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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Category Archives: Humility

The Buddhist critique of shame

17 Sunday Nov 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Disgust, Early and Theravāda, Fear, Humility, Shame and Guilt

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Bernard Williams, Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli, Buddhaghosa, June Price Tagney, Maria Heim, Maurice Walshe, Pali suttas, Ronda Dearing, Sarah Shaw

It doesn’t sit very well with many modern readers, including myself, to put a high value on shame. We often find shame to be something that cripples us, makes us burn with embarrassment in a way that inhibits our doing good. Too often I look to some minor misdeed of mine, sometimes even just a joke that failed to land, and instinctively beat myself up for it. Yet detailed introductions to Pali Buddhist texts will often note that these texts prize the mental states of hiri and ottappa, two Pali terms which are both often translated “shame”. It is important to pay attention to the parts of a tradition we disagree with, especially if it’s our own tradition; they can be the ones we learn from the most. So I don’t want to dismiss the texts’ valuation of what looks like shame.

And yet one day while looking through the suttas for something unrelated, I chanced upon something that is much less commonly remarked on: the Pali texts also contain a critique of shame. Or at least of something that could be translated as “shame” just as reasonably as hiri and ottappa can be. That something is kukkucca.

Continue reading →

Self-improvement by not-self-improvement

05 Sunday Nov 2023

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

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Augustine, autobiography, Chan/Zen 禪, Disengaged Buddhism, John Dunne, Nancy Houfek, Pali suttas, Śāntideva, skholiast (blogger), Wangchuk Dorje

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.

Continue reading →

Why I am a Buddhist

07 Sunday Jun 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Buddhism, Faith, Family, Health, Humility, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Science, Prayer, Reading and Recitation, Therapy

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, autobiography, cancer, Evan Thompson, identity, Mañjuśrī, religion, Śāntideva, Seth Zuihō Segall

On Facebook, Seth Segall commented in response to my posts on Evan Thompson:

I agree with all the arguments you have made, but I think there is one maining major issue that divides you from Evan that transcends all the other issues. That is, as a “lover of all wisdom,” why would you define yourself as a Buddhist as opposed to someone who is informed by many wisdom traditions but holds a special place in his heart for Buddhism—in another words, how is your stance different from a more cosmopolitan one that is Buddhist-friendly, but not, strictly speaking, Buddhist?

I think I have answered this question before, but there is more to say on it. For a long time – including the first six years of writing this blog – I defined myself in just such a way, as Thompson does. Like Thompson, I went so far as to say I don’t identify as a Buddhist.

Continue reading →

Naturalized kammatic Buddhism

01 Sunday Mar 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Death, Early and Theravāda, External Goods, Faith, Flourishing, Generosity, Humility, Karma, Modernized Buddhism, Supernatural

≈ 23 Comments

Tags

Aristotle, Dale S. Wright, Jan Westerhoff, Maria Heim, Paul Woodruff, rebirth, Śāntideva

I think I’ve shown that the kammatic-nibbanic distinction should matter to the historian, textual scholar, or anthropologist trying to figure out what Buddhism has meant in other times and places. Contra Damien Keown, it is a helpful ideal type to understand how Buddhists have thought about their tradition to date. But should it matter constructively, to us, now?

Yes, it should – at least to us Buddhists, and to anyone trying to think philosophically with Buddhism today. Because, I would argue, there are things valuable about worldly life – and it turns out that there have always been Buddhists who agreed that there are, in practice if not in theory. At least some forms of the dichotomy turn out to reprise the key constructive problem of my dissertation – the role of external goods in a good human life – from an intra-Buddhist perspective. The Buddhism of the suttas, of Buddhaghosa and Śāntideva, turns out to be single-minded: only liberation is important. Buddhists will often identify that austere Buddhism as normative, the ideal to aspire to – and yet live a life remarkably different from that ideal. And I think that they are, at least to some extent, right to live such a life. Continue reading →

Rejecting certainty

19 Sunday Feb 2017

Posted by Amod Lele in Certainty and Doubt, Early and Theravāda, French Tradition, Humility, Metaphysics, Self

≈ Comments Off on Rejecting certainty

Tags

Abhidhamma, mathematics, Pali suttas, Plato, René Descartes

I struggle with the Buddhist concept of non-self. I am not sure whether I accept it. But I am confident that Buddhists are able to demolish one of the more influential Western accounts of the self, that of René Descartes.

