But if one takes up the resulting position – neither supernatural nor political – then one has relatively little company in the history of philosophy. From Yavanayāna Buddhists to Unitarian Universalists, those who have sought to move beyond the supernatural have typically also believed in political engagement. The vast majority of political quietists like Śāntideva believed in a vast panoply of unseen worlds far beyond those supported by empirically tested evidence.

I continue to wonder: is there something I’m missing? Is there some reason why so many in the end tend to supernaturalism, politics, or both? (Epicurus is perhaps the clearest example of a figure who avoided both supernaturalism and politics – but Epicureanism as a system did not last, and even those who sought to resurrect Epicurus’s philosophy have sometimes ditched his anti-politics.)

Last time I mused on the subject, I turned to an explanation from Simone Weil: “Atheist materialism is necessarily revolutionary, because to orient oneself toward an absolute good down here, one must place it in the future.” Humans, Weil seems to imply, will always seek some sort of absolute perfection: the choice is to seek it in an otherworldly realm, or in the future of this one. Eric Voegelin appeared to see the same choice as Weil, and view the latter choice as disastrous: there will always be an “eschaton,” a Final End that human life aspires to, and if we immanentize it – that is, set it in this world instead of a transcendent world beyond – then we will end up with totalitarian states that goosestep over the messy imperfections inevitable in human life. Whether or not there were any other world in which to transcend, according to Voegelin, the absence of belief in such an other world leads us to terror in this one.

But I asked before: do we really have to seek an absolute good? What about just seeking modest improvements, trying to minimize suffering without eliminating it? As non-supernaturalists, shouldn’t we just try and make sure that people set their eyes lower than Weil and Voegelin do?

Well, one answer that comes to mind for that question is: death. The existence of a final death seems to pose a major problem for any sort of egoistic consequentialism, any idea that one should seek out the best consequences for oneself – including the virtue and tranquility that Epicurus himself seeks. For eventually, there will be no further consequences no matter what one does. At the last moment of one’s life, there is no future, nothing to maximize and no reason to do anything. And at the previous moment, all the egoist can act for is something better in that last moment. In the earlier moments of life, the moments that one can improve will run out before one knows it. As important as this one life looks while we’re in it, it begins to look pretty small when one faces impending death, whether it is impending in seconds or in decades.

By contrast, an absolute good – an “eschaton” – outlasts the individual self, it is something bigger to strive for. Even striving for the good of one’s immediate circle of friends and relatives seems hollow when their death will follow in a few decades as well. But the state – that offers the promise of something more lasting. The Jacobins are long dead, but the capitalist world unleashed by the French Revolution is still with us. The possibility of a classless communist society offers the same intoxicating thought of a world in which one’s contributions live on long after death, a world where one’s life is more important than its mere length.

Politics, then, offers a way to transcend death through what Freud called cathexis – as might one’s children and one’s work. We break down the boundaries of our selves and identify them with something that outlasts ourselves, such as a state or new classless society.

But there remains a basic problem with transcending death through cathexis in this way: the object of cathexis has no guarantee of immortality either. Lenin’s classless society lies in ruins today. What guarantee have we that the perfect society we think we’re building will not do the same? Let alone the more minor improvements we might make to politics as it is. This seems to me the greatest problem with descent philosophies of whatever variety: however much one might accomplish, in the end it comes to naught. Lucretius is right that when we die we won’t care about that nothingness. But that doesn’t stop it from casting a shadow over all we do in life, raising questions about the point of it all, whether it’s really worth bothering or we’re just fooling ourselves.

And so I start to turn to ascent philosophies, views that turn us in some respect away from the world we see. But then we are back to the original problem: most ascent philosophies, especially the ascending intimacy philosophies, are supernaturalist. They depend on an afterlife, turn us away from this world toward the one that is supposed to come after death – but to one who doesn’t believe in the supernatural, it would seem like there is no such thing.

