Category Archives: Asian Thought

Medicine as ethics

01 Tuesday Sep 2009

Posted by in Biology, Early and Theravāda, Flourishing, Food, German Tradition, Happiness, Health, Judaism, Politics, Psychology, Roman Catholicism, South Asia

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In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre once said that “it is the lawyers, not the philosophers, who are the clergy of liberalism.” That is, in modern societies – liberal in the broad sense – it is lawyers who do the work, and have the status, once given to the medieval European Christian priesthood.

On this point I think MacIntyre is half right – or perhaps three-quarters right. He is quite right to note the low status that the modern West accords philosophers; but he overemphasizes the role of lawyers, because his concept of the good is (to my mind) overly political. Lawyers do play the role of medieval clergy as the rulers’ intellectual assistants in determining what a good state will be in practice. When it comes to the good life itself, however, the intellectual heavy lifting is done by a very different group: namely doctors, and medical researchers. It is medicine, not law (and certainly not philosophy), that plays the greatest role in telling moderns how they should live.
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Reconsidering traditional masculinity

27 Thursday Aug 2009

Posted by in Buddhism, Emotion, Greek and Roman Tradition, Patient Endurance, Stoicism

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I’d like to push a bit further on the theme of the previous post, because I think it points to some important objections people have to Buddhism – and related philosophies.

A long time ago, I was talking to my friend Nic Thorne, a classicist, about Buddhism and virtue. I was explaining the characteristically Buddhist virtue of k??nti or patient endurance – taking unpleasant events with peace and equanimity. He said: “stoicism.”

The word just floored me. At that point I’d never studied the Stoics, and never imagined that there could be a connection between Buddhism and stoicism – whether with a small or big S. I associated the term “stoicism” with icons of old-fashioned masculinity, which seemed at the time almost comical: the British stiff upper lip, John Wayne. Men who refused to display emotion. I assumed such a posture was repression, leading to passive aggression – or perhaps to self-destruction. (Slash‘s autobiography is an interesting case study of a man who, unwilling to talk about or express his worries, instead turns to heroin for a release.)

But through my appreciation for Buddhism, I came to a new appreciation of that traditional masculinity as well. There’s something to the idea that one should control one’s emotions – though, again, this is very different from repressing them. It’s good to be the kind of person who doesn’t get angry – even though it’s terrible to be the kind of person who gets angry inside and represses it outside.

I do think, though, that the association of small-s stoicism with masculinity is misguided. Harvey Mansfield tried to defend it in his book on manliness, and in a talk he gave on the subject at Harvard; but I couldn’t discern a single reason in his talk why this manliness should be a virtue limited to biological males. I asked him why it wouldn’t be a virtue for women too, and he said “well, that’s the gender-neutral society I’m attacking,” but nothing in his reply seemed at all persuasive in claiming there was anything wrong with such a society. I appreciated his attempt to revive the virtues associated with masculinity, but his attempt to maintain a gender link did those virtues no favours.

If anything, it seems to me that the opposite of Mansfield’s position is true. Men should be the ones trying to express their repressed emotions, since they’re so conditioned to repress them – that’s how we avoid ending up in Slash’s position. It’s women, conditioned to be emotional, who most need a healthy dose of Buddhist patient endurance.

Repressing and reducing anger

25 Tuesday Aug 2009

Posted by in Anger, German Tradition, Mahāyāna, Monasticism, Patient Endurance, Psychology, Unconscious Mind

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What first drew me to Śāntideva was his critique of anger. I had students read him for a tutorial course on comparative ethics, and one student was shocked by his almost total criticism of anger as an emotion. “What about righteous anger?” she asked. I replied: “according to this text, I don’t think there’s any such thing as righteous anger.” The more I thought about this teaching afterward, the more profound it seemed: the number of times in my life I’d been glad I got angry, I could count on the fingers of one hand.

