Amod Lele

An encyclopedia article about Śāntideva, the 8th-century Indian Mahāyāna Buddhist philosopher known for his work on ethics. The article explores his history and written corpus and classifies his work (as he does) by way of the "perfections" (pāramitā) of the bodhisattva. It addresses his views on metaphysics and their implications for ethics and practice, as well as his views on gift-giving, anger and other emotions. It also briefly discusses his relationship to virtue ethics and consequentialism

An encyclopedia article about Śāntideva, the 8th-century Indian Mahāyāna Buddhist philosopher known for his work on ethics. The article explores his history and written corpus and classifies his work (as he does) by way of the "perfections" (pāramitā) of the bodhisattva. It addresses his views on metaphysics and their implications for ethics and practice, as well as his views on gift-giving, anger and other emotions. It also briefly discusses his relationship to virtue ethics and consequentialism

Contemporary engaged Buddhist scholars typically claim either that Buddhism always endorsed social activism, or that its non-endorsement of such activism represented an unwitting lack of progress. This article examines several classical South Asian Buddhist texts that explicitly reject social and political activism. These texts argue for this rejection on the grounds that the most important sources of suffering are not something that activism can fix, and that political involvement interferes with the tranquility required for liberation. The article then examines the history of engaged Buddhism in order to identify why this rejection of activism has not yet been taken sufficiently seriously. 1 Department of Philosophy, Boston University. Email: lele@bu.edu. 240 Lele, Disengaged Buddhism

In his Siksasamuccaya (Anthology on Training, abbreviated SS), the eighth-century Indian Mahayana Buddhist thinker Santideva proclaims that a bodhisattva should think as follows: "I will give alcoholic drink (madya) even to alcohol drinkers; I will cause them to obtain mindfulness (smrti) and introspection (samprajanya)" (SS 271). How, one might wonder, could giving alcohol to alcohol drinkers promote their mindfulness and introspection? Especially when, in the same text, Santideva warns the bodhisattva against alcohol consumption on the very grounds that it interferes with mindfulness and introspection (SS 120)? In the same passage, Santideva's advice on gift-giving takes another surprising turn. As well as alcohol, he says, one can even legitimately give the gift of weapons (SS 271)--a startling claim from a thinker who saves his harshest criticisms for anger and hatred and the harm they cause. And elsewhere in the text, Santideva even urges gifts of sexual intercour...

This thesis compares the recent rise and decline of two political uses of cultural tradition, one in India and one in Singapore. In India, the thesis examines the Hindutva (Hindu-ness) movement, which became influential in the 1980s and 1990s. The Bharatiya Janata Party, which leads India’s current coalition government, arose from the Hindutva movement, but it deemphasized Hindutva themes in favour of militaristic nationalism as it came closer to power. In Singapore, the thesis examines the government’s promotion of Confucian ethics in schools and the media. While this promotion was a major effort in the 1980s, the government quickly moved away from it, and began promoting a more generic form of “Asian values” instead. The thesis’s aim is to show the underlying similarity between the projects of Hindutva and Singapore Confucianism. It does so using a modified version of Jürgen Habermas’s theory of legitimation crisis. Habermas claims that modern states have changed the basis of thei...

Introduction: Buddhist Metaphysics and Buddhist Ethics Among Western Buddhists, it is commonplace to claim that metaphysical speculation is irrelevant to Buddhism. A key text cited for this claim is the Shorter Malunkya Sutta in the Pali Canon. The monk Malunkyaputta comes to think: These speculative views (ditthigata) have been undeclared by the Blessed One, set aside and rejected by him, namely: 'the world is eternal' and 'the world is not eternal'; 'the world is finite' and 'the world is infinite'; 'the soul is the same as the body' and 'the soul is one thing and the body another'; and 'after death a Tathagata exists' and 'after death a Tathagata does not exist' and 'after death a Tathagata both exists and does not exist' and 'after death a Tathagata neither exists nor does not exist. (MN i.426; Nanamoli and Bodhi 533) (3) Malunkyaputta wants to know the answers so much that he is ready to leave the monkh...

