without relying on the supernatural connections usually implied by the concept, especially rebirth. (By “karma” here I refer above all to the referents of Sanskrit pāpa and especially puṇya, best translated respectively as “bad karma” and “good karma”.) I’d like to explore this idea in more detail here.

Wright’s basic approach is to read karma as meaning something like an Aristotelian virtue ethic: good actions are rewarded with a good, flourishing life, in this life irrespective of future ones (and bad ones correspondingly punished). This much is not a Yavanayāna innovation; plenty of Buddhist texts make it clear that good action is rewarded in this life as well as in future ones. Continue reading →

Translating puṇya and pāpa

01 Sunday Apr 2012

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Karma, Mahāyāna, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Roman Catholicism

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Classical Indian Buddhist texts rely a great deal on two concepts: puṇya (Pali puñña) and pāpa. The former is good, something to pursue; the latter is bad, something to avoid. They have something to do with our actions and their results: punya comes out of our good actions and brings good results for us, pāpa comes out of our bad actions and brings bad results. We find these concepts all over the place in pretty much any Indian Buddhist text we might pick up. Next week I’ll explore in more detail what they are and how we might best think about them. This week I want to start with something more basic: how should we translate them into English? Absolutely not, I would argue, with the two words that Buddhism scholars most commonly use for them: namely “merit” and “sin” respectively. Continue reading →