Category Archives: Practice

Is Asian philosophy footnotes to the Buddha?

01 Sunday Jun 2025

Posted by in Confucianism, Daoism, East Asia, Greek and Roman Tradition, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Metaphilosophy, South Asia, Vedānta

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Recently I wanted to explore a fascinating passage of the Daoist founder Zhuangzi, where the text recommends “sitting in oblivion” or “sitting and forgetting” (zuòwàng 坐忘). That passage bears striking similarities to mystical practices and experiences from around the globe.

To help figure it out, I turned to Sitting in Oblivion by the Daoism scholar Livia Kohn, which shows how “sitting and forgetting” was developed as a practice and taken up at great length by later Daoist thinkers. One passage of Kohn’s particularly struck me:

The most important aspects of the rather extensive Buddhist imports into Daoism for sitting in oblivion include the organizational setting of meditation practice in monastic institutions, the formalized ethical requirement in the taking of precepts and refuge in the Three Treasures, the doctrines of karma and retribution, the five paths of rebirth, and the various layers of hell, as well as the vision of the body-mind in terms of multiple aspects, defilements, hindrances, and purification. (107)

“Rather extensive” indeed! I knew that East Asian Buddhists had drawn a great deal from Daoism – I have sometimes uncharitably described Chan/Zen as “Daoists cosplaying as Buddhists” – but I hadn’t realized how much the influence went in the other direction. Karma, rebirth, meditation, monastic institutions, taking precepts, taking refuge? At that point you sure sound a lot like Buddhists without the name!

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The secret of mindfulness meditation

09 Sunday Mar 2025

Posted by in Emotion, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Psychology

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One of the things that really surprises me about contemporary mindfulness meditation is how rarely – especially at the beginning – they highlight what, as far as I can tell, is the most beneficial aspect of the practice. It’s not a “secret” in the sense of being concealed away somewhere, just that beginners are rarely told how important it is; I more or less had to figure it out for myself. This holds true for the practices I’m most familiar with – Headspace, Robert Sokolove’s medical mindfulness recording, Goenka vipassanā – but also seems to hold for other forms of modern mindfulness that I’ve listened to recordings of. Because of this, I think it’s easy for a beginner to misinterpret what mindfulness meditation is about.

Headspace’s meditation instructions usually involve focusing your attention on your breath – its inward and outward movement, the way your chest and stomach rise and fall with the breath. (Sokolove’s likewise.) Goenka vipassanā puts more emphasis on repeatedly scanning your attention up and down through your body. But it’s become clear to me that that focus, on the breath or the bodily sensations, is not the point of any of these exercises.

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We need a history of modern yoga but not A History of Modern Yoga

02 Sunday Mar 2025

Posted by in Meditation, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modern Hinduism, Physical Exercise, Sāṃkhya-Yoga

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Even more ubiquitous in the West than mindfulness meditation, and for a longer period of time, is yoga: specifically meaning the practice of postural stretching exercises, with names like “sun salutation” and “downward dog”. They can be supplemented by breathing exercises and perhaps occasionally meditation, and there is often some element of Sanskrit or philosophy involved, but to a normal English-speaking layperson, the core of what yoga means is the postures. This is the sort of yoga that is sometimes even a competitive sport. Its health benefits are rarely contested; as my own aging body gets less naturally flexible, it’s probably only a matter of time before I sign up with a local yoga studio myself.

Yoga as we know it today. Image copyright Somkiat, Adobe Stock.

Meanwhile, in the classical Sanskrit from which the term is derived, yoga refers to a variety of spiritual practices in which postures play a minor role, if any. Śāntideva uses the term “yogin” to describe people with a greater understanding of reality, with postures never being mentioned in the text. The most famous and influential yoga text, the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali, says that posture (āsana) is one – just one – of the eight limbs of yoga, and the only thing it specifies about posture is that posture should be “firm and pleasant” (sthirasukham) (YS II.46). There’s no stretching involved here; indeed the text suggests the opposite, that one should be comfortable, likely for meditation. The Yoga Bhāṣya commentary – traditionally included with the original – names several kinds of posture without explaining them; when Vācaspati Miśra’s subcommentary does come to explain them, it shows that they are postures for meditation, ways of placing your feet while you sit. Meditation, in general, plays the largest role in this classical yoga; stretching plays none.

