Category Archives: Asian Thought

On justice and activism in Pali Buddhism

28 Sunday Sep 2014

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Monasticism, Politics

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My discussion with Justin Whitaker continues after my last post, which was a response to his original post about trans* inclusiveness in Buddhism.

There followed a discussion back and forth between Justin and myself. The discussion has moved away from anything to do with trans* issues, which is fine with me because my point, and I think Justin’s too, was about something bigger: the role of justice and activism in Buddhist tradition. I won’t try to recap the discussion here because the link is available for those who haven’t seen it. I’ll just refresh your memory by quoting Justin’s most recent comment: Continue reading →

Trans* inclusiveness as an innovation to Buddhism

14 Sunday Sep 2014

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Modernized Buddhism, Monasticism, Politics, Sex

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On his American Buddhist Perspective blog, my friend Justin Whitaker recently posted an interesting interview on the experience of trans* people in American Buddhism. Justin uses “trans*” as a shorthand for “transgender”, “transsexual”, “transvestite” and similar terms – to denote people who have become or attempted to become, in some respect, a gender different from the one associated with their biology at birth. It is clear to me that trans* people in the US face various forms of unjust discrimination. Where the tricky questions get raised is when the struggle against that injustice intersects with Buddhism – as, for that matter, when the struggle against any injustice intersects with Buddhism. Justin and I began a conversation about this in the comments to that post, and I’d like to continue that conversation in more detail here. Continue reading →

The double standard of misinterpretation

31 Sunday Aug 2014

Posted by in Hermeneutics, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modern Hinduism, Modernized Buddhism, Vedas and Mīmāṃsā

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I have recently welcomed the corrective force of books like Andrew Nicholson’s Unifying Hinduism, which remind us that modern appropriations of Indian tradition have their own continuity with the evolving past tradition. I now find myself regularly reminded just how much such a corrective is needed. I have noted plenty of examples before, as with respect to Gregory Schopen and Donald Lopez. But I recently found perhaps the most striking example in the works of the contemporary Sanskrit scholar Herman Tull. Continue reading →

Matilal vs. Radhakrishnan

08 Sunday Jun 2014

Posted by in Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modern Hinduism

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A little while ago on the Indian Philosophy Blog, Matthew Dasti provided a fascinating glimpse into the recent, 20th-century history of “Indian philosophy” – not the doing of it but the studying of it, the history of “secondary work” into Indian philosophy. Since Westerners have been studying Indian philosophy for literally hundreds of years now, there is a significant history there. And it is hardly new to take this second-order focus. It is old news that the way we (Indians as well as Westerners) now think about Indian traditions in general has been deeply, perhaps irrevocably, shaped by the 19th-century Orientalists. But where Matthew’s comment goes deeper is to look specifically at the discipline of philosophy – and at the 20th century, not the 19th. Continue reading →

The No True Fish fallacy

25 Sunday May 2014

Posted by in Biology, Early and Theravāda, Foundations of Ethics, Logic, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Science, Prejudices and "Intuitions"

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Consider this dialogue:

A: “All fish breathe through gills rather than lungs.”

B: “But whales are fish, and they breathe through their lungs.”

A: “Whales may look and seem like fish, but they aren’t truly fish because they breathe through their lungs.”

To anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of biology, A’s reasoning here must seem sound. Yet among some philosophers with a scientific bent, the structure of the reasoning A employs is often criticized as a logical fallacy. Continue reading →

Papers from my course

19 Monday May 2014

Posted by in South Asia

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I have just created a website to showcase the research papers written by my undergraduate students in this semester’s Indian philosophy course. I think the overall quality of the papers was good, considering many of these students had never taken a philosophy course before. Some even went further and made me think hard about my own ideas. Have a look.

Qui veut faire l’ange fait la bête

11 Sunday May 2014

Posted by in Anger, Attachment and Craving, Emotion, External Goods, Flourishing, French Tradition, Humility, Indigenous American Thought, Mahāyāna, Neoplatonism, Patient Endurance

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In his excellent little book on Plotinus, Pierre Hadot quotes a lovely maxim of Blaise Pascal‘s, of which I was not previously aware: qui veut faire l’ange fait la bête. Roughly: whoever wants to act like an angel, acts like a beast. The full quote from Pascal’s Pensées is: L’homme n’est ni ange ni bête, et le malheur veut que qui veut faire l’ange fait la bête. Man is neither an angel nor a beast, and the problem is that whoever wants to act like an angel, acts like a beast.

The maxim is a good word of caution for everyone, but particularly when considering those traditions I have described as ascent: the ones that aim to transcend our particular human condition for a higher and better state of being. Continue reading →

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 →

Searching for ascent and descent (2)

13 Sunday Apr 2014

Posted by in Greek and Roman Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Vedānta

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For reasons I discussed last time, I’ve found it important to categorize philosophies using the ideal types of ascent and descent – but have not yet been able to specify them as clearly as an ideal type should be. I had thought I had drawn the concepts from Martha Nussbaum as well as Ken Wilber, but Nussbaum’s use of the ascent-descent dichotomy turned out to be implicit at most.

Wilber is not exactly clear on the topic himself. In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, the most systematic presentation of his ideas, he does not offer a definition as such. He does present us with a more detailed description of what he’s getting at, speaking of the movements of a quasi-Hegelian Spirit (with a capital S): Continue reading →

Searching for ascent and descent (1)

30 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by in Flourishing, Metaphilosophy, South Asia

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A couple years ago on this blog, after exploring a number of ways of classifying world philosophical traditions cross-culturally, I found the most robust and satisfying to be a 2×2 grid: we may classify philosophies as intimacy or integrity, and we may classify them as ascent or descent. (Methodologically, I find it best to treat each of these four as an ideal type.)

What I didn’t do was spell out with much care what each of these terms really meant. Last fall I tried to articulate more precisely what I meant by intimacy and integrity, and am currently in the process of writing an article on the topic. But what about ascent and descent? Continue reading →