However, those philosophies of the afterlife have one thing in common with the descent philosophies. They both put the absolute good, the eschaton, in the future, whether a transcendent or immanent future. A great appeal to me of Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta philosophy is that it gives us an eschaton which is beyond time itself, and therefore essentially not in the future. We have an absolute good that is already there at all times; it’s just a matter of realizing it. Does Śaṅkara get us entirely beyond the supernaturalism-or-politics quandary? Probably not – he believed in rebirth himself, after all, and the main point of bothering to realize the absolute good would be that one would do so in the future and avoid the suffering attached to future ignorant births. It makes for an interesting alternative way of viewing the problem, but not necessarily a solution to it.

The argument to this point is, I think, in perfect sympathy with Augustine. Human beings for him are invariably and inevitably flawed, in a way that makes them unworthy of our trust. Instead, Augustine wants to argue, we must place our trust in a truly perfect being, God. Augustine’s argument here underlies a great deal of conservative Christianity: even if church institutions and/or biblical scripture appear wrong to us, they are a better guide than our own weak and easily misled intellects.

For the moment, let us leave aside the question of how we know Church or Bible embody God, or even whether God exists. I think there is a far deeper question at issue here: even assuming he exists, how can we trust God?

Most of the answer to the question will hinge upon how we define God. But let us assume that God has one characteristic attributed to him by almost every believer, even by deists: that he is the creator of all that is, directly or indirectly responsible for everything that happens except (perhaps) those events caused by human free will, and perhaps the will of other free beings like angels.

If that is so, the verdict is severe: God’s track record is no better than ours. Too often we think of the “problem of evil” rather than, more correctly and appropriately, of the problem of suffering. And then we neglect to think the problem through, and blame it all on human free will. For when we live so close to the twentieth century, the readiest examples of grave horrors are human-caused; the mere mention of the names Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot make it easiest to question God. But this version of the question is also the easiest to answer: the universe would not be as good if we were not free, and this freedom is worth the possibility of evil.

But how small this human-caused misery begins to look compared to the misery caused by God. In Hurricane Katrina, the Haiti earthquake, the Asian tsunami we have plenty of recent examples of suffering not caused by humans. Smallpox, malaria, tuberculosis, cancer have killed more than Hitler or Pol Pot ever did. The tortures of ALS make the gas chambers look humane. Crippling diseases, natural disasters, animal attacks: we didn’t do that. God did.

And that’s just a deist God, a God inferred from creation. The evidence against the God of scriptures is worse still. In the book of Exodus, God punishes every Egyptian family with ten “wonders” – diseases, crop failures and more – culminating in the deaths of all their firstborn children. They are punished not for their own actions, but for the actions of their Pharaoh – even though the text explicitly says that God “hardened Pharaoh’s heart,” God deliberately caused the Pharaoh to do the very thing that Pharaoh is punishing him for. Later God sends horrible afflictions, including the death of his children, on his most faithful servant Job, just in order to win a bet with the Accuser (“the Satan” in Hebrew). Worse even than all this is the idea of a literal hell, not necessarily attested in the scriptures but widely believed in the traditions, including by Augustine himself. Whatever Pol Pot did to his victims, it always ended with death. God keeps going, tormenting people for all eternity, with no deterrent purpose whatsoever, leaving sheer vengeful retribution as an end in itself.

It seems to me the evidence against God is, quite literally, damning. Augustine, it seems to me, is right that humanity is fallen and sinful, not worthy of trust. The problem is that God is worse. (And let me stress again that it is not God’s existence I’m addressing here. Like Ivan in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, I would not trust a creator God even if he did exist. Maybe especially if he did.)

It is not only Western traditions that face this problem. These reflections came to me when I began reading Rāmānuja‘s commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā. Rāmānuja begins the text with a long homage to Vishnu as the creator of all things, who appears in the Gītā in the form of Lord Krishna. The purpose of life, according to Rāmānuja, is to reach knowledge of and devotion to this Lord. But Krishna always appears as a morally questionable sort of deity, from his childhood stealing butter, through his adulterous sexual affairs – to the advice he gives in the Mahābhārata itself. In the Gītā, Krishna tells Arjuna to kill his cousins and their armies because he should always do his duty (dharma) irrespective of the consequences. Even if one thinks this morally sound advice, the same Krishna later tells Arjuna to kill his rival Karna while Karna is fixing his chariot – an act that clearly violates all applicable rules of dharma – in order to achieve the consequence of winning the war. So too, it is Krishna who tells Yudhiṣṭhira to mislead Drona about Aśvatthāman the elephant, an act for which Yudhiṣṭhira later receives a karmic punishment – again, breaking the duty of truthfulness in order to bring about the best consequences. Krishna tells others to break the rules he himself sets out, and does so with impunity. Krishna’s bad deeds might not quite reach the scale of the Judeo-Christian God, but he is far from a moral paragon. He may be better than Pol Pot, but a human saint could surely outdo him.

