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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Category Archives: Attachment and Craving

The goods of lay life

13 Sunday Feb 2022

Posted by Amod Lele in Attachment and Craving, Early and Theravāda, External Goods, Family, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Modernized Buddhism, Monasticism, Pleasure

≈ 14 Comments

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Justin Whitaker, Pali suttas, puruṣārthas, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha)

I return today to my correspondence with Justin Whitaker on the Sigālovāda Sutta, taking off from his response to my previous post. The question at issue between us, I think, is what constitutes a good Buddhist life for a layperson or householder, a non-monk. We can get more specific by asking: should the layperson’s life be one that aspires to emulate the monk’s? I don’t think that it should, and I continue to suspect that Justin doesn’t either.

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The Sigālovāda’s vicious mean

01 Sunday Aug 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Attachment and Craving, Early and Theravāda, Faith, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Hermeneutics, Monasticism, Play, Pleasure, Self-Discipline, Work, Zest

≈ 15 Comments

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fundamentalism, H.L. Seneviratne, Martin Hägglund, music, Pali suttas, Sri Lanka

The Sigālovāda Sutta might be my least favourite sutta in the Pali Canon.

There is relatively little that the Pali texts say on “ethics” in a modern Western sense of interpersonal action-guiding; much of the specific instructions on action are found in vinaya, legal texts for the conduct of monks. The Sigālovāda is relatively unusual in providing guidance for action to lay householders. For that reason, a number of secondary writers on Buddhist ethics regard it as as a valuable guide for Buddhist ethical conduct.

I do not.

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Frustration where mind meets world

20 Sunday Jun 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Attachment and Craving, Early and Theravāda, External Goods, Mahāyāna, Patient Endurance, Politics

≈ 3 Comments

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Aśvaghoṣa, Disengaged Buddhism, Patrick O'Donnell, Sallie King, Śāntideva

I find myself repeatedly returning to the question I asked earlier this year: “Is the problem in our heads?” That is: for Buddhists, especially classical ones, is the fundamental human problem located in our minds, or in the world? I have found that my thinking on this question has already changed even just since my posts on the topic last month.

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Suffering’s mental causes are not merely conventional

16 Sunday May 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Attachment and Craving, Early and Theravāda, Metaphysics, Psychology

≈ 1 Comment

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conventional/ultimate, Dhammapāda, Disengaged Buddhism, Four Noble Truths, Nāgārjuna, Pali suttas, Patrick O'Donnell

Patrick O’Donnell makes several interesting comments disputing my claim that for most classical Indian Buddhists “the causes of suffering are primarily mental.” I think they’re worth responding to at length, so I’ll take two posts to do so: this week on the theoretical (metaphysical and psychological) claims about the causation of suffering, next week on their practical implications.

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Is the problem in our heads?

18 Sunday Apr 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Anger, Attachment and Craving, Modernized Buddhism, Politics, Psychology

≈ 7 Comments

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Disengaged Buddhism, Engaged Buddhism, Pali suttas, Ron Purser, Sallie King

A key idea that I’ve stressed from the Disengaged Buddhists is that the causes of suffering are primarily mental – especially the “three poisons” or “unwholesome roots” of craving (rāga), aversion or hostility (dveṣa/dosa) and delusion (moha) – and that therefore changes in material conditions of life will do relatively little to solve them. Engaged Buddhists reject this latter idea, since they take changing the material conditions as essential. What has struck me recently, though, is that they reject the idea in ways that are different, and sometimes even opposite – each of which still, surprisingly to me in some ways, seems to accept that rāga, dveṣa and moha are indeed where the key problems of human existence lie. I see this point especially in comparing the different views expressed by Ron Purser and Sallie King. Continue reading →

Rejecting Śāntideva’s ethical revaluation

11 Sunday Apr 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Attachment and Craving, External Goods, Family, Flourishing, Mahāyāna, Patient Endurance, Politics, Serenity

≈ 2 Comments

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Aśvaghoṣa, Disengaged Buddhism, Engaged Buddhism, Hsiao-Lan Hu, Mahāvaṃsa, puruṣārthas, Sallie King, Śāntideva

The key goal of my dissertation was to understand Śāntideva’s thought as it was and how it could be applied in a contemporary context. Now, for my book, I want to actually apply Śāntideva’s thought, which requires asking where he is right and where he is wrong. And that, it turns out, changes my understanding of some of the dissertation’s key concepts – especially the one in its title.