So it’s natural to ask: how exactly did we get from one to the other, from a meditative classical yoga in which stretching plays no role, to a modern yoga in which it plays the primary role? I’ve seen this question asked in surprisingly few places. I wanted to get a deeper understanding of that question, so I thought it would be worth reading Elizabeth De Michelis’s 2005 work with the very promising title A History of Modern Yoga.

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Empiricism of the subtle body

23 Sunday Feb 2025

Posted by in Biology, Emotion, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Philosophy of Science, Supernatural

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A public-domain illustration by Alex-engraver of the chakras and channels, taken from Wikipedia.

Traditional Indian and Tibetan tantric anatomy tells us that in the middle of the human torso there are three channels (nādis or “streams”), one each on the left, middle, and right, and that these proceed vertically upward through a number of circular centres (cakras in standard Sanskrit transliteration, chakras in modern English spelling). This account of the “subtle body” (sūkṣma śarīra) has become popular in modern yoga and other forms of alternative medicine or spirituality.

I don’t believe this account of the subtle body – but not primarily for the obvious reason.

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We need to see emotions as bodily

16 Sunday Feb 2025

Posted by in Anger, Compassion, Emotion, External Goods, Fear, Health, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Practice, Psychology, Stoicism, Unconscious Mind

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The most important lesson I ever learned was back in Thailand in 1997: that the biggest contributor to my unhappiness wasn’t external problems like being single or unemployed, but my own mental states like craving. Fixing those mental states was a surer path to happiness and reducing suffering.

But the question that has played an ever-increasing role in the three ensuing decades has been: okay, but how? It is one thing to recognize that your craving and anger – or fear or self-pity or shame or other negative emotions – are the main thing keeping you down. It is quite another to do something about them. Our animal natures make those states quite recalcitrant.

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Notes on a Jewish Sufi

20 Sunday Oct 2024

Posted by in African Thought, Islam, Judaism, Politics, Prayer, South Asia, Sufism

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I don’t wish at the moment to weigh in on the terrible current conflict in Israel and Palestine, save to offer my condolences to anyone whose loved ones are hurt by its horrors. I salute those on either side who are still striving, in the midst of it all, for a world where both Jews and Arabs can go about their lives in peace and freedom. But I have no idea how to get there; if there is a way, it will require the complex and difficult work of diplomats and politicians more than philosophers, and ones who know that situation far better than I do. What I hope I can offer today is merely a bit of historical perspective. That is: most of us alive today have only known a world where Jews and Muslims make headlines for being at each other’s throats. But it wasn’t always that way.

The years of the Abbasid caliphate‘s reign in Baghdad, from the 8th to 13th centuries, are often considered the Muslim golden age, where Muslim societies were the envy of the world for their civilizational achievements from poetry to medicine. 20th-century South Asian poets like Hali and Iqbal looked back with envy and nostalgia to that golden age, lamenting how far they had fallen from it under British colonialism.

What’s less frequently noted is that that era was also a Jewish golden age.

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Being Ezili Freda

01 Sunday Sep 2024

Posted by in Aesthetics, Attachment and Craving, Deity, Economics, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Rites, Roman Catholicism, Supernatural

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On a trip last year to New Orleans, I wanted to learn more about a tradition with deep roots there: the one whose West African root is called Vodún, became Vodou in Haiti, and in New Orleans is always known as voodoo. The book I read is Karen McCarthy Brown’s Mama Lola, which focuses on the Haitian version, so I’ll use the “Vodou” spelling. Any introductory discussion of this tradition always begins with an obligatory disclaimer about Hollywood stereotypes: very little of it is about zombies, and even less is about sticking pins in dolls. But the real tradition is fascinating in its own ways.

