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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Śāntideva

Honing in on a disagreement

01 Sunday Jan 2023

Posted by Amod Lele in Early and Theravāda, Family, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Monasticism, Morality, Self, Virtue

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

Aristotle, Charles Goodman, Dhammapāda, Peter Singer, Śāntideva, utilitarianism

I wanted to reflect a bit more on my debate with Charles Goodman at Princeton this November. (If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the video of the debate and our handouts.) I don’t think either of us would consider the debate conclusive. Indeed, following the debate, our conversations that afternoon indicated that the issues we were really concerned about lay elsewhere.

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Video debate: “Śāntideva: utilitarian or eudaimonist?”

15 Thursday Dec 2022

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Generosity, Happiness, Karma, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Morality, Supernatural

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Charles Goodman, consequentialism, Evan Thompson, Mozi, Peter Singer, Princeton University, Śāntideva, utilitarianism

This November, Charles Goodman and I had a wonderful debate at Princeton’s Center for Culture, Society and Religion, on the interpretation of Śāntideva’s ethics: Charles claims that Śāntideva is a utilitarian, I claim that he is a eudaimonist. You can now watch the video of the debate on the Center’s website; I hope you enjoy!

Charles and I refer a lot in the debate to the handouts we created; I’m attaching them here.

Lele handoutDownload
Goodman handoutDownload

On courage

26 Sunday Sep 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Courage, Early and Theravāda, Fear, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Psychology

≈ 12 Comments

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Andrea Petersen, Aristotle, Carmen McLean, gender, Harvey Mansfield, Headspace, John Dunne, John Wayne, Pali suttas, Reinhold Niebuhr, Reshma Saujani, Śāntideva, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha), Sober Heretic (blogger)

Courage figures prominently in many lists of the virtues. It is a key example for Aristotle of how virtue is a mean: the courageous person is neither cowardly nor rash, but finds an appropriate middle ground. It is among the three key virtues summed up by the Serenity Prayer, in nearly all of its versions. Yet in the 21st century we can be a little suspicious of it. A blogger called the Sober Heretic thinks the Serenity Prayer is wrong to emphasize courage:

The fact that I need courage to change says a lot about what the prayer thinks change is. What does a person normally need courage for? Marching into battle. Jumping out of an airplane. Giving a speech. Facing a life-threatening disease. Courage is necessary when you’re fighting something: an enemy soldier, a virulent pathogen, your own fear. The need for courage says that change is fundamentally combative.

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The Buddhist oxygen mask

15 Sunday Aug 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Early and Theravāda, Family, Foundations of Ethics, Generosity, Health, Mahāyāna

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Dhammapāda, Ken Wilber, Richard Mahoney, Śāntideva, Treya Killam Wilber

If you are travelling with a child or someone who requires assistance, secure your oxygen mask on first, and then assist the other person.

Anyone who has flown on a commercial airline has heard this instruction; anyone who flies frequently has heard it so often that it becomes background noise, though relatively few of us have ever had the chance to put it into practice. If the plane cabin depressurizes and the oxygen masks drop, one has only seconds before running out of oxygen oneself; if one tries to put the oxygen mask on a child first, hypoxia may inhibit one’s ability to put the mask on the child correctly, to say nothing of the risk to oneself. One can best save both people by attending to oneself first – running against any parent’s natural instinct to protect his own child.

I’m not the first to see this advice as a metaphor for other forms of ethical conduct in relationships: “the oxygen-mask principle”. Often we can take care of others most effectively by taking care of ourselves. What I also see, though, is that this principle is deeply Buddhist.

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Frustration where mind meets world

20 Sunday Jun 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Attachment and Craving, Early and Theravāda, External Goods, Mahāyāna, Patient Endurance, Politics

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Aśvaghoṣa, Disengaged Buddhism, Patrick O'Donnell, Sallie King, Śāntideva

I find myself repeatedly returning to the question I asked earlier this year: “Is the problem in our heads?” That is: for Buddhists, especially classical ones, is the fundamental human problem located in our minds, or in the world? I have found that my thinking on this question has already changed even just since my posts on the topic last month.

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The path corrects the mind

23 Sunday May 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Early and Theravāda, Foundations of Ethics, Generosity, Morality, Politics, Psychology

≈ Comments Off on The path corrects the mind

Tags

Disengaged Buddhism, Engaged Buddhism, Noble Eightfold Path, Pali suttas, Patrick O'Donnell, Śāntideva, Stephen Jenkins

This week I continue my response to Patrick O’Donnell’s comments disputing my claim that in classical Indian Buddhism “the causes of suffering are primarily mental”. The discussion last time was abstract and theoretical, but it has practical consequences – which bring us back to Engaged and Disengaged Buddhism. Patrick has an interesting discussion here which I think is unfortunately confused by terminological problems. He says:

If the problem is in our heads, what about the story of the poisoned arrow? One removes the arrow without inquiring into who shot it, why, etc. Of course we may inquire into such things later, after the fact (the metaphysics and psychology if you will).