So whether we are speaking of Vishnu or Jehovah, I do not think Augustine’s answer to human fallibility is acceptable. Perfect goodness is not to be found in men or in gods. But a chastened intellectualism without God seems to leave us with two unpalatable alternatives: a tyranny like Xunzi’s, or a life of miserable neurosis like Freud’s. I think this may be why Nietzsche and the existentialists view life without God as a terrifying (if perhaps ultimately fulfilling) “abyss”: if you don’t trust in God, you have to trust in man, and that’s not very comforting.

Or do you? I wasn’t thinking of it this way at the time, but I suppose all this might be part of the reason why, when I needed to pray, I turned to the bodhisattva Manjuśrī rather than to a God or Goddess as such. For Mañjuśrī, while perhaps omniscient, is not omnipotent. He lets much of the world suffer not because he chooses to – as God does – but because there’s too much he can’t prevent. A being who is omnibenevolent but not omnipotent – you can’t completely trust in such a being, because he might let you down; he can’t do everything. But if he exists – and maybe even if he doesn’t – he is at least more worthy of trust than either a human being or a creator God.

What then should we do about our impending death? The most common answers typically involve the supernatural, with belief in an afterlife. Christians will speak of an afterlife in heaven, Buddhists of rebirth. So all we have to do is be good in this lifetime (or ask forgiveness for our sins), and we’ll be able to continue “living” well after death. Such a view is comforting. Unfortunately, I don’t have any reason to believe it true. I’ve heard it argued that we really don’t know enough about consciousness to say that it ends with death. That may well be so. But we also don’t know enough to say that anything else happens to it, either – certainly nothing like the graphic hells that, according to Śāntideva, await those with sufficiently bad karma. In terms of any sort of survival of the self after death, it seems to me, the very best we can do is agnosticism, and perhaps not even that.

But if death really is – or might be – the end of each individual, then what? Well: I posted a little while ago about three basic ways of life, three orientations to theoretical as well as practical philosophy: the asceticism of most Buddhists, Jains, Advaitins and early Christians; the traditionalism of most Jews, Confucians and dharmaśāstra; and the libertinism of Marx, Nietzsche, Rawls, Ayn Rand and the utilitarians. Asceticism and libertinism can each take on more egoistic or more altruistic forms. Stephen Walker challenged the formulation somewhat, noting that Mozi doesn’t comfortably fit it; but a typology like this must necessarily consist of ideal types in Max Weber’s sense, giving us extremes within which real examples take a middle ground, and Mozi seems like an altruist who takes on some elements of all three basic ways of life.

My point here, however, was to be that these three ways of life each seems to have a corresponding way of death – an attitude toward death that does not depend on the supernatural. This is true whether they take an egoistic or altruistic form, for others must die as surely as oneself. The traditionalist would take the path most people likely take, seeking immortality through her children. This is the path the Hebrew Bible offers – progeny represent immortality. (Thus the now-shocking happy ending to the book of Job: he loses all his children, but it’s all okay in the end because he gets more!) By contrast the libertine, it seems to me, must follow Lucretius’s advice: do not fear death; nothing bad can happen to you. True, you won’t have any of the things you loved during life, but that won’t matter, because you’ll be dead. You won’t notice any of it.

And the ascetic? Most ascetic traditions do rely in some sense on the supernatural, but I’m not sure that they have to. I’m particularly intrigued by the approach to death in Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta philosophy. Our selves are illusion in the first place; the true nature of the world is a simple oneness identical with all our selves, if we could perceive it. Indian gurus will sometimes leave the words for their disciples: “I was not born, I did not die.” This sounds somewhat supernatural, but I don’t think that it must be – at least not if we take “supernatural” in the standard sense of “ideas incompatible with the evidence of natural science.” The Advaita view is not falsifiable by empirical evidence, and is not supposed to be; arguments for it take place at the pre-sensory level of a priori foundations, of what makes empirical knowledge possible.

