There’s a new book series that may interest readers of the Indian Philosophy Blog. You can find the information below.

Oxford University Press is seeking submissions of proposals for a new series:  Philosophy Across Borders.  OUP is committed to publishing high quality philosophical work that draws on broad sourcing to create novel philosophy or novel approaches to recognized problems, methodologies, or approaches.  The hope is that books in the series will exhibit conversation between traditions or cultural sources not often engaged together.  This might include, e.g., engagement between underrepresented traditions and more widely studied western sources, but it could also include work that engages multiple underrepresented traditions not often engaged together.  The goal is not to re-create comparative philosophy, but to provide accessible philosophical work that simply does philosophy in an idiom that is open and global.  If you have a proposal for the series, please contact any of the series editors below or the OUP editor, Peter Ohlin.

Series Co-editors:  Kristi Dotson, Bronwyn Finnigan, Jonardon Ganeri, Amy Olberding, Evan Thompson

In the discourse of the United States today, everything is supposed to be about race. That particular American view infects any American discussion of the West. Overt racists like Lothrop Stoddard associated Western civilization with racial whiteness. Today, the American left often seems to agree with Stoddard, viewing “the West” as code for racial whiteness – as when Natalie Wynn says “the association between whiteness and the West is always lurking beneath the surface”. But the Greek, Semitic and Latin historical roots that make the West go back much earlier than the 17th-century concept of the “white race”; Westerners thought of themselves as “Christendom” long before they thought of themselves as “white”. Anti-black and anti-native racism are the US’s original sin, but we mislead ourselves in a deeply parochial way if we think of the whole world in those American terms.

Rather, it seems to me that the important thing is to reclaim the West from that recent (and harmful) concept of whiteness. “Whiteness” never was constitutive of the West as a historical complex, and the last thing we should do is treat it that way now. For as it turns out, the history of the West is in key respects not even European.

To see why, let’s take a look at the history of the West. Philosophy forms a key part of that history, and this is a philosophy blog, so the history of Western philosophy is as good a case study as any other.

Let’s start at the beginning – the very very beginning. Who was the first Western philosopher, ever? Aristotle, and most philosophers after him, have effectively answered this question with Thales, the sixth-century (BCE) Greek-speaking thinker who first looked for the ultimate principle (archē) of reality, and identified it with water. I don’t think it’s particularly controversial to say that Thales was the first Western philosopher.

So, where did Thales live? Where was he from? If you answered “Greece”, you are wrong, if by “Greece” you mean the European landmass which now belongs to a country by that name. Thales was born and raised, and founded his school, in Miletus – a Greek-speaking town located in Ionia, on the west coast of what is now Turkey. And not in Thrace, that tiny part of northwestern Turkey which is physically part of Europe. No, Miletus and Ionia were in Anatolia, the Turkish landmass that was the first place ever to be called Asia, and gave its name to the rest of that vast continent. That is to say: the first Western philosopher was an Asian. So was his student Anaximander – from whom we have the earliest surviving lines of Western philosophy. And so was Heraclitus of Ephesus, author of that famous early line that one can never step into the same river twice. Western philosophy begins in the continent of Asia.

Note further that yavana – the Indian term for the Greek-speakers who came over in Alexander’s conquests, which I used to use to describe Westernized Buddhism – itself comes from “Ionian”. When ancient Indians thought about Greek-speaking Westerners, the word they used referred to a part of the continent of Asia. And while the term “Asian” has shifted its referent enough that one could perhaps argue “Asian” shouldn’t refer to Ionians anymore, that doesn’t change the fact that Ionians were and are not European. (And not American either, of course, which will become relevant next time.)

Nor is the early Asian referent of Western philosophy an isolated fluke of history. For the first two thousand years of Western philosophy, its centre was not Europe but the Mediterranean Sea, which borders three continents. We saw in a previous post how Africans have played a major role in the history of Western philosophy – including Augustine, arguably one of the most important thinkers in the entire history of Western tradition. This isn’t even to mention the fact that Judaism, Christianity and Islam – without which Western philosophy would look nothing like it currently does – all have their own origins in West Asia, “the Middle East”. The one possible exception, the one possibly non-Asian founder of these three traditions, is Moses – for, if the biblical story were right, he would have come from Africa.

Most of the story of the West is the story of the three continents that touch the Mediterranean. The people of those three continents regularly mixed with each other. And if we are going to apply the modern concept of “race” to the people who created the West, the most important thing to recognize is that very mixing. To the Greek and Roman worlds, with their thriving Asian and African centres, people with pale skin and blonde hair were savage barbarians, but the swarthy citizens of Miletus were not. “Whiteness” could only be invented centuries after the cultural centres of the West had moved into the northern corners of Europe – which is millennia into the West’s established history. That invention of whiteness comes alongside colonialism – and colonialism, for its part, begins the process of moving the West out of Europe into the Americas and Oceania.

All this history matters because it creates the culture of the West that we now have today. Especially, it shows that that Western culture has been multiracial and multi-continental long before the concept of race existed.

In the present day, the multiracial nature of the West has been obvious in my personal experience. When I travel to India, my dress and mannerisms mark me clearly as a Westerner. This point came out most vividly when, as a long-haired youth, I checked into a cheap hotel in Andhra Pradesh and the clerk told me: “When foreigners stay here there’s more paperwork, so don’t put down your name, put an Indian name.” It did not even occur to her that I might have an Indian name. But an even more striking thing was my own reaction. In my previous couple weeks’ travelling around India, the locals’ reactions to me had made me feel so obviously a Westerner that it didn’t even occur to me that my own name was appropriate. So, in response to the clerk’s request, I put down an Indian friend’s name – without it even occurring to me that I had a perfectly good Indian name of my own! All this, even though in the West my skin tone marks me as visibly non-white. I’m not white, but I am a Westerner; of that, there is no doubt. (This is one of the countless reasons it irritates me when navel-gazing Americans or Australians insist on referring to modernist Buddhism as “White” – even in the face of modernist Buddhists who obviously aren’t.)