The dissertation is entitled “Ethical revaluation in the thought of Śāntideva”. In its third chapter, I describe “ethical revaluation” as a consequence of Śāntideva’s ideals of nonattachment (aparigraha) and patient endurance (kṣānti). I explain the idea of ethical revaluation as follows:

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Defending the removal of suffering

31 Sunday Jan 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Attachment and Craving, Early and Theravāda, Epicureanism, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Happiness, Mahāyāna, Patient Endurance, Serenity, Stoicism

≈ 4 Comments

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Aristotle, ascent/descent, Four Noble Truths, Martha Nussbaum, Martin Hägglund, religion, Śāntideva

It is typically the case that more can be said in disagreement than agreement. In the case of Martin Hägglund’s This Life, I think paying attention to those realms of disagreement is particularly helpful, because our deepest disagreements highlight the ways in which I am a Buddhist and he is not, even though there are core elements to his critique of Buddhism that I absolutely share.

As is the case in many extended disagreements, it can be helpful to start with a disagreement over terminology in order to make sure that what follows is clear. In Hägglund’s case, he frames his argument as one for a “secular” view over a “religious” one. I have said a great deal over the years about why I think the concept of “religion” generally obscures more than it clarifies, and there’s no need to repeat those general points here; in the present context, the important thing is that Hägglund falls victim to the same problems others do. In Hägglund’s telling, Martha Nussbaum can count as entirely “secular” despite her self-identification as Jewish, while Spinoza, the Stoics and the Epicureans all count as “religious” – even though many Epicureans explicitly rejected the gods. Such a framing, it seems to me, can only end up as the vast majority of other attempts to demarcate the “religious” from the “non-religious” do: in confusion.

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Right view vs. true statements

13 Sunday Sep 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Anger, Attachment and Craving, Early and Theravāda, Epistemology, Philosophy of Language, Truth

≈ 4 Comments

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Abhidhamma, Buddhaghosa, Noble Eightfold Path, Pali suttas, Paul Fuller, Wilfred Cantwell Smith

Paul Fuller’s The Notion of Diṭṭhi in Theravāda Buddhism, as its title might suggest, is a dry, abstract, technical monograph. It may also be one of the more spiritually beneficial books I have ever read.

I suppose maybe both of these things are appropriate to the book’s subject matter, the Pali Canon. One of the Canon’s “three baskets”, the abhidhamma, is notorious for its level of technical abstraction – and yet Theravāda tradition has consistently held it to be of great spiritual benefit. Erik Braun has demonstrated how the modern Burmese traditions of vipassanā meditation, now enormously popular around the world, have their origins in study of the abhidhamma.

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Eudaimonist Buddhist modernism and the norm of authenticity

02 Tuesday Jun 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Attachment and Craving, Foundations of Ethics, Modernized Buddhism, Self

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

authenticity, Charles Taylor, Evan Thompson, existentialism, modernism, qualitative individualism, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha)

I now finish my present reply to Evan Thompson’s response. Let us return to Thompson’s general critique of Buddhist modernism. He doesn’t “reject using Buddhist ideas in the project of ameliorating suffering and promoting human flourishing.” On that, it seems, we are in agreement. Rather, what he objects to is “the rhetoric and logic that Buddhist modernists typically use in pursuing this project.” So let’s revisit what he takes issue with in this rhetoric and logic:

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In defence of McMindfulness

08 Sunday Dec 2019

Posted by Amod Lele in Anger, Attachment and Craving, Early and Theravāda, Economics, External Goods, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Politics

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Disengaged Buddhism, Four Noble Truths, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Pali suttas, Ron Purser, Śāntideva

The mainstreaming of mindfulness meditation continues at a rapid clip. According to the Center for Disease Control, in the years 2012 to 2017 the percentage of adults meditating in the United States more than tripled, to 17%. The American market for provision of meditation-related services is now worth $1 billion and growing.

With any phenomenon this mainstream, one expects a backlash. Sure enough, there have been a number of pieces appearing recently that chastise programs like BU’s under the name “corporate mindfulness”, or more pithily, “McMindfulness”. Continue reading →

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