Ken Wilber's Integral Theory insists that valid knowledge must be derived from paradigms: sets of injunctions and social practices that lead to replicable experiences. Wilber claims that the theory still includes the essentials of premodern traditions, because the essentials of those traditions consist of a phenomenological core of practices leading to mystical experience. Drawing on the works of Robert Sharf and Wilhelm Halbfass and on close readings of primary texts, this article argues that mystical paradigms of replicable experience are not in fact the essentials of these traditions—neither for the majority of practitioners, nor even for their revered teachers or masters. Its conclusion discusses the implications of this point for constructive integral work.

Ken Wilber's Integral Theory insists that valid knowledge must be derived from paradigms: sets of injunctions and social practices that lead to replicable experiences. Wilber claims that the theory still includes the essentials of premodern traditions, because the essentials of those traditions consist of a phenomenological core of practices leading to mystical experience. Drawing on the works of Robert Sharf and Wilhelm Halbfass and on close readings of primary texts, this article argues that mystical paradigms of replicable experience are not in fact the essentials of these traditions—neither for the majority of practitioners, nor even for their revered teachers or masters. Its conclusion discusses the implications of this point for constructive integral work.

Contemporary engaged Buddhist scholars typically claim either that Buddhism always endorsed social activism, or that its non-endorsement of such activism represented an unwitting lack of progress. This article examines several classical South Asian Buddhist texts that explicitly reject social and political activism. These texts argue for this rejection on the grounds that the most important sources of suffering are not something that activism can fix, and that political involvement interferes with the tranquility required for liberation. The article then examines the history of engaged Buddhism in order to identify why this rejection of activism has not yet been taken sufficiently seriously.

Western Buddhists often believe and proclaim that metaphysical speculation is irrelevant to Buddhist ethics or practice. This view is problematic even with respect to early Buddhism, and cannot be sustained regarding later Indian Buddhists. In Śāntideva’s famous Bodhicaryāvatāra, multiple claims about the nature of reality are premises for conclusions about how human beings should act; that is, metaphysics logically entails ethics for Śāntideva, as it does for many Western philosophers. This article explores four key arguments that Śāntideva makes from metaphysics to ethics: actions are determined by their causes, and therefore we should not get angry; the body is reducible to its component parts, and therefore we should neither protect it nor lust after other bodies; the self is an illusion, and therefore we should be altruistic; all phenomena are empty, and therefore we should not be attached to them. The exploration of these arguments together shows us why metaphysical claims can matter a great deal for Buddhist ethics, practice and liberation.

The Mahāyāna Buddhist thinker Śāntideva tells his audience to give out alcohol, weapons and sex for reasons of Buddhist compassion, though he repeatedly warns of the dangers of all these three. The article shows how Śāntideva resolves this issue: these gifts, and gifts in general, attract their recipients to the virtuous giver, in a way that helps the recipients to become more virtuous in the long run. As a consequence, Śāntideva does recommend the alleviation of poverty, but assigns it a much smaller significance than is usually supposed. His views run counter to many engaged Buddhist discussions of political action, and lend support to the “modernist” interpretation of engaged Buddhist practice.

Ken Wilber insists that valid knowledge must be derived from paradigms: sets of injunctions and social practices that lead to replicable experiences. In this article, I examine Wilber's claims that the theory still includes the essentials of premodern traditions, because the essentials of those traditions consist of a phenomenological core of practices leading to mystical experience. Drawing on the works of Robert Sharf and Wilhelm Halbfass and on close readings of primary texts, this article argues that mystical paradigms of replicable experience are not in fact the essentials of these traditions--neither for the majority of practitioners nor even for their revered teachers or masters. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of this point for constructive integral work.

... This system of patronage became widely known as “the Congress system.” The Congress system, suggests Atul Kohli (199026. ... Manor James (1990) Parties and the party system in Atul Kohli (ed) India's democracy: An analysis of changing state-society relations 2nd ed. pp. ...