So too are African-Americans. A black American friend of mine worked for the Peace Corps in a Mali village in his youth. He told me that the locals said to him in no uncertain terms: “You’re not African. We don’t know what you are, but you’re not African.” And it should not be a surprise to hear that said about someone who had spent the majority of his life in the United States. When Asians decry “Westernization”, they are often concerned about the influence of the very African-American art forms of rock’n’roll and hip-hop. Philosophically, Martin Luther King Jr. and W.E.B. Du Bois and the late bell hooks are all very much of the West.

We people with non-European ancestral origins are part and parcel of the West – and we always have been, since before “whiteness” existed. And so: no, the association between whiteness and the West is not “always lurking between the surface”; wherever it does so lurk, it shouldn’t. The West has always been bigger than the harmful colonial concept of race. And it’s also always been bigger than Europe.

Cross-posted at Love of All Wisdom.

When one studies Indian philosophy, or Asian philosophy in general, one is always faced with its other: a philosophical tradition with origins to the west of India, which, after the history of colonialism and modernity, is in the background of everyone now. What should we call this tradition?

The term in by far the most widespread use is Western. It’s not a very good term, but it is the one we have, and I think there is good reason to keep it. I’ll be arguing that point in a series of three posts. I’ve seen two camps of people who discourage the use of “Western”. One (found within philosophy) merely discourages the term, in favour of the term “Euro-American”, which I find far worse; I will deal with that in the final post. The other thinks that “the West” doesn’t even name a meaningful referent at all, such that there should not even be a term to replace it. As I think that that’s a deeper criticism, I will start with it, in both this post and the next.

Natalie Wynn of ContraPoints argues that the “Western” tradition isn’t a real thing. Wynn rightly points out how places like Latin America and the Middle East have been traditionally excluded from “the West”, even though their cultures are part of the same Greek and Semitic historical complex. Wynn is right to note that that exclusion is a problem. But as far as I’m concerned, that isn’t actually an argument against getting rid of “the West”, but for including those places in it, to some extent at least.

I suspect Wynn argues for dropping the concept because she imagines that a “West” including Latin America and the Middle East would then look so broad as to be meaningless. But it does not look that way at all to those of us who study South and East Asia. More than half of the world’s population lives east of the Khyber Pass (and south of the Altai Mountains and north of the Timor Sea). People in those places inherit traditions with origins in northern India and China, independent from and other to a West that includes the Arab world and Latin America – and Eastern Europe. A concept of “the West” that includes all three of those regions is meaningful and significant to those concerned with the more than half of the world that is none of them.

That’s not to say that the whole Islamic world is of the West. “The West” is too big if it stretches from Nigeria to Indonesia. But there’s a difference between the Islamic heartland – the Arabic-speaking countries of North Africa and the Middle East (plus Turkey) where Islam began, which both deeply influenced and were influenced by Greek and Roman culture – and the many other places that Islam eventually spread to. Bangladesh is not a Western country despite being majority Muslim, just as the Philippines are not a Western country despite being majority Christian.

And yes, it is absolutely ironic that two of the three regions I’m arguing are of the West – Eastern Europe and the Middle East – have “East” in their names! Indeed it was these “Easts” that the concept of the “West” was originally defined against: coming out first of the East-West Schism between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. That usage persisted through the days when Eastern Europe was a Communist Other: “Ukraine girls really knock me out, they leave the West behind.” But, with the “Eastern Bloc” decades behind us, relatively few use the concept of the “West” in that way anymore. More often now we wrongly assimilate “the West” to a racialized “whiteness” – and Eastern Europe is of course “whiter” than Spain or Italy. But its “whiteness” is not the reason to include Eastern Europe in the West. Rather, what Eastern Europe does share with Western Europe is a set of historical roots, roots which they both share with Latin America and the Middle East (and North America and Oceania) – and not with sub-Saharan Africa or South or East Asia.

It is those historical roots, I would argue, that make “Western” tradition or civilization a thing. The contemporary cultures of North and South and Central America, Western and Eastern Europe, the southern and eastern Mediterranean and the Arabian Peninsula, all derive from the innovations of two original places: the classical Greek world of the northeastern Mediterranean, and the Semitic world rooted in that small stretch of land on the shores of the southeastern Mediterranean, the Nile, and the Red Sea. (Each of these worlds, note, first arose in lands further east than Warsaw or Sarajevo.) The pan-Mediterranean Roman Empire brought the two together, and eventually came to be dominated by a tradition whose sacred scriptures are half in Hebrew and half in Greek. As that empire declined, a new Semitic tradition arose which promptly turned back to the Greeks for its intellectual life – and whose learning would later prove essential to Northern Europe once it eventually came to be civilized for the first time. I don’t think it’s too hard to see the continuities among the cultures whose main roots go back to these Greek and Semitic worlds.

