Tag Archives: autobiography

My mother’s meditations

09 Sunday Sep 2012

Posted by in Confucianism, Family, Gratitude, Meditation, Modernized Buddhism, Serenity

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

, ,

Over the past little while I have been reading more Confucianism, and becoming more sympathetic to it for a variety of reasons. I’ve hardly converted to Confucianism, which is probably just as well; I sometimes think I’d be the world’s worst Confucian – not having children, living far from my parents, and having grown up regularly challenging their authority. To be fair, my parents – a Marxist and a child of the sixties – effectively encouraged me to challenge their authority. Still, in recent years and months I have come to sympathize with Confucianism a lot more. And it feels like the very least I can do is honour my parents in this forum.

I chose this week to do so because my mother, Dorothy Lele, just celebrated her birthday, and I will start by speaking of her. Continue reading →

Slouching towards intimacy

26 Sunday Aug 2012

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, East Asia, Family, Greek and Roman Tradition, Happiness, Virtue

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

, , , , ,

I have noted that those modern Westerners who learn from South Asian philosophy are usually looking for Ascent while those who learn from East Asian are usually looking for intimacy. Given that my own doctorate was specialized in South Asia, with little East Asian component despite my eventual focus on Buddhism, you might easily guess what my own orientation has been on this score – and you’d be right. I’ve often insisted on correcting those who portray Buddhism as an intimacy-oriented tradition – not just to set the historical record straight, but because I think it’s important to emphasize the value of integrity. When I was thinking in terms of three ways of life, the integrity-oriented “ascetic” and “libertine” approaches, for all their contrasts with each other, both appealed to me far more than the intimacy-oriented “traditionalism”.

But then in recent months and years I’ve been reading significantly more East Asian thought myself – and I’ve also been a bit startled to find myself leaning more toward an intimacy orientation. Continue reading →

In praise of questions which tend not to edification

12 Sunday Aug 2012

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, German Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Monasticism, Social Science

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , ,

The Shorter Māluṅkya Sutta, in the early Pali Buddhist sutta texts, opens with the Buddhist monk Māluṅkyaputta meditating and thinking as follows:

These positions that are undeclared, set aside, discarded by the Blessed One [the Buddha] — ‘The cosmos is eternal,’ ‘The cosmos is not eternal,’ ‘The cosmos is finite,’ ‘The cosmos is infinite,’ ‘The soul and the body are the same,’ ‘The soul is one thing and the body another,’ ‘After death a Tathagata exists,’ ‘After death a Tathagata does not exist,’ ‘After death a Tathagata both exists and does not exist,’ ‘After death a Tathagata neither exists nor does not exist’ — I don’t approve, I don’t accept that the Blessed One has not declared them to me. I’ll go ask the Blessed One about this matter. [Majjhima Nikāya i.426, Thanissaro Bhikkhu translation]

The absence of answers to these questions frustrates Māluṅkyaputta enough that he is ready to leave the monkhood and become a layman if the Buddha doesn’t answer him. Continue reading →

Augustine and Xunzi at Stonehill

05 Sunday Aug 2012

Posted by in African Thought, Confucianism, Happiness, Human Nature, Politics, Roman Catholicism, Social Science

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

For the sorts of reasons I discussed last week, I have been strongly leaning for the past couple years toward Xunzi‘s negative dark view of human nature – or so I have thought. I observe my own tendencies and see just how hard it is to be good even when I really want to. Augustine, whose similarities to Xunzi run deep (as Aaron Stalnaker has noted), points to the behaviour he observes in babies: creatures not only of desire and greed, but even of jealousy and anger. It’s as we grow up that we learn to be good. And then, of course, there’s the history of human violence and bloodshed. I often find myself a little bewildered by the 20th-century philosophies that say philosophy must be entirely different after the Holocaust; the Holocaust would not have surprised Augustine. He knew what evil lurks in our minds.

One of the more common objections to such a dark view of human nature is that it leads to tyranny: if people can’t be trusted, they need an iron ruler to rule them. Such a view is most famously associated with Thomas Hobbes, and it seems that Xunzi held something like it, but I’ve tended to find it a bit puzzling. If we can’t trust people to rule themselves, how on earth could we trust an arbitrary sovereign to rule them? A dim view of human nature seems perfectly compatible with Winston Churchill’s endorsement of democracy: that it’s the worst form of government except for all the others. We need a strong system of checks and balances to hold down the dark tendencies of our leaders.