The thing is, the Shorter Māluṅkya Sutta’s story of the poisoned arrow is not a warning against seeking an understanding of “metaphysics”, let alone of psychology. The “questions that tend not to edification” in that sutta are largely cosmological questions: about the eternality or finitude of the cosmos, whether a Tathagata exists after death. The unedifying questions are described as “positions that are undeclared, set aside, discarded by the Blessed One” – which psychological questions pretty clearly are not. The craving and ignorance in our heads are the poisoned arrow that we have to get out first, before we can worry about the cosmological questions of who shot it.

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How to reach a colour-blind society

02 Sunday May 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Economics, Politics, Psychology, Unconscious Mind

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

caste, Implicit Association Test, Jawaharlal Nehru, Jay Garfield, Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., Prince Ea, race, Ronald Reagan, Śāntideva, United States

Perhaps the best-known quote from Martin Luther King Jr. is: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” The kind of society that King dreams of in this sentence is often called “colour-blind” – in a meaning referring not literally to the disability, but to skin colour being irrelevant to people’s lives and the way society judges them. Prince Ea’s wonderful “I am not black, you are not white” video, which I cited as an exemplar of qualitative individualism, further expresses the ideal of colour-blindness: race is just a label that diminishes who we really are. For my own qualitative individualist reasons, it is an ideal I endorse.

In recent years, though, the concept of racial colour-blindness has come under attack. And I do believe that one strand of this attack is entirely justified.

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Rejecting Śāntideva’s ethical revaluation

11 Sunday Apr 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Attachment and Craving, External Goods, Family, Flourishing, Mahāyāna, Patient Endurance, Politics, Serenity

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Aśvaghoṣa, Disengaged Buddhism, Engaged Buddhism, Hsiao-Lan Hu, Mahāvaṃsa, puruṣārthas, Sallie King, Śāntideva

The key goal of my dissertation was to understand Śāntideva’s thought as it was and how it could be applied in a contemporary context. Now, for my book, I want to actually apply Śāntideva’s thought, which requires asking where he is right and where he is wrong. And that, it turns out, changes my understanding of some of the dissertation’s key concepts – especially the one in its title.

The dissertation is entitled “Ethical revaluation in the thought of Śāntideva”. In its third chapter, I describe “ethical revaluation” as a consequence of Śāntideva’s ideals of nonattachment (aparigraha) and patient endurance (kṣānti). I explain the idea of ethical revaluation as follows:

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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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Is the eudaimonist proposition true?

27 Sunday Sep 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Death, Epicureanism, External Goods, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Karma, Mahāyāna, Modernized Buddhism, Morality, Philosophy of Science, Pleasure, Stoicism, Supernatural

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

Charles Goodman, Dalai Lama XIV, Evan Thompson, hell, Immanuel Kant, rebirth, Śāntideva

Evan Thompson’s critique of my eudaimonistic and probabilistic approach to karma has two prongs: that it is not really karma, and that it doesn’t work on its own terms. I addressed the first criticism last time. Now I’d like to turn to the second, which I personally find to be the more interesting and important of the two.

Let us start with the word “probabilistic”, which I use in a non-technical way. My eudaimonism is a probabilistic claim (as opposed to a deterministic claim) in the same sense that “brushing your teeth will prevent cavities” or “running into the middle of a busy street will get you run over by a car” are probabilistic claims. That is, we assert that these causal correlations are likely, not certain. In the case of the busy street, I’m not sure we have a detailed statistical model of how likely you are to get run over by a car, but I don’t think we need one. Everyday observation is sufficient to determine that. In the case of virtue and happiness, I’ve mentioned a couple of ways that Śāntideva says one leads to the other, in this life; there is a lot more to say about it, and I intend to say it in my book – not with a statistical model, but again I don’t think that’s necessary. This is what I mean by “probabilistic”. I’m not wedded to that specific word: so far “probabilistic” has seemed the most appropriate word to express the concept in question and I haven’t been convinced that it isn’t, but I wouldn’t mind expressing the concept just described with a different term if a better one is available.

If I read Thompson’s objections on that point correctly, though, I don’t think they are about a statistical model or its absence. Rather, his bigger concern is this: Continue reading →

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