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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Theosophy

Mystical experience across cultures

06 Sunday Nov 2022

Posted by Amod Lele in Epistemology, M.T.S.R., Prejudices and "Intuitions"

≈ 20 Comments

Tags

Bhagavad Gītā, Dov Baer, drugs, Meister Eckhart, mystical experience, nondualism, perennialism, phenomenology, Robert Forman, Robert M. Gimello, Roland Griffiths, Steven Katz, Teresa of Ávila, Theosophy, W.T. Stace, Yoga Sūtras

There are likely a number of religious-studies scholars who would cringe and groan at Roland Griffiths’s studies of drug-induced mystical experience. I haven’t gone into their literature in a while, but I think it would be easy for them to say Griffiths is setting the study of mysticism back many decades. Because Griffiths’s stated conception of mystical experience is one that many religionists would already have considered very dated – even when I was studying them twenty years ago.

I say this because Griffiths’s first groundbreaking study, in indicating that many psilocybin volunteers had mystical experiences, measures mystical experience using a questionnaire based on W.T. Stace‘s Mysticism and Philosophy, published in 1960. And when I was in grad school twenty years ago, Stace’s work was often considered impossibly backward.

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The double standard of misinterpretation

31 Sunday Aug 2014

Posted by Amod Lele in Hermeneutics, M.T.S.R., Modern Hinduism, Modernized Buddhism, Vedas and Mīmāṃsā

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Annie Besant, authenticity, Herman Tull, Max Müller, Sāyaṇa, Theosophy, Vedas

I have recently welcomed the corrective force of books like Andrew Nicholson’s Unifying Hinduism, which remind us that modern appropriations of Indian tradition have their own continuity with the evolving past tradition. I now find myself regularly reminded just how much such a corrective is needed. I have noted plenty of examples before, as with respect to Gregory Schopen and Donald Lopez. But I recently found perhaps the most striking example in the works of the contemporary Sanskrit scholar Herman Tull. Continue reading →

Translating puṇya and pāpa

01 Sunday Apr 2012

Posted by Amod Lele in Early and Theravāda, Karma, M.T.S.R., Mahāyāna, Roman Catholicism

≈ 27 Comments

Tags

Barbra Clayton, Gregory Schopen, Harvard University, Jonathan Z. Smith, Peter Harvey, Theosophy

Classical Indian Buddhist texts rely a great deal on two concepts: puṇya (Pali puñña) and pāpa. The former is good, something to pursue; the latter is bad, something to avoid. They have something to do with our actions and their results: punya comes out of our good actions and brings good results for us, pāpa comes out of our bad actions and brings bad results. We find these concepts all over the place in pretty much any Indian Buddhist text we might pick up. Next week I’ll explore in more detail what they are and how we might best think about them. This week I want to start with something more basic: how should we translate them into English? Absolutely not, I would argue, with the two words that Buddhism scholars most commonly use for them: namely “merit” and “sin” respectively. Continue reading →

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