One of my favorite blogs is the American Buddhist Perspective by Justin Whitaker, a Buddhist philosopher specializing in Ethics. His Phd. work is focused on Kantian and Buddhist Ethics and he's always posting wonderful nuggets of his work as well as links to some good Kantian resources. Now, I'm nowhere near ready to approach Kant in my studies, but I thought I would bookmark a few of those resources here for you, dear reader, and for future reference:

• Critique of Practical Reason - audio book... pretty great for auditory learners like myself


• Kant and Kantian Ethics - multimedia resources


• Kant: Overview - well written

Justin also mentioned a book I may want to get:

The Discipline of Freedom: A Kantian View of the Role of Moral Precepts in Zen Practice by Philip Olson.

My dance teacher, my soundtrack, my idol growing up has passed away. May he be at peace.

My perspective is that our religious views and opinions have value insofar as they guide our actions. If a belief leads me to act skillfully, then it is a good belief to hold. I think this is true regardless of the truth-value of the belief (although hopefully beliefs that motivate skillful action are also true ones). This perspective puts a limit on how dogmatic we can be in asserting our views, and also suggests we refrain from taking a position on things we have no experience with.

Do you think this sort of pragmatic stance holds water? I know we can reason about things that we have no experience with (or cannot have experience with) and come to conclusions that would be true assuming our premises are true, but when it comes to religion, I think action and experience is paramount.

David Carradine was found dead in his hotel room in Bangkok today. His character on the TV series Kung Fu was a big influence on me growing up. He'll be missed.

The traditional Buddhist Body Contemplation method has the practitioner sit visualizing the various parts of the body using a (memorized) list of its major parts.

"Furthermore, the monk reflects on this very body from the soles of the feet on up, from the crown of the head on down, surrounded by skin and full of various kinds of unclean things: 'In this body there are head hairs, body hairs, nails, teeth, skin, flesh, tendons, bones, bone marrow, kidneys, heart, liver, pleura, spleen, lungs, large intestines, small intestines, gorge, feces, bile, phlegm, pus, blood, sweat, fat, tears, skin-oil, saliva, mucus, fluid in the joints, urine.' Just as if a sack with openings at both ends were full of various kinds of grain — wheat, rice, mung beans, kidney beans, sesame seeds, husked rice — and a man with good eyesight, pouring it out, were to reflect, 'This is wheat. This is rice. These are mung beans. These are kidney beans. These are sesame seeds. This is husked rice'; in the same way, the monk reflects on this very body from the soles of the feet on up, from the crown of the head on down, surrounded by skin and full of various kinds of unclean things: 'In this body there are head hairs, body hairs, nails, teeth, skin, flesh, tendons, bones, bone marrow, kidneys, heart, liver, pleura, spleen, lungs, large intestines, small intestines, gorge, feces, bile, phlegm, pus, blood, sweat, fat, tears, skin-oil, saliva, mucus, fluid in the joints, urine.' And as he remains thus heedful, ardent, & resolute, any memories & resolves related to the household life are abandoned, and with their abandoning his mind gathers & settles inwardly, grows unified & centered. This is how a monk develops mindfulness immersed in the body."
[MN 119]

In my practice I wanted to explore this method, but after trying to use this list, I found that the quality of introspection grew deeper and more refined when I used a more modern anatomical and kinesthetic model. I started studying anatomy texts and books on body mechanics. Not only are my visualizations richer and more closely aligned with reality, but the acuity of my attention has grown sharper.

Just picked up The Conscious Mind by David Chalmers. Already a few chapters in and I am really enjoying it. Have any of you read this book? Any thoughts?

I'm not usually one for musical chanting, but I thought this version of the Heart Sutra was pretty and different.

Pyrrhon was a Greek philosopher who is attributed with founding the philosophical tradition of skepticism. When he was thirty five or forty years old, he followed his teacher Anaxarchus and Alexander of Macedon to India. What he learned there is unknown, but when he returned, his lifestyle and teachings (though he wrote nothing down) seem remarkably similar to certain strands of Buddhism. This paper explores those similarities:

Pyrrhonism and Maadhyamika

( Excerpt after the cut )

Someone in buddhists asked: What is reincarnation/rebirth, what is it precisely that gets reborn, does Buddhist scripture support the notion and if yes, where and how?

