Category Archives: Asian Thought

In praise of the present moment

19 Sunday Nov 2023

Posted by in Anger, Daoism, East Asia, Flourishing, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Serenity

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One of the things that helped me realize the need for self-improvement by not-self-improvement was regular practice with the excellent Headspace meditation app, created by a former Tibetan monk named Andy Puddicombe. Headspace is at the epicenter of “McMindfulness”: the app normally charges for access but I get it for free as a work wellness benefit, and this arrangement has made Puddicombe millions of dollars. In turn, the app is a big reason I defend McMindfulness – especially through John Dunne’s hugely helpful distinction between “classical” and “nondual” mindfulness.

That is to say: the core practice in Headspace is noticing your emotions, positive and negative, as they arise, and reacting to them with nonjudgemental acceptance. And you do so, yes, in the present moment. Critics like Ron Purser correctly note that that present-moment focus is not found in classical Indian texts like the Pali suttas or Śāntideva – but Dunne notes that it is found in other premodern Buddhist traditions, like the Tibetan writings of Wangchuk Dorje. And I dare say that that present-moment technique is an improvement: one that does a better job than the classical tradition’s techniques at their shared goal of reducing our suffering.

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Self-improvement by not-self-improvement

05 Sunday Nov 2023

Posted by in Attachment and Craving, Christianity, Daoism, Deity, Flourishing, Humility, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Mindfulness, Self-Discipline, Serenity, Virtue

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Years ago, in a difficult period of my life, I had looked for philosophical help and explicitly found it in Buddhism and not Daoism, rejecting Daoism and its sudden-liberation views in about the strongest possible terms. But that wasn’t the whole story.

I had already been trying to apply the four-stage model of skill development, taught to me by Nancy Houfek, in which one progresses from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence to unconscious competence. Trying to find a peaceful mind in those difficult days, I was all too conscious of my own incompetence, and Daoism provided no guidance that I could discern on how one could make the all-important step to conscious competence. But it is eight years later now, eight years I have spent working on my mindfulness through a nightly prayer ritual and, increasingly, meditation. I’ve gotten better at stopping my harmful thoughts when I put my mind to it; I think I’ve acquired a certain degree of conscious competence. The next step seems to be making it a habit, making it unconscious competence. And when it comes to that, the Daoists might have a point.

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On f***ing Daoism

22 Sunday Oct 2023

Posted by in Action, Anger, Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, Family, Health, Meditation, Practice, Psychology, Virtue

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In previous years I have aimed to provide what are now known as content warnings when my posts contained swear or curse words. But just in the years since LoAW began, English swear words have undergone a striking shift; the formerly shocking F-word has become relatively unremarkable, while a six-letter derogatory term for black people is now regarded with horror. In keeping with the likely shift in audience expectations, in future posts I will be warning only about the new crop of swear words rather than the old. I use this post as an occasion to make this transition because the F-word appears in it quite frequently, as the title indicates. That title is probably the last time I will mark that word with asterisks; the word is uncensored in the text.

My wife’s previous round of cancer treatment, in 2015, was one of the most difficult periods in my life. Near the beginning of it I started describing myself as a Buddhist, based on a mere passing question in her hospital survey. But by the end I had become a practising Buddhist, having derived a great deal of support and comfort from Buddhism and its practices.

In the middle, though, I was still experimenting with a variety of ideas and practices from different traditions. The Neo-Confucian Zhu Xi reminded me of the spiritual benefit of practising scriptural reading, and I turned to multiple traditions for help in that regard. Buddhism proved the most valuable by the end, after a long period of learning from other traditions. Among these, I had a particularly powerful reaction to Daoism – perhaps I should say, against Daoism.

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Of races and other castes

08 Sunday Oct 2023

Posted by in Family, Modern Hinduism, Politics

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While studying development sociology at Cornell in my early twenties, I took a trip to see my Marathi family in India. I was pleasantly sipping tea with older relatives whom my father was making conversation with.

“One of Amod’s colleagues in his graduate program is Marathi,” he said. The family members nodded appreciatively and expressed their approval.

“And her name is Rukmini,” he added. The family nodded appreciatively again. “Ah! Rukmini! Very nice.”

Wanting to add to the conversation, I chimed in: “Yes, Rukmini Potdar.”

Suddenly the tone in the room took a dramatic shift. “Oh, Potdar,” one of them spat as they all rolled their eyes and shook their heads. I looked around in bewilderment – what was so wrong with being called Potdar? – but no further explanation came up. The conversation just moved on to different topics.

After we left, I turned to my father. “What happened there?” I asked him. Rukmini was a perfectly nice person and Potdar seemed to me a perfectly nice name. What did they have to object to?

“Well,” he said, “Rukmini is a nice old-fashioned Marathi name, so they appreciated that. But Potdar is a Bania name.”

I had stumbled into the world of modern Indian caste prejudice.

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The Confucian obligations of a manager

10 Sunday Sep 2023

Posted by in Confucianism, Family, Foundations of Ethics, Leadership, Morality, Philosophy of Language, Politics, Work

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I recently passed the examination to be a project management professional. In the Standard for Project Management – the Project Management Institute‘s statement of principles underlying project management – one particular principle caught my eye for its ethical significance. That is the principle they call stewardship.

The closest thing to a definition of stewardship in the Standard is:

Stewardship has slightly different meanings and applications in different contexts. One aspect of stewardship involves being entrusted with the care of something. Another aspect focuses on the responsible planning, use, and management of resources. Yet another aspect means upholding values and ethics. (25)

That definition covers a lot of ground, but the part that struck me in particular was being entrusted with the care of something. That idea resonated with an ethical principle that I’ve found important as a manager – one which I have drawn above all from Confucianism.