Latin America may be a question mark here because they have non-Western historical roots from their indigenous peoples – but that is also true of North America! I suppose that on these grounds one could make a reasonable case that the mostly indigenous Guatemala, say, should not be counted as a Western country – but if Canadians and Americans (let alone Australians) are Westerners, then Argentinians and Uruguayans definitely are too. Note that that distinction should be on cultural grounds, not racial ones; the issue is not that Guatemalan indigenous peoples aren’t white, but that their indigenous cultural heritage arose independently of Europe and the Mediterranean – as that of the Muslim Middle East did not. More on the supposed “whiteness” of the West next time.

Cross-posted at Love of All Wisdom.

Justin Whitaker has made a second defence of the Sigālovāda Sutta, and it’s time for another response on my end. As a recap, we are debating the value of the Sigālovāda as a guide to lay Buddhist ethics: I do not find it a good guide, he does, and we’ve had a round of back-and-forth over this

I think Justin’s latest comment on the topic is very perceptive, and it pushes the points at which my own take on Buddhism is a reinterpretation, a departure from the classical Pali suttas – for the advice offered by the Sigālovāda is in keeping with the tenor of advice offered in many other such suttas. I’d like to follow up in a couple of ways, among them to ask about how much Justin’s own view might be such as well.

Justin says:

Perhaps now, in your life, drinking and staying out late are trustworthy bringers of joy. The Sigālovāda sutta doesn’t seem to be unique among Buddhist teachings in suggesting this won’t last, or that other pursuits would be better uses of your time, should you wish to be a noble disciple.

With something like alcohol, I’d agree that moderation isn’t the goal. But, as many Buddhists have interpreted it (and I’d agree), moderation is an excellent step for many people (a step in the direction of elimination).

Jumping to becoming a monastic would be too drastic a step for the vast majority of us (and many who jump into too quickly disrobe). So I would never advise someone who has lost trust in worldly pleasures to jump into that. There is so much more nuance in individual lives – perhaps, for instance, they are deeply depressed and that is why they do not get pleasure from worldly things. This would be no reason to become a monk.

I agree with Justin that the Sigālovāda is not at all unique in criticizing worldly pleasures like staying out late and going to the theatre. It is a general theme throughout the suttas that all the joys of worldly life are fleeting and therefore unsatisfactory; for that reason, the suttas claim, the life of a monk is better, and something we should all aspire to. Household life of the sort described in the Sigālovāda Sutta is a consolation prize, for the majority of people who aren’t good enough to be monks; most likely they don’t have the discipline, but it could also be (as Justin says) that they have so many mental problems that a turn to monasticism would be merely as an escape and therefore actually harmful. But either way, being a monk is always the ideal goal, for anyone who has got things together enough to do so.

I’m not sure we disagree on that interpretation of the suttas. But here’s the thing. I think that the suttas’ view, as just described, is not a good way to think about lay life – and I have a suspicion that Justin might think so too.

Over a decade ago, before I started calling myself a Buddhist, I talked on LoAW about my decision to get married, and how I disagreed with the suttas that that path of marriage was a lesser path for weaker people. Years later I came to call myself Buddhist, for reasons I’ve discussed before, but in a way that did not dissuade me from my earlier beliefs – key among those beliefs being a belief that worldly goods are goods in themselves. The goods of aesthetic pleasure, justice, familial love all have a value in themselves, distinct from their ability to contribute to suttas’ goal of reducing suffering – a value that is not erased by their impermanence.

I am at odds with many suttas, not merely the Sigālovāda, when I say this. I recognize that. It’s a reason I have drawn some inspiration from kammatic Buddhism, like that of the Mahāvaṃsa, in which the devaluation of worldly pleasures fades into the background. But I think it’s important to do, because classical Buddhism does value seeing correctly, and I do not think we see correctly if we treat worldly goods as worthless.

I do deeply admire monks and see something in them that is worthy of emulation, even for those of us who have rejected their path. I think the path of the monk is a good one to take for those who already place such a high value on self-cultivation that it transcends other values. And for the rest of us, the intense discipline that is monkhood is a reminder that we can always be pushing harder and further to better ourselves. In my post defending worldly life I followed Amber Carpenter in describing my position as Nietzschean – and in the third book of the Genealogy, Nietzsche himself discusses his admiration for asceticism as self-mastery. For these reasons I think it is worth our having śraddhā toward monks, and expressing that śraddhā with donations where possible. But I don’t think that any of that necessarily implies that the household life is a lesser path than the higher monastic goal, or that the goods of worldly life are superseded by a monastic pursuit of the reduction of suffering.

And I suspect Justin may, at heart, take a similar view to mine. For I notice that he has taken one step further into worldly life than I have, and had children. When the Buddha himself found out he had a son, he proclaimed “a fetter is arisen”, and named the boy Rāhula, “fetter”. To have children, the Buddha made clear, was something holding him back, a hurdle in the way of his path to liberation. By the standards of the suttas, Justin has intentionally fettered himself.

So here’s my challenge to Justin: did you yourself take up your household life, with spouse and children, merely because you weren’t ready in this life for the drastic step of monkhood? Do you view your family life as a lesser path, one in which you follow a moderation toward worldly goods because you sadly could not bring yourself all the way to their elimination?

I suspect that the answer is no. I’m prepared to be wrong about that: if the answer turned out to be yes, I’d be impressed, and would love to hear a spirited defence of such a view, as I think it runs deeply against our typical Western conceptions of familyhood as constitutively good. Disagreement over the Sigālovāda proper would fade into the background of that deeper question. But if the answer is indeed no, then I think we are back on the grounds of my original critique of the Sigālovāda: the aesthetic pleasure of a theatrical show, like familial love, is something good in itself. And we should not take the suttas’ advice to reduce, let alone eliminate, the presence of either one.

