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Text of the page (random words):
op making offerings to the spirits after all the christian god admits no competition no idolatry no other gods before me but i asked my former student would offerings to spirits necessarily be idolatry what if the interactions weren t worship but transactional in many cultures one leaves offerings to spirit beings in the hope that they will provide some sort of good fortune in return that doesn t necessarily have anything to do with worship if one pays a doctor or a mechanic that s not idolatry it s just fee for service why would it be any different to pay a faerie or a river spirit continue reading marx and mill similar makers of the modern left 16 sunday aug 2026 posted by sandhya lele in analytic tradition economics flourishing german tradition place politics 7 comments tags aristotle autobiography confucius expressive individualism french revolution harriet taylor mill jeremy bentham jessica main john rawls john stuart mill karl marx london nathan j robinson rongdao lai susan neiman utilitarianism karl marx and john stuart mill have both done a great deal to shape modern political philosophy their differences stand out fairly easily mill the analytical english language utilitarian enthusiast of capitalist progress marx the continental dialectical advocate of communist revolution yet what stands out to me is what they have in common maybe their commonalities stand out to me because they re the first two philosophers i ever seriously engaged with myself back in high school as i sought a deeper justification for my own activist political views mill s utilitarianism was the first primary philosophical text i ever read and my father s marxism spurred me to do a paper on marxism in a high school economics class for a teacher who was somewhat bewildered by it possibly as a result both thinkers have shaped my own political philosophy considerably though i have my disagreements with both but in both my agreements and disagreements i find their similarities more important than their differences continue reading the radical buddhism project 06 thursday aug 2026 posted by amod lele in modernized buddhism politics 2 comments tags engaged buddhism james shields modernism my friend and colleague james shields has just started a new site called the radical buddhism project an independent digital humanities archive and research portal dedicated to recovering preserving and contextualizing the historical intersections of buddhist doctrine with radical left wing socio political thought it collects information on buddhist radicals in countries across asia i ve often been at pains to point out that classical buddhism often opposed political engagement others like brian victoria and michael jerryson have called attention to something that should have been obvious that buddhism has frequently been deployed in a right wing direction as well that said traditions flourish by being reinvented and extended in new ways from chinese tiantai to medical mindfulness i think the radical buddhists on the site are creating an interesting form of modernized buddhism that s worth knowing about and i m excited that james has put the site together the present moment has no marshmallow 02 sunday aug 2026 posted by amod lele in action attachment and craving food mahāyāna mindfulness modernized buddhism pleasure psychology self self discipline 2 comments tags śāntideva seth zuihō segall walter mischel last year the zen philosopher seth zuihō segall invited me to speak to a course on seven universal virtues on the topic of self discipline or temperance i want to return here to the point that i think was most important in that talk there s an apparent contradiction between the virtues of self discipline and mindfulness at least in the modern form of mindfulness but it is only apparent specifically self discipline is all about delaying gratification focusing on a future benefit that makes it worth avoiding the thing that seems appealing in the present whereas mindfulness at least in its modern forms which have more historic precedent than is sometimes supposed is all about a focus on the present moment letting the past and the future fall away aren t these two supposed virtues then in contradiction with each other the one telling you to focus on the future over the present the other telling you to focus on the present over the future continue reading the gap is not glorious 26 sunday jul 2026 posted by amod lele in daoism death deity early and theravāda economics flourishing metaphysics mindfulness politics 12 comments tags alex caring lobel aśvaghoṣa david gelles george grant karl marx laozi patton oswalt richard swinburne ross coggins theodicy the buddha s encounter with unwelcome facts of life picture from wat preah prom rath siem reap cambodia adobe stock image copyright by godong photo 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 course the king s plan doesn t work the buddha to be sneaks out and sees an old man a sick man and a dead man reminding him that these fates will come to a king as surely as anyone else and so he renounces the world and becomes a monk the story shows us that there always remains a gap between what is and what should be we will always face sad facts like illness and death that gap is bad it is always with us and that is unfortunate it is just the way things are whether we like it or not it provides a need and an impetus for us to improve our minds to escape the suffering that comes from craving in the face of those sad facts a very different take on that gap comes from jacobin senior editor alex caring lobel in the springer handbook of mindfulness which collects over thirty essays objecting to the modern mindfulness movemennt these essays take particular objection to david gelles s claim that stress emanates from a mismatch between our expectation of how things should be and the way things are p85 caring lobel in particular objects to gelles s view because it dismisses that glorious gap between how things should be and the way there sic are as a kind of impediment to flourishing this is after all the space of the social imagination it is also the space in which democracy operates caring lobel p209 continue reading announcing my book after anger 19 sunday jul 2026 posted by amod lele in anger buddhism flourishing mahāyāna mindfulness patient endurance serenity 9 comments tags anthony bourdain kurt cobain reinhold niebuhr śāntideva suicide thich quang duc 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 numbers encourage bookstores to order more copies which will help the book do well i am