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What is engaged Buddhism, anyway?

16 Sunday Jul 2023

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

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Western scholars of (socially) engaged Buddhism have often also considered themselves practitioners of engaged Buddhism, in a way that is more common than with other forms of Buddhism. Thus scholarship on engaged Buddhism often tends to take on a theological cast. I don’t think this is a bad thing. I’ve long tried to advocate that non-Western traditions should be treated as partners in dialogue, not as mere objects of study; we should be doing ethics and not only doing ethics studies. The field of engaged Buddhism is one where scholars often do Buddhist ethics and not merely study other people who do Buddhist ethics, and I appreciate that about the field very much – against those like Victor Temprano who object to such normative work.

Now theological scholarship still is, and should be, scholarship, subject to standards of academic rigour. This is where engaged Buddhist scholarship has sometimes been lacking. Engaged Buddhist scholars often write as if all Buddhism is socially engaged Buddhism, ignoring the Buddhists who advocate social disengagement. I’ve said my piece about that part. Today I want to point to another area where engaged Buddhist scholarship has lacked rigour in the past: the question of what engaged Buddhism is.

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A beef with Hindutva

18 Sunday Jun 2023

Posted by in Food, Islam, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modern Hinduism, Politics, Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, Vedānta

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When I was getting ready for my PhD program to study Indian philosophy, I figured I should get more acquainted with the classics, so I sat down to read through the Upaniṣads in their entirety. I was making my way through a passage about what a man should ask his wife to do if they want a good and learned son. I saw it advance through progressively better outcomes, a son who knows one Veda, two Vedas, three. And then it culminated in this passage:

‘I want a learned and famous son, a captivating orator assisting at councils, who will master all the Vedas and life out his full life span’—if this is his wish, he should get her to cook that rice with meat and the two of them should eat it mixed with ghee. The couple thus becomes capable of begetting such a son. The meat may be that of a young or a fully grown bull. (Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 6.4.18, Olivelle translation)

I was startled. One of the first things you would typically learn in “Hinduism 101” is that “Hindus” are supposedly forbidden from eating beef, that that is one of the key requirements of their “religion”. And that certainly fit my own experience with the Indian side of my family, who consider themselves Hindu and don’t eat beef. I had vaguely heard of D.N. Jha’s The Myth of the Holy Cow, and its argued that the prohibition on eating beef was not as ancient as we think it is. But I hadn’t expected to encounter the very opposite – an instruction to eat cows right there in the Brḥadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad.

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Experiencing different ultimate unities

21 Sunday May 2023

Posted by in Consciousness, Metaphysics, Vedānta

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Defenders of cross-cultural mystical experience are right to note that in many widely varying cultures, respected sages have referred to the experience of an ultimate nonduality: a perception that everything, including oneself, is ultimately one. But one might also then rightly ask: which ultimate nonduality?

Nondualism may be the world’s most widespread philosophy, but it can mean different things – not merely different things in different places, but different things in the same place. Members of the Indian Vedānta tradition frequently proclaimed that everything is “one, without a second”, in the words of the Upaniṣads they followed. But they disagreed as to what that meant. Śaṅkara founded the Advaita Vedānta tradition – a-dvaita literally meaning non-dual – which argued that only the one, ultimate truth (sat, braḥman) was real, and all multiplicity and plurality was an illusion. His opponent Rāmānuja agreed that everything is “one, without a second” – but in his Viśiṣṭādvaita (qualified nondual) school, that meant something quite different. All the many things and people we see around us – what Chinese metaphysicians called the “ten thousand things” – are parts of that ultimate one, and they are real, not illusory.

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Thoughts on MonkTok

12 Sunday Mar 2023

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Modernized Buddhism, Monasticism, Play, Politics, Self-Discipline

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In my view the most interesting thing about TikTok is the proliferation of subcultural communities that flourish on it – WitchTok, BimboTok, KinkTok, NunTok. The most unfortunate thing about TikTok, conversely – well, aside from the alarming power it gives the Chinese government – is that there is no real way to find these cultures on the platform, you just hear about them on the news. This week, I happened to hear in that way about one such subculture of particular interest to me – and that is MonkTok.

In Cambodia, that is, younger Buddhist monks are now making videos on TikTok and getting famous for them, drawing up to half a million followers. From what little I know about this phenomenon – basically drawn from one article this week – I have mixed feelings about this.

Hak Sienghai, a Buddhist monk with more than 500 000 TikTok followers, according to the Rest of World article that is this image’s source.
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Stoicism for boys, mindfulness for girls?

26 Sunday Feb 2023

Posted by in External Goods, Gentleness, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Patient Endurance, Serenity, Stoicism

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The contemporary world is not a particularly philosophical place, the United States even less so. Philosophy’s reputation can be low enough to make it a convenient whipping boy, as when politicians join in a pile-on on it. So it’s a wonderful surprise when a philosophical tradition becomes a trend.

Such is the recent rise of popular Stoicism in the past decade. While it’s particularly influential in Silicon Valley, the modern Stoic movement is popular around the world, with conventions on multiple continents. Stoicism’s message that external goods are not what makes the difference to living well proved a particularly important consolation during the pandemic, when sales of the works of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius surged.

Now a common observation about the newly popular Stoicism is that it appeals primarily to men. I’ve often heard its practitioners dismissed as “tech bros”. An interview by Skye Cleary observed that Stoicon attenders were primarily men, and took this as an occasion for criticism: little surprise, perhaps, in an era that rarely uses the noun “masculinity” without attaching the adjective “toxic”.

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