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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Candrakīrti

Disengaged Buddhism article is published

18 Monday Nov 2019

Posted by Amod Lele in Early and Theravāda, M.T.S.R., Mahāyāna, Modernized Buddhism, Politics

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Aśvaghoṣa, Candrakīrti, Disengaged Buddhism, Engaged Buddhism, Jātakas, Pali suttas, Śāntideva

It’s been a long time in the making, but my article on disengaged Buddhism is finally published. It’s at the free online Journal of Buddhist Ethics, so you can go read it for yourself.

I’ll say a bit here about what you can expect to find. Some of the article goes over territory I’ve already covered on Love of All Wisdom and the IPB: I discuss Aśvaghoṣa’s worries about severity, Śāntideva’s rejection of external goods, the Cakkavatti Sīhanāda Sutta’s detached attitude to time. The article does this in more detail than the blogs have, and I also show similar ideas in other suttas and jātakas and from Candrakīrti.

The article also responds more directly to existing engaged Buddhist scholarship. Engaged Buddhist scholars have, so far, been the people actually doing constructive Buddhist ethics. They are not merely describing what Buddhists happen to believe but prescribing a Buddhist way of life, and that much is something I think we need more of. What I don’t think they do nearly enough is think about or respond to the points made by the likes of Śāntideva and Aśvaghoṣa. The article explains why they should.

So the article isn’t itself a work of constructive Buddhist ethics; I’m not taking a position on engagement or disengagement there. What I am doing is reminding other people doing constructive Buddhist ethics about a large body of ideas that they ignore or silence, and urging them to take those ideas more seriously. My own constructive position on these questions is complicated. I’ve started to take some of it up on the blog – for example, I think there is some empirical confirmation for the Disengaged Buddhists’ psychological claims. That isn’t the whole story, though, and you can expect to hear more about my constructive views in the years to come. I am proud of the article as a starting point.

Cross-posted at the Indian Philosophy Blog.

Does Śāntideva think bodhisattvas are happy?

24 Sunday Feb 2019

Posted by Amod Lele in Compassion, External Goods, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Happiness, Hermeneutics, Mahāyāna, Patient Endurance

≈ 2 Comments

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AAR, Candrakīrti, conferences, Disengaged Buddhism, Madhyamaka, Matthieu Ricard, Śāntideva, Stephen Harris, Thomas Kuhn, William Edelglass

A while ago William Edelglass put up a paper for discussion on academia.edu about Śāntideva and happiness. I made some suggestions for changes in a way that turned out to be unhelpful, since William informed me that the paper was already on its way to publication and he had only put it up by accident! Now, though, the paper has been published, as a chapter in David McMahan and Erik Braun’s valuable and readable volume on meditation, Buddhism and science. So perhaps now is the time to take my old suggestions and reframe them here as part of an ongoing public discussion.

William’s purpose in the chapter is to critique what he calls the “happiness turn” in Western Buddhism, in which Buddhist advocates cite Buddhism’s ability to make its practitioners happy. The most prominent such case is Matthieu Ricard, the Tibetan monk whose fMRI scans showed record levels of activity in the parts of the brain associated with happiness. William thinks this emphasis on happiness misrepresents significant elements of Buddhism, and cites Śāntideva at length to prove his case.

Overall, I do not find myself convinced. Continue reading →

The psychological case for disengaged Buddhism

05 Sunday Aug 2018

Posted by Amod Lele in Anger, Early and Theravāda, External Goods, Fear, Happiness, Health, Mahāyāna, Politics, Psychology

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Aśvaghoṣa, Boston University, Candrakīrti, Disengaged Buddhism, Donald Trump, Nick (Nattavudh) Powdthavee, Pali suttas, Philip Brickman, Richard Easterlin, Śāntideva, Steven Collins

My project on disengaged Buddhism has now been submitted to a journal. It’s undergone several revisions by this point. One of the most important such revisions was suggested unanimously by BU’s magnificent CURA seminar. In an earlier draft I had attempted to emphasize the contemporary constructive significance of disengaged Buddhism by noting how its ideas were corroborated by some contemporary psychological research. The seminar participants thought that discussion of psychology did not strengthen the paper because I didn’t have the space to defend them fully; the paper would stand best discussing disengaged Buddhists’ claims in their historical context and letting those claims stand on their own.

