Buddhism and the State: Rājadhamma after the Sattelzeit (New Paper)
Published today in the Journal of Buddhist Ethics. abstract — Rājadhamma is a list of ten royal virtues or duties that occurs in the jātaka tales and that has been influential in Southeast Asian Buddhist political thought. Like pre-modern political thought in Europe — that is, thought before the Sattelzeit — Buddhist political thought lacks a concept of the “state” and is concerned with kings and similar rulers. Here I propose a modernized interpretation of rājadhamma as virtues/duties of the state. The full text (in pdf format) can be downloaded here.
Western Buddhism and the New Age
Western Buddhism has been heavily influenced by the New Age movement. In online forums it is common to encounter nominal Buddhists proclaiming New Age beliefs that are alien or even antithetical to Buddhism. Adherents of such ideas rarely seem to be aware of those ideas’ origins, however; nor of their problematic nature from a Buddhist point of view. And even less rarely will they self-identify as followers of the New Age. The latter is typical, however. As Margrethe Løøv remarks in a recent book about the New Age movement, “very few people actually denote themselves New Age — the preferred...
What does it mean to be a Buddhist?
In “What Does it Mean to Be a Marxist?”, Norman Geras distinguishes “three meanings of ‘being a Marxist’”: personal, intellectual, and sociopolitical. He writes that “for someone to be a Marxist, in the first – personal – sense …, he or she must (a) subscribe to a significant selection of recognized Marxist beliefs and (b) describe him or herself as a Marxist”. About the intellectual meaning he writes that “a person can work – as writer, political publicist, academic, thinker, researcher – within the intellectual tradition begun by Marx and Engels and developed by later figures”, and about the sociopolitical...
“Protestant Buddhism”
The term “Protestant Buddhism” was introduced in 1970 by Gananath Obeyesekere to describe a development in Ceylonese Buddhism that started with Anagarika Dharmapāla almost a century earlier. The notion was further developed in a 1988 book he co-authered with Richard Gombrich, but variants of the term have also been used outside the Ceylonese (Sri Lankan) context – in reference to certain trends in Western Buddhism, for example, as well as to the switch from “self-power” 自力 jiriki to “other-power” 他力 tariki in Japanese Pure Land Buddhism. The term is also sometimes used in a more general sense in reference to...
The Cluelessness of Longtermism
Longtermism is a variety of utilitarianism (itself a variety of consequentialism) that holds that far-future utility potentially far outweighs near-future utility, and therefore, that we should prioritize far-future consequences of our actions and policies. Utilitarianism is often summarized with the slogan “the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people”, but the term “utility” or “benefits” tends to be preferred by some philosophers (especially those who are close to, or have a background in economics). An associated, even shorter characterization of utilitarianism is that it aims to maximize utility (or benefits). Longtermism, then, holds that we should aim to maximize...
Can an Anarchist Take Refuge?
The first of the Bodhisattva vows is to liberate all sentient beings (from suffering) and it isn’t a stretch to include sociopolitical liberation in that goal. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that Buddhist anarchism has been a small, but persistent undercurrent within Buddhism and anarchism throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. One may wonder, however, whether it is really possible to be both a Buddhist and an anarchist, although this very much depends on the definitions of “Buddhist” and “anarchist”. The term “anarchism” suggests that an anarchist opposes or rejects (ἀν-) (coercive/opaque) power/authority (ἀρχή) and the institutionalization thereof...
Residual Emissions
Residual emissions are carbon emissions that are difficult or impossible to (fully) eliminate due to technological or other limitations. These emissions are extremely important, because – given that we effectively cannot avoid them – they need to be compensated with various kinds of carbon removal technologies (mainly carbon capture and storage) to be able to reach net zero (or carbon-neutrality). Carbon removal is very energy intensive, however, and there are limits to how much carbon we can remove. Estimates of these limits vary, but the most optimistic ones are typically somewhere in the neighborhood of 25Gt/year, or roughly half our...
Buddhism, Marxism, and Negating Self-centeredness — Preliminary Remarks on the Philosophy of Neville Wijeyekoon
summary — In 1943, S.N.B. (Neville) Wijeyekoon published a book under the pseudonym Leuke aiming to compare Buddhism and Marxism. It starts out doing so indeed, but the second half of the book presents his own philosophy focused on achieving mental harmony by negating self-centeredness through “merging one’s self in social welfare”. Wijeyekoon’s wrote two more books, and in one of those he further developed aspects of this idea, while eliminating the overt Buddhist and Marxist influence. This long blog post summarizes and comments on two of Wijeyekoon’s books (namely, his first and third). I do not have access to...
Predicting Global Warming for Dummies
Climate scientists use supercomputers and extremely complicated models to predict the future climate, but there is a shortcut that can be used to predict average global warming. The key to that shortcut is the following simple formula: $$ \Delta T_{anom.} = \frac {ECS \times ( C_{atm.} – 280 )} {280} \: – \: \psi,$$ in which \(\Delta T_{anom.}\) is the average temperature anomaly (or average global warming), \(ECS\) is “Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity”, \(C_{atm.}\) is atmospheric carbon (in ppm CO₂ equivalent), and \(\psi\) (from Greek ψῦχος, meaning “cold”) stands for various cooling effects. If you have the values of the variables...
Some Disorderly Thoughts on Antisemitism and Related Matters
1 In response to protests at American universities against Israel’s genocidal “war” in Gaza, the United States House of Representatives accepted the “Antisemitism Awareness Act” on April 30. This act codifies the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism as well as its attached list of eleven “contemporary examples of antisemitism”. Most of those examples are antisemitic indeed by any reasonable interpretation of the term, but three of those – namely, examples 7, 8, and 10 – are a bit more dubious, largely due to their ambiguity. The text of these examples is the following: (7) — Denying...
Davidsonian Pragmatism
Donald Davidson didn’t like being called a pragmatist. He associated pragmatism with William James’s definition of truth as that what works (or something similar), which he rejected for a number of reasons. Davidson’s understanding of pragmatism and how it contrasts with his own view is probably most clearly expressed in a passage from “Truth Rehabilitated”: Truth is not a value, so the ‘pursuit of truth’ is an empty enterprise unless it means only that it is often worthwhile to increase our confidence in our beliefs, by collecting further evidence or checking our calculations. From the fact that we will never...
Atrekic Buddhism
To be clear, atrekic Buddhism is not a variety of Buddhism. It’s not un-Buddhist either, I think, but we’ll get to that later. The term “atrekic Buddhism” works in a similar way as “methodological anarchism” (famously proposed by Feyerabend) or “metaphilosophical anarchism”. The latter is a – more or less – anarchist approach to doing philosophy. It isn’t anarchism per sé (i.e., anarchism as political ideology), but can be thought of as something like anarchism about philosophy. That said, it could be argued that (political) anarchists should also be metaphilosophical anarchists (but not necessarily the other way around), which doesn’t...