Now the idea of immortality through one’s children requires a bit more fleshing out, to the point that Job’s version no longer satisfies. The simple fact of having children does nothing to defeat death, for one’s children are not oneself. Children can only offer a sort of immortality because they promise what Freud (or his translator) called cathexis (German Besetzung): the breaking down of self boundaries, so that we come to identify ourselves with our children, and really come to see ourselves as existing partially in those children. It seems unlikely that this happened in Job’s case; if new children were as good as the old ones, he can’t have been that closely cathected with the old ones to begin with. On the other hand, cathexis alone isn’t enough; we surely cathect with our spouses or other romantic lovers, but they will only survive a few decades beyond us at most, and usually not that. Children, on the other hand, can pass on their own cathexis, a new identification with our grandchildren and their descendants.

I suppose a similar kind of cathexis might happen in the attempt to achieve immortality through one’s work: artistic, scientific, philosophical, sociopolitical. If the creation one brings into the world is closely identified with oneself, and if it is everlasting, then it can similarly keep one around. But both kinds of cathexis face a similar problem: one cannot know at death whether the object of cathexis will survive. Will one’s descendants keep oneself alive, or will their bloodlines die out, as seems to be happening frequently in my generation where so few have children? Will one’s social accomplishments be toppled, will one’s artistic work fade into such obscurity that it is forever lost? (Woody Allen: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying.”) Lucretius’s comfort with nonexistence, and Śaṅkara’s identification with a unified cosmic Self, seem to promise a surer way.

Why did he do this? I suppose it could have been merely a cynical move to gain followers, but Marcionism had an appeal that lasted long after Marcion’s death; I don’t see much reason to believe that Marcion didn’t believe what he was writing. But this is still puzzling. To our eyes it seems like an awful sort of arrogance to edit historical writings according to one’s own theology. One might ask: how could he have believed any of this?

In trying to understand Marcion I can only think of the popular view expressed in the Mahāyāna Adhyāśayasaṃcodana Sūtra, that “whatever is well spoken is the word of the Buddha.” This was a justification used for the newly emerging Mahāyāna s?tras. It’s pretty clear from any historical standpoint that no such texts existed during the Buddha’s lifetime; the Mahāyāna was a new phenomenon, and many of its creators seemed to know it. They justified the composition of new s?tras by arguing: the Buddha knows everything, so anything that is correct is therefore effectively spoken by the Buddha. Surely this is what Marcion was up to: because Jesus was God, he could only have spoken the truth. So since the content of the revised Marcionite Gospels were true, as we could presumably ascertain on scripture-independent grounds, it must therefore have been what Jesus really said.

Which brings us back to the previous post‘s discussion of authenticity. It’s strange to me that today we put such a high value on things being what they have always been, unchosen by contemporary people. But the premodern view of authenticity is curious in its own way. If you are already so convinced that your new scripture is true, why do you need to attribute it to the Buddha or to Jesus? Why not just admit that you found the truth yourself?

I guess I can start to see an answer when I look at what people do try to come up with from scratch, without connection to the past. Modernist attempts to rebuild society from the ground up didn’t work very well. And individually, when we avoid submitting to the guidance of a tradition, we run the risk of merely believing what we want to believe, being guided by our persistent and troublesome unconscious desires rather than by the truth. That’s why I have myself argued that in some cases it is important to argue that some people and practices are not really Buddhist. The example that comes to my mind here is Gary Snyder’s horrifying Smokey the Bear Sutra: a “Buddhist” text advocating ecologically motivated violence and wrath. I try to avoid feelings of offence, but that text felt like a slap in the face toward Buddhist critiques of anger.

Here there seems to be a justified continuity between premodern and modern authenticity: our individual choice leads us too easily to the wrong places. This idea is at the heart of a chastened intellectualist view of human nature, a view shared by thinkers as diverse as Augustine, Xunzi and Freud. If we just do what we choose and believe what we discover for ourselves, we will be led astray: to sin (Augustine), to chaos and disharmony (Xunzi), to repression, neurosis and pathology (Freud). Rather, we need to be humble, to submit ourselves to others with greater vision than ours. I wonder if the contemporary search for authenticity is an aestheticization of this view: there’s something objectively better that happens when a North American discovers the pleasures of Chinese food developed over generations in China, as opposed to the Chinese food designed to conform to his North American sweet tooth at the Panda Hut around the corner. Rather than having one’s existing tastes pandered to, one educates one’s palate, becomes a connoisseur.