I think they were right, and I removed the psychology discussion from the paper – a little sadly, as I thought the psychological case for disengaged Buddhism was worth making. Fortunately, I have another place to make it: here. Continue reading →

The significance of ethics to Candrakīrti’s metaphysics

25 Sunday Jun 2017

Posted by Amod Lele in Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Truth

≈ 1 Comment

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Candrakīrti, conventional/ultimate, Dan Arnold, Dignāga, Jayarāśi, John Dunne, Madhyamaka

As I noted last time, I think the disregard of ethics by Indian-philosophy scholars like Dan Arnold is a problem in itself: it’s a misconception of what philosophy is, and one that harmfully shrinks the field of the study of Indian philosophy. But I think this neglect would still be a problem even for people who do decide to restrict their study of Indian philosophy to the theoretical realms of metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language. For it seems to me that at least in Arnold’s case, the neglect of ethics leads to a misinterpretation of the metaphysics.

Arnold’s misinterpretation is focused above all around the relationship between the famous Buddhist “two truths”: conventional truth (saṃvṛti) and ultimate truth (paramārtha). Consider Arnold’s description (again in his review of Karen Lang) of the second chapter of Candrakīrti’s Catuḥśatakaṭīkā. “Candrakīrti develops (contra Vasubandhu) a characteristically Mādhyamika point to the effect that the conventional reality of pleasure is not denied, only its being the ‘inherent nature’ of life.” From this description, Candrakīrti’s chapter sounds like it is all about acknowledging pleasure and making room for it. You would not be able to tell that the point of this chapter, very explicitly stated at its beginning, is “rejecting the illusion of regarding the painful as being pleasant” – or that in this chapter, pretty much everything that we would normally consider pleasant turns out to be painful. Continue reading →

Don’t exclude ethics from philosophy

11 Sunday Jun 2017

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Emotion, Foundations of Ethics, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics

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Bimal Krishna Matilal, Candrakīrti, Dan Arnold, Karen Lang, Madhyamaka, Martha Nussbaum, Pierre Hadot, Śāntideva

It is commonplace today for scholars of Indian philosophy to focus their attention entirely on theoretical philosophy at the expense of the practical. I think this tendency is a mistake. I see at least two grave problems with it. First: In my 2015 article I argued that (at least in the case of Śāntideva) our understanding of Buddhist ethics is incomplete if we ignore Buddhist metaphysics. I am now beginning to think this issue goes in the other direction as well: that we will misinterpret Buddhist metaphysics if we ignore Buddhist ethics. I will talk about that problem next time. This time, I will address the other problem: it can drop us into the all-too-familiar trap of treating some Indian inquiries as “not philosophical” even when they were engaged in by most of the great philosophers of the West.

Traditional Tibetan portrait of Candrakīrti, taken from Rigpa Wiki.I notice both problems most clearly in the writings of Dan Arnold on Candrakīrti. Continue reading →

Précis of “Beyond enacted experiences”

30 Sunday Sep 2012

Posted by Amod Lele in Buddhism, Christianity, Consciousness, Dialectic, Judaism, M.T.S.R., Meditation, Metaphilosophy, Natural Science, Vedānta

≈ 15 Comments

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Candrakīrti, Jesus, Ken Wilber, mystical experience, New Testament, perennialism, religion, Robert Sharf, Wilhelm Halbfass

I’ve been wanting to refer on the blog to the article I recently wrote for the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice. Out of respect for the journal’s hardworking editors (and the law!), I will not post the article or its text on the site. But I’d like to give a summary of what I said there, so that blog readers without access to JITP will know what I’m talking about. The argument here is not as precise or careful as that in the article, and readers will need to find a copy of JITP 7(2) to get those details.

The article is above all a critique of Ken Wilber’s method in cross-cultural philosophy, a method that Wilber himself describes as a form of empiricism. Continue reading →

Skepticism in two directions

29 Wednesday Dec 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Cārvāka-Lokāyata, Epistemology, Mahāyāna, Prejudices and "Intuitions", South Asia

≈ 18 Comments

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APA, Candrakīrti, conferences, Ethan Mills, Jayarāśi, Laura Guererro, Madhyamaka, Śāntideva, Tibet, Tsong kha pa

I attended a great panel yesterday at the Eastern APA. Two of the presentations addressed each other directly on a topic I’ve discussed before: skepticism in Indian thought. The presenters, Ethan Mills and Laura Guererro of the University of New Mexico, had clearly been engaged in a longstanding debate with each other on the subject beforehand, which I think helped sharpen their thoughts nicely for the talk.

