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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Laozi

No opposite for the ultimate

28 Sunday Mar 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Christianity, Daoism, God, Indigenous American Thought, Metaphysics, Truth, Vedānta

≈ 13 Comments

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Advaita Vedānta, Augustine, Aztec, G.W.F. Hegel, Hebrew Bible, James Maffie, Krishna, Kyoto School, Laozi, Nishida Kitarō, Nishitani Keiji, nondualism, Śaṅkara, Satan, theodicy, Zhuangzi

I have considerable sympathies for nondualism and have started in recent years to think that it might be true. But there is an important qualifier to any such view. Namely: I do not think that there could possibly be an omnipotent omnibenevolent God. The problem of suffering is just too intractable.

Many nondualists, especially Sufis, would identify the nondual ultimate with that God. And I cannot accept that view. For similar reasons I am skeptical of a Vedānta view where the ultimate is sat: both being and goodness. There is too much being that is not good.

For this reason I have been inspired by a wonderful passage in Nishida Kitarō’s “The logic of nothingness and the religious worldview”:

Continue reading →

The wisdom of serenity

27 Sunday Oct 2019

Posted by Amod Lele in Courage, Daoism, Metaphysics, Politics, Prayer, Protestantism, Serenity

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

12-step programs, Augustine, Chan/Zen 禪, Edward (Ted) Slingerland, Laozi, Reinhold Niebuhr, Thich Quang Duc, Zhuangzi

There are probably few people in the English-speaking world unfamiliar with the Serenity Prayer. In its best-known form this prayer asks: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” The prayer was created by Reinhold Niebuhr, a mid-20th-century American Christian theologian who was possibly the biggest influence on Martin Luther King. It has spread into widespread usage through its adoption by twelve-step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous. Because of its ubiquity, I think, it is sometimes regarded as a sort of vacuous and vapid New Age pablum. I do not think that it should be. Continue reading →

Understanding understanding

02 Sunday Feb 2014

Posted by Amod Lele in Daoism, Epistemology, Hermeneutics, Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Language

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

Benjamin Bloom, Boston University, Laozi, pedagogy, SACP, technology

I have recently begun the exciting opportunity to teach a course in Indian philosophy in Boston University’s philosophy department. Thinking about and designing the course, I had the great opportunity to work with the small but excellent staff of BU’s Center for Excellence and Innovation in Teaching. They asked me: what’s your objective for the course? More specifically, what will your students be able to do when the course is done? They recommended that I pay particular attention to the verbs identifying these student abilities.

Such a question is easier to answer in skill-oriented courses – courses in Java programming or academic writing. There, the point of the course is all about something that students will be able to do. In a humanistic course, objectives are different, and often not easily specified. It’s not just that humanistic learning may have as much to do with personal transformation as with any acquired ability. It’s that even the abilities acquired are themselves difficult to define. In particular: one of the first verbs to come out of my mouth in response was “understand”. And one of the staff soon said in response, “we’d like to encourage you to avoid the U-word.” Continue reading →

No apologies for studying Laozi and Zhuangzi

19 Sunday May 2013

Posted by Amod Lele in Daoism, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy

≈ Comments Off on No apologies for studying Laozi and Zhuangzi

Tags

Laozi, Nathan Sivin, pedagogy, religion, Russell Kirkland, Zhuangzi

I’ve lately been trying to get a better understanding of Daoist thought, as I believe Daoism to be the major philosophical tradition I have so far understood the least. I have done this by turning to the two texts most widely read in the tradition: the Daodejing (Tao Te Ching), attributed to Laozi (Lao Tzu), and the Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu) – the latter the name of both text and author. (I use the modern Pinyin spellings which are now most accepted by contemporary scholars, but older Wade-Giles spellings like “Taoism” and “Lao Tzu” may be more familiar to a general audience.) Were I to have free rein to teach a course that involved a component on Daoism, I would almost certainly focus on Laozi and Zhuangzi there as well.

To focus one’s study of Daoism on Laozi and Zhuangzi is very common. It is also controversial. Continue reading →

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