Category Archives: Theoretical Philosophy

Who were the Magi?

21 Sunday Dec 2025

Posted by in Christianity, Greek and Roman Tradition, Judaism, Place, Supernatural

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Depiction of Jesus with his visitors, from St. Michael’s Cathedral in Toronto. Wikimedia Commons photo by Wojciech Dittwald, CC-BY-SA licence.

One of the most familiar and celebrated parts of the traditional Christmas story is the tale of the visitors who brought gifts to the baby Jesus at his birth. If you were raised anywhere in North America or Europe you surely at least know of this tale, even if you have no Christian background. More than any other part of the Christmas story, this tale may have served to create Christmas as we know it today – since few things are more central to modern Christmas than the giving of gifts, and that giving is usually held to commemorate the story of these visitors. The famous Christmas carol “We Three Kings” is entirely about them, and several other beloved carols refer to their story (“The First Noël”, “What Child Is This?”)

Yet there is something enigmatic about these visitors. Biblical scholar Eric Vanden Eykel wrote an interesting book on them (which also serves as an engaging introduction to the methods of biblical scholarship). Vanden Eykel doesn’t even try to ask the question of whether they historically existed, because we have so little evidence on which to base an answer. Within the Bible, they are not mentioned outside of one short passage in chapter 2 of the Gospel of Matthew, and there are no other texts from a similar time period that mention them either. There are apocryphal Christian texts – texts outside the Bible – that mention them, and I was hoping these might tell an alternate story, but Vanden Eykel points out that that these are significantly later and draw on the Matthew story themselves; they are not independent witnesses. That means that if they ever existed historically – Vanden Eykel never asks that question, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was because he believes they didn’t – Matthew is by far the closest thing to a witness that we have.

So let’s take a look at what Matthew says about Jesus’s visitors. I’m taking this translation from the New Revised Standard Version, which I understand to be the most historically accurate – though leaving a couple words in the original Greek because we’ll talk about them later. I’m leaving out the part in the middle about their encounter with King Herod for space, but providing everything it says about them and their encounter with Jesus:

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For transracialism

07 Sunday Dec 2025

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Logic, Politics

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The bullying campaign to cancel Rebecca Tuvel’s defence of transracialism was shoddy and shameful. There was no merit in it at all. Whether or not you think Tuvel’s argument for transracialism succeeds, that part seems to me pretty obvious. But it does raise the next question, to which the answers are less obvious: does Tuvel’s argument work? Does the logic of accepting transgender identity imply accepting transracial identity?

You could not have got me to answer that question (in public) back in 2017, while Tuvel was still being actively persecuted. For a while, that bullying campaign and others like it successfully achieved their goal of terror: they succeeded in getting me, and others like me, to silence our dissenting views out of fear of the consequences that were so regularly experienced by others.

But the climate has changed a lot since then, in ways that make it still harder to speak on some issues (like Israel and Palestine), but easier to speak on this one. So I am going to take a risk now, stick my head up, bite the bullet, and answer the question: yes!

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Nondual mindfulness in Teresa of Ávila

16 Sunday Nov 2025

Posted by in Consciousness, Deity, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Mindfulness, Prayer, Psychology, Roman Catholicism

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Portrait of Teresa of Ávila by Juan de la Miseria, her contemporary.

The autobiography of (Saint) Teresa of Ávila is a most remarkable book. Its beginning sections on Teresa’s early life feel at once relatable (she recalls her youthful interest in making herself pretty) and utterly alien: she and her brother admired the Christian martyrs so much that in childhood they “agreed to go off to the land of the Moors and beg them, out of love of God, to cut off our heads there”, and felt very disappointed that they could not find a way to do this. (Section 1.4, page 3 of the Kavanaugh-Rodriguez translation) The later sections are the more famous ones, depicting Teresa’s vivid visions of angels.

In the middle, though, the book takes an unexpected detour – nearly a hundred pages – providing instructions for prayer. I don’t believe in Teresa’s God, let alone pray to him, which made it very tempting to skip these chapters. I’m very glad I didn’t, though, because I found important things in them that I recognized as a Buddhist.

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Mindform Podcast interview

12 Wednesday Nov 2025

Posted by in Anger, Attachment and Craving, Confucianism, Early and Theravāda, Emotion, External Goods, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Human Nature, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Metaphysics, Mindfulness, Morality, Natural Science, Pleasure, Politics, Psychology, Self

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I was interviewed by Frank Lawton on a recent episode of the Mindform Podcast on self-development and wisdom, associated with Ryan A. Bush’s Designing the Mind. We begin with my formative story in Thailand and the anti-politics associated with it, proceeding to a critique of utilitarianism, a discussion of my gradual movement from Theravāda to Mahāyāna Buddhism, and finally to an exploration of expressive individualism. All told, I think it’s a very nicely rounded introduction to my philosophical thinking – even if my growing hair is in its awkward phase and I stammer a little too much!

Ambedkar and the Nation of Islam as skillful means

09 Sunday Nov 2025

Posted by in Hermeneutics, Islam, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modernized Buddhism, Politics, Rites

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It’s hard for me to view B.R. Ambedkar as a real Buddhist, when he threw out the Four Noble Truths after getting to Buddhism by a mere process of elimination. But then, to a real Buddhist, it shouldn’t matter – at least it shouldn’t matter much – whether you are a “real Buddhist”! Buddhism has no more essence, no more svabhāva, than anything else does. What really matters is relieving suffering. What’s more important than his status as a Buddhist is that Ambedkar’s rejection of the Four Noble Truths deeply inhibits the relief of suffering – or rather, it has the potential to. Yet things might be a bit more complicated than that.

