Coming to like modern India

03 Sunday Feb 2013

Posted by in Aesthetics, Family, Food, Modern Hinduism, Place, Pleasure, Rites

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This post will be a little less philosophical, strictly speaking at least, than is usual here. Readers have found my autobiographical explorations interesting in the past, and I hope this will be similarly so.

I recently returned from India, to have a traditional Indian wedding ceremony. (I’ve been married for two and a half years, but my Indian friends and relatives could not attend that ceremony, nor did it have Indian gods presiding over it.) It’s an unfortunate irony that I have been able to get to India much less frequently ever since I started studying it. My previous trip was at the beginning of 2005; it had been eight years between that trip and the one I just returned from, whereas in my childhood the years between trips were no more than three. And I’m very glad to have had this trip, for it made quite a different impression on me from the previous ones. Continue reading →

Indian intimacy

27 Sunday Jan 2013

Posted by in Confucianism, Early and Theravāda, Family, Jainism, Modern Hinduism, Monasticism, Rites, Social Science

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I’m back from a trip to see my family in India, and have an Indian wedding ceremony. It was wonderful to see everyone there, and it also got me thinking.

When I wrote recently about my Indian background, I put some emphasis on how having an Indian background could be misleading in trying to understand Indian philosophy. It had taken me longer to see that Indian philosophy has an integrity orientation because after living in modern India, I’d spent a long time thinking of India as having an intimacy orientation.

But in my excitement over that realization, I think I’d forgotten that I’d held an intimacy view of India for a reason. Continue reading →

Buddhists and “Hindus” against traditional family values

16 Sunday Dec 2012

Posted by in Christianity, Early and Theravāda, East Asia, Family, Jainism, Mahāyāna, Monasticism, Social Science, South Asia

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A while ago I wrote about how Indian traditions upset conventional assumptions about family and community being essential to premodern tradition and culture. There, I was responding to a piece by Patrick Deneen, which drew only on Western traditions. As a result, Deneen’s piece had a narrowness of focus, but within that focus it was able to attain some accuracy. Not so for a recent report by urban geographer Joel Kotkin, entitled The Rise of Post-Familialism. Continue reading →

Pro-choice humility

09 Sunday Dec 2012

Posted by in Certainty and Doubt, Humility, Morality, Politics, Roman Catholicism

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A little while ago on Skholiast’s blog, Elisa Freschi pointed to an argument from Nicholas Shackel attacking the “pro-choice” position on abortion. Shackel objects deeply to the following claim from the US’s newly elected Catholic vice-president, Joe Biden:

I accept my church’s position on abortion…. Life begins at conception. That’s the church’s judgment. I accept it in my personal life. But I refuse to impose it on equally devout Christians and Muslims and Jews…I just refuse to impose that on others.

As Shackel notes, such a position is hardly unique to Biden. Forms of this position are very common; in many Western countries, they may even be the most common. It is the position one could reasonably call “anti-abortion but pro-choice”. And as far as Shackel is concerned, such a position is ignorant or worse. Continue reading →

Indian heritage?

02 Sunday Dec 2012

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, South Asia

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As my doctoral studies were in Indian philosophy and my ethnic background is part Indian, I was often asked whether my studies had to do with exploring my own heritage. The answer is basically no.

As I noted in telling my story, I came to the study of Asian philosophy through Thai Buddhism, which is not at all part of my ethnic background. I learned Sanskrit and Pali because it seemed to me that most of what was philosophically interesting in Thai Buddhism had come from its Indian heritage – even though Buddhism in India had all but died out.

If I ever thought my heritage would play a major role in the process, such thoughts stopped in my first-year Sanskrit class. My teacher, Stephanie Jamison, was explaining the rules of caste in traditional dharmaśāstra (ethical-legal texts), and how the brahmins were the ones expected to do all the thinking. I wondered whether I counted as a brahmin by this standard, so I asked: how would they count the offspring of a brahmin and an outsider, a yavana?