Then again, I’m not sure this answers the question of why people write or edit new scriptures and claim their authenticity. One might rightly want to aim at humility, seeking to prevent the arrogance of believing oneself in charge of the whole truth. But isn’t it just as arrogant to believe that one’s own discovery is not only the truth, but the word of the Buddha or Jesus himself?

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.)

This “paradox of hedonism” (as Peter Railton calls it) is what comes to my mind when I hear Jesus’s paradox expressed in the books of Matthew and Luke: “Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it.” The alternative proffered to seeking one’s own life and happiness is different – following Jesus rather than seeking others’ happiness – but there is a commonality in the importance of looking to something bigger than oneself.

All this is another of the points that lead me to a foundational ethical point that I’ve been coming to more and more (and somewhat grudgingly): there must be more to the proper end of life than pleasure, and more even than happiness itself. One could argue (as Neil Sinhababu and other utilitarians indeed do) that a focus on others’ happiness is enough, but it strikes me that such an approach is still vulnerable to the paradox. Too much focus on others’ happiness can lead one to a despair just like that found when one focuses on one’s own happiness: one sees the billion miserable people out there, and seeing the fact only increases their number to a billion and one. (This problem was at the heart of my own conversion away from utilitarianism.)

As I noted before, Railton tries to save utilitarianism (or consequentialism more generally) by distinguishing between truth and justification: it could still be true that the only proper purpose of life is to be happy or to make others happy, but that for that very reason one is not justified in believing it is so. But I have a hard time accepting such a view. I’m reminded of Freud’s comment on a very similar viewpoint advocating useful fictions, Hans Vaihinger’s philosophy of the “as if”: Freud said that its demand “is one only a philosopher could put forward.” While ordinary unphilosophical people do indeed believe false things all the time, they usually do so merely because they haven’t thought about them; once they actually understand that something is false, that is sufficient reason for them to stop believing it. And we philosophers face a similar problem in the opposite direction: Railton’s or Vaihinger’s views seem to require that we not think too hard about our own philosophy lest we stop (or start!) believing it, which would appear to be the antithesis of what a philosopher does. Whether we’re philosophical or not, the call to deliberately believe false things seems to ring hollow. And therefore, for the reasons above, it seems to me that we can’t reasonably accept happiness as the sole aim of life.

Fast forward: a little while ago, things were a little rough in my home. My fiancée and I tried to adopt a big beautiful black dog, which turned out not to be the right pet for our situation. The dog found a very good home and we’ll be able to get another dog soon enough, but losing the dog was pretty rough on us, especially my fiancée. It didn’t help that it was late winter, when everything was dark and cold, without the novelty of snow’s first arrival or the joys of Christmas. The stress of wedding planning didn’t help either. I was intending to ease some of my fiancée’s distress by planning a surprise party for her approaching milestone birthday. Of course, while the planning was happening, I couldn’t tell her about the party to comfort her; and hiding the event from her was its own source of stress.

It was a hard thing to take. Even though I knew I was doing something that would make her happy in the end, the combination of the secrecy and the present suffering was hard for me to handle emotionally. And so I found myself offering a prayer to Mañjuśrī, the celestial bodhisattva to whom Śāntideva offers his devotion. I prayed, tearfully, for him to give me the strength I needed to help me through my loved one’s suffering. At one point while doing this I wound up calling him Maitreya, because (I admit sheepishly) I sometimes have difficulty remembering the difference between the two.

All this is no small deal for me, because I don’t actually believe in Mañjuśrī or Maitreya, at least not in any standard sense of the term. I don’t think there is actually somebody out there who accumulated enough good karma to become a celestial being who redirects good karma down to the rest of us for our benefit. I don’t even think we get reborn after death.

