Tag Archives: Tiantai 天台

Sudden and gradual together

03 Sunday Dec 2023

Posted by in East Asia, Emotion, Mahāyāna, Mindfulness, Practice, Therapy, Virtue

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , ,

The past few years have taught me the wisdom in Daoist-influenced traditions of sudden liberation: in a certain way we can improve ourselves by not improving ourselves, through an acceptance of everything, including ourselves, in the present moment. Yet I had had good reason to be frustrated earlier with such traditions – for their rhetoric sometimes implies that that present-moment acceptance is easy, which it is not. It was a long and painful lesson for me learning how hard it is to be good. That made me a longtime advocate of what East Asian Buddhists would call the gradual path, but I increasingly also see the wisdom in its converse, the sudden. Can the two be reconciled?

Continue reading →

In praise of the present moment

19 Sunday Nov 2023

Posted by in Anger, Daoism, East Asia, Flourishing, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Serenity

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

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

One of the things that helped me realize the need for self-improvement by not-self-improvement was regular practice with the excellent Headspace meditation app, created by a former Tibetan monk named Andy Puddicombe. Headspace is at the epicenter of “McMindfulness”: the app normally charges for access but I get it for free as a work wellness benefit, and this arrangement has made Puddicombe millions of dollars. In turn, the app is a big reason I defend McMindfulness – especially through John Dunne’s hugely helpful distinction between “classical” and “nondual” mindfulness.

That is to say: the core practice in Headspace is noticing your emotions, positive and negative, as they arise, and reacting to them with nonjudgemental acceptance. And you do so, yes, in the present moment. Critics like Ron Purser correctly note that that present-moment focus is not found in classical Indian texts like the Pali suttas or Śāntideva – but Dunne notes that it is found in other premodern Buddhist traditions, like the Tibetan writings of Wangchuk Dorje. And I dare say that that present-moment technique is an improvement: one that does a better job than the classical tradition’s techniques at their shared goal of reducing our suffering.

Continue reading →

Acknowledging newness

02 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, M.T.S.R., Modernized Buddhism, Natural Science

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

, , , , , ,

Readers may have noticed my expressing a certain ambiguity with respect to the new Buddhist movements I call Yavanayāna. I have often defended their value as legitimate traditions in their own right, but I have also repeatedly criticized them for their political activism, their embrace of “interdependence”, their reluctance to admit the significance of sectarian differences. Moreover, my ground for criticism in these cases is that they misrepresent traditional and especially early Buddhism. Some readers might well wonder whether there is a problem here: whether I am criticizing their innovation only when it is convenient to do so, which is to say only when I agree with it.

In response I would stress that I am not against innovation as such. Continue reading →

Mou Zongsan’s theories across cultures

05 Sunday Jun 2011

Posted by in Confucianism, Deity, East Asia, Judaism, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Sufism, Vedānta

≈ 38 Comments

Tags

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

I have recently taken on a position as interviewer for the New Books Network, an exciting new project to hold podcast interviews with the authors of recently published scholarly books. I will be interviewing for New Books in Buddhist Studies, a position I share with Scott Mitchell. I’ve completed a first podcast which is not yet available online, but I’ll let you know when it is.

I mention this now because that first podcast is with Jason Clower on his The Unlikely Buddhologist, the study I recently mentioned of 20th-century Confucian Mou Zongsan. The podcast is there to explore Clower’s ideas; here I’d like to add my own.

