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The gap is not glorious
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...
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“In praise of negativity”: Now
I appreciate looking back on my 19-year-old self’s piece in praise of negativity because it highlights most the ways my views have changed since then. It’s not that I assess that specific situation...
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In praise of alcohol
Alcohol is further out of fashion these days than at any time in living memory. Even American Prohibition just made people try harder to get alcohol. Today, though, alcohol drinking in the US has...
View ArticleMindform Podcast interview
I was interviewed by Frank Lawton on a recent episode of the Mindform Podcast on self-development and wisdom, associated with Ryan A. Bush’s Designing the Mind. We begin with my formative story in...
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The lost Buddhisms
One of the first things you’d learn in any Intro to Buddhism course is that most Buddhists alive today are part of the Mahāyāna tradition, in which one aspires to be a bodhisattva (and eventually...
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Canadian psychedelic podcast interview
Following up my talk on psychedelics and mysticism, Osheen Dayal of the Canadian branch of MAPS just interviewed me on the same subject for their video podcast. In the interview we talk about a wide...
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Where Buddhists agree on metaphysics
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...
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The practical implications of non-self
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...
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Disengaged Buddhism in the second era of Trump
Early in the first Trump administration, I preached the importance of disengaged Buddhists’ lessons: to refrain from anger, to remind ourselves that some things are more important than politics. I...
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The physics of emptiness
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...
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The scientific self is not reductionist
Any serious contemporary Buddhist intellectual needs to think through the connection between Buddhist ideas and the relevant claims of natural science. Many of us, too, are expressive individualists:...
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The Buddhist critique of shame
It doesn’t sit very well with many modern readers, including myself, to put a high value on shame. We often find shame to be something that cripples us, makes us burn with embarrassment in a way that...
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Improving on the Buddha
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...
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Online course: The Seven Universal Virtues
Seth Zuihō Segall, longtime friend of Love of All Wisdom and author of The House We Live In, will be offering an eight-week online course, called The Seven Universal Virtues, offered through Tricycle...
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How to live knowing the world will die
We can say with confidence that, someday, there will be no more human beings. That means that we are fooling ourselves if, as Simone Weil claims atheists must do, we seek an absolute good in a human...
View ArticleWhat is engaged Buddhism, anyway?
Western scholars of (socially) engaged Buddhism have often also considered themselves practitioners of engaged Buddhism, in a way that is more common than with other forms of Buddhism. Thus scholarship...
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Thoughts on MonkTok
In my view the most interesting thing about TikTok is the proliferation of subcultural communities that flourish on it – WitchTok, BimboTok, KinkTok, NunTok. The most unfortunate thing about TikTok,...
View ArticleHoning in on a disagreement
I wanted to reflect a bit more on my debate with Charles Goodman at Princeton this November. (If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the video of the debate and our handouts.) I don’t think either of us...
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The Nativity is my Ramakien
For most of my life, when people asked me “what’s your religion?”, I usually felt the need to respond with a paragraph. That changed about eight years ago, dealing with my wife’s cancer treatment,...
View ArticleWho cares about phenomenological similarities?
I think one often learns the most about a philosopher from those points where her views change. With that in mind, I’d like to highlight a way I think my own thought has changed recently. Ten years ago...
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