A group blog of scholars exploring Indian philosophy
I received the Call for Abstracts below from Scott Stroud (University of Texas at Austin). He added, “The call for abstracts is deliberately wide-ranging, since there are so many useful angles to consider here. Approaches from a range of different Continue reading Call for Abstracts: Pragmatism and India
The great Buddhist poet Aśvaghoṣa famously tells the story of the Buddha’s father, the king, who tried to keep his son as an heir rather than a monk by isolating him from all the bad things in the world. Of Continue reading The gap is not glorious
Readers, I’m delighted to announce that my first book is officially scheduled for publication! It’ll come out in November but you can preorder it now, and I would really like to encourage you to do so if you’re interested: preorder Continue reading Announcing my book: After Anger
Karin Meyers’s work on the “damned topics” of Buddhist philosophy is most powerful on the topic of rebirth. Because that’s the place where there’s actually some reasonably powerful evidence for the “damned topic”. Where I think she goes too far Continue reading You still have to naturalize karma
American University philosopher Karin Meyers made an important contribution to Buddhist philosophical studies with her 2016 essay “The damned topics of Buddhist philosophy“. The essay (available free online) has never been formally published, though it clearly deserves to be: when Continue reading On the damned topics of Buddhist philosophy
The autobiography of (Saint) Teresa of Ávila is a most remarkable book. Its beginning sections on Teresa’s early life feel at once relatable (she recalls her youthful interest in making herself pretty) and utterly alien: she and her brother admired Continue reading Nondual mindfulness in Teresa of Ávila
It’s hard for me to view B.R. Ambedkar as a real Buddhist, when he threw out the Four Noble Truths after getting to Buddhism by a mere process of elimination. But then, to a real Buddhist, it shouldn’t matter – Continue reading Ambedkar and the Nation of Islam as skillful means
Dr. Ambedkar, the 20th-century leader of the lowest (“Dalit”, formerly “untouchable”) Indian caste groups, might be having a moment. In my Indian philosophy class in 2019, I wanted to have a segment on modern Indian philosophy, so I introduced the Continue reading My complicated relationship with B.R. Ambedkar
One of the first things you’d learn in any Intro to Buddhism course is that most Buddhists alive today are part of the Mahāyāna tradition, in which one aspires to be a bodhisattva (and eventually become a buddha). Mahāyāna is Continue reading The lost Buddhisms
How does one know about the self, according to the three main schools discussed in my last post? Buddhist Epistemological School (Dharmakīrti): the self does not exist. The only thing that exists is a stream (santāna) of causally linked momentary Continue reading Cognition of the self