As a philosopher, I’m nearly always most intrigued by cultural traditions in their philosophical or theological aspect: what sorts of thinking and reflection they have about the universe and how to live in it. But that’s not all such traditions have to offer, and if I confined all my interest to the philosophy, I would have to have found Vodou a disappointment. Mama Lola, the Vodou priestess Brown learned from, would regularly tell her “Karen, you think too much!” or “You ask too many questions!” Brown gets excited when a discussion between Mama Lola and another Vodou expert starts to turn to the theological, but they quickly drop the subject and never return. The tradition is all about interactions with the loa or lwa, supernatural beings with the ability to possess people in ritual trances. But neither in Mama Lola nor in anything else I’ve read or heard on the tradition, do I see Vodou practitioners think much about what exactly those beings are – even though there’s a lot to wonder about, since most Vodou practitioners consider themselves Catholics, and the relationship of the loa to the saints and angels they’re identified with, let alone to any singular God (bondye), is hazy at best.

But in spite of all that, there is one element of the tradition that absolutely fascinates me and calls to me. And her name is Ezili Freda.

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Finding mysticism in unexpected places

28 Sunday Jul 2024

Posted by in Consciousness, Daoism, Epistemology, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Serenity

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When I was in grad school, a big academic fashion was to heap scorn on the idea that mystical experience could be something cross-cultural: everything was reducible to social context, and the similarities of experience didn’t really matter, as I had once argued myself. But the roots of that idea were often more asserted than argued: the famous article by Steven Katz, which inaugurated the approach, didn’t bother to justify its assumption that “There are NO pure (unmediated) experiences“, assuming perhaps that italics and capital letters were the only support necessary.

A little while ago I noted how Robert Forman’s collection of essays illustrate “cool” mystical experiences, where distinctions of senses and self drop away and the mind ceases to fluctuate, in sources as varied as the Indian Yoga Sūtras, the Ukrainian Hasidic Dov Baer and the German mystic Meister Eckhart. Something similar seems to be going on in the Sri Lankan systematizer Buddhaghosa and the medieval English Cloud of Unknowing, which both involve, in Ninan Smart’s terms, a “systematic effort to blot out sense perception, memories, and imaginings of the world of our sensory environment and of corresponding inner states.” And it turns out that once your mind is no longer prejudged to deny any cross-cultural similarity, you start noticing it in a lot of other places.

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The importance of deep differences

10 Sunday Mar 2024

Posted by in Buddhism, Friends, Hermeneutics, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Monasticism, Stoicism

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In thinking further about Seth Segall’s The House We Live In: Virtue, Wisdom and Pluralism, I want to turn from reviewing the book itself, whose broad approach I generally agree with, to exploring my major points of philosophical difference with it. I think this is a particularly important approach here because the book’s biggest weakness is its refusal to go down to deep philosophical differences, differences in questions of ultimate value, meaning, truth, reality. Such an approach leaves Seth in no position to understand his political opponents, many of whom are going to be conservative Christians (in the US) or conservative Muslims (worldwide). I don’t think you can reach a full mutual understanding with them unless you understand their differences from you at this very deep, foundational level.

For when we look at Seth’s engagement with monotheistic thought – the thought that underlies those conservative Christian or Muslim views – it turns out to be unfortunately superficial. They get their most extensive treatment on pp 133-7, in which the wide range of thinkers quoted includes Francis of Assisi, Rabbi Hillel and Albert Schweitzer. But notice how the section characterizes the work done by its quotations:

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Sudden and gradual together

03 Sunday Dec 2023

Posted by in East Asia, Emotion, Mahāyāna, Mindfulness, Practice, Therapy, Virtue

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The past few years have taught me the wisdom in Daoist-influenced traditions of sudden liberation: in a certain way we can improve ourselves by not improving ourselves, through an acceptance of everything, including ourselves, in the present moment. Yet I had had good reason to be frustrated earlier with such traditions – for their rhetoric sometimes implies that that present-moment acceptance is easy, which it is not. It was a long and painful lesson for me learning how hard it is to be good. That made me a longtime advocate of what East Asian Buddhists would call the gradual path, but I increasingly also see the wisdom in its converse, the sudden. Can the two be reconciled?

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