A group blog of scholars exploring Indian philosophy
If Nāgārjuna, the great Madhyamaka Buddhist philosopher, is known for anything, it’s his doctrine of the emptiness (śūnyatā) of all things. But in his most famous work, Nāgārjuna warns his audience about emptiness: “Misperceived emptiness ruins a person of dull Continue reading Snakes wrongly grasped: on the psychedelic experiences of Musk and Manson
Buddhists have never agreed on an overall metaphysics. They have long agreed that prajñā – accurately seeing things according to the ultimate truth – is hugely important, but they differ greatly on what that ultimate truth is. The Theravāda Abhidhamma Continue reading Where Buddhists agree on metaphysics
While Buddhist schools have many different takes on metaphysics – on what the world really is – they all acknowledge a distinction between two truths, or two levels of reality. That is: there is a conventional truth, the one familiar Continue reading Seeing through conventional reality
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
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
Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart is a beautiful and valuable work on dealing with difficult circumstances. What strikes me in it is how Chödrön – despite being a monk herself – takes a position so deeply at odds with Continue reading Improving on the Buddha
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
Binod Kumar Choudhary & Debajyoti Gangopadhyay, Editors. Nalanda Dialogue Series – Volume 1 – Prolegomena to Intercultural Dialogue: Modern Engagement with Indian Knowledge Tradition. Xvi + 273 pp., index. Nava Nalanda Mahavihara, 2022. ₹780 (paperback). The Nalanda Dialogue Series is Continue reading Book Review of Nalanda Dialogue Series – Volume 1 – Prolegomena to Intercultural Dialogue: Modern Engagement with Indian Knowledge Tradition (Reviewed by David Simone)
The past few years have taught me the wisdom in Daoist-influenced traditions of sudden liberation: in a certain way we can improve ourselves by not improving ourselves, through an acceptance of everything, including ourselves, in the present moment. Yet I Continue reading Sudden and gradual together