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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: religion

After mystical experiences

08 Sunday Jun 2025

Posted by Amod Lele in Daoism, German Tradition, M.T.S.R., Metaphysics, Psychology, Roman Catholicism, Vedānta

≈ 2 Comments

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Advaita Vedānta, Aristotle, drugs, Gauḍapāda, Ingmar Gorman, John Hick, MAPS, Meister Eckhart, mystical experience, nondualism, Rachael Petersen, religion, Roland Griffiths, Upaniṣads, Zhuangzi

I’m delighted to be giving a talk at Psychedelic Science 2025, the annual conference of the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies. The conference (June 17-20 in Denver) promises to be really fun and stimulating. If you can make it, I’d love to say hi: registration isn’t cheap, but you can use code SPEAKER15 to get 15% off your registration.

I’m especially excited because my talk is really experimental, the kind of broad comparative work that would have got frowned on when I was in grad school. I’m still aiming to exercise scholarly caution to avoid saying anything false, trying to stay reasonably close to what’s in the texts, but I am writing about multiple thinkers whose source languages (classical Chinese and old German) I don’t know well: something which I think one has to do in order to investigate human cultural commonalities, but which would have raised every eyebrow in my PhD program. It’s the kind of project that an aspiring professor only undertakes after getting tenure; in my case, I can do it because I’m no longer trying for a faculty job.

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Trump is a BJP-wala

19 Sunday Jan 2025

Posted by Amod Lele in Islam, Modern Hinduism, Modernized Buddhism, Politics, Protestantism, South Asia

≈ 7 Comments

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20th century, 21st century, BJP, Donald Trump, fundamentalism, George W. Bush, identity, Martin Luther King Jr., religion, Tim Alberta, United States

When Donald Trump first rose to rapid popularity in American politics, many people were shocked and had no explanation. I was not among those people, for a couple of reasons. Among them: one way to make a new phenomenon comprehensible is analogy. And having watched Indian politics for a couple decades, I found it easy to say: Trump is a BJP-wala.

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In defence of ultimate meaning and truth

24 Sunday Mar 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Buddhism, Epistemology, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Greek and Roman Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Language, Self, Truth

≈ 5 Comments

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Aristotle, Bruce Cockburn, drugs, Kieran Setiya, Kyoto School, mathematics, mystical experience, Nishitani Keiji, Pali suttas, pragmatism, puruṣārthas, Rachael Petersen, religion, Richard Rorty, Seth Zuihō Segall

While the cover of Seth Zuihō Segall’s The House We Live In claims the book draws its account primarily from Aristotle, the Buddha and Confucius, the deeper, animating influence turns out to be pragmatism. There’s no problem with taking inspiration from pragmatism as such; the problem is that Seth’s pragmatism is so relentless and extreme that it rules out of court all opinions that differ from it – including, it turns out, those of Aristotle, the Buddha and Confucius.

The excessive pragmatism in question is expressed above all in this sentence: “whenever we ask ‘what’s the meaning of “X?”‘, we are really asking, ‘what is the significance of “X” for maintaining and enhancing our lives.'” (107) This pragmatic claim is simply not true. Some of us are really asking the latter question when we ask the former. Seth would like it to be the case that all of us are asking the latter question. But it’s not.

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The Nativity is my Ramakien

18 Sunday Dec 2022

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Christianity, Early and Theravāda, Epics, Modernized Buddhism, Rites

≈ 2 Comments

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autobiography, Christmas, identity, Jātakas, Jesus, music, New Testament, Rāmāyana, religion, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha), Thailand

For most of my life, when people asked me “what’s your religion?”, I usually felt the need to respond with a paragraph. That changed about eight years ago, dealing with my wife’s cancer treatment, where I realized it was important to me to be able to say simply: I am a Buddhist.

It felt strange, and yet reassuring, to be able to answer “what’s your religion?” with a simple answer. Yet complexity remains – the sort of complexity that has led me to proclaim, “I am a fine distinction“. I note nowadays how there is almost no area in which my identity is single, and I say: I am gender-fluid, biracial, binational… and a Buddhist who celebrates Christmas.

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On getting a religious exemption

11 Sunday Sep 2022

Posted by Amod Lele in Indigenous American Thought, M.T.S.R., Politics

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

drugs, law, religion, United States

Longtime readers will know I don’t have much patience for the concept of “religion”. I continue to endorse the various critiques I’ve made in the past: the concept of “religion” confuses more than it clarifies. And yet as it turns out, I owe the concept of “religion” a favour.

What do I mean by that? I mean that I recently got a valuable and important opportunity which I don’t think I could have undertaken if the concept of “religion” didn’t exist.

