Love of All Wisdom

As I mentioned in this week’s post, I’ve just taken up a position conducting podcast interviews for New Books in Buddhist Studies at the New Books Network. My first interview is now up! Have a look. I’m speaking to Jason Clower of Cal State U Chico about his book on Mou Zongsan, which I riffed on earlier this week. As I mentioned, Mou’s ideas are of significant interest to cross-cultural philosophers, and few Westerners know much about him yet.

While you’re there, you may also be interested in checking out the previous interview conducted with Clower’s Chico colleague Daniel Veidlinger, by my co-host Scott Mitchell. (If that name sounds familiar to longtime readers, it could be because I’ve briefly engaged with Scott on this blog before.)

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…)

The translation of a small passage can turn out to tell us a great deal. Consider section 4B12 of the Mencius. Mencius says in this section that the great man is one who retains, or does not lose, chizi zhi xin 赤子之心. This Chinese phrase translates literally as something like “heart/mind of baby.” Most translators have followed the interpretation of the great Neo-Confucian synthesizer Zhu Xi, which dovetails smoothly with the optimistic view of human nature generally attributed to Mencius: in D.C. Lau’s translation, “A great man is one who retains the heart of a new-born babe.” We are born naturally good as babies, and become bad only if something intervenes to impede our natural development. (Contrast Augustine in the first chapter of the Confessions, who observes babies as creatures of desire and envy.)

Bryan Van Norden’s recent translation of Mencius challenges this interpretation. He translates 4B12 as “Great people do not lose the hearts of their ‘children.’” And he notes that in this he is following the early commentator Zhao Qi – for whom “children” refers to the subjects of a ruler, whose hearts must be won over. Nothing here about babies or children being naturally good.

Van Norden could be right about Mencius to this point; I’m far from a Mencius scholar and wouldn’t be able to tell. What struck me as far more surprising, though, is what Van Norden says next. (continue reading…)

Still on honeymoon break, but I thought I’d share the opening remarks that were read at our wedding ceremony. I wrote them, with my fiancée’s help, and our wonderful officiant, Jason Clower, read them:

Friends and loved ones, it has been three years since Amod and Caitlin met at the home of Joanna, whose music has accompanied us into this chapel. Now we are gathered here in love and support for Amod and Caitlin as they promise to face the future together, accepting whatever may lie ahead. What we are celebrating, they have summed up in a Sanskrit word inscribed on both of their wedding rings. This word is parasparaprīti, a word that can mean many things. It is a compound word, made of two parts, paraspara and prīti. Prīti can mean love, joy, delight, pleasure, friendship, kindness, affection, zest, exuberance. Paraspara means mutual, shared, of or by or for each other.

And so when these two words are put together into the compound parasparaprīti, it can mean any number of things — including mutual love, shared joy, delight in each other, kindness toward each other, exuberance for each other — all of which Caitlin and Amod have already felt for each other, and all of which they pledge to continue feeling for each other from this day forward.

The marriage, which they begin today, is not only about joy and delight. It is also about the sorrow, frustration, and grief that are inevitable parts of life — about committing to share these as well, and knowing they can be made a little lighter by facing them together. It is this commitment to share and stand by each other, in joy and in sorrow, that we are here to declare and affirm today.

EDIT (29 July): For some reason, comments were turned off when I first made this post. That was not my intention; I don’t know why it happened. It should be fixed now.

I’ve found Thomas Kasulis’s distinction between intimacy and integrity to be one of the more helpful ways to think through the significance of culture in philosophy, especially when dealing with East Asia. To help Westerners understand East Asian thought, Kasulis portrays it as having an “intimacy” orientation, as opposed to a more familiar “integrity” orientation.

Now Kasulis is aware enough to realize that there are exceptions to all such generalizations, and some of his examples of “intimacy” come from the West too. The distinction is supposed to function more like one of Max Weber’s ideal types. That is to say: one may never encounter intimacy or integrity orientations in their pure forms; any actual culture or person or book will probably contain some mix. Nevertheless, by thinking of the two as relatively coherent extremes, one is better able to understand what’s going on in the middle.

When applied to ethics and politics alone, the distinction is not particularly original and could even come across as something of a cliché: basically, the modern West is individualistic and oriented toward individual rights and the integrity of the individual, while East Asia focuses on the intimacy community and the ensuing responsibilities of interdependence. Where Kasulis’s work gets interesting is when he applies the distinction to theoretical philosophy. (continue reading…)