I would still tend to agree with Śāntideva against that criticism; I don’t see the righteousness of any cause as justifying anger. But there’s another common modern criticism of Śāntideva’s position that I think has more force. Namely: is it even possible to get rid of anger, as Śāntideva recommends we do? Don’t you just wind up repressing it, so that it comes back as a passive aggression that’s ultimately more destructive than the original anger?
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My article’s up!

19 Wednesday Aug 2009

Posted by in Blog Admin, Mahāyāna

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Just a quick note of celebration: the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has just published my article on Śāntideva! If you’ve been wondering what the deal is with this Śāntideva guy I keep talking about, the article should be a good introduction.

The IEP website looks like it’s just undergone a snappy redesign, too. If the last time you visited was several months ago, have another look.

An evil God?

18 Tuesday Aug 2009

Posted by in Buddhism, Death, Deity, Karma, Morality, Roman Catholicism, Supernatural

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I’ve lately been finding myself increasingly horrified by the concept of hell, and its implications for a certain kind of Christian belief in God. I’m familiar with several theological ways in which Christians handle this concept; there’s the pre-New Testament view in which the unsaved simply disappear after death, or the view in which hell is simply an allegory for what we do to ourselves psychologically in life. (I think Dante, who did a great deal to create our conception of hell, is often interpreted this latter way.) I don’t have serious problems with hell interpreted in either of these ways, or with a God who created it.

My problem is with the literal concept of hell, the one you see preached in evangelical sermons. I’ve been tempted to think of it as just a superstition for those who haven’t thought their Christianity through very well. But it isn’t that. Even Augustine, a profound thinker I have a deep respect for, seems to say fairly clearly that the damned suffer physical and psychological torment for eternity. This, to me, raises huge problems.

I can’t figure any way around the view that a God who damns people to hell for all eternity is evil. Such a God would deliberately inflict far more suffering than Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot put together (and added to every other vicious tyrant you might care to name). Moreover, such a punishment seems completely gratuitous, far more than anything the sufferers could reasonably be said to deserve. Augustine argues the point merely by reference to Cicero and the Roman customs of the time: “we have punishments more severe than the crime all the time!” Such a point convinces me only of the barbarism of Rome, not of God’s justice. Nietzsche notes with some satisfaction that Aquinas and Tertullian go even further than this: among the pleasures granted to the elect in heaven comes the ability to see the ways the damned are punished. What kind of God would encourage such a thing?

Buddhist hells, by contrast, give us two ways out of the dilemma. First, they’re not permanent; everybody gets a second chance, as one should expect from a merciful god. Second, and more fundamentally, nobody put them there. Like all the other suffering in the world, they’re just an unpleasant fact of nature, one we need to find a way to deal with. If the Buddhas could eliminate the hells, they would; they’re omniscient and omnibenevolent, but not omnipotent. Śāntideva, in redirecting his good karma, hopes that the hells will become glades of lotuses – he just doesn’t succeed in effecting this transformation, at least not for the majority of the hells.

Am I missing something here? With respect to the God of the medieval theologians, if he existed, it’s not just that I would find it hard to believe him omnibenevolent. Rather, I would find it hard to believe him benevolent at all.

Did Hinduism exist?

11 Tuesday Aug 2009

Posted by in Epicureanism, Greek and Roman Tradition, Islam, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modern Hinduism, South Asia

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My father, Jayant Lele, has often liked to say of Hinduism that it doesn’t exist. His view made a lot of sense to me when I first travelled around India – first encountering claims that Hindus were vegetarians because of their deep respect for animals, and then visiting the temple in Calcutta where the priest suggested I stick around to watch them sacrifice a goat. Could there be anything in common here?

I’ve moderated my own views on the subject a little. I think there is such a thing as Hinduism now; it’s just a relatively recent invention. The first person to use the word “Hinduism” was Rammohun Roy, a modern reformer who wanted to see a modernized, politically active Hinduism. I have no problem using the term “Hinduism” and “Hindu” to refer to modern Hindus who follow Roy’s example (like Gandhi, Aurobindo, the Arya Samaj, or Swami Vivekananda). Hinduism, then, is something closely parallel to Yavanayāna Buddhism: a modern reform movement that can be intellectually honest as long as it recognizes itself as such.

