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
Daniel Pallies, a philosophy postdoc at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, recently wrote a blog post entitled “The inexplicable appeal of spicy food”. Pallies, from his bio, indicates that one of his key interests is the question: “What makes a Continue reading If only Bentham had read the Kāma Sūtra
It was thirty years ago, in 1995, that a then-unknown junior academic named Jeffrey Kripal published Kālī’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna. The book took a new look at the stories written Continue reading Kali’s Child at 30
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
One of the reasons Buddhists emphasize the idea of non-self so much, I think, is they see the kind of danger that can emerge from self-focused approaches like expressive individualism. That danger is when we identify with our bad qualities Continue reading The practical implications of non-self
This Friday, while I was taking my lunch break from work, my mother called to let me know that my father, Jayant Lele, had peacefully passed away. (I am posting this here because he was, in the last analysis, an Continue reading My last months with my father
The Journal of Indian Philosophy is seeking a copy-editor. We need someone who is both a native speaker of English, and able to understand the contents of the articles. So the ideal candidate would be a post-doc who has a PhD thesis Continue reading JIP copy-editor position
On May 15, Harry Falk announced on the Indology mailing list that Johannes Bronkhorst had “left this world”. In the following weeks the mailing list (and, I am sure, other online forums) has been virtually monopolised by people remembering the Continue reading Thinking about Johannes Bronkhorst (with small updates)
One cannot solve the Agnīṣomīya problem (the clash between the prohibition to perform any violence and the prescription to slaughter an animal as an offer to Agni and Soma) via an appeal to suspension (bādha) of the prohibition to perform Continue reading On sacrificial violence