Tag Archives: race

Farewell to “Yavanayāna”

22 Sunday Jan 2017

Posted by in Humility, Mahāyāna, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modernized Buddhism, Politics

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Late last year I was delighted to see a post from Richard Payne retracting his earlier post on “White Buddhism”, motivated at least in part by my critique. It is all too rare to see a human being change his or her mind, especially on politically charged issues where passions run high and it is all too easy to develop attachment to views. I commend and thank Payne for his thoughtful retraction. On my end, he has provoked me to make a retraction of my own. Continue reading →

Of “White Buddhism”

08 Sunday May 2016

Posted by in Meditation, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Patient Endurance, Politics

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Mindfulness meditation has become so mainstream that it’s not just doctors who prescribe it. A couple weeks ago, Boston University had a workshop on mindfulness for its information-technology staff. Google made a splash for having an in-house mindfulness coach, Chade-Meng Tan, who was recently interviewed in Religion Dispatches.

Tan makes some startling claims in the interview – most notably that American Buddhism is “purer Buddhism” because mindfulness is its “source teaching”, which temples in Asian countries have supposedly moved away from. I have spent plenty of time debunking such an approach in Ken Wilber and others, and there’s no need to say more here. What does need a response is a recent discussion of Tan by Richard K. Payne. Continue reading →

On making America great again

10 Sunday Apr 2016

Posted by in Economics, Politics, Work

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In the early 1960s, my father finished his PhD in political science from Cornell. Under the restrictive and racialized American immigration rules of the day, he needed to work in a neighbouring country for two years before he could come to the US. So he applied for six tenure-track faculty jobs in Canada. He was offered five of them. The sixth, at the relatively low-prestige Memorial University of Newfoundland, turned him down with a curt letter that said “In our competition, you failed to qualify.” He found it amusing that such a lower-tier school would say such a dismissive thing when he had offers from so many places higher in the hierarchy.

This story ceased to amuse me when I received my PhD from Harvard in the late 2000s and began applying for faculty teaching jobs myself. I sent out nearly two hundred job applications, most of them for tenure-track jobs, across Canada and the United States, and a few off the continent. I received not one tenure-track offer anywhere. If Memorial University of Newfoundland had offered me a position, I would have taken it without hesitation and been grateful to have the opportunity. The same applies to most of my generation in academia. To those coming of age in the 21st-century university, my father’s story sounds as implausible as if he had wandered into the White House, said “I’d like a job as President of the United States”, and been offered it on the spot. But it was and is true. His experience was in Canada, but as far as I know, those faculty of his generation with a similarly prestigious degree who could apply for jobs in the United States had a comparably wide range of opportunities.

This intergenerational experience should highlight how the story in the academic humanities and social sciences from the 1960s to the 2010s has been above all a story of decline. Many North American leftists look at the real accomplishments made in areas of race, gender and sexuality and see this period as a time of unalloyed progress. I cannot. Continue reading →

Indian heritage?

02 Sunday Dec 2012

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, South Asia

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As my doctoral studies were in Indian philosophy and my ethnic background is part Indian, I was often asked whether my studies had to do with exploring my own heritage. The answer is basically no.

As I noted in telling my story, I came to the study of Asian philosophy through Thai Buddhism, which is not at all part of my ethnic background. I learned Sanskrit and Pali because it seemed to me that most of what was philosophically interesting in Thai Buddhism had come from its Indian heritage – even though Buddhism in India had all but died out.

If I ever thought my heritage would play a major role in the process, such thoughts stopped in my first-year Sanskrit class. My teacher, Stephanie Jamison, was explaining the rules of caste in traditional dharmaśāstra (ethical-legal texts), and how the brahmins were the ones expected to do all the thinking. I wondered whether I counted as a brahmin by this standard, so I asked: how would they count the offspring of a brahmin and an outsider, a yavana?

She answered: caste mixing is always viewed as an evil, so the offspring of any mix would be counted as the lower of the two – at the very best. In other words, according to the Laws of Manu, I’m a white boy. (If not an outright abomination.) Continue reading →

Mimicry, mockery or mumukṣutva? A response to Deepak Sarma, by Jeffery D. Long

27 Tuesday Nov 2012

Posted by in Karma, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modern Hinduism, Truth, Vedānta

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This is the first time I have featured a guest post on Love of All Wisdom. Jeffery Long, a professor of religion and Asian studies at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, sent me this response after I had written my own piece on the topic. I disagree with a few of Jeff’s ideas, most notably the free employment of the term “Hindu”, but some disagreement is always to be expected among philosophers and humanists. I thought the piece merited prompt online publication and I found it to be in broad sympathy with the aims of this blog, so I am presenting it to readers here. I haven’t configured the site to allow others to add content, for the moment at least, so the “official” byline currently lists me as the author. But readers should be clear that this is Jeff’s work, not mine, and all credit and copyright belong to him. Enjoy. – Amod Lele

The first thing a respondent to Deepak Sarma’s essay, “White Hindu Converts: Mimicry or Mockery?”, needs to do is acknowledge the essential core of experiential truth and the genuine pain at its heart.  Racism against brown-skinned persons is real and pervasive in North America.  Being married now for over seventeen years to a Bengali, I cannot help but be aware of it.  Sometimes this racism is overt and brutal, as in the case when, shortly after 9/11, a fellow customer at a gas station pointed to my wife and asked aggressively, “Is she from Afghanistan?”  At other times it is more subtle, and perhaps even unknown to its perpetrators, such as when my wife speaks in a faculty meeting at the college where we both work only to have her words met with blank stares and confusion, while I later make basically the same comment and am told what a brilliant and insightful observation I have made. Continue reading →

In defence of White Hindu Converts

24 Saturday Nov 2012

Posted by in Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modern Hinduism, Politics

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[I wasn’t planning to update this week, but I wanted to post this while it was still topical.]

