• About me
  • About this blog
  • Comment rules
  • Other writings

Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Huayan

The story of Buddhism’s Descent

04 Sunday Sep 2011

Posted by Amod Lele in Early and Theravāda, East Asia, Jainism, Mahāyāna, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Monasticism

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

ascent/descent, Chan/Zen 禪, Charles Taylor, David McMahan, Dōgen, Fazang, Huayan, interview, James Joyce, Martha Nussbaum, modernity, Nāgārjuna, natural environment, Pali suttas, Pure Land, S.N. Goenka, Śāntideva, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha)

This week I did a new podcast interview with David McMahan, about his book The Making of Buddhist Modernism. The “Buddhist modernism” of the title is what I have typically called Yavanayāna: the new forms of Buddhism that have emerged in the past two centuries, which sometimes portray themselves as if they’re what Buddhism always was. (In what follows I will use the terms “Yavanayāna” and “Buddhist modernism” interchangeably.)

McMahan’s chapters are topical rather than chronological, so that he can examine the various features of the transition to Buddhist modernism. Naturally, he rounds up the most common topics: the asserted compatibility between Buddhism and science, and the idea of meditation as the most central Buddhist practice. He takes a genuinely balanced perspective on these topics that’s a welcome antidote to others. But he also touches on a few less widely noticed topics: interdependence, nature, and ordinary life. During the interview, I began to think about how closely these topics are connected with each other – and how they share a history in Buddhism that goes back long before the rise of Yavanayāna. Continue reading →

Buddhists against interdependence

07 Sunday Mar 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Attachment and Craving, Buddhism, Confucianism, Emotion, Friends, Hope, Jainism, Metaphysics, Modernized Buddhism, Monasticism, Sāṃkhya-Yoga

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Diana Eck, Four Noble Truths, gender, generations, Huayan, intimacy/integrity, Joanna Macy, natural environment, Pali suttas, pedagogy, René Descartes, Śāntideva, Yoga Sūtras

It’s become something of a cliché to say that Buddhism is about embracing our “interdependence.” The mechanistic Cartesian worldview, so the story goes, has led us to think of human beings as subjects independent of the world around them, in a way responsible for our current environmental catastrophes. (Depending on who you ask, this idea of independence might also be responsible for patriarchy, racism, homophobia, class exploitation and an inability to express our emotions.) But Buddhists know better: Buddhists know that everything arises dependent on everything else, so we should affirm and celebrate our mutual ties to each other and to the earth. In Thomas Kasulis’s terms, Buddhism on this interpretation offers us an intimacy worldview, distinct from the integrity worldview of the modern West. This idea is perhaps most clearly found in the thought of Joanna Macy, but its spread goes much wider among Western (Yavanayāna) converts to Buddhism, especially (but not only) in the baby-boom generation.

The problem: this view is almost the opposite of what the classical Indian Buddhists – including the Buddha of the Pali suttas – actually taught. To be sure, the autonomous, independent selves that we would like to believe in are an illusion. We must indeed recognize the dependent co-arising (paticca samuppāda or pratitya samutpāda) of all things, acknowledge that everything arises out of a circle of mutually dependent causes.

Here’s the thing: this circle of causes is bad. Continue reading →

Welcome to Love of All Wisdom.

I invite you to leave comments on my blog, even - or especially - if I have no idea who you are. Philosophy is a conversation, and I invite you to join it with me; I welcome all comers (provided they follow a few basic rules). I typically make a new post every other Sunday. If you'd like to be notified when a new post is posted, you can get email notifications whenever I add something new via the link further down in this sidebar. You can also follow this blog on Facebook or Twitter. Or if you use RSS, you can get updates through the RSS feed.

Recent Comments

  • Amod Lele on Confucius in middle age
  • Amod Lele on Confucius in middle age
  • Seth Zuihō Segall on Confucius in middle age
  • Paul D. Van Pelt on Confucius in middle age
  • Amod Lele on King’s improvement on Gandhi

Subscribe by Email

Post Tags

20th century academia Alasdair MacIntyre Aristotle ascent/descent Augustine autobiography Buddhaghosa Canada conferences Confucius conservatism Disengaged Buddhism Engaged Buddhism Evan Thompson Four Noble Truths Friedrich Nietzsche G.W.F. Hegel gender Hebrew Bible identity Immanuel Kant intimacy/integrity justice Karl Marx Ken Wilber law Martha Nussbaum modernity mystical experience Pali suttas pedagogy Plato qualitative individualism race rebirth religion Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha) technology theodicy Thomas Kuhn United States utilitarianism Śaṅkara Śāntideva