She answered: caste mixing is always viewed as an evil, so the offspring of any mix would be counted as the lower of the two – at the very best. In other words, according to the Laws of Manu, I’m a white boy. (If not an outright abomination.) Continue reading →

Mimicry, mockery or mumukṣutva? A response to Deepak Sarma, by Jeffery D. Long

27 Tuesday Nov 2012

Posted by in Karma, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modern Hinduism, Truth, Vedānta

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This is the first time I have featured a guest post on Love of All Wisdom. Jeffery Long, a professor of religion and Asian studies at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, sent me this response after I had written my own piece on the topic. I disagree with a few of Jeff’s ideas, most notably the free employment of the term “Hindu”, but some disagreement is always to be expected among philosophers and humanists. I thought the piece merited prompt online publication and I found it to be in broad sympathy with the aims of this blog, so I am presenting it to readers here. I haven’t configured the site to allow others to add content, for the moment at least, so the “official” byline currently lists me as the author. But readers should be clear that this is Jeff’s work, not mine, and all credit and copyright belong to him. Enjoy. – Amod Lele

The first thing a respondent to Deepak Sarma’s essay, “White Hindu Converts: Mimicry or Mockery?”, needs to do is acknowledge the essential core of experiential truth and the genuine pain at its heart.  Racism against brown-skinned persons is real and pervasive in North America.  Being married now for over seventeen years to a Bengali, I cannot help but be aware of it.  Sometimes this racism is overt and brutal, as in the case when, shortly after 9/11, a fellow customer at a gas station pointed to my wife and asked aggressively, “Is she from Afghanistan?”  At other times it is more subtle, and perhaps even unknown to its perpetrators, such as when my wife speaks in a faculty meeting at the college where we both work only to have her words met with blank stares and confusion, while I later make basically the same comment and am told what a brilliant and insightful observation I have made. Continue reading →

In defence of White Hindu Converts

24 Saturday Nov 2012

Posted by in Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modern Hinduism, Politics

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[I wasn’t planning to update this week, but I wanted to post this while it was still topical.]

I have not had as much time as I would like to read Deepak Sarma‘s work in Indian philosophy. It intrigues me, and what little I have seen so far seems to be well researched and well thought out. I hope to be more involved with it in the future.

My reaction was considerably less favourable when I saw a recent short blog post of Sarma’s at the Huffington Post. (I found out about it through the RISA-L mailing list, and there has already been some discussion of the post there.) Sarma expresses discomfort with “White Hindu Converts”, those white Americans who claim to have “converted to Hinduism”. I agree that such a claim can be problematic, given that the recent term “Hinduism” typically covers such a wide and disparate range of meanings, and the concept of “conversion” does not adequately cover much of what happens in Indian traditions (where Muslims offer prayers to revered “Hindu” sites and vice versa). But Sarma’s post goes considerably further than this. Continue reading →

Freedom of choice: a classical defence

18 Sunday Nov 2012

Posted by in Confucianism, Human Nature, Politics

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“Freedom” is among the most central concepts in our political vocabulary. I think it is deservedly so. But it’s also a concept with a notoriously large number of meanings. Libertarians identify freedom simply with the absence of state coercion; by contrast, the most widely used Sanskrit term with an equivalence to freedom is probably mokṣa, liberation from the suffering of worldly existence. And the most common use of “freedom” today is something different again: the ability to make unrestricted choices, to decide for oneself what one will do.

Freedom in this sense of choice played a fairly limited role in premodern political thought, and I think this is because the ancients understood its limitations. Continue reading →

Of transcendence

11 Sunday Nov 2012

Posted by in Christianity, Deity, Flourishing, Politics

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Last time I discussed the relationship between the concepts of Ascent and of transcendence. I think there’s more to say about the latter. Last time I had noted two forms of transcendence: an Ascent beyond the physical world, and the “transcendence by descent” endorsed by Martha Nussbaum in which one transcends one’s own limits. But I think there’s also a third type found between them, one which I’ve spoken of before in other terms.

A key feature of any kind of transcendence, it seems to me, is dissatisfaction: something appears wrong with that which one is trying to transcend. In Nussbaum’s transcendence-by-descent, one is dissatisfied with one’s own weaknesses and flaws. In an Ascent, one is in some sense dissatisfied with the whole world. But what if one is dissatisfied with the whole world in a way that motivates one not to step outside the world, but to change it? Continue reading →

The supernatural without Ascent

04 Sunday Nov 2012

Posted by in Deity, Early and Theravāda, Flourishing, Social Science, Supernatural, Vedas and Mīmāṃsā

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I’ve repeatedly returned on this blog to the concepts of Ascent and Descent, derived above all from Ken Wilber’s work and to a lesser extent from Martha Nussbaum’s. I have found that these concepts do a lot to help us understand the differences between philosophical traditions. I have not yet been precise about defining them, however, and I would like to think them through in some more detail.

The concept of Ascent has above all to do with transcendence; “transcendence” and “immanence” are close cousins to Ascent and Descent as I understand them. However, Ascent is not transcendence as such. Continue reading →