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Philosophy as/and/or Religion

Philosophy as/and/or Religion