I have not had as much time as I would like to read Deepak Sarma‘s work in Indian philosophy. It intrigues me, and what little I have seen so far seems to be well researched and well thought out. I hope to be more involved with it in the future.

My reaction was considerably less favourable when I saw a recent short blog post of Sarma’s at the Huffington Post. (I found out about it through the RISA-L mailing list, and there has already been some discussion of the post there.) Sarma expresses discomfort with “White Hindu Converts”, those white Americans who claim to have “converted to Hinduism”. I agree that such a claim can be problematic, given that the recent term “Hinduism” typically covers such a wide and disparate range of meanings, and the concept of “conversion” does not adequately cover much of what happens in Indian traditions (where Muslims offer prayers to revered “Hindu” sites and vice versa). But Sarma’s post goes considerably further than this. Continue reading →

The value of forgetting

11 Sunday Sep 2011

Posted by in Anger, Buddhism, Patient Endurance, Politics, Serenity

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Ten years ago today, my first wife and I were in the process of moving into our new unfurnished student apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We had rented a moving truck and driven over to the house of a friend, who had generously offered us an old piece of furniture. My wife rang the bell and we waited a minute or two. Then my friend came running down the stairs, slightly flustered and dishevelled. “I’m sorry I took so long,” she said, panting a little. “I was watching the news.”

“The… news?” We looked at each other.

“Oh my God, you haven’t heard! Two planes crashed into the World Trade Center. It’s collapsed.”

“Two planes!” I said. “Then it must have been deliberate.”

“Yeah, they think it’s Osama bin Laden.”

“Huh,” I said. “Wow.” I paused for a few seconds, saying “Wow” and “Huh” a few more times. Then I shrugged my shoulders and said “Well, let’s get back to moving.”

This was not, I would soon learn, the way most Americans reacted to the same news. Continue reading →

The inadequacy of primary theory

14 Sunday Nov 2010

Posted by in Greek and Roman Tradition, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Social Science, Vedānta

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Last time, I accepted that there were two reasonable ways to define “common sense.” One can identify it with prejudices, as I did the first time around, so that common sense is what is held to be common and taken for granted by a given group of people (usually one’s own). Alternately, one can identify common sense with Robin Horton’s “primary theory”: the kind of description or explanation of human experience that is basic enough to be mostly universal, such as plants requiring water to grow. Primary theory is opposed to more complex “secondary theory” like witchcraft or subatomic physics, referring to unseen phenomena, which explains events anomalous to primary theory and is not at all universal.

Now if common sense is defined as primary theory, what then is its philosophical significance? Far less, I would argue, than is often claimed for “common sense.” The problems with primary theory are twofold: first, it is relatively limited in scope; and second, it is often wrong. Continue reading →

In defence of hypocrisy

28 Sunday Jun 2009

Posted by in Morality, Politics, Virtue

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Recent news of South Carolina governor Mark Sanford’s affair provides an appropriate occasion to discuss a topic that’s been on my mind lately: hypocrisy. When social conservatives like Sanford or Bill Bennett get caught in vice, the charge immediately hurled at them is hypocrisy; this is said to make their crimes far worse than those of, say, Eliot Spitzer, who wasn’t that kind of moralizer in the first place. But I want to make the case here that hypocrisy is really not so bad.

A defence of hypocrisy is not original to me. There are plenty of right-wingers who’ve defended hypocrisy in these sorts of situations: William Vallicella blogged about it a while ago, Jeremy Lott wrote a whole book about it, and most recently James Matthew Wilson‘s defence of hypocrisy at Front Porch Republic was where I heard about Sanford’s adultery in the first place. But these men do not share the ideals of those who usually attack hypocrisy, and I think the point might be more persuasive coming from a left-leaner like me. I oppose Sanford’s and Bennett’s sexual politics, and I think their behaviours were unjustifiable; but I want to claim that these two criticisms are and should be mostly separate.

Put it this way. Suppose a man preaches anti-racism, tells all his friends they must avoid racism, donates to anti-racist causes; but himself refuses to hire black people or associate with them professionally. Now imagine a man who acted the same way toward black people but advocated doing so — a man who said that black people are unreliable and should not be hired or associated with. The first man is a hypocrite, the second man is absolutely not; the second man is sincere, and true to himself. But is the second man then better than the first? I don’t think so. In both cases the serious wrongdoing is the racism, not the hypocrisy. I might say, actually, that the hypocrite who preaches anti-racism is at least a bit better than the consistent man who doesn’t; the first is doing some good. Moreover, one can point out the inconsistency between his behaviour and his ideals, in a way that helps his behaviour change for the better. It’s much harder to change the man whose bad ideals match his bad behaviour.