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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: James Joyce

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 →

How not to think dialectically

03 Wednesday Nov 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Dialectic, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Psychology

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Ayn Rand, G.W.F. Hegel, James Joyce, Jean Piaget, Ken Wilber, Martha Nussbaum, phenomenology, Plato

I introduced the last post by referring briefly to the idea of dialectic, and meant it in a Hegelian sense. But I don’t think I adequately spelled out what I mean by that. It ties closely to the key point of synthesis over compromise, which I did note. A mere compromise can include the bad parts of the two extremes it puts together, as well as the good (as per Shaw’s quip about body and brain); a synthesis qua synthesis takes as much of the good as possible and minimizes the bad, and in doing so is more than mere compromise.

But a dialectical synthesis is more than this. Continue reading →

Ascent and Descent

16 Wednesday Jun 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Bhakti Poets, Christianity, Confucianism, Dialectic, Family, Flourishing, God, Greek and Roman Tradition, Jainism, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Modern Hinduism, Modernized Buddhism, Sāṃkhya-Yoga, Self

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, ascent/descent, Augustine, Ayn Rand, Caitanya, Confucius, intimacy/integrity, ISKCON, James Joyce, Ken Wilber, Krishna, Martha Nussbaum, pàn jiāo 判教, phenomenology, Plato, Prabhupada, Tattvārtha Sūtra, Thomas P. Kasulis, Yoga Sūtras

Five years ago, on a language fellowship in India, I had more time to do broad reading in cross-cultural philosophy than grad school usually permitted. I wound up reading a lot of Ken Wilber, and had already been immersed in Martha Nussbaum’s thought for my dissertation. These two thinkers don’t have a whole lot in common, beyond coming out of roughly the same (American baby boom) cultural milieu and having an unusually wide-ranging philosophical outlook. But there is one set of categories that features prominently in both of their work, and I suspect for good reason: ascent and descent.

For Wilber, one of the most fundamental philosophical debates is that between Ascent and Descent: between a spiritual view that aspires to transcendence of the everyday material world, and a materialist view that embraces it. (Like the intimacy-integrity distinction – on which more shortly – the distinction is particularly interesting because it embraces theoretical as well as practical philosophy, metaphysics as well as ethics.) Some of Wilber’s sharpest criticisms are directed against ecological philosophies of interdependence, which suggest that what we ultimately need is to embrace our mutual dependence in the natural world. In Wilber’s eyes, such a view leaves us scarcely better off than the mechanistic individualism it aims to replace, for both views remain squarely within a materialist tradition of “descent,” neglecting the spiritual realm. I have noted before that, while Yavanayāna Buddhists often embrace such views of interdependence, they are wildly at odds with traditional Indian Buddhism, for reasons similar to those noted by Wilber.

Upheavals of Thought, the weighty tome that I would consider Nussbaum’s magnum opus, employs such a distinction through its third, longest and final part – entitled “Ascents of Love.” Continue reading →

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