Mills presented on Jayarāśi, whose Tattvopaplavasiṃha (“The Lion that Afflicts Categories”) is the only extant full text attributed to a member of the Cārvāka-Lokāyata, the atheist and materialist school of ancient Indian thought. But Jayarāśi takes the Cārvāka school’s thought much further than it is usually thought to go. Whereas this materialist school is normally understood to merely deny the existence of gods and karma, Jayarāśi denies the existence of pretty much everything. Previous Cārvākas were said to believe that the world was made up entirely of the four elements; Jayarāśi says, “Even the view of world as elements is not well established. How much less are all the others?” He is, in short, a skeptic. Continue reading →

Politics as ethical analogy: Plato and Candrakīrti

27 Wednesday Oct 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Confucianism, Greek and Roman Tradition, Humility, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Politics

≈ 3 Comments

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Candrakīrti, Confucius, Disengaged Buddhism, justice, Mencius, Plato, Śāntideva

Even if one accepts Śāntideva’s idea that political participation is harmful to a good life, that doesn’t mean that one must be finished with political thought. For there’s another key way that politics enters into reflection: as analogy. The politician has often appeared in ethical texts as a figure for the individual; we learn what is good or bad in a single human life by examining what is good or bad for a king or a state.

The most famous use of this analogy between individual and state is likely in Plato’s Republic. In Book II, Socrates reminds Glaucon that one can typically see bigger things more clearly than smaller things. Similarly it is easier to observe justice in a state than in an individual, so we should first ask what justice is in a state, and then we will be more able to see what it is in an individual. The city or state is larger than the individual; “perhaps, then, there is more justice in the larger thing, and it will be easier to learn what it is.” (368)

Plato’s approach, of using the state to illuminate the individual, is not obvious or natural; it was not taken by the Confucians, as far as I can tell. Confucius in Analects I.2 says that those who behave well toward their parents don’t start revolutions; Mencius argues for benevolence over profit by arguing that a state of benevolent people will flourish. Here – not so surprising given the early Confucians’ social context – the point seems to be to figure out how to run a state, and individual conduct is addressed for its relevance to that goal, rather than the other way ’round.

But one can find a similar approach to Plato’s in a more surprising place, where it plays a different role: the work of the Buddhist thinker Candrakīrti (whom I also discussed last time). Continue reading →

Can a Prāsaṅgika live his skepticism?

24 Sunday Oct 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Early and Theravāda, Epistemology, Flourishing, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Monasticism, Self, Serenity, Skepticism, Truth

≈ 24 Comments

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Abhidhamma, Bhāvaviveka, Candrakīrti, conventional/ultimate, Harvard University, Madhyamaka, Myles Burnyeat, Nāgārjuna, Rory Lindsay, Śāntideva, Sextus Empiricus, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha), Tibet

Last week I attended an interesting talk by Harvard PhD candidate (and fellow Canuck) Rory Lindsay, through the graduate Workshop in Cross-Cultural Philosophy – a workshop I’m proud to have played a part in founding (and I’m happy to say that its current leaders have made it exponentially more successful than it ever was under my stewardship). Lindsay was exploring the skepticism of the Indian Buddhist thinker Candrakīrti; he compared Candrakīrti to the Hellenistic capital-S Skeptic Sextus Empiricus, who held similar views, and examined the arguments made against Sextus by Myles Burnyeat. I want to discuss Lindsay’s talk by first giving some background to it, then recounting it, and finally offering a few of my reflections that came out of it.

Lindsay’s talk – I hope I will be interpreting it correctly – delved far enough into the technical details of Buddhist theoretical debates that some introductory remarks are in order. Those familiar with these debates should feel free to skip down a couple of paragraphs. Buddhist teaching deliberately and thoughtfully attacks certain aspects of common sense and common linguistic usage, and yet nevertheless needs to make some use of that linguistic usage. Continue reading →

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