The book asks why Mou, a committed Confucian, spent a great deal of time thinking and writing about Buddhism. Its answer is that Mou found East Asian Buddhists expressing metaphysical distinctions with a clarity that the Confucians had not. Mou is deeply concerned with the metaphysics of value – specifically, the relationship between ultimate value and existing things. One might refer to this as the relationship between goodness and truth, or between God and world, even creator and creation. Continue reading →

On the genealogy of “Buddhism and science”

29 Sunday May 2011

Posted by in Buddhism, East Asia, French Tradition, German Tradition, M.T.S.R., Modernized Buddhism, Natural Science

≈ 28 Comments

Tags

, , , , ,

The most recent book from Donald S. Lopez, Jr., one of the most widely read contemporary American scholars of Buddhism, is entitled Buddhism and Science. Unlike most books with this title, it does not explore similarities or complementarities between Buddhist tradition and the natural sciences. It is instead best described by Lopez’s original intended subtitle: A Historical Critique. Alas, Lopez’s publishers apparently thought this subtitle boring, and therefore required him to replace it; his chosen replacement, A Guide for the Perplexed, is not particularly exciting either, and more importantly makes it impossible for the casual reader to find out the ways that this book is drastically different from all the other books out there with the same title.

I am not here to write about dreadful editorial decisions, however, but rather the content of the book. Lopez undertakes what has become one of the most standard methodologies in the contemporary academic humanities: following Foucault and ultimately Nietzsche, it is typically known as genealogy. One starts with a widely used contemporary concept and goes on to show the history of its usage, in order to create doubts among those who might otherwise use it. This has already been done plenty of times both for the concepts of “Buddhism” and of “science”; Lopez’s project here is instead a genealogy of the joint concept of “Buddhism and science,” the frequent form of inquiry that tries to link the two conceptually or analytically. As is typical for contemporary genealogies ever since Edward Said (though not for Foucault’s own and certainly not Nietzsche’s), Lopez finds the origins of “Buddhism and science” in the colonial nineteenth century. He shows us that claims about Buddhism’s compatibility with science remain remarkably consistent from the late 19th century to the early 21st, even though the science itself has changed drastically.

Now what is the purpose of showing us this point? From Nietzsche onward, the genealogical method has never been neutral. The point has always been to undermine. Lopez doesn’t like “Buddhism and science” any more than Nietzsche liked morality. Continue reading →

Yavanayāna Buddhism: a defence

16 Thursday Jul 2009

Posted by in Buddhism, East Asia, M.T.S.R., Mahāyāna, Modernized Buddhism

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

, , , , , ,

In my last post I spoke of Yavanayāna Buddhism, the new modernized, Western-influenced Buddhism (including Engaged Buddhism) that focuses on meditation and denies the supernatural. Many contemporary Buddhologists look at Yavanayāna with barely concealed disdain. Donald López’s article on belief in the volume Critical Terms for Religious Studies, for example, is a prolonged sneer toward the views of Henry Steel Olcott, the nineteenth-century reformer who made much of Sri Lankan Buddhism what it is today.

I’ve heard several fellow academics look at a Buddhism like Olcott’s or Walpola Rahula’s or even S.N. Goenka’s and snort “That’s not Buddhism!” And certainly, as noted, Yavanayāna Buddhism turns out quite different from what the Buddha actually taught. But few of these same academics are willing to turn around and say about East Asian Buddhism: that is not Buddhism. And yet, I would argue, East Asian Buddhist tradition has (at least at times) gone even further than North American Buddhism from anything that could be identified as the Buddha’s teaching. It’s not just Mahāyāna that I’m concerned about here; Mahāyāna Buddhism as such has its origins in the j?taka stories of the Buddha’s previous lives, which are some of the oldest Buddhist texts we know of. Rather, I think of doctrines like the Tiantai view that material things have a permanent and enduring nature – contradicting not only the classical Buddhist metaphysical view of non-self and non-essence, but also its ethical implications that material things are not worthy of our pursuit. If we’re willing to grant that Tiantai is legitimately Buddhist, I would argue, we cannot but do the same for Yavanayāna.

East Asian Buddhism is often seen as an “authentic” Buddhism in a way that Yavanayāna is not. But I’ve already posted my misgivings about the concept of authenticity. East Asian Buddhism seems authentic because people now are born into it, rather than choosing to join it as they do with Goenka; but we value what isn’t chosen because that’s what modern capitalism makes scarce. It doesn’t necessarily mean that that “authentic” Buddhism is a better path to follow; indeed, a certain romanticism may mislead us into thinking that nothing modern can possibly be good.