But in moments like these it becomes clear to me that prayer to some sort of personal higher being is something I need. And I am surely not alone in this. As atheists have become more open and strident in their criticism of theism, one of their favourite memes is the Flying Spaghetti Monster – a made-up joke deity which, they argue, should have as much of a status as any historical religious tradition, since there’s no more reason to believe in any of those.

And yet. A couple years ago the AAR held a panel on the Flying Spaghetti Monster phenomenon, one of the few such panels to catch the media’s eye. Lucas Johnston, a student on the panel, told an anecdote that rightfully caught a lot of attention. As reported in the AP story on the panel: “his neighbor, a militant atheist who sports a pro-Darwin bumper sticker on her car, tried recently to start her car on a dying battery. As she turned the key, she murmured under her breath: ‘Come on, Spaghetti Monster!’”

Was she joking or being ironic? To some extent perhaps – but clearly she really wanted her car to start, felt a need to say something. And it seems to me that when facing difficult times, most people feel a need to pray to something, even if they don’t think there’s any real entity they can pray to.

Why is this? Freud thought that “religion” was all about the personification of nature: we have learned to treat nature, which we have no influence over, like the fellow human beings we do have some influence on. I wouldn’t be surprised if this were accurate as a historical account of belief in higher beings (which, let’s not forget, is far from exhausting the concept of “religion” as it is usually used.) But there’s something further and deeper going on here as well – something I think Augustine really grasped. We human beings will never be as good as we want to be, let alone having all the things we want. We need help, we are dependent – but the people we depend on, our community, are often not there for us. We need a being to turn to. For Augustine this was really convenient, since he believed that life was all about turning to such a being. And yet, experience seems to testify that even if there are no higher beings, it is still necessary to invent them. David Hume’s Natural History of Religion claimed that science would lead us to belief in a distant deist God, a First Cause, but also noted that most “religion” had nothing to do with this – rather, it was a belief in actively intervening beings like saints or celestial bodhisattvas, whose existence was completely unsupported scientifically.

Hume dismissed such “superstitious” beliefs, saw them as being of value only to the uninformed. But there are good reasons for their endurance, well beyond misinformation. The Alcoholics Anonymous program has proved to be one of the most successful ways of dealing with alcohol addiction, and their “12-step” method has transferred successfully to treating many other kinds of addictions, not only to substances. The heart of the method is admitting one’s own helplessness and putting oneself in the hands of God, or some sort of trusted Godlike being – Mañjuśrī would do the trick. Relying on oneself doesn’t work, because oneself caused the problem; nor can one rely on the people around one, who work in the same established patterns in which the problem developed. It’s a very Augustinian method: one relies on grace and faith, not on works.

So the question is, what do we moderns do about this matter? If we are not convinced that gods exist, or if the God we believe in is an abstract First Explanation (let alone a First Cause) that doesn’t answer prayers, is there any appropriate way to satisfy our need for prayer in hard times?

Such practice seems at first to involve the kind of thing we might normally count as “religion”: meditation, prayer, ritual. But it seems to me that there’s another thinker, not religious except in the broadest stretching of the word, whose worldview also counts as chastened intellectualism: namely, Sigmund Freud. Freud’s message, it seems to me, is very similar to Augustine’s and Xunzi’s: the ego is not the master of its own house. To be saved from oneself, one needs some understanding of the textual learning that Freud saw himself as beginning; but simply reading Freud isn’t going to be enough to understand yourself. Our repression, our defences, are too strong. You need to engage in the practice of therapy (or analysis) at someone else’s guidance.

I tend to suspect that a chastened intellectualist view of humans is correct. I rather wish it weren’t, because its conclusions never seem pleasant. Augustine slams the very idea of human flourishing – because we are weak we cannot live a good life in this world, only in the next. Freud says a very similar thing – but denies that there is a better world to come. All we can do is be slightly less neurotic. Of the three, it’s Xunzi who seems to allow that a life in this world could be good – but only if restrained by the kind of hierarchies that would now seem tyrannical to us.

I would still tend to agree with Śāntideva against that criticism; I don’t see the righteousness of any cause as justifying anger. But there’s another common modern criticism of Śāntideva’s position that I think has more force. Namely: is it even possible to get rid of anger, as Śāntideva recommends we do? Don’t you just wind up repressing it, so that it comes back as a passive aggression that’s ultimately more destructive than the original anger?