And yet. With reflection I have realized that I cannot endorse a view like Xunzi’s and Augustine’s, even modified in the latter way. Continue reading →

How intellectual conversion happens (and elephants)

01 Sunday Jul 2012

Posted by in Certainty and Doubt, Deity, Early and Theravāda, Jainism, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Roman Catholicism, Truth

≈ 40 Comments

Tags

, , , , ,

One of the reasons I’ve enjoyed reading about Leah Libresco‘s conversion is it’s such a clear, current and vivid illustration of a phenomenon whose existence many would fervently like to wish away, would like to declare impossible. Namely, Libresco is demonstrably intelligent, with an actively questioning mind, and young; and she once actively declared herself belonging to the atheism that she has now rejected in favour of Catholicism. Many people find the existence of such a person really hard to take.

The clearest example of this is JT Eberhard, a young atheist blogger who remains a young atheist blogger. In his reaction, Eberhard proclaims: “I’m reading through all her posts and I’m floored. Leah’s really smart. I cannot believe the things she’s writing are coming from her mind.” Continue reading →

Philosophical single-mindedness (1)

20 Sunday Nov 2011

Posted by in Aesthetics, Modernized Buddhism, Place, Prayer, Protestantism, Rites, Roman Catholicism, Salafi

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , ,

One of the most common slams made against modernist (Yavanayāna) Buddhism is that it is “Protestant.” I’ve previously written about how there’s more to Buddhist modernism than this, and about the curious quasi-theological assumption that having Protestant influence is seen as a bad thing. At the same time, I’ve been realizing that there are close links between Protestantism and modernism. Not too surprising, perhaps, since the two emerge out of the same historical context, the Europe of the past 500 years – but I think their similarities may go deeper than that. Continue reading →

The Buddhist problem of value

16 Sunday Oct 2011

Posted by in Deity, Early and Theravāda, Foundations of Ethics, Karma, Mahāyāna, Self

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Today’s post follows up on those from two and three weeks ago, and there’ll be another one next week. I intend the four posts, taken together, to make a statement about the continuing importance of the idea of God: why, in the face of the very real problem of suffering and the scientific ability to easily do without God as an explanation of life’s apparent design, God is still hard to do away with. I mean this on an intellectual and philosophical level, not merely an emotional one; it is not just that we need to bother with God because so many people out have some neurological need for him, but that there yet remain ways in which God helps us to make sense of reality.

I’m going to begin this week not with God, but with Buddhism. Continue reading →

The virtue of leadership

09 Sunday Oct 2011

Posted by in Humility, Leadership, Virtue, Work

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

, , , , , ,

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 →

The value of forgetting

11 Sunday Sep 2011

Posted by in Anger, Buddhism, Patient Endurance, Politics, Serenity

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

Ten years ago today, my first wife and I were in the process of moving into our new unfurnished student apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We had rented a moving truck and driven over to the house of a friend, who had generously offered us an old piece of furniture. My wife rang the bell and we waited a minute or two. Then my friend came running down the stairs, slightly flustered and dishevelled. “I’m sorry I took so long,” she said, panting a little. “I was watching the news.”

“The… news?” We looked at each other.

“Oh my God, you haven’t heard! Two planes crashed into the World Trade Center. It’s collapsed.”

“Two planes!” I said. “Then it must have been deliberate.”

“Yeah, they think it’s Osama bin Laden.”

“Huh,” I said. “Wow.” I paused for a few seconds, saying “Wow” and “Huh” a few more times. Then I shrugged my shoulders and said “Well, let’s get back to moving.”

This was not, I would soon learn, the way most Americans reacted to the same news. Continue reading →

Love is better than anger: Jack Layton (1950-2011)

28 Sunday Aug 2011

Posted by in Anger, Buddhism, Fear, Flourishing, Gentleness, Happiness, Hope, Patient Endurance, Politics, Protestantism

≈ 48 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

Jack LaytonIt will not do my readers much of a service to announce that Jack Layton has died. To non-Canadian readers, the name will probably mean little or nothing; Canadian readers in the past week will have heard of little else.

Jack Layton was the leader of the left-wing New Democratic Party, the only political party whose candidates I have ever voted for. He died of cancer on 22 August, at the relatively young age of 61 – at the peak of his career. Until Layton took over the NDP, the party had never received more than 44 of the roughly 300 seats in the Canadian Parliament. Earlier this year, under his leadership, the party earned over 100, most of those in Québec – where the party had never held more than a single seat before. It received more than twice as many seats as the third-place Liberals, a party which had governed Canada so often that it viewed itself as the “natural governing party.” And a great deal of this rapid rise derived from Layton’s personal popularity. His funeral has now been receiving coverage in Canada comparable to that of Princess Diana’s – at a time when it is held as a commonplace that people hate politicians and are fed up with them. His life and death moved a great many. My American wife, who a year ago didn’t know who Jack Layton was, was moved to tears watching the coverage of his memorials.

Now why am I going on about Jack Layton on a philosophy blog? Continue reading →