Cross-posted at Love of All Wisdom.

In general, Medhātithi’s commentary systematizes the MDh. In the case of action and intention, he does his best to iron away seeming incongruities by explaining that intentional actions are liable to more blame than unintentional ones, which he accomplishes by adding the needed adverbs or adjective to the wording of MDh (e.g., in his commentary on 9.242 (on intentional vs unintentional crimes), 11.56, 11.77 (on the intentional vs unintentional killing of Brāhmaṇas), 11.125, 11.209 (on deciding expiations when no one is explicitly prescribed)). Accordingly, Medhātithi explains away the “unintentionally” in MDh 11.127, because the strength of the penalty implies that the action was performed intentionally.

As often the case in his commentary, Medhātithi derives his philosophical framework of reference from the deontic teachings of the philosophical school of Mīmāṃsā. For instance, he does not add his own definition of “action” and “intention”, but presupposes the Mīmāṃsā understanding of these concepts.
The speculation on action starts for Mīmāṃsā philosophers by considering the paradigmatic case of complex ritual actions. This means that they consider first and foremost actions spanning over a long period of time (hours or even days) and that cannot be easily explained as the result of ephemeral desires, but rather require what Alfred Mele calls “distal intentions” (intentions about the non-immediate future, see Mele 2006). Nonetheless, they all agree about the pivotal role of desire in action and, in this sense, ground each complex action ultimately in a “primitive” desire (i.e., a desire for something independently desirable, and not desirable for the sake of something else). Typical examples for primitive desires are desires for sons, rain, cattle, happiness, whereas desiring to know the meaning of a certain passage is considered subservient to some other desire, which has led one to read the corresponding text.
Accordingly, Mīmāṃsā authors distinguish between main actions and the activities they are composed of; one’s intention relates to the main action, whereas the intermediate activities are needed sub-steps, but are not independently intended. Therefore, different rules apply to the two sets. This bipartition is taken for granted also in the MDh and by Medhātithi. For instance, MDh 11.11–12 discuss the case of a main action (a sacrifice) being interrupted for want of an ingredient needed for an intermediate activity. Since the main action needs to be completed, one is allowed to complete it even by appropriating a single ingredient in a way which would not be normally allowed (taking it away from someone who does not need it). In other words, the need to complete the main action creates a situation of necessity that permits one to act in a sub-ideal way.
Intention is not dealt separately from blame in the Dharmasūtras nor in the MDh. However, Medhātithi is himself an insightful thinker and often takes up small clues in the MDh to open up a deeper discussion, and this happens in the case of his discussion of intention. Specifically, Medhātithi adds a second axis to the one examined above concerning intentions, prohibitions, and expiations, namely that of intention (saṅkalpa) and motivation. Near the beginning of the MDh, the elements underlying one’s observance of law is briefly outlined, including intention and desire:

To be motivated by desire is not commended, but it is impossible here to be free from desire; for it is desire that prompts vedic study and the performance of vedic rites.
Intention is the root of desire; intention is the wellspring of sacrifices; and intention triggers every religious observance and every rule of restraint—so the tradition declares. Nowhere in this world do we see any activity done by a man free from desire; for whatever at all that a man may do, it is the work of someone who desired it.
By engaging in them properly, a man attains the world of the immortals and, in this world, obtains all his desires just as he intended.

In this passage, Manu asserts a few things. First, he asserts that both engaging in activity and refraining from particular activities are “triggered” by intention (“intention triggers every religious observance and every rule of restraint”). The terminology suggests that Medhātithi is thinking of activities that would have otherwise taken place, and which demand effort on one’s side to be avoided (such as lightning a cigarette as the first thing in the morning for a passionate smoker). In other words, intention triggers one to change the present inertia, be it by undertaking something or refraining from acting inertially.
Second, he asserts—perhaps counter to intuitive notions—that it is intention that comes before and necessitates desire (“intention is the root of desire”). Third, he asserts that desire is a requirement for acting in the world (“Nowhere in this world do we see any activity done by a man free from desire; for whatever at all that a man may do, it is the work of someone who desired it”).
In his commentary, Medhātithi’s develops the ideas in this passage. Specifically, Medhātithi outlines the concept of intention and the required elements for action. Medhātithi introduces the topic of his commentary by first quoting a portion of Manu’s above passage:
Intention is the root of desire; intention is the wellspring of sacrifices; and intention triggers every religious observance and every rule of restraint—so the tradition declares.

Medhātithi then goes on to further explicate a view of how intention relates to desire and action, responding to various objections:

And therefore, he (Manu) spells out what has been said, namely that without a desire the nature of a sacrifice is not carried out. An intention is the root of sacrifices and similar actions, and of desire. A person who desires to perform a sacrifice or a similar action necessarily forms an intention. And when an intention is being formed, it is necessarily the case that a desire is also brought close as caused by it, even if this (desire) is itself not wished. Just like when a person aiming at cooking burns [wood-logs] also smoke is produced, even if unwished, insofar as it is caused by that same cause. In this regard, it is impossible that a sacrifice or a similar action is performed, if desire does not occur.

[Obj.:] Then, what is this intention, which you say to be the root of all actions?