This is the kind of objection we would likely associate with Freud, though one sees versions of it in Nietzsche’s attacks on morality – moral blame and criticism, for Nietzsche, is its own form of passive aggression, a less healthy outlet for anger than angry words or blows. Does their objection defeat Śāntideva?

I think it’s possible to put the two together. Śāntideva is not criticizing only the outward manifestations of anger, after all. Anger expressed in the passive-aggressive’s sighs and eyerolls is still anger, just like anger expressed in screams and fists. Anger that has been repressed hasn’t really been eradicated in the way that Śāntideva advocates.

The question remains: is it possible to genuinely eradicate anger, as opposed to merely repressing it? I suspect that the answer may be no – in the context of the hubbub of everyday life. (Śāntideva tells us to be monks, and the monk’s single-minded focus on virtue may make it a more serious possibility.) Nevertheless, I think it’s still possible to reduce anger in a way that does not repress it. Sometimes anger really does go away without resurfacing – through talking it through, through understanding its causes, through meditative introspection (all practices that Śāntideva recommends). The trick is in distinguishing the two; and that may be something you can only learn through practice.

(I don’t think Śāntideva actually says any of this, mind you, and I wish he said more; but I do think this position is compatible with what he does say.)

Now the people who post anti-Laine messages online can’t personally be blamed for this violence, any more than Al Gore can be blamed for ecoterrorism; but the violence certainly illustrates the kind of passions the issue has aroused. I myself ran afoul of the scholars’ critics a number of times during my graduate career; the fact that I defended Western scholars while having an Indian name appeared to rankle them a lot, to the point that Malhotra called me a “sepoy-in-training” (and that was far from the worst insult I received).

The sad irony in all this for me is that I actually sympathize strongly with what I take to be the heart of the critics’ project: to get a better hearing for Indian traditions in the scholarly community. Readers of this blog, or my dissertation, will have seen that this is a major aim of my own scholarly work – to highlight the contributions of Asian, and especially Indian Buddhist, thought to our own understanding of the world.

A key problem is that these critics’ understanding of academic work is so limited that they do this cause more harm than good. A comment I’ve heard very often: “how would you feel if scholars started saying this stuff about Christianity?” To which Jeff Kripal’s response was effectively: um, you mean like these? (See footnote 18 at the reference.) He listed a dozen good introductions to psychoanalytic sexual studies of Jesus and Biblical texts off the top of his head, and mentioned accurately that such studies number in the hundreds – far outnumbering the relatively puny number of such studies made of anything that can be called Hindu.

The critics are right about one thing: Christianity gets a much more sympathetic hearing, overall, in Western academies than does Hinduism. But why is this? Is it, as they sometimes bizarrely claim, because scholars wouldn’t dare say negative things about Christianity in the way that they do about Hinduism? Absolutely not, as even the slightest bit of research on Christian studies would confirm. Scholars of religion make attacks on Christianity that are often stronger than anything said about Hinduism. (Kripal was actually quite sympathetic to Ramakrishna, and doesn’t see sexuality as diminishing mysticism.)

Rather, Hinduism gets a worse rap than Christianity overall because scholars are too timid, often for reasons of career self-preservation, to say all the positive things about Hinduism that they do about Christianity. There are countless well regarded academic programs, articles and other institutions that specialize in Christian theology – but it is an act of courage to acknowledge that one specializes in Buddhist or Hindu theology. (Even my own milder self-portrait – that I specialize in “constructive” Buddhist studies rather than “theology,” learning from the tradition critically and thinking with it as an outsider – has cost me at least one academic job. And that was just the job where the search committee told me this fact directly; I strongly suspect there were other cases where my positive view of Buddhism got me taken off the list as well, they just didn’t happen to tell me about it.)

There are encouraging signs here. I’m happy to see the formation of organizations like DANAM, the Dharma Association of North America, aimed explicitly at learning from Indian thought. (I’m also happy to have presented at a DANAM meeting in 2004.) DANAM is an initiative that may yet help Indian thought gain some academic respectability. The verbal (and physical) attacks thrown at Kripal and Laine, by contrast, serve only to embarrass it.