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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Zhuangzi

Finding mysticism in unexpected places

28 Sunday Jul 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Consciousness, Daoism, Epistemology, M.T.S.R., Mahāyāna, Meditation, Serenity

≈ 4 Comments

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Buddhaghosa, Butön, Cloud of Unknowing, Confucius, Dov Baer, Meister Eckhart, mystical experience, Ninian Smart, perennialism, phenomenology, Śāntideva, Tāranātha, Tibet, Victor Mair, Yoga Sūtras, Zhuangzi

When I was in grad school, a big academic fashion was to heap scorn on the idea that mystical experience could be something cross-cultural: everything was reducible to social context, and the similarities of experience didn’t really matter, as I had once argued myself. But the roots of that idea were often more asserted than argued: the famous article by Steven Katz, which inaugurated the approach, didn’t bother to justify its assumption that “There are NO pure (unmediated) experiences“, assuming perhaps that italics and capital letters were the only support necessary.

A little while ago I noted how Robert Forman’s collection of essays illustrate “cool” mystical experiences, where distinctions of senses and self drop away and the mind ceases to fluctuate, in sources as varied as the Indian Yoga Sūtras, the Ukrainian Hasidic Dov Baer and the German mystic Meister Eckhart. Something similar seems to be going on in the Sri Lankan systematizer Buddhaghosa and the medieval English Cloud of Unknowing, which both involve, in Ninan Smart’s terms, a “systematic effort to blot out sense perception, memories, and imaginings of the world of our sensory environment and of corresponding inner states.” And it turns out that once your mind is no longer prejudged to deny any cross-cultural similarity, you start noticing it in a lot of other places.

Continue reading →

George Grant, Daoist

21 Sunday Jul 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Action, Daoism, Flourishing, Metaphysics, Protestantism, Serenity

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Canada, Chris Fraser, George Grant, Martin Heidegger, Martin Luther, modernity, natural environment, Robert Meynell, Robert Sibley, Zhuangzi

I think George Grant is in many respects a Daoist. I don’t think he thought of himself as a Daoist. But key parts of his viewpoint seem very Daoist to me.

For those who don’t know Grant: he was a 20th-century Canadian philosopher best known for his Lament for a Nation, a book which claimed that the idea of Canada was to remain an outpost of the British Empire in North America, and thereby resist the influence of the United States – an idea which he thought had been lost. (In those ideas he was taking cues from John Watson, in the stream of Canadian Hegelianism.) I have little love for that view of Canada, so it’s not my favourite part of Grant’s thought. But there’s a lot more to Grant that I find much more exciting.

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On f***ing Daoism

22 Sunday Oct 2023

Posted by Amod Lele in Action, Anger, Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, Family, Health, Meditation, Practice, Psychology, Virtue

≈ 6 Comments

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autobiography, cancer, insomnia, Laozi, Martha Nussbaum, Martin Broadwell, Nancy Houfek, Ted Slingerland, Zhu Xi, Zhuangzi

In previous years I have aimed to provide what are now known as content warnings when my posts contained swear or curse words. But just in the years since LoAW began, English swear words have undergone a striking shift; the formerly shocking F-word has become relatively unremarkable, while a six-letter derogatory term for black people is now regarded with horror. In keeping with the likely shift in audience expectations, in future posts I will be warning only about the new crop of swear words rather than the old. I use this post as an occasion to make this transition because the F-word appears in it quite frequently, as the title indicates. That title is probably the last time I will mark that word with asterisks; the word is uncensored in the text.

My wife’s previous round of cancer treatment, in 2015, was one of the most difficult periods in my life. Near the beginning of it I started describing myself as a Buddhist, based on a mere passing question in her hospital survey. But by the end I had become a practising Buddhist, having derived a great deal of support and comfort from Buddhism and its practices.

In the middle, though, I was still experimenting with a variety of ideas and practices from different traditions. The Neo-Confucian Zhu Xi reminded me of the spiritual benefit of practising scriptural reading, and I turned to multiple traditions for help in that regard. Buddhism proved the most valuable by the end, after a long period of learning from other traditions. Among these, I had a particularly powerful reaction to Daoism – perhaps I should say, against Daoism.

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No opposite for the ultimate

28 Sunday Mar 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Christianity, Daoism, Deity, Indigenous American Thought, Metaphysics, Truth, Vedānta

≈ 13 Comments

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Advaita Vedānta, Augustine, Aztec, G.W.F. Hegel, Hebrew Bible, James Maffie, Krishna, Kyoto School, Laozi, Nishida Kitarō, Nishitani Keiji, nondualism, Śaṅkara, Satan, theodicy, Zhuangzi

I have considerable sympathies for nondualism and have started in recent years to think that it might be true. But there is an important qualifier to any such view. Namely: I do not think that there could possibly be an omnipotent omnibenevolent God. The problem of suffering is just too intractable.

Many nondualists, especially Sufis, would identify the nondual ultimate with that God. And I cannot accept that view. For similar reasons I am skeptical of a Vedānta view where the ultimate is sat: both being and goodness. There is too much being that is not good.

