Universal Liberation
Taixu ๅคช่ was one of the most influential thinkers of modern East-Asian Buddhism. In 1904, at the age of 14, he became a monk at Xiวo Jiวhuรก temple ๅฐไน่ฏๅฏบ in Suzhou, China. Soon after, he developed an interest in modern science, left-wing politics, and Buddhist reform. A decade later (partially due to changing political circumstances) he had himself sealed in a cell in a monastery to study Buddhist scripture and philosophy. After he left his cell in 1917, he revived a Maitreya Pure Land cult, but also continued working for the modernization and revival of Buddhism in China under the...
Buddhism and the State: Rฤjadhamma after the Sattelzeit (New Paper)
Published today in the Journal of Buddhist Ethics. abstract โ Rฤjadhamma is a list of ten royal virtues or duties that occurs in the jฤtaka tales and that has been influential in Southeast Asian Buddhist political thought. Like pre-modern political thought in Europe โ that is, thought before the Sattelzeit โ Buddhist political thought lacks a concept of the โstateโ and is concerned with kings and similar rulers. Here I propose a modernized interpretation of rฤjadhamma as virtues/duties of the state. The full text (in pdf format) can be downloaded here.
No Time for Utopia
Most political thought is โideal theoryโ: its arguments are based on an idealized world in which important aspects of reality are abstracted away. Abstraction isnโt necessarily a bad thing โ in the contrary, it is often necessary in science โ but it isnโt self-evident that the results of abstractions and idealizations are (always) applicable to the real world, and if theory doesnโt descend from the ideal world to reality it turns into an intellectual game without practical relevance; or worse, as the case of neoclassical economics illustrates. In that case abstraction and idealization resulted in a โtheoryโ that explains nothing,...