particularly delighted that the book is coming out with shambhala publications the esteemed buddhist publisher of ken wilber whose work has inspired a ton of this blog s reflection and pema chödrön whom i ve increasingly found a powerful source of wisdom continue reading on being from canada and not india 12 sunday jul 2026 posted by amod lele in indigenous american thought modern hinduism place politics 6 comments tags autobiography canada identity ireland joey miller music race stan rogers united states war stan rogers picture taken originally from toronto com used under fair use the great canadian folk singer stan rogers taken from us far too soon at a mere 33 has inspired me in many ways i first encountered him through his modern and very canadian sea chantey barrett s privateers a staple of folk singers at pub nights for drunken canadian undergraduates like myself and which has more american admirers than you d think the joy of singing along to that song was part of what led me to join mcgill s folk music society club and eventually become its president for a year it wasn t long after that that i had my life changing buddhist epiphany in thailand yet even there rogers s mary ellen carter played a major role his the idiot was a great comfort at the times i expected a tenure track job would leave me in a long distance relationship from the woman i loved on the east coast when i married her forty five years was the last dance at our wedding lately though there s a much lesser known song of his that has been going through my mind repeatedly it is the closing song of from fresh water his posthumous 1984 album about ontario where despite his well known ties to the maritime provinces rogers like me was born and raised this song is called the house of orange continue reading against nostalgic ecology 28 sunday jun 2026 posted by amod lele in biology politics serenity 6 comments tags conservatism natural environment reinhold niebuhr ronald sandler sally haslanger slavoj žižek technology when we think about the natural environment and how to treat it we often assume by default that what we re trying to do is return the nonhuman world to where it was before we started seriously messing with it that impulse is very understandable the world s ecosystems functioned better in the way that they had evolved to do and a way that was helpful to us before we started clear cut logging and making vast pits full of plastic waste and so on it would be great if we could get the natural world back to where it was in 1800 the problem is we can t do that extinction is forever as they say with a very significant exception that i ll get to the garbage dumps are there we have no way of turning all the plastic in them into something not plastic as alan weisman vividly reminds us in the world without us if humans were to disappear entirely from the planet tomorrow our products from ceramics to radioactive waste would remain for millions of years we can certainly take steps to diminish the impact of our future actions but the effects of our past actions are going to remain with us the natural world now and in the future is the natural world impacted by our actions continue reading you still have to naturalize karma 21 sunday jun 2026 posted by amod lele in consciousness death flourishing karma mahāyāna modernized buddhism philosophy of science psychology supernatural 10 comments tags evan thompson gananath obeyesekere ian stevenson jim tucker karin meyers rebirth śāntideva 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 with that evidence is in the title of her unpublished paper on the topic which is against naturalizing buddhism i think we need to naturalize that is to put in non supernatural terms one of buddhism s most important ideas namely karma and i think we need to do that even if the evidence convinces us that rebirth is real continue reading on the damned topics of buddhist philosophy 14 sunday jun 2026 posted by amod lele in death mahāyāna metaphysics method and theory in the study of religion modernized buddhism supernatural 15 comments tags butön harvard university karin meyers rebirth śāntideva 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 i met meyers recently she noted that people have already discussed and commented on it more than any other piece she ever wrote while i disagree with meyers s substantive conclusions i think she takes an often methodologically wrong headed field and points it in the right direction meyers calls damned those buddhist topics that would typically be called supernatural a term that she dislikes but i have no problem with myself that is topics such as rebirth karma non human beings and realms siddhi s devotional and contemplative practices and even aspects of buddhist soteriology and she claims although such topics are described and analyzed by textual historians and anthropologists they tend to be avoided or dismissed by philosophers this is not because they are inherently immune to rational scrutiny or lack philosophical relevance instead i suspect it is because of an implicit and often unacknowledged allegiance to certain modernist assumptions namely physicalism and epistemologies that privilege a cognicentric empiricism restricted to the five senses as well as rationalistic and disembodied ways of knowing basic buddhist doctrines and traditional forms of buddhism directly challenge these assumptions continue reading older posts welcome to love of all wisdom i invite you to leave comments on my blog even or especially if i have no idea who you are philosophy is a conversation and i invite you to join it with me i welcome all comers provided they follow a few basic rules i typically make a new post every sunday if you d like to be notified when a new post is posted you can get email notifications whenever i add something new via the link further down in this sidebar you can also follow this blog on facebook or if you use rss you can get updates through the rss feed recent comments rick repetti on christians can have neutral supernatural beings amod lele on marx and mill similar makers of the modern left donna brown on marx and mill similar makers of the modern left nathan on marx and mill similar makers of the modern left donna brown on marx and mill similar makers of the modern left subscribe to receive love of all wisdom by email type email here subscribe post tags 20th century academia alasdair macintyre aristotle ascent descent augustine autobiography buddhaghosa canada confucius conservatism disengaged buddhism engaged buddhism evan thompson expressive 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anger 43 attachment and craving 33 compassio...