A group blog of scholars exploring Indian philosophy
Recently I wanted to explore a fascinating passage of the Daoist founder Zhuangzi, where the text recommends “sitting in oblivion” or “sitting and forgetting” (zuòwàng 坐忘). That passage bears striking similarities to mystical practices and experiences from around the globe. Continue reading Is Asian philosophy footnotes to the Buddha?
The most important lesson I ever learned was back in Thailand in 1997: that the biggest contributor to my unhappiness wasn’t external problems like being single or unemployed, but my own mental states like craving. Fixing those mental states was Continue reading We need to see emotions as bodily
The philosophy department at Ghent University recently posted a vacancy for a professorship in Critical Religion Studies and Comparative Philosophy. https://jobs.ugent.be/job/Ghent-Professor-in-Critical-Religion-Studies-&-Comparative-Philosophy-%28BOF%29-9000/810167202/
If we take a modern Buddhist approach where the ultimate reality is emptiness, what then does that look like in practice? Especially as we think about the key question:how can you be yourself if there is no self? In thinking Continue reading Sketching an existentialist Buddhism
How can we reconcile Buddhism with expressive individualism (“be yourself”) and with natural science? When I had previously turned to Wilfrid Sellars for help on this question, I had compared Sellars’s view to two Buddhist metaphysical positions on ultimate truth, Continue reading The physics of emptiness
Any serious contemporary Buddhist intellectual needs to think through the connection between Buddhist ideas and the relevant claims of natural science. Many of us, too, are expressive individualists: we believe that there is something valuable in the project of discovering Continue reading The scientific self is not reductionist
Monism is the idea that everything is, or is ultimately reducible to, one. This is not quite the same as nondualism, a term increasingly common in mystical circles. Nondualism is the idea that everything is not two or more – Continue reading Nondualism without monism
The University of Hawai’i at Mānoa is hiring an Associate or Full Professor in Classical Indian Philosophy. Applications are due Dec. 2, 2024 for full consideration with a hard deadline of Jan. 13, 2025. More information, including instructions on how Continue reading Job Ad: Associate or Full Professor in Classical Indian Philosophy at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa
We are extremely sad to report that Anand Jayprakash Vaidya passed away on Oct. 11, 2024. He was Professor of Philosophy at San Jose State University, champion for integrating Indian philosophy into the larger discipline, and a contributor to this Continue reading Remembering Anand Vaidya
When I was in grad school, a big academic fashion was to heap scorn on the idea that mystical experience could be something cross-cultural: everything was reducible to social context, and the similarities of experience didn’t really matter, as I Continue reading Finding mysticism in unexpected places