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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Prayudh Payutto

Why we sometimes need to deadname

20 Sunday Apr 2025

Posted by Sandhya Lele in Friends, Morality, Philosophy of Language, Politics, Self

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Caitlyn Jenner, gender, identity, LARP, Maria Heim, Nora Berenstain, Prayudh Payutto, Rebecca Tuvel

A little while ago I was at a party en femme and met an older man who didn’t know many transgender people but was interested in talking about it. He mentioned someone else he knew who’d transitioned, and asked about how to refer to that person when discussing things they’d done together before the transition. He said that in that context it felt more natural to refer to them by their old name and pronouns. While I understood that, I responded “It’s considered polite to refer to someone who’s transitioned by their new name and pronouns, even when you’re talking about them before the transition.”

I stand by that response, and I think that that custom is quite appropriate. For most trans people, their new identity is important to them, they have gone to some struggle to reach it, and that’s how they prefer to be thought of in general; they’d prefer to turn the page on the chapter of their life where they had been called something else. So where there are not other major considerations that override, it’s generally polite and preferred to respect their wishes to be referred to by their new name and pronouns, even retrospectively. That norm seems to me extremely reasonable. What I disagree with is an emergent norm that goes much further than this.

Continue reading →

Wealth is not neutral

04 Wednesday Nov 2009

Posted by Amod Lele in Attachment and Craving, Buddhism, Economics, External Goods, Flourishing, Happiness, Monasticism, Psychology

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

autobiography, Justin Whitaker, Michael Eysenck, Pali suttas, Prayudh Payutto, Śāntideva

It’s common for those new to Buddhism to ask: “Do Buddhists think wealth and making money are bad?” It’s equally common to answer: “no, wealth itself isn’t bad, it’s just what you do with it.” The Thai scholar-monk Prayudh Payutto (also known as Phra Rajavaramuni and several other names, but this one is the easiest to track him down by) is probably the best-known exponent of this view: in his Buddhist Economics he says “it is not wealth as such that is praised or blamed but the way it is acquired and used.” (61) Others writing on the topic, such as Peter Harvey and Donald Swearer, have said similar things; the topic’s on my mind right now because Justin Whitaker said the same thing in a recent comment here.

There are a number of passages in the suttas that support this interpretation, on which wealth itself is neutral to our well-being (although I suspect that these passages are not always being read in their proper context). But it’s worth pointing out that there’s another view in South Asian Buddhism that takes a significantly more negative view of wealth and its accumulation, one that appears strongly in Śāntideva. Continue reading →

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