Descartes, recall, is worried that he cannot be certain of anything. Like Plato before him, he knows his senses are often wrong; he could be dreaming, he could be in the Matrix. Unlike Plato, he is not satisfied to take even mathematics as a certain foundation. It could be that an evil demon (or the creators of the Matrix) had deceived him such that there was no shape or place, and the real world was far stranger. Geometry isn’t certain enough. Arithmetic? Here he comes to real uncertainty:

I sometimes think that others go wrong even when they think they have the most perfect knowledge; so how do I know that I myself don’t go wrong every time I add two and three or count the sides of a square?

I think Descartes’s reasoning is right up to this point (as many Buddhists would not). Continue reading →

Farewell to “Yavanayāna”

22 Sunday Jan 2017

Posted by Amod Lele in Humility, M.T.S.R., Mahāyāna, Modernized Buddhism, Politics

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Anagarika Dharmapala, authenticity, B.R. Ambedkar, David McMahan, Engaged Buddhism, identity, Jim Wilton, modernism, modernity, race, Richard K. Payne, Sulak Sivaraksa, Tibet

Late last year I was delighted to see a post from Richard Payne retracting his earlier post on “White Buddhism”, motivated at least in part by my critique. It is all too rare to see a human being change his or her mind, especially on politically charged issues where passions run high and it is all too easy to develop attachment to views. I commend and thank Payne for his thoughtful retraction. On my end, he has provoked me to make a retraction of my own. Continue reading →

Praying to something you don’t believe in, redux

24 Sunday May 2015

Posted by Amod Lele in Deity, External Goods, Honesty, Human Nature, Humility, M.T.S.R., Mahāyāna, Prayer, Supernatural, Truth, Virtue

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

autobiography, cancer, David Haberman, Mañjuśrī, Maria (commenter), Martha Nussbaum, Rūpa Gosvāmi

I mentioned last time that in dealing with my wife’s cancer, I had started praying to Mañjuśrī, just as I had done (and written about here) five years ago in another period of my life that involved emotional difficulties – though considerably less difficult than this.

But that previous time had posed me an intellectual challenge as well, for I didn’t believe Mañjuśrī existed, as a sentient being capable of answering prayers. And while I may be calling myself a Buddhist now, what I said then still holds true: “I don’t think there is actually somebody out there who accumulated enough good karma to become a celestial being who redirects good karma down to the rest of us for our benefit.” Can it make any sense to pray to something you don’t believe in?

As it turned out, the question bothers me a lot less now than it once had. Continue reading →

Qui veut faire l’ange fait la bête

11 Sunday May 2014

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

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

ascent/descent, Blaise Pascal, Gnosticism, Inuit, Jean Briggs, Martha Nussbaum, narcissism, passive aggression, Pierre Hadot, Plotinus, Śāntideva

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 →

Pro-choice humility

09 Sunday Dec 2012

Posted by Amod Lele in Certainty and Doubt, Humility, Morality, Politics, Roman Catholicism

≈ 18 Comments

Tags

abortion, Joe Biden, Katherine Ragsdale, law, Nicholas Shackel, relativism

A little while ago on Skholiast’s blog, Elisa Freschi pointed to an argument from Nicholas Shackel attacking the “pro-choice” position on abortion. Shackel objects deeply to the following claim from the US’s newly elected Catholic vice-president, Joe Biden:

I accept my church’s position on abortion…. Life begins at conception. That’s the church’s judgment. I accept it in my personal life. But I refuse to impose it on equally devout Christians and Muslims and Jews…I just refuse to impose that on others.

As Shackel notes, such a position is hardly unique to Biden. Forms of this position are very common; in many Western countries, they may even be the most common. It is the position one could reasonably call “anti-abortion but pro-choice”. And as far as Shackel is concerned, such a position is ignorant or worse. Continue reading →

The virtue of leadership

09 Sunday Oct 2011

Posted by Amod Lele in Humility, Leadership, Virtue, Work

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Apple, autobiography, Confucius, Jack Layton, obituary, Steve Jobs, technology

I was intending this week to continue the series of posts about value and reality, but that can wait. For this week, there’s been another of the memorable lives that ended in 2011.

I speak, of course, of Steve Jobs, the co-founder and former CEO of Apple Computer. Jobs’s figure loomed large over my life a decade ago. My first wife had convinced me to switch to a Mac in 2000, and I embraced everything Mac and Apple with all the zeal of the newly converted. She and I regularly went together to the Apple retail store in Cambridge for Jobs’s keynotes, just to watch him announce new products with his famous showmanship. I have been far less enthused about Apple recently, especially the arbitrary restrictions the company places on iPhone apps – the exact kind of controlling monopolistic behaviour that Apple was once best known for fighting against. I still happily use Macs and iPods, though. And more importantly for today, I learned important lessons from following Apple and Jobs so devotedly in the 2000s – above all about leadership. Continue reading →

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