[R:] It is the appearance (sandarśana) of consciousness (cetas), after which desiring (prārthanā) and ascertaining, one after the other, occur. In fact, these mental activities (vyāpāra) attain the role of root for the undertaking of all actions. For, it is not the case that material activities are possible without them. To elaborate: First of all, one ascertains the nature of a given thing, e.g. “This thing produces this effect”. This cognition is here called intention. Thereafter, desiring (prārthanā), i.e., will (icchā) occurs. This is desire (kāma). Once one has the will “How will I realise that (thing) through that (action)?”, one ascertains “I will do it”. This is the ascertaining. Thereafter, one undertakes an action with regard to an external activity which is the instrument to realise [one’s goal]. For instance, a person who wants to eat something first observes the action of eating [by someone else], then wishes “May I eat!”, then ascertains “I will abandon all other activities and eat!”. Then, he tells to the action, the cause, the place and the eligible person: ‘Come together, prepare (sajjīkṛ-) a succulent [food]’.

[Obj.:] But if this is the case, sacrifice and similar actions do not occur just because of an intention. Rather, they occur because of intention, desire and ascertaining. Thus, why does Manu say “sacrifices originate out of intentions”?

[R:] There is no flaw, since the intention is the original cause. For this very reason, he (Manu) will later say that one never sees any action by a person who does not desire anything.

These passages favour a plain reading of the claim in Manu whereby intentions are the root cause of engagement in sacrifices and other actions. At its core, the understanding of intention furthered here appears to be a basic consciousness of how certain acts relate to certain ends. While intentions have an initiatory role, desire and ascertainment necessarily follow. This approach is distinct from cognitivism (as defined by Sarah Paul), insofar as intentions are volitions and not identical with the corresponding beliefs.
In which sense can intention be the cause of desire and not the opposite? Is not it the case that we first experience appetites, then move on to form the intention to satisfy them and then perform the relevant sequence of acts? Let us start with Medhātithi’s starting point, namely that of complex actions, such as sacrifices, that extend through time. In their case, the claim that a basic appetite is what causes one to act, appears less plausible, because appetites are ephemeral and cannot sustain a longer cycle of activities. Accordingly, Medhātithi’s account makes perfect sense when it comes to actions that are performed not because of a basic appetite, but because of a conscious decision, but can it apply also to other kinds of actions?

While focus is placed in these passages on sacrificial and “similar actions”, which indicates a series of complex actions aimed at a particular result, Medhātithi makes it clear that the mental activities of intending, desiring, and ascertaining are the “root for the undertaking of all actions”. This sets up a fairly robust picture of action whereby actors hold in their minds a consciousness of how they understand their movements to interact with the world, which will result in a particular and desired end. In this sense, the psychological sequence Medhātithi sketched above could be a depiction of the phenomenological process through which a certain level of consciousness is a preliminary requirement for the process to be started, but cognition and appetite are also needed. The emphasis on phenomenology is due to the fact that it is hard to make sense of the statement that intentions generate desires (could one say “I intend to have dinner, therefore I am starting to feel hungry”?), but it makes sense that one only becomes aware of desire after having conceived the corresponding intention (“I intend to have dinner and realize that I am in fact hungry”). If taken to its extreme consequences, this would imply that there are no genuine conflicts between intentions and desires, because desires become available to one’s consciousness only once one has intended to do something. If desires are not directly responsible for our actions, how can Medhātithi explain episodes that are often ascribed to them, e.g. in case of what Euro-American philosophers call the “weakness of the will”? For instance, how could he explain the case of one failing to dress up to go to an opera even though they had previously formed the intention to go? Medhātithi could deal with is as a conflict among intentions, not among different causal factors (the intention to go and the desire to stay home) determining one’s actions. Alternatively, he could mention how inertial states take stronger intentions to be resisted and discuss such examples as based on a conflict between an intention and a hard-to-break inertial state. He could argue that it would be hard to dress up even independently of an active desire to stay home (thus proving that the problem is not due to a conflict between intentions and desires), because dressing up (like any act) involves effort, and all efforts are only undertaken if one sees that a bigger advantage will come of out them.

What do you think? Given Medhātithi’s premisses, does my extension of his thought to the above case make sense?

(cross-posted on my personal blog)

Veṅkaṭanātha recognises two soteriological paths, namely bhakti (restricted to only few eligible people) and prapatti (being the only one accessible to normal people). In both cases, how can one get there?

Prapatti, to begin with, cannot be sought for independently, because one only becomes eligible for prapatti only after having become aware of one’s desperation because one cannot ever be eligible for bhakti (not to speak of karma- and jñānamārga). Thus, one’s only way to reach prapatti is by means of trying to achieve bhakti and becoming aware of one’s inability to do so and therefore deciding to just surrender to God or His spouse.

Bhakti, in turn, has an intellectual aspect and an emotional one. On the one hand, it is defined by Rāmānuja as a continuous meditation on the real nature of God, and therefore needs a preliminary ascertainment of what this nature could be. On the other, it is based on a surplus of loving affection, one that will never be satiated, not even in Vaikuṇṭha. Therefore, since the time of Rāmānuja’s Śaraṇāgatigadya, Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta authors have engaged in a pedagogy of emotions, one enhancing one’s raw emotions and transforming them into soteriologically-relevant ones. The former are temporary and might be about the wrong topic, the latter focus on God, and are able to last forever and become more intense with time. Veṅkaṭanātha tries to reach this level through his learned religious poetry, which is made to be listened/read, re-listened/re-read and pondered upon for a long time, since its many layers of theological meanings can only reveal themselves through a long perusal.

For instance, the detailed descriptions from head to toe (anubhava) of God’s body in various poems by Veṅkaṭanātha are meant to show how one can train one’s sense faculties to relish always more in their object, rather than being satiated by it. The same poems also underline the poet’s unworthiness, possibly so that the listener/reader can get a chance to contemplate their own unworthiness (for some beautifully translated poems by Veṅkaṭanātha, see Hopkins 2007).