Rebirth is the continuation of the causal chain of mental events from one moment to the next and from one life to the next. No "thing" gets reborn, but rather the stream of mental events continues to flow, becoming bound up with a new physical aggregation (body).

The first issue that comes up when we look at the issue of rebirth is the relationship of mental events to the body. Indeed, this is the main issue that most people I've talked to that have difficulties with rebirth tend to question. This is most likely due to the influence of metaphysical naturalism (or rather physicalism) in Western culture.

Physicalists will argue that the physical body is a sufficient condition for the mind and consciousness to arise. Indeed, the scientific study of the mind tends to assume this as well -- if only out of necessity. Buddhists have argued that while the body may be a necessary condition for mental events, it is not a sufficient condition. The Buddhist philosopher Dharmakirti has argued that both physical and non-physical factors must account for the formation of the mind. He argues that non-physical factors are necessary to account for the difference between living beings and inanimate objects. This is similar to contemporary arguments in the philosophy of mind. Namely that physicalist theories do not account for the problems of qualia and intentionality. In Buddhist terms, the four non-material aggregates have properties of a different nature from the properties of the physical body. Therefore, mental events have their own chain of causality.

The second issue is this: even if the naturalist concedes that the mind has both physical and non-physical causes, it still isn't clear whether mental events can exist without those physical processes. In other words, even if physical processes are not a sufficient condition for the mind, they still may be a necessary condition, in which case rebirth is still impossible. Therefore, if Buddhists want to maintain the theory of rebirth, they must show that mental events can occur in the absence of physical processes. To this second issue, several Buddhist philosophers have offered slightly varying arguments, the soundness of which I leave to you to explore. Doing so will lead to a richness of speculative and philosophical thought that makes Buddhism one of the great spiritual traditions of the world, and quite relevant to modern thought.

I'll end on a personal note by saying that, for me, none of the arguments I've come across that seek to justify the Buddhist position on the latter issue have convinced me beyond a doubt, though I have not come across all of them. So I tend to hold an agnostic position on the issue of rebirth.

My goal of the last few years has been to critically examine the extant traditions of Buddhism as well as its history in order to find the most suitable practice that doesn't involve some affront to reason or modern understandings and doesn't "pervert" the teachings of the Buddha to such an extent that it is no longer recognizable as Buddhism. It hasn't been easy, and I'm nowhere near being finished, but I feel like I'm on the right track.

What I've come to is a practice that involves the cultivation of ethics in my daily life, the practice of various sorts of meditation and the application and appreciation of reason. I pepper that with some Zen iconoclasm to keep things from solidifiying into dogma or scholasticism for its own sake.

I'm quite happy with my practice, but I often feel quite alienated from the mainstream Buddhist traditions. I've taken refuge in (the human known as) the Buddha, (my nontraditional understanding of) the Dharma, and the (eclectic collection of fellow seekers and philosophers I consider) the Sangha. All those caveats in parentheses may make some traditionalists uncomfortable, but frankly, I don't care.

It's often claimed that religion is unanimously hostile to homosexuality. I once gave a speech discussing how homosexuality has been treated in Buddhism. I was glad to find this post that sums up that history quite well.

Buddhism and Homosexuality
Excerpt:

According to the ancient Indian understanding, homosexuals were thought of simply as being 'the third nature' (tritiya prakti), rather than as perverted, deviant or sick. With its emphasis on psychology and cause and effect, Buddhism judges acts, including sexual acts, primarily by the intention (cetana) behind them and the effect they have.

We will now briefly examine the various objections to homosexuality and give Buddhist rebuttals to them. The most common Christian and Muslim objection to homosexuality is that it is unnatural and "goes against the order of nature". There seems to be little evidence for this. Miriam Rothschild, the eminent biologist who played a crucial role in the fight to decriminalize homosexuality in Britain, pointed out at the time that homosexual behaviour has been observed in almost every known species of animal. Secondly, it could be argued that while the biological function of sex is reproduction, most sexual activity today is not for reproduction, but for recreation and emotional fulfillment, and that this too is a legitimate function of sex.

