Tag Archives: Śāntideva

Snakes wrongly grasped: on the psychedelic experiences of Musk and Manson

28 Sunday Sep 2025

Posted by in Certainty and Doubt, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Humility, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Self

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

If Nāgārjuna, the great Madhyamaka Buddhist philosopher, is known for anything, it’s his doctrine of the emptiness (śūnyatā) of all things. But in his most famous work, Nāgārjuna warns his audience about emptiness: “Misperceived emptiness ruins a person of dull intelligence, like a snake wrongly grasped.” (MMK XXIV.11) If you know how to pick up a poisonous snake properly, you can move it to a place where it will do less harm, or even milk it to help produce an antidote. But if you don’t, then trying to grasp it will get you bitten and maybe killed. Likewise, if you perceive emptiness wrongly, that’s worse than not perceiving it at all.

If you’re going to try this, you’d better know what you’re doing. Adobe Stock image copyright by kampwit.
Continue reading →

Canadian psychedelic podcast interview

22 Monday Sep 2025

Posted by in Consciousness, Daoism, Deity, Early and Theravāda, Indigenous American Thought, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Metaphysics, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Psychology, Roman Catholicism, Self, Supernatural, Vedānta

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Following up my talk on psychedelics and mysticism, Osheen Dayal of the Canadian branch of MAPS just interviewed me on the same subject for their video podcast. In the interview we talk about a wide range of subjects from my personal Buddhist story through St. Teresa’s angel to Elon Musk. Have a look!

Where Buddhists agree on metaphysics

24 Sunday Aug 2025

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Self, Truth

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

Buddhists have never agreed on an overall metaphysics. They have long agreed that prajñā – accurately seeing things according to the ultimate truth – is hugely important, but they differ greatly on what that ultimate truth is. The Theravāda Abhidhamma view says everything is ultimately reducible to smaller parts; the Madhyamaka says it’s ultimately just emptiness; the Yogācāra says it’s all mind; Chinese Huayan and Tiantai views have their own trippy takes.

It recently hit me, though, that there’s actually a huge point of metaphysical agreement among all the Buddhist schools: huge enough to mean that this disagreement about the ultimate isn’t what matters most to them. And that’s on the point I discussed last time: namely that what really matters in Buddhist metaphysics isn’t so much the nature of the ultimate. Rather, it’s breaking down the conventional!

Continue reading →

Seeing through conventional reality

17 Sunday Aug 2025

Posted by in Attachment and Craving, Christianity, Deity, Foundations of Ethics, Islam, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Truth

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

While Buddhist schools have many different takes on metaphysics – on what the world really is – they all acknowledge a distinction between two truths, or two levels of reality. That is: there is a conventional truth, the one familiar to us in everyday life where we can fruitfully speak of individual selves or persons and other everyday objects – and another, more ultimate (paramārtha) truth that is distinguished in some respect from the conventional, truer than the conventional. Their widely varying metaphysics mostly have to do with how we understand the ultimate truth, and I’ll talk about that more next week. I want to start this time, though, I want to note a key point that the metaphysical schools share: the importance of breaking down the conventional – or, put another way, of seeing through it.

Continue reading →

Philosophy as psychedelic practice

15 Sunday Jun 2025

Posted by in Certainty and Doubt, Epistemology, French Tradition, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Practice, Self, Serenity

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

David J. Blacker’s recent Deeper Learning with Psychedelics is a valuable attempt to think through the implications of psychedelics for philosophy and education. One passage in particular caught my imagination: Blacker points out the similarities between a psychedelic experience and René Descartes’s passage of radical doubt.

Continue reading →

The secret of mindfulness meditation

09 Sunday Mar 2025

Posted by in Emotion, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Psychology

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

, , ,

One of the things that really surprises me about contemporary mindfulness meditation is how rarely – especially at the beginning – they highlight what, as far as I can tell, is the most beneficial aspect of the practice. It’s not a “secret” in the sense of being concealed away somewhere, just that beginners are rarely told how important it is; I more or less had to figure it out for myself. This holds true for the practices I’m most familiar with – Headspace, Robert Sokolove’s medical mindfulness recording, Goenka vipassanā – but also seems to hold for other forms of modern mindfulness that I’ve listened to recordings of. Because of this, I think it’s easy for a beginner to misinterpret what mindfulness meditation is about.

Headspace’s meditation instructions usually involve focusing your attention on your breath – its inward and outward movement, the way your chest and stomach rise and fall with the breath. (Sokolove’s likewise.) Goenka vipassanā puts more emphasis on repeatedly scanning your attention up and down through your body. But it’s become clear to me that that focus, on the breath or the bodily sensations, is not the point of any of these exercises.

