Love of All Wisdom

The momentous yet mixed results of this week’s Canadian election were overshadowed on the global scene by the killing of Osama bin Laden. Though the first event riveted me more, the second has more philosophical significance – or rather, not the event itself, but the reaction to it.

Americans have typically greeted bin Laden’s death with jubilation and celebration, often waving American flags and chanting “U.S.A.” But some minority voices, such as Linton Weeks at NPR radio and Pamela Gerloff of the Huffington Post, have raised questions about this celebration. Is it really a good idea to celebrate a human death, even the death of one’s enemy? (continue reading…)

The new Journal of Buddhist Ethics has an interesting article up on Śāntideva, by Stephen Harris, a grad student at U of New Mexico. Harris is a colleague of Ethan Mills, who gave the APA talk about skepticism that I discussed in late December (and who has since made thoughtful contributions to this blog’s comments); Harris also gave a talk about Śāntideva on Mills’s panel.

Harris’s article returns us to the most famous passage in Śāntideva’s work: the meditation on the equalization of self and other in Bodhicaryāvatāra chapter VIII, in which Śāntideva takes metaphysical arguments for the nonexistence of self (Buddhist anātman) and uses them as a premise to argue for altruism, ethical selflessness. He asks: “Since both others and myself dislike fear and suffering, what is special about my self that I protect it and not another?” The self that I was three minutes ago is a different entity from the self I will be three minutes from now; the present self has as much reason to protect others as it does its future self. He adds: if you object that suffering should be prevented only by the one it belongs to, well, your foot’s suffering does not belong to your hand, so why should the hand do anything to protect the foot?

The Catholic Buddhologist Paul Williams has criticized this passage in depth, arguing that altruism makes no sense without selves. I’ve discussed Williams’s criticisms twice before, though I haven’t taken a position on the debate yet. I will note that several Buddhologists have already come to Śāntideva’s defence on these arguments – with varying degrees of success.

Harris is the first writer I’m aware of to defend Williams’s position (other than Williams himself). (continue reading…)

Responding to my post on doubt, Jim Wilton agreed that “truth established through thought and logic is always subject to doubt.” But he suggested that not all knowledge or truth is a product of logic – and, he claimed, perhaps this non-logical knowledge can be certain, indubitable.

I agree that not all knowledge is a product of logic. This is one of the reasons I have spent a great deal of time discussing what Thomas Kasulis calls intimacy worldviews, background approaches to philosophy that are not derived from direct argument. I agree with the thinkers in such traditions that truth is not merely something expressed in linguistic propositions.

Where I disagree strongly, however, is on the view that such non-logical knowledge can be a source of genuine certainty. (continue reading…)

Glenn Wallis has recently produced a fascinating new piece of “Buddhist theology” called the Buddhist Manifesto. The document first strikes me for what it tells us about the process of writing about Buddhism today. Wallis, like me, was once a Buddhist-studies academic in a fairly standard mold: PhD from Harvard, assistant professor at the University of Georgia. (I was offered his old job at Georgia, and turned it down because the offer given would have required me to teach twice as many courses as he did, for less total pay and no chance of tenure.) I had read the major work he produced in that capacity: Mediating the Power of Buddhas, a study of a seventh-century Buddhist Sanskrit ritual text called the Mañjuśrīmūlakalpa. Mediating the Power of Buddhas offers a close and careful reading of this particular text. But one is left wondering at the end: why was this written? It avoids historical context, attempting instead to “enter into the world” within the text, which makes it difficult to learn much from the study about the text’s historical period and its contemporaries (say, Śāntideva). But it also avoids constructive philosophical engagement with the text – asking how it might challenge our current ideas about the world and how to live in it. If one can get neither history nor constructive application from this study, what can one get from it?

My critique of Wallis’s older work is hardly limited to Wallis; one could make it about a great number of works produced in contemporary religious studies. Anne Monius encouraged her students to ask of the texts and rituals they study: “Why bother?” and “So what?” Why do people bother doing this, and what is its significance for their culture? What she never asked students was to turn those same questions on ourselves: ask of our own work, “Why bother?” and “So what?” But it seems to me like these are the most pressing questions to ask of a work like Mediating the Power of Buddhas.

No such problem exists in the Buddhist Manifesto! (continue reading…)

By far the most famous portions of Śāntideva’s work are his meditations on the equalization and exchange of self and other, found in chapter VIII of the Bodhicary?vat?ra. They appear in Western introductory readers on ethics, and are considered the foundation for an entire genre of Tibetan literature, blo sbyong or “mental purification.” Personally, these are not generally my favourite parts of Śāntideva’s work; his arguments against the existence of the self do not convince me, and the meditative exercises strike me as potentially damaging. That said, they do contain one line that sticks with me, that strikes me as extremely profound and valuable: All those in the world who are suffering are so because of a desire for their own happiness. All those in the world who are happy are so because of a desire for the happiness of others. (BCA VIII.129, my translation)