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My complicated relationship with B.R. Ambedkar

02 Sunday Nov 2025

Posted by in Hermeneutics, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modern Hinduism, Modernized Buddhism, Politics, Sikhism

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Public-domain image of Ambedkar.

Dr. Ambedkar, the 20th-century leader of the lowest (“Dalit”, formerly “untouchable”) Indian caste groups, might be having a moment. In my Indian philosophy class in 2019, I wanted to have a segment on modern Indian philosophy, so I introduced the students to Gandhi and to Ambedkar as a critic of Gandhi – and was interested to see how the students absolutely loved Ambedkar. This year, I attended a fascinating workshop at Princeton on black Buddhist perspectives, where Ambedkar probably played a larger role than any other figure, even the Buddha himself. I’m glad to see black Americans discovering Ambedkar, since there are such close analogies between American race and Indian caste – already observed by Martin Luther King. A recent Economist article now mentions that even Narendra Modi is trying to proclaim Ambedkar as an ally for his militant Hindu agenda – a claim that should be laughable, given Ambedkar’s clearly expressed hostility to Hinduism, but an understandable attempt given Ambedkar’s huge popularity in India: there are now more statues of Ambedkar than any other Indian political figure, including Nehru, Gandhi and Aśoka.

I find Ambedkar overall a very admirable figure – both his personal story of rising through the ranks intellectually and becoming a leader, and his accomplishments. I also find his approach to caste more sensible than the American approach to race, one that Americans could learn a lot from. My late father admired him greatly. He is also a figure who makes me personally uncomfortable – perhaps in a good way.

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The lost Buddhisms

26 Sunday Oct 2025

Posted by in Buddhism, Early and Theravāda, Mahāyāna, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Philosophy of Language, Self, South Asia

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One of the first things you’d learn in any Intro to Buddhism course is that most Buddhists alive today are part of the Mahāyāna tradition, in which one aspires to be a bodhisattva (and eventually become a buddha). Mahāyāna is the majority tradition because it’s the one practised in Japan, Korea, most of Vietnam, and China including Taiwan and Tibet. (Tibetans sometimes refer to their tradition as “Vajrayāna”, but they know that that’s still a form of Mahāyāna; there are no non-Mahāyāna Vajrayānists.) The name “Mahāyāna” (translated as “Great Vehicle”) is not in dispute; everybody agrees that that’s the preferred term. That part is easy.

Now here’s a question: what do you call all the other Buddhists?

Your typical intro Buddhism course gets around that question pretty easily, because there’s a simple answer if you’re exclusively talking about Buddhists today, in the modern era. As of about 1850, basically all the non-Mahāyāna Buddhists in the world identified as part of the Theravāda tradition, practised throughout Sri Lanka and mainland Southeast Asia. The only Buddhists who might identify as something else are more recent modernist Buddhists of one stripe or another – hippyish Western Buddhists who don’t want to be pinned down to specifics, or perhaps B.R. Ambedkar’s Navayāna – and they understand they’re doing something new and a little weird. (“Navayāna” means “new yāna”.) In general, it’s pretty reasonable to say that the Buddhism existing in the past thousand years or so has been divided into the two traditions of Mahāyāna and Theravāda.

But go back before that, and things look very different.

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What is a woman?

05 Sunday Oct 2025

Posted by in Biology, Philosophy of Language, Politics

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A common paraphrase of H.L. Mencken says: “For every complex question there is an answer that is clear, simple – and wrong.” These days we see how helpful that quote is, when it is applied to the question “What is a woman?”

The OED’s first definition of “woman” is “an adult female human being”. Webster says “an adult female person”. It has become a commonplace on the right, of late, to feel so very clever by defining “woman” as “adult human female” – roughly but not exactly following the dictionary definitions – and then watch others struggle to provide their own definition. UK activist Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull put up billboards proclaiming as much; director Matt Walsh even made a whole movie with this definition as its thesis. The intended point of this exercise, of course, is to say that transgender women are not really women and that presumably this should be obvious. And while I do think it can reasonably be debated whether trans women are women, this particular piece of rhetoric does far more to illustrate foolishness on the anti-trans side than the pro-trans side.

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Snakes wrongly grasped: on the psychedelic experiences of Musk and Manson

28 Sunday Sep 2025

Posted by in Certainty and Doubt, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Humility, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Self

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If Nāgārjuna, the great Madhyamaka Buddhist philosopher, is known for anything, it’s his doctrine of the emptiness (śūnyatā) of all things. But in his most famous work, Nāgārjuna warns his audience about emptiness: “Misperceived emptiness ruins a person of dull intelligence, like a snake wrongly grasped.” (MMK XXIV.11) If you know how to pick up a poisonous snake properly, you can move it to a place where it will do less harm, or even milk it to help produce an antidote. But if you don’t, then trying to grasp it will get you bitten and maybe killed. Likewise, if you perceive emptiness wrongly, that’s worse than not perceiving it at all.

If you’re going to try this, you’d better know what you’re doing. Adobe Stock image copyright by kampwit.
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Canadian psychedelic podcast interview

22 Monday Sep 2025

Posted by in Consciousness, Daoism, Deity, Early and Theravāda, Indigenous American Thought, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Metaphysics, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Psychology, Roman Catholicism, Self, Supernatural, Vedānta

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Following up my talk on psychedelics and mysticism, Osheen Dayal of the Canadian branch of MAPS just interviewed me on the same subject for their video podcast. In the interview we talk about a wide range of subjects from my personal Buddhist story through St. Teresa’s angel to Elon Musk. Have a look!