Before that, things get hazy. True, Muslims in India referred to non-Muslim Indians as “Hindu.” But it was a generic term for exactly that: non-Muslim Indians. When “Hinduism” is used to mean anything other than the 19th-century reform movement, it means little more than “miscellaneous Indian traditions”: Indians who are not Muslim or Christian, and in more recent cases not Buddhists or Jains or Sikhs. (Muslim chroniclers like al-Biruni would have been startled to hear Buddhists called anything other than Hindu.)

I’m fairly comfortable, then, in saying that premodern “Hinduism” doesn’t really exist. But let me be clear on this point, as it’s one of the things that’s got me into trouble with Hinduism’s would-be defenders before: this isn’t a criticism. I like the fact that in early India, “religious” boundaries were so porous: the same king might pay homage to Buddhist monks and Śaivite bhakta mystics. Early India is comparable more to “Greek and Roman religion,” or perhaps to “Chinese religion,” than it is to Judaism or Christianity: a set of philosophies, practices, supernatural beings moving around between traditions. If you were going to give yourself to a certain idea wholeheartedly (as a monk would do), your loyalty might have needed to be more absolute – as it would have been in Greece for those who wanted to follow Epicurus in his garden. For most people, though, it wasn’t, and the point strikes me as something worth learning from now. Wisdom can be found in many places, and we do well to look for it in as many of those places as possible, rather than refusing to look at ideas and practices that aren’t Christian – or are Christian, depending on where our allegiance has been declared.

How not to defend Hinduism in academia

09 Sunday Aug 2009

Posted by in Christianity, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modern Hinduism, Politics, Sex, South Asia

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Over the past decade, the academic study of Indian traditions has become heavily politicized. For those who haven’t been following the issue: basically, some people of Indian origin (usually Hindu), in India and elsewhere, have started finding out what North American religionists are saying about the traditions they recognize as their own; and it outrages them. Their most visible leader is Rajiv Malhotra, a New Jersey-based businessman with pockets deep enough to get his views a hearing. Most of the time the flashpoints for the critics are around sex: they are outraged at frankly sexual depictions of the tradition they follow and the gods and leaders they revere. The outrage is not so much about the obviously sexual parts of the tradition – the Khajuraho temples or the K?ma Sūtra – so much as it is about Freudian psychoanalytic depictions of beloved figures in the tradition, such as the elephant god Ga?e?a (Ganesh), the military hero Shivaji or the nineteenth-century mystic Ramakrishna. There have been calls to ban or even the offending books (respectively by Paul Courtright, James Laine and my friend Jeff Kripal). Sometimes these calls have effectively succeeded, with Courtright’s Indian publisher removing his book from circulation in India. As a result of these controversies, a group of activists from the right-wing Hindu Shiv Sena party broke into the offices of Shrikant Bahulkar – one of the kindest, gentlest and most generous men I have ever had the fortune of working with – and blackened his face, as well as destroying priceless manuscripts at the institution where he works, solely because James Laine had thanked Bahulkar in the acknowledgements of his book. Continue reading →

Chastened intellectualism and practice

06 Thursday Aug 2009

Posted by in African Thought, Christianity, Confucianism, Greek and Roman Tradition, Human Nature, Humility, Metaphilosophy, Practice, Unconscious Mind

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My previous post discusses the problem that academic philosophy doesn’t do a whole lot to make us better people; its main defence is that it isn’t supposed to. But then what is?

Aaron Stalnaker addresses this point in his book Overcoming Our Evil. It compares Augustine and Xunzi, two thinkers from faraway contexts who share a commonly pessimistic assessment of human nature. I had some serious methodological concerns about Stalnaker’s work in the sixth chapter of my dissertation – basically that the work isn’t as relevant to constructive ethical reflection as it claims to be – but I’ve softened a bit on those concerns since writing the dissertation. While I still don’t think that Stalnaker’s work itself makes the constructive contributions it claims to make, I do think that its categories are helpful for others who do want to make such contributions.

