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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Dhammapāda

Honing in on a disagreement

01 Sunday Jan 2023

Posted by Amod Lele in Early and Theravāda, Family, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Monasticism, Morality, Self, Virtue

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

Aristotle, Charles Goodman, Dhammapāda, Peter Singer, Śāntideva, utilitarianism

I wanted to reflect a bit more on my debate with Charles Goodman at Princeton this November. (If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the video of the debate and our handouts.) I don’t think either of us would consider the debate conclusive. Indeed, following the debate, our conversations that afternoon indicated that the issues we were really concerned about lay elsewhere.

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The Buddhist oxygen mask

15 Sunday Aug 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Early and Theravāda, Family, Foundations of Ethics, Generosity, Health, Mahāyāna

≈ 4 Comments

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Dhammapāda, Ken Wilber, Richard Mahoney, Śāntideva, Treya Killam Wilber

If you are travelling with a child or someone who requires assistance, secure your oxygen mask on first, and then assist the other person.

Anyone who has flown on a commercial airline has heard this instruction; anyone who flies frequently has heard it so often that it becomes background noise, though relatively few of us have ever had the chance to put it into practice. If the plane cabin depressurizes and the oxygen masks drop, one has only seconds before running out of oxygen oneself; if one tries to put the oxygen mask on a child first, hypoxia may inhibit one’s ability to put the mask on the child correctly, to say nothing of the risk to oneself. One can best save both people by attending to oneself first – running against any parent’s natural instinct to protect his own child.

I’m not the first to see this advice as a metaphor for other forms of ethical conduct in relationships: “the oxygen-mask principle”. Often we can take care of others most effectively by taking care of ourselves. What I also see, though, is that this principle is deeply Buddhist.

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Suffering’s mental causes are not merely conventional

16 Sunday May 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Attachment and Craving, Early and Theravāda, Metaphysics, Psychology

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

conventional/ultimate, Dhammapāda, Disengaged Buddhism, Four Noble Truths, Nāgārjuna, Pali suttas, Patrick O'Donnell

Patrick O’Donnell makes several interesting comments disputing my claim that for most classical Indian Buddhists “the causes of suffering are primarily mental.” I think they’re worth responding to at length, so I’ll take two posts to do so: this week on the theoretical (metaphysical and psychological) claims about the causation of suffering, next week on their practical implications.

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The rejection of righteous anger

25 Sunday Oct 2015

Posted by Amod Lele in Anger, Early and Theravāda, Friends, Karmic Redirection, Mahāyāna, Modernized Buddhism, Morality, Patient Endurance, Politics

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

A.J. Jacobs, autobiography, David Chapman, Dean Esmay, Dhammapāda, Disengaged Buddhism, George W. Bush, Jack Layton, justice, Śāntideva, Thich Nhat Hanh

Last time I began to propose an answer to David Chapman’s questions about what might be distinctively Buddhist about a modern Buddhist ethics. I mentioned the classical Buddhist critique of politics and activism, and noted that I agree with some of that critique. Let me now say more about what I mean by that.

What first excited me about Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra was not the widely read eighth chapter (with its meditations on self and other and the deconstruction of the body that repulses many). Rather, it was the sixth chapter, on anger and patient endurance – when I responded to a student’s question about the text by saying “in this text, there’s no such thing as righteous anger.”

I do not think this is a message a typical secular North American liberal is likely to accept. Continue reading →

The No True Fish fallacy

25 Sunday May 2014

Posted by Amod Lele in Biology, Early and Theravāda, Foundations of Ethics, Logic, M.T.S.R., Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Science, Prejudices and "Intuitions"

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, Antony Flew, caste, Confucius, Dhammapāda, RationalWiki, religion, Scotland

Consider this dialogue:

A: “All fish breathe through gills rather than lungs.”

B: “But whales are fish, and they breathe through their lungs.”

A: “Whales may look and seem like fish, but they aren’t truly fish because they breathe through their lungs.”

To anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of biology, A’s reasoning here must seem sound. Yet among some philosophers with a scientific bent, the structure of the reasoning A employs is often criticized as a logical fallacy. Continue reading →

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