Do you agree that emotions come at the end of one’s soteriological journey for Veṅkaṭanātha?

Paul Fuller’s thoughtful and well researched new introduction to Engaged Buddhism cites my Disengaged Buddhism article together with an article I hadn’t heard of before, Victor Temprano’s 2013 “Defining engaged Buddhism” (Buddhist Studies Review 30.2). (Fuller has very kind words for both Temprano and myself.) I proceeded to read Temprano’s article and was quite struck by it – and by the fact that Fuller had listed our two articles together, as making complementary critiques. Fuller’s putting our two articles together is striking to me because, while Temprano and I do both make a critique of Western engaged Buddhist scholars like Sallie King and David Loy, we do so for entirely different reasons – reasons that are actually opposed to one another. And indeed, I think my differences from Temprano are larger than my differences from King and Loy.

Temprano directs his critique against the kinds of claims that I made in my article’s section on method. Temprano and I both note that engaged Buddhist scholarship has a strong normative dimension, as for example when King says “it is easy to take expressions of contempt and acts of violence as criteria for discerning what is not a valid expression of the Dharma” (Socially Engaged Buddhism 25-6, her emphasis). But Temprano takes this normative dimension to be a problem, something wrong with scholarship like King’s. I do not.

Temprano correctly claims that “Loy’s and King’s definitions are, after all, not merely different ways of accounting for the origins of engaged Buddhism, but ways of defining what true Buddhism really should be.” Where he goes wrong in his followup:

The resulting denunciation, judgment, and exclusion of threatening Buddhisms expresses the deep sense of authority that academics can feel in regards to their ability to concretely define who is and who is not a Buddhist. Yet Buddhists are practicing diverse traditions already; there is no need to present certain forms as somehow more ideal than others. (268, his emphasis)

Isn’t there, though? Consider the Burmese monk Wirathu. When lynch mobs composed of Burmese Buddhists were killing hundreds of Muslims and driving hundreds of thousands more from their homes, Wirathu called the Muslims “troublemakers” and said “You can be full of kindness and love, but you cannot sleep next to a mad dog.” He added that “Muslims are like the African carp. They breed quickly and they are very violent and they eat their own kind.” As riots grew worse he proclaimed to his followers that “Now is the time to rise up, to make your blood boil.”

Wirathu is a self-identified Buddhist, and one who has gone through all the traditional and institutional requirements necessary to become a monk. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Wirathu is not a Buddhist. (I don’t feel a strong need to take a position on whether he counts as an engaged Buddhist; Fuller reasonably argues that he does.) But I would agree with King, contra Temprano, that Wirathu is a bad Buddhist – that his form of Buddhism is indeed less ideal than others. His preaching of anger, hate and violence goes against all the normative ideals that King and I have learned, as Buddhists, from Buddhist tradition. We believe in Buddhist ideals that say what Wirathu is doing is wrong, pāpa.

And so, we would argue, there is a need to present Wirathu’s Buddhism as bad Buddhism. Temprano makes no argument for his claim that there isn’t; it is a non sequitur to move from the existence of different Buddhist traditions to the claim that none is better than others, unless one is going to make the a priori assumption that nothing is ever better than anything else. (Indeed, the way Temprano puts his argument, one could just as easily turn it around against him: “Buddhologists are practising diverse methods already, including normative ones; there is no need to present a non-normative Buddhology as somehow more ideal than the normative kind.”) If one were already committed to a position of strict neutrality, then that would imply that one should not say one person’s Buddhism is better than another’s. But King clearly is not so committed, and neither am I.

Should we be? Temprano never makes a convincing case for such neutrality. (Few ever have.) At several points in his article Temprano recognizes that King and Loy are both scholars and practitioners, but at other points he bifurcates these two identities such that they can or should never meet: “The question of whether or not a practice is truly Buddhist is largely a question for practitioners to debate, not for scholars to determine.” (269) Or, “The condemnation of violence as not simply bad, but as un-Buddhist, is a judgment that Buddhists must make, not a judgment for scholars to disseminate to a global society through the academy.” (273) Temprano has already admitted that we are both Buddhists and scholars. Why should it not be the case that the two inform each other?

Here Temprano claims:

When scholastic and secular authority, embodied in the symbolic capital accrued by King and Loy upon completing Ph.Ds and becoming widely published, is directed towards supporting and authorizing one Buddhist tradition and towards denigrating and delegitimizing others, it is entirely a different beast than squabbles between religious traditions themselves. Evaluations of religious traditions end up relying mostly on personal prejudices, and ignore entirely the reality that Buddhists of different traditions legitimately practice in a vast variety of different, and even opposing, ways. (273, emphasis in original)

In the first sentence, Temprano says that King and Loy “delegitimize” views and practices like Wirathu’s. In the last, he is effectively claiming that Wirathu practices “legitimately”. Since this latter claim directly contradicts the statement that his opponents are making, one would expect to find an argument for it, but there is none. As far as I can tell, Temprano’s only ground for believing groups like Wirathu’s “legitimate” is that they exist. But anti-vaxxers and flat earthers also exist. The existence of false beliefs is well documented. The mere existence of such beliefs does not make them legitimate! Are we delegitimizing Wirathu? Damn right we’re delegitimizing Wirathu. Why aren’t you?