Categories

  • African Thought (12)
  • Applied Phil (280)
    • Death (36)
    • Family (42)
    • Food (17)
    • Friends (14)
    • Health (23)
    • Place (26)
    • Play (13)
    • Politics (160)
    • Sex (20)
    • Work (37)
  • Asian Thought (401)
    • Buddhism (289)
      • Early and Theravāda (124)
      • Mahāyāna (118)
      • Modernized Buddhism (86)
    • East Asia (84)
      • Confucianism (54)
      • Daoism (13)
      • Shinto (1)
    • South Asia (131)
      • Bhakti Poets (3)
      • Cārvāka-Lokāyata (5)
      • Epics (16)
      • Jainism (24)
      • Modern Hinduism (37)
      • Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika (6)
      • Sāṃkhya-Yoga (14)
      • Vedānta (36)
      • Vedas and Mīmāṃsā (7)
  • Blog Admin (27)
  • Indigenous American Thought (4)
  • Method (243)
    • M.T.S.R. (137)
    • Metaphilosophy (160)
  • Practical Philosophy (356)
    • Action (11)
    • Aesthetics (43)
    • Emotion (153)
      • Anger (31)
      • Attachment and Craving (26)
      • Compassion (5)
      • Despair (3)
      • Disgust (3)
      • Faith (19)
      • Fear (7)
      • Grief (5)
      • Happiness (47)
      • Hope (15)
      • Pleasure (32)
      • Shame and Guilt (6)
    • External Goods (48)
    • Flourishing (85)
    • Foundations of Ethics (107)
    • Karma (43)
    • Morality (64)
    • Virtue (149)
      • Courage (5)
      • Generosity (13)
      • Gentleness (5)
      • Gratitude (10)
      • Honesty (13)
      • Humility (22)
      • Leadership (4)
      • Mindfulness (14)
      • Patient Endurance (28)
      • Self-Discipline (8)
      • Serenity (27)
      • Zest (6)
  • Practice (121)
    • Karmic Redirection (5)
    • Meditation (32)
    • Monasticism (44)
    • Physical Exercise (3)
    • Prayer (14)
    • Reading and Recitation (12)
    • Rites (20)
    • Therapy (10)
  • Theoretical Philosophy (334)
    • Consciousness (15)
    • Epistemology (109)
      • Certainty and Doubt (15)
      • Prejudices and "Intuitions" (28)
    • Free Will (17)
    • God (64)
    • Hermeneutics (55)
    • Human Nature (30)
    • Logic (28)
      • Dialectic (16)
    • Metaphysics (90)
    • Philosophy of Language (18)
    • Self (64)
    • Supernatural (49)
    • Truth (59)
    • Unconscious Mind (14)
  • Western Thought (425)
    • Analytic Tradition (91)
    • Christianity (141)
      • Early Factions (8)
      • Protestantism (22)
      • Roman Catholicism (48)
    • French Tradition (47)
    • German Tradition (85)
    • Greek and Roman Tradition (110)
      • Epicureanism (24)
      • Neoplatonism (2)
      • Pre-Socratics (6)
      • Skepticism (2)
      • Sophists (7)
      • Stoicism (18)
    • Islam (37)
      • Mu'tazila (2)
      • Salafi (3)
      • Sufism (9)
    • Judaism (33)
    • Natural Science (88)
      • Biology (24)
      • Philosophy of Science (47)
    • Social Science (149)
      • Economics (32)
      • Psychology (61)

Recent Posts

  • Confucius in middle age
  • King’s improvement on Gandhi
  • Honing in on a disagreement
  • The Nativity is my Ramakien
  • Video debate: “Śāntideva: utilitarian or eudaimonist?”

Popular posts

  • One and a half noble truths?
  • Wishing George W. Bush well
  • Do Speculative Realists want us to be Chinese?
  • Why I am not a right-winger
  • On faith in tooth relics

Basic concepts

  • Ascent and Descent
  • Intimacy and integrity
  • Ascent-descent and intimacy-integrity together
  • Perennial questions?
  • Virtuous and vicious means
  • Dialectical and demonstrative argument
  • Chastened intellectualism and practice
  • Yavanayāna Buddhism: what it is
  • Why worry about contradictions?
  • The first philosophy blogger

Personal favourites

  • Can philosophy be a way of life? Pierre Hadot (1922-2010)
  • James Doull and the history of ethical motivation
  • Praying to something you don't believe in
  • What does postmodernism perform?
  • Why I'm getting married

Archives

Search this site

All posts, pages and metadata copyright 2020 Amod Lele. Comments copyright 2020 their comment authors. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA) licence.

Proudly powered by WordPress Theme: Chateau by Ignacio Ricci.