I discussed this claim once before but want to return to it. The claim is, I think, overstated for rhetorical effect. Even in Śāntideva’s eyes, merely desiring others’ happiness will not make you happy – especially if you are misguided about the causes of their happiness, so that you try only to provide them with external goods rather than addressing the inner mental causes of their suffering. And yet from my experience, I would still say the claim is more true than not. There’s something self-defeating about searching after one’s own happiness itself. If one keeps one’s eye on this goal above all, one becomes too acutely aware of failures at it, too focused on one’s lack of happiness – “I’m trying so hard to be happy and yet I’m not; something must be wrong with me” – and the goal is inhibited. (In his book Power Sleep, psychologist James Maas noted a similar problem with respect to sleep: subjects offered $20 if they fell asleep quickly would take longer to fall asleep than subjects who were not offered the money.) (continue reading…)

My philosophical awakening occurred in Thailand in 1997; but it has been over the past decade, “the ohs,” that I’ve really had the chance to develop my thoughts. As that decade closes, I would like to note how my thoughts were shaped by their time.

I spent almost the entire decade living in the United States, except for two three-month stints in Toronto in 2001 and India in 2005. It was not the ideal decade in which to do this, for the US of this decade was the US of George W. Bush: a man who opposed almost everything I had ever stood for, whether substantively (torture, wars of choice, gutting environmental regulations), procedurally (incompetent patronage appointments for natural disasters, governing unilaterally without respect for other branches of government) or symbolically (insisting on suits and ties in the White House). I had grown up despising Ronald Reagan, but Reagan now looked like a saint compared to W – Reagan at least was competent. And in the face of all this, Americans returned him to office in 2004.

For my many American friends – the vast majority of them left-wingers like me – this decade was a time of powerlessness and rage. But they at least could vote, could contribute to political campaigns, could do something about it. (continue reading…)

In almost any contemporary introduction to Buddhism, one of the first things one learns is the Four Noble Truths:

1. Everything is suffering (dukkha).
2. Suffering is caused by craving.
3. There is an end to suffering.
4. One can reach this end by following the Buddhist Noble Eightfold Path.

The Four Truths are central to the teaching of the early Pali suttas, so something like them was probably central to the teaching of the historical Buddha. There’s been a recent trend in Buddhist studies to disparage the Four Truths, on the ground that they were far removed from the practice of most Buddhists in history, whose lives (especially but not only in East Asia) focused much more on devotion and magic. But never mind. I’m far less concerned with learning about the historical structure of past Buddhist societies, and more with the question of whether these truths – undeniably revered and treated as truths by many Buddhists throughout history – are indeed true.

I noted before that the Second Noble Truth was of great importance in my own spiritual development. I would still count it as the most important thing I’ve learned from Buddhism. Maybe not all suffering comes from craving, but a huge chunk of it does.

But what about the other three? (continue reading…)

A question that I saw recurring throughout the SACP was technique: when is philosophical reflection about our ends or goals, and when is it just about means to those ends? I’d previously thought about this question with respect to S.N. Goenka’s vipassanā meditation: the word Goenka uses most frequently to describe it is “technique.” The webpage describing vipassanā refers to it as a “non-sectarian technique”: thus Goenka’s claim that people from “any religion” can practise vipassanā – as long as they don’t bring any religious symbols into meditation practice.

This question of technique came up at least three times at the SACP. (continue reading…)

When I first read Śāntideva, his practice of redirecting good karma (pariṇāmanā, often translated “merit transfer”) struck me as somewhat curious. As I tend to a naturalistic view of karma, I wasn’t sure how habits could realistically move from one person to another. Dale Wright’s article on naturalized karma speaks of redirection mainly to criticize it.

I gained a newfound respect for the practice, though, when I attended a vipassanā meditation retreat in S.N. Goenka’s tradition, in 2005. Many people I know swear by Goenka’s overall technique; it frankly didn’t do a lot for me. What made a huge difference, though, was at the very end of the retreat, when Goenka urged us to a practice very much like traditional pariṇāmanā. Wish everyone well, he said on his videotape. Think of people you know and wish them the best.

Fine, that’s the easy part. But then he said: wish your enemies well. Think of your enemies, and devote wishes to their being happy. So I thought: who is my greatest enemy? As a lifelong leftie, in 2005, it didn’t take me long to identify George W. Bush. And so, as part of the practice, I tried sincerely to wish that man well.

The experience was more than unsettling. I cried in the process. But it helped me grow a lot. I had spent a long time feeling such poisonous hatred for that man, which did terrible things to me and my own well-being – in a way that Śāntideva warns us about. It’s a terribly unnerving, but highly rewarding, thing to wish your enemies well. Since your enemies are only human it makes philosophical sense to do so, really, if your main aim is consequentialist – that is, to produce the best results for yourself or for humanity. The trick is that it requires you to give up retribution as a goal, and even for a consequentialist, that’s not easy.

(continue reading…)