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The people need their opium

21 Sunday Nov 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, German Tradition, Metaphysics, Play, Pleasure

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Aśvaghoṣa, Clement Greenberg, drugs, existentialism, film, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, kitsch, Martin Heidegger, Milan Kundera, Preston Sturges, religion, Theodor Adorno

Preston Sturges’s splendid old Sullivan’s Travels is a wonderful film with an important message. (I assume a spoiler warning is not necessary for an eighty-year-old film.) The protagonist, John Sullivan, is a director of lowbrow comedies who aspires to instead make serious art about the suffering of the poor. He tries to do experiential research about their suffering, and winds up being falsely imprisoned at hard labour. The prisoners’ one reprieve is to watch a Disney Goofy cartoon, at which Sullivan finds himself laughing uproariously. His lesson, from actually experiencing the suffering of the poor, is to go back to making silly comedies. The film closes with his lines: “There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that’s all some people have? It isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan.”

Sullivan in prison laughing at Goofy

The story of Sullivan’s Travels serves as an eloquent defence of lowbrow or shallow art, of kitsch and even smarm. And I think it helps us see what is wrong with the philosophical critique of kitsch.

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Defending the removal of suffering

31 Sunday Jan 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Attachment and Craving, Early and Theravāda, Epicureanism, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Happiness, Mahāyāna, Patient Endurance, Serenity, Stoicism

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Aristotle, ascent/descent, Four Noble Truths, Martha Nussbaum, Martin Hägglund, religion, Śāntideva

It is typically the case that more can be said in disagreement than agreement. In the case of Martin Hägglund’s This Life, I think paying attention to those realms of disagreement is particularly helpful, because our deepest disagreements highlight the ways in which I am a Buddhist and he is not, even though there are core elements to his critique of Buddhism that I absolutely share.

As is the case in many extended disagreements, it can be helpful to start with a disagreement over terminology in order to make sure that what follows is clear. In Hägglund’s case, he frames his argument as one for a “secular” view over a “religious” one. I have said a great deal over the years about why I think the concept of “religion” generally obscures more than it clarifies, and there’s no need to repeat those general points here; in the present context, the important thing is that Hägglund falls victim to the same problems others do. In Hägglund’s telling, Martha Nussbaum can count as entirely “secular” despite her self-identification as Jewish, while Spinoza, the Stoics and the Epicureans all count as “religious” – even though many Epicureans explicitly rejected the gods. Such a framing, it seems to me, can only end up as the vast majority of other attempts to demarcate the “religious” from the “non-religious” do: in confusion.

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On “philosophy of religion”

06 Sunday Dec 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Christianity, Deity, Judaism, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy, Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

AAR, academia, APA, atheism, Bryan Van Norden, Jay Garfield, Moses Maimonides, Rāmānuja, religion, Speculative Realism

A while ago I was contacted by an academic publisher asking me to review a new introductory textbook on philosophy of religion. I didn’t do so, even though the publisher offered me a stipend. The main reason was just that I didn’t have the time for it. But the more interesting reason was my objections to the work’s entire project.

The book’s proposed table of contents spoke of a work devoted entirely to God: the concept of God, and arguments for and against his existence. That is not an idiosyncratic approach; there are many existing textbooks in “philosophy of religion” that take the same approach. So there was nothing especially or unusually outrageous about this textbook and its other. And that is exactly the problem.

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Why I am a Buddhist

07 Sunday Jun 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Buddhism, Faith, Family, Health, Humility, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Science, Prayer, Reading and Recitation, Therapy

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, autobiography, cancer, Evan Thompson, identity, Mañjuśrī, religion, Śāntideva, Seth Zuihō Segall

On Facebook, Seth Segall commented in response to my posts on Evan Thompson:

I agree with all the arguments you have made, but I think there is one maining major issue that divides you from Evan that transcends all the other issues. That is, as a “lover of all wisdom,” why would you define yourself as a Buddhist as opposed to someone who is informed by many wisdom traditions but holds a special place in his heart for Buddhism—in another words, how is your stance different from a more cosmopolitan one that is Buddhist-friendly, but not, strictly speaking, Buddhist?

I think I have answered this question before, but there is more to say on it. For a long time – including the first six years of writing this blog – I defined myself in just such a way, as Thompson does. Like Thompson, I went so far as to say I don’t identify as a Buddhist.

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Naturalizing Buddhism and other traditions

31 Sunday May 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Christianity, Death, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Karma, M.T.S.R., Modernized Buddhism, Philosophy of Science, Supernatural

≈ Comments Off on Naturalizing Buddhism and other traditions

Tags

Aristotle, Evan Thompson, rebirth, religion, Rudolf Bultmann

In the previous three posts I aimed to show, contra Evan Thompson’s response, that the philosophical core of the karma doctrine does not have to do with explaining why bad things happen to good people, but rather with how good and bad actions produce good and bad results for the agent. As such, eudaimonic karma is not “incongruent with its traditional meaning and function.” (I also agreed that the fact of bad things happening to good people is a problem for naturalized eudaimonic karma, but discussed attempts to resolve that problem.)

Now let us turn back to the wider argumentative context in which the karma discussion is set. At this point our disagreements may prove smaller than they seem. Thompson, it turns out, does not deny that

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