"So, Nagarjuna concludes, the supposition that something can be proven through reference to some other putative fact runs into the problem that the series of proofs will never reach an end, and leaves us with an infinite regress. Should we commit ourselves to the opposite justification and propound that we know things to be true which are self-evident, then Nagarjuna would counter that we would be making a vacuous claim. The whole point of epistemology is to discover reliable methods of knowing, which implies that on the side of the world there are facts and on the side of the knower there are proofs which make those facts transparent to human consciousness. Were things just self-evident, proof would be superfluous, we should just know straightaway whether something is such and such or not. The claim of self-evidence destroys, in an ironic fashion which always pleased Nagarjuna, the very need for a theory of knowledge!"

- from the IEP entry for Nagarjuna

Hmm... Does the existence of self-evident truths negate the need for epistemology?

This thread serves as proof that Buddhists can be as blindly dogmatic as any other religious nutter. It's not that I agree with a particular side, but simply that the argumentum ad antiquitatem is such a bad form of argument it makes me cringe.

And then there is the appeal to authority, which, if used properly, isn't necessarily a fallacy. Certainly, as the founder of Buddhism, there is no higher authority on Buddhism than the Buddha. But where does that authority end? Is the Buddha an expert on, say, cosmology? What about metaphysics? Certainly he had thoughts on such matters, but did his awakening confer on him some infallible knowledge about them? I don't think so, and I don't think a close reading of the early sutras indicates this either. Early Buddhism did not show the Buddha as omniscient like the later schools did. As such, the Buddha's knowledge and expertise is limited to a specific domain, and arguments from authority on subjects not within that domain are fallacious.

In other words, just because the Buddha spoke of Brahma, doesn't mean Brahma exists is true. Note, I'm not saying that the Buddha didn't believe in devas and maras and brahmas, but that the conjunction of him believing in them and him being awakened does not imply that his beliefs were true.

Just finished reading Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism". Ideas about upaya, Pragmatism, and Madhyamika are spinning about in my head. Perhaps something will come of it. In the mean time, here's a gem of a paragraph:

"The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field. Truth values have to be redistributed over some of our statements. Re-evaluation of some statements entails re-evaluation of others, because of their logical interconnections -- the logical laws being in turn simply certain further statements of the system, certain further elements of the field. Having re-evaluated one statement we must re-evaluate some others, whether they be statements logically connected with the first or whether they be the statements of logical connections themselves. But the total field is so undetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is much latitude of choice as to what statements to re-evaluate in the light of any single contrary experience. No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole."

Richard P. Hayes has written a paper explaining why he, unlike countless Buddhists throughout history, is not smitten by the famous Buddhist philosopher, Nagarjuna. Hayes charges Nagarjuna as engaging in equivocation on the term svabhava, which any student of Nagarjuna knows, the rejection of which is the foundation of all of his later arguments. Reading Hayes' argument was somewhat uncomfortable, as I too have fallen prey to the founder of Madhyamika Buddhism's seemingly devastating arguments against the Abhidhammikas, but it was also oddly refreshing.

Hayes' argument after the cut:
( The case for equivocation )

Thoughts?

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/08/080805075614.htm

Happiness does not heal, but happiness protects against falling ill. As a result, happy people live longer. The size of the effect on longevity is comparable to that of smoking or not. This is concluded from an analysis of 30 follow-up studies published in the latest issue of the Journal of Happiness Studies.

"If one removes the concept of a destination, the question of whether any given road is the right one becomes meaningless."

~Richard Hayes

I stumbled across a biting critique of Nagarjuna by the Professor Richard Hayes. Before you denounce him as an ignorant Westerner, know that this man is a true scholar, sanskritist, and has done his homework re:Nagarjuna. With that in mind, he has called the exalted Buddhist philosopher's arguments "largely fallacious".

Find out why:
Master of Paradox [PDF]