Among far too many religion scholars, it is an article of faith – in the most pejorative sense of that term – that all traditions and all sides of a tradition are legitimate; the illegitimate thing, supposedly, is to arbitrate between them. This article of faith is self-contradicting, and the house of cards on which it is built rapidly falls. For the claim itself delegitimizes those of us within the tradition who do believe that one side of a “squabble” is better than another and that there are good reasons to take that side over the other. In so delegitimizing us, it takes a side, and thus does exactly what it claims to reject. As a result, this article of faith is incoherent nonsense, and should be expunged from the field of religious studies wherever it appears (which is all too frequently).

Temprano really gives that game away when he claims that “Evaluations of religious traditions end up relying mostly on personal prejudices.” In saying this, as far as I can tell, all he is doing is revealing a personal prejudice of his own. For he provides not the slightest bit of argument of evidence for this claim. It is a claim dripping with implicit contempt for us Buddhist practitioners, whether Western, Asian or otherwise: the beliefs we take as central to our traditions are so disconnected from objective reality that objective scholarly claims cannot even be made about them; our belief comes down to mere personal prejudice, and must remain so. And it does not take much examination to reveal this claim of Temprano’s to be false.

Is our consciousness reborn after death? Ian Stevenson provided some empirical evidence to suggest objectively that it is. Evan Thompson critically examined Stevenson’s evidence and found it insufficient to prove the point. Both Stevenson’s and Thompson’s claims are claims about the objective truth of a key Buddhist doctrine, made with the standards of scholarly rigour that are our best route to objective truth in any field.

Likewise, the theory of evolution, if true, logically implies that the literal interpretation of Genesis is objectively false; fundamentalists and biologists both rightly agree on that much, which is why the former reject the theory. Scholarly methods establish that theory of evolution is objectively true, as far as we can tell, and the literal interpretation of Genesis therefore false. One would have to be a truly extreme die-hard postmodern relativist to say that that point relies “mostly on personal prejudices”, and Temprano provides no indication that he swings in such a direction.

My objection to engaged Buddhist scholars is that so far their scholarship has not adequately lived up to standards of scholarly rigour; I wrote my article to encourage them to do so. Temprano, however, is telling them the opposite! He is telling them to abandon any attempt at objective truth and the rigour that leads to it, when it comes to normative claims made within Buddhist tradition. Instead he wants them to shut up and impose a radical bifurcation between their Buddhist selves and their scholar selves – in a way that reveals a patronizing contempt for the Buddhist part. And he does so for reasons that lack rigour themselves. Between all that and the engaged Buddhists, I’ll take the engaged Buddhists any day.

(As a final note on questions of authority: I would have felt bad about writing a piece this harsh, and would therefore have toned it down, if Temprano’s academic title was still “assistant to Arvind Sharma”, as it appears in the article. I would not want to punch down at a junior academic in a position that precarious. Fortunately for both of us, it appears that in the ensuing years Temprano, like me, has found gainful employment outside his academic specialty. I’m happy for him that that’s the case – and I also think he is therefore fair game for a lateral punch.)

Cross-posted at Love of All Wisdom.

Is it possible to command someone who is already inclined to act according to Prabhākara? 

Bṛhatī ad 6.1.1 says na pravṛttapravartane prayogaḥ āmantraṇādiṣu vyabhicārāt, literally: “[Exhortative endings] are not used to promote people who are already active, because of the deviant case (vyabhicāra) of invitations”. 

In fact, Prabhākara appears to believe that commands are always imparted on someone who is not yet active and who becomes active upon hearing them. The addressee of a command  desires something already and recognises themselves as the addressee through such desires (see Freschi 2012), but they are not active until they become enjoined.

Now, if Prabhākara means that active people are never promoted to act, why are āmantraṇas a good example? Orders (ājñā) are not used as a standard example because their being a clear case of promoting someone not already active had been attacked by the opponent in the previous line.

As for āmantraṇa, the situation with āmantraṇa is ambiguous, but Śālikanātha takes it as connected to a command uttered among peers (thus, it is not a clear case of a command uttered for people who are not already active). Moreover, what is the role of the vyabhicāra argument? How can a vyabhicāra argument be used to convince someone that something is *always* the case? A vyabhicāra can be used to show that it is incorrect to claim that “All As are B”, since there is at least one A that is not a B, but it can’t be used to corroborate “All As are B” by showing a further case of an A that is indeed B. In other words, why speaking of “vyabhicāra” and not of “yathāmantraṇeṣu” or the like? The only possible explanation seems to be to think of āmantraṇādiṣu vyabhicārāt as “because the case of invitations, etc., deviates from the [opponent’s] claim”.  

Still, if it is impossible to command someone who is already inclined to act, how can Prabhākara make sense of permissions? When we are already about to light a cigarette and look around and ask whether it is OK and someone tells us “No problem, go ahead!”, isn’t the “go ahead” a command directed to someone who is already active? Could Prabhākara perhaps say that a command cannot enjoin someone who is already active because it would miss the apūrva element?

I was delighted to see Justin Whitaker responding to my post on the Sigālovāda Sutta – both in a comment and in a separate post of his own. Justin and I first found each other long ago over our shared interest in Pali Buddhist ethics, and he was one of my more frequent interlocutors in the early days of Love of All Wisdom, so it’s great to see him back around. I recall Justin citing the Sigālovāda favourably several times in earlier conversations, so perhaps it’s not surprising that my broadside against it is what brought him out of the woodwork!

Justin’s post says, “For Lele, the text is problematic precisely because it does not push the reader to monasticism and a singular focus on ending suffering.” I think this is a bit misleading as a description of my position. After all, as I think Justin knows, I’m against a singular focus on ending suffering. I don’t necessarily see monasticism as the ideal human life; I’ve now taken two major steps that might make me ineligible for monkhood, and I don’t regret either of them.