Continue reading →

Sketching an existentialist Buddhism

22 Sunday Dec 2024

Posted by in Foundations of Ethics, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Modernized Buddhism, Physics and Astronomy, Self

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

, , , , , ,

If we take a modern Buddhist approach where the ultimate reality is emptiness, what then does that look like in practice? Especially as we think about the key question:how can you be yourself if there is no self?

In thinking through my Buddhism, I had once turned to a reductionist “Sellarsian solution” because it allows in some sense for selves as conventional (rather than ultimate) truth. I’ve now moved instead to a Buddhist view that is based on emptiness rather than reductionism – and, crucially, the emptiness view allows selves in that conventional sense too. For that reason, I think an emptiness-based approach may still be able to leave room for an expressive individualism, where we seek to be ourselves more fully.

Continue reading →

The physics of emptiness

15 Sunday Dec 2024

Posted by in Consciousness, Early and Theravāda, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Modernized Buddhism, Physics and Astronomy

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

How can we reconcile Buddhism with expressive individualism (“be yourself”) and with natural science? When I had previously turned to Wilfrid Sellars for help on this question, I had compared Sellars’s view to two Buddhist metaphysical positions on ultimate truth, which are quite different from each other. One of these was Buddhaghosa’s view that ultimate truth is reductionist, and I no longer find that comparison helpful. But I also turned to Śāntideva’s view that the ultimate is normatively inert, with no good or bad involved. Śāntideva’s view rejects Buddhaghosa’s in some very important ways – and I think that philosophically his metaphysics is considerably more powerful.

That’s a big deal for me because, having come to my Buddhism in Thailand, I have generally viewed myself as a Theravādin like Buddhaghosa. I’ve been skeptical of the most famous piece of Śāntideva’s metaphysics, his ethical deconstruction of self and other in chapter VIII of the Bodhicaryāvatāra. I’m not convinced by his or any other argument for a universal impartial altruism – a key Mahāyāna doctrine. Yet I do now find myself moving closer to a Mahāyāna or at least Madhyamaka view, because of a different aspect of Śāntideva’s metaphysics: the metaphysics of emptiness in chapter IX, which I think are considerably deeper.

Continue reading →

Happiness from politics, or, mourning in America (again)

10 Sunday Nov 2024

Posted by in Anger, Attachment and Craving, Compassion, Despair, Gratitude, Grief, Happiness, Mahāyāna, Patient Endurance, Politics, Serenity

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

This is the first time I’ve ever reposted an old Love of All Wisdom post, because, despite its being nearly twenty years old now, I think it’s timelier than ever.

I first posted the following piece in 2016 when Trump won the first time – but I wrote it in 2005, after George W. Bush won the second time. I had been furious at Bush’s endorsement of torture and devastation of the climate throughout his first term I had been able to comfort myself with the thought that he didn’t really win: after all, even leaving aside all the voting irregularities, his opponent had also got more votes than he did. But in 2004 no such comfort was available to me; that disaster of a president had won a decisive victory including even the popular vote, and I had to find some way of coming to terms with the awful world he was going to keep building. I wrote this piece in my personal journal, for myself, and I have kept its original stream-of-consciousness style, reflecting my raw thought process as I processed.

Continue reading →

Improving on the Buddha

03 Sunday Nov 2024

Posted by in Attachment and Craving, Death, Disgust, Early and Theravāda, Faith, Foundations of Ethics, Hermeneutics, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modernized Buddhism

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart is a beautiful and valuable work on dealing with difficult circumstances. What strikes me in it is how Chödrön – despite being a monk herself – takes a position so deeply at odds with traditional Indian Buddhism.

Chödrön refers to the traditional Buddhist “three marks” (tilakkhaṇa or trilakṣaṇa) of existence: everything is impermanent, suffering, and non-self. This idea goes back to very early texts. But Chödrön does with it is something quite different from the earlier idea:

Even though they accurately describe the rock-bottom qualities of our existence, these words sound threatening. It’s easy to get the idea that there is something wrong with impermanence, suffering, and egolessness, which is like thinking that there is something wrong with our fundamental situation. But there’s nothing wrong with impermanence, suffering, and egolessness; they can be celebrated. Our fundamental situation is joyful. (59)

Here’s the problem with this passage: the classical Indian Buddhist texts are quite clear that in fact there is something wrong with our fundamental situation. She is disagreeing with them, whether or not she acknowledges it.

Continue reading →