For this reason I have been inspired by a wonderful passage in Nishida Kitarō’s “The logic of nothingness and the religious worldview”:

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The wisdom of serenity

27 Sunday Oct 2019

Posted by Amod Lele in Courage, Daoism, Metaphysics, Politics, Prayer, Protestantism, Serenity

≈ 2 Comments

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12-step programs, Augustine, Chan/Zen 禪, Edward (Ted) Slingerland, Laozi, Reinhold Niebuhr, Thich Quang Duc, Zhuangzi

There are probably few people in the English-speaking world unfamiliar with the Serenity Prayer. In its best-known form this prayer asks: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” The prayer was created by Reinhold Niebuhr, a mid-20th-century American Christian theologian who was possibly the biggest influence on Martin Luther King. It has spread into widespread usage through its adoption by twelve-step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous. Because of its ubiquity, I think, it is sometimes regarded as a sort of vacuous and vapid New Age pablum. I do not think that it should be. Continue reading →

Roots of a project on method

19 Sunday Aug 2018

Posted by Amod Lele in Buddhism, Dialectic, Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Science

≈ 4 Comments

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ACLA, Alasdair MacIntyre, autobiography, G.W.F. Hegel, Imre Lakatos, Momin Malik, perennialism, relativism, Thomas Kuhn, Zhuangzi

How should one do philosophy across cultures? This is not an easy question, though too many people treat it as if it is. Mid-twentieth-century answers leaned to a perennialism like Ken Wilber’s, where at some deep level all the traditions are basically the same. That perennialism does not stand up to critical scrutiny: philosophical traditions are quite different from each other, and disagree with each other (and within each other) on crucial points.

But once one acknowledges those differences, one is still left trying to figure out what to do with them. It will not do to take one’s starting standard as given and judge everything that one encounters according to it – an approach characteristic of analytic philosophers, but also taken by Martha Nussbaum in Upheavals of Thought. Once one does that, there is scarcely much point left to thinking cross-culturally at all, for one already knows the answers. Given human finitude and fallibility, such confidence seems more like gross arrogance. But no better is the converse approach – typically labelled relativist – which views all the different traditions as equally right. Such an approach is a logical absurdity, since very few traditions themselves hold such a view: by declaring them right it declares them wrong.

What approach then should one take? Continue reading →

Reading the Zhuangzi as a composite text

09 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by Amod Lele in Confucianism, Daoism, Hermeneutics, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy

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Chris Fraser, Guo Xiang, Harold Roth, Thomas Kuhn, Zhuangzi

This week’s post follows the previous one and should be taken in the same light: namely, that while my views expressed in it have developed in response to a thoughtful and valuable exchange between me and Chris Fraser, it should not be taken to imply any views on Fraser’s part that are not already expressed in his published works.

I have long noted how for a philosopher, the most productive way to examine a text from another time is to examine the mind behind that text – so that one can follow Thomas Kuhn’s advice to “ask yourself how a sensible person could have written” that text with all of its apparent absurdities. This approach runs into trouble with composite texts, which are not the work of a single author. In thinking about the composite work attributed to Śāntideva, I had found it quite satisfactory to instead identify a single redactor. Last time, however, I noted how such an approach may be problematic for a text like the Zhuangzi, where the redactor of the edition known to us, namely the commentator Guo Xiang, has a Confucian agenda that appears to be at odds with some of the statements in the text itself.

But if that’s so, the next question is: what then is the best approach to take, as philosophers and not just philologists, to a composite text like the Zhuangzi? Continue reading →

Philological and philosophical approaches to the Zhuangzi

26 Sunday Oct 2014

Posted by Amod Lele in Daoism, Hermeneutics, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy

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A.C. Graham, Alexander Nehamas, Chris Fraser, Guo Xiang, Harold Roth, Śāntideva, Thomas Kuhn, Zhuangzi

Last year, I made several posts criticizing Chris Fraser‘s interpretation of the Zhuangzi, supported by a previous post on interpretive method. Fraser was kind enough to reply at length to my posts by email, for which I am very grateful, and his replies have provoked my own thoughts further. I have not received his express permission to quote my exchange with him, however, so what follows should not be taken to imply any views or lack thereof on his part – beyond what is in his published papers. Rather, it should be taken solely as a description of how my own views on related subjects have developed and evolved.

Where my views have shifted above all is on the question of how one may best interpret a text – and especially a composite text. The approach I previously outlined for approaching such a text stems from my dissertation on Śāntideva. While it may well be that the works we now associate with Śāntideva are the product of multiple authors, it seemed to me that we can plausibly use the name “Śāntideva” to name the redactor who put them together in the forms we now know through the tradition. I still believe that to be the case. I am, however, far less confident now that that approach can be generalized to other composite texts – most notably the Zhuangzi itself. Is it appropriate to describe that text as the work of an author (or redactor) named Zhuangzi? Continue reading →

How a sensible person could hold the radical Zhuangist view

09 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by Amod Lele in Action, Daoism, Flourishing, Hermeneutics, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy, Serenity, Unconscious Mind

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Chris Fraser, Śāntideva, Thomas Kuhn, Zhuangzi

Last week I critiqued Chris Fraser‘s readiness to discard the “implausible, unappealing radical” view that he found in the Zhuangzi. My reflections there were general and methodological. Here I want to plunge into the details and see what might happen if we read the Zhuangzi in the way that I recommended there, rather than the way that Fraser takes in his article.

Let me be clear that what follows is the work of a rank beginner in the study of Daoism. Indeed, most of what I know of the Zhuangzi comes from Fraser himself. So I acknowledge that my attempted interpretation here may be totally wrong. But just based on the passages Fraser himself translates, I find it a more satisfying interpretation than the one that Fraser takes. Continue reading →

The appeal of the unappealing

02 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by Amod Lele in Daoism, Hermeneutics, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Chris Fraser, Thomas Kuhn, Zhuangzi

As I noted last week, I owe a real intellectual debt to Chris Fraser‘s work for helping me figure out Zhuangzi – or the Zhuangzi, as Fraser would say. His interpretations have been of incredible value to me in understanding this very difficult thinker (or text, if you prefer). I have my difficulties with him, though, when it comes to methods of constructive application – of trying to apply Zhuangist philosophy to our contemporary context. Continue reading →

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