So the problem I see with the Sigālovāda is not that it doesn’t push the reader to monasticism. Rather, it’s that for people who aren’t monks, the advice it offers is terrible! It portrays a sad and dreary life that offers precious few advantages over monkhood. I think monkhood is a valuable and wonderful life choice; I admire a life aimed entirely at the cultivation of virtue, and the perspective that those who pursue it can bring to those who don’t. But If we’re not going to be monks, I submit, then we should be out going to the theatre, singing, dancing – and waking up well after sunrise as a consequence of having done these things the night before. If we don’t trust worldly pleasures, we should be monks; but if we do trust those pleasures, then by all means we should embrace them.

Justin adds in his comment,

For a person like Sigala, and surely many of us today, progress could be best accomplished by reducing (or foregoing) certain of life’s little pleasures. Perhaps no longer “frequenting theatrical performances” could mean going a bit less often, using the new free time to study or practice or help friends. Seeing the benefit of those over the theatre, perhaps Sigala would give it up altogether in much the same way some of us today give up certain social media platforms or their television sets.

I could read this interpretation of Justin’s in two ways. One, we gradually come to see that worldly pleasures are less valuable than activities that cultivate virtue, such as studying, practising, helping friends. We start to engage in worldly pleasures less, as a sort of training wheels to not engaging in them at all. The latter is the real goal – at which point, again, we might as well be monks! If we really want to give up those things that are not studying, practising and helping, then we’ll want to take up the vocation that allows us to engage in these latter activities full-time.

Alternately, the interpretation could be saying that the real point of the Sigālovāda’s discouragements is just to encourage us to moderate our involvement in worldly pleasures, taming our desires for them and doing them a little bit less in favour of other pursuits of self-cultivation. On this second approach, our moderation might lead us to give a few of those pleasures up altogether, but it wouldn’t necessarily lead us there, and it’s totally fine if it doesn’t.

I could see taking an approach like this second one as a reinterpretation of the Sigālovāda to make it fit with our other commitments – as we might reinterpret karma without the supernatural. But it is a reinterpretation, for it’s not what the Sigālovāda actually says. The sutta says that the noble disciple just does not pursue “frequenting theatrical shows”, period – along with drinking or “sauntering in streets at unseemly hours” (both pastimes I rather enjoy). Moderation isn’t the issue; you’re not supposed to do these things at all. So the text in its own terms seems to require the first interpretation – in which case, again, you might as well be a monk.

Now I don’t mean to disparage that reinterpretation. For I think we Buddhists need reinterpretations of problematic passages in our scriptures. When we see passages that encourage the subordination of women or queer people, or that say the sun and the moon revolve around Mount Meru, we should not take them literally, but we also don’t want to simply throw them out. Thus I noted that the vinaya passages subordinating women and prohibiting queer people were there to maintain the social reputation of the saṅgha, and that in the modern era that goal would be better served through equality and inclusion.

My point, though, is that the Sigālovāda is one of those problematic pieces that requires reinterpretation. (From our perspective, we should consider it entirely neyyattha, not nītattha!) It’s worth trying to revise its message in a modern way, just as we would with passages about the cosmology about Mount Meru. The issue is that as it stands, without reinterpretation, the sutta is bad advice to follow. And so we shouldn’t make it the centrepiece of Buddhist lay ethics.

Cross-posted at Love of All Wisdom.

The main thing about Sanskrit philosophical commentaries is that they are the standard way of doing philosophy. For centuries, they were almost the only way of doing philosophy. After Maṇḍana, one starts seeing monographs dedicated to a specific topic. Still, even those take often the form of verses+autocommentary and do not become the mainstream form of philosophy. Until today, Sanskrit philosophers think and write in the form of commentaries. This has several implications:

1. They do not value originality per se. I am probably preaching to the converted if I say that one can make incredible innovations while writing a commentary (and in fact, this routinely happened, with sources of knowledge being removed from the list, new accounts being added, completely different explanations being offered etc.). However, the genre “commentary” involves the habitus of intellectual humbleness. One does not praise one’s innovations and rather locates them in a tradition of exegesis of truths that were already available for everyone, if only one had paused long enough to see them.

2. Lower level explanations about word-meanings, sentence-syntax etc. are mixed with high level elaborations. This means that even the most self-confident intellectual will not disdain intellectual labour, because the two are contiguous.

3. Philosophy is constantly seen as a dialogue with one’s intellectual predecessors. In fact, and unlike in other philosophical traditions, Sanskrit commentaries typically take the form of dialogues among possible interpretations.

4. The constraints of the commentary open the way for the never-ending play of possible interpretations. Abhinavagupta lists 18 (if I remember correctly) interpretations for the word anuttara in his Paratriṃśikāvivaraṇa and everyone is aware of the amplifying potential of commenting on words and texts.

In later times, I would add two further features of philosophical commentaries:

1. Commentaries tend to take into account more and more networks of texts rather than single texts

2. Consequently, one comments not only on the texts of one’s schools, but also on influential texts one wants to appropriate (think of Śaṅkara’s inaugurating the use of commenting on the BhG and the Upaniṣads, as well as Abhinavagupta’s commentary on the Triṃśikā). Still later, one comments on the texts on one’s adversaries as a way to refute them, like Madhusādana Sarasvatī did in the case of Vyāsatīrtha.

(cross-posted on my personal blog: http://elisafreschi.com)