Specifically: what Augustine and Xunzi have in common, according to Stalnaker, is “chastened intellectualism.” While they agree that we can know a great deal of the truth about how we should live, they also agree that knowing the truth is not enough to make us act accordingly – contradicting at least some readings of Plato. Some sort of further practice is required. Pierre Hadot points out that in Roman times such practices were viewed as integral to philosophy. (Jonathan Schofer, on my dissertation committee, kept insisting that I pay greater attention to Śāntideva’s accounts of practices, and now I’m seeing why.)

I’m very sympathetic to such an account, from my personal experience. It was one thing to realize that my own attitudes and behaviours were the big problem in my life. It has been quite another to actually change those attitudes and behaviours.

But then seekers like me face a problem. Augustine and Xunzi recommend practices that are embedded within a particular tradition – Christianity and Confucianism respectively – each of which I find highly problematic. There’s a lot I disagree with in Buddhism as well; I don’t think any tradition has managed to fully grasp truth (though I also certainly don’t claim to have done so myself!) Some traditions of practice (like Goenka’s) claim to be non-sectarian techniques, but nevertheless incorporate a great deal of their tradition’s own teachings. (At the same time, Goenka’s technique didn’t do a lot for me, with one major exception.)

What then are we seekers to do? Should we swallow the practices of an existing tradition whole even while disagreeing with it, as a part of developing a necessary humility? Or should we pick and choose to make our own practice, retaining intellectual integrity but giving ourselves less chance to learn from what’s out there?

Why was gay sex considered misconduct?

28 Tuesday Jul 2009

Posted by in Buddhism, Family, Monasticism, Roman Catholicism, Sex

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José Cabezón has an interesting article on Buddhism and sexuality in the latest (summer 2009) issue of Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly. The article examines the tricky concept of “sexual misconduct” (kamesu micchācāra in Pali); one of the basic Five Precepts is a vow to refrain from “sexual misconduct.” But what exactly counts as misconduct? A fellow student asked me this when I took a Goenka vipassanā course. Goenka, in keeping with his general emphasis on non-harming, himself listed only rape and adultery as examples. But premodern Buddhists have typically gone further than this.

Cabezón probes the point that the present Dalai Lama, while defending the “full human rights” of gay people, nevertheless treats male homosexual sex (and oral and anal sex more generally) as a form of sexual misconduct. Continue reading →

The Buddhist critique of hope

26 Sunday Jul 2009

Posted by in Buddhism, External Goods, Happiness, Hope

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In her class on Buddhist ethics, Janet Gyatso once described Buddhism as a “critique of hope.” The statement has two flaws. First, of course, it’s an overgeneralization, like any statement about Buddhism as such; more importantly, it misses the hope for liberation, awakening, nirvana. Nevertheless, it strikes me as being basically true in many respects. This is perhaps another way of putting the critique of external goods: most Buddhist thinkers tell us to avoid hoping that the external conditions of our lives will get better, focusing instead on improving ourselves and making ourselves better able to deal with those conditions. On old BBSes I remember a message tagline saying “I feel so much better ever since I’ve given up hope.” In a certain sense, Buddhists urge us to be hopeless.

The problem is that in English this is not at all what “hopelessness” means. This kind of hopelessness is an arguably positive state; but normally “hopelessness” simply means despair, a terribly negative state. The reason, it seems to me, is that the word “hope” means two things at once: first, the strong desire that things be different than they are, and second, the expectation that they will become so, or at least have a chance of becoming so. Despair – hopelessness in the normal sense – is the first of these without the second. But the Buddhist critique is that it’s the first one that causes our problems, whether or not we have the second. Let go of the first, and the second doesn’t matter anymore.

It’s a self-help commonplace that we will never be happy as long as we tell ourselves “I’ll be happy when…” But that “I’ll be happy when” requires hope. If we give up the hope that we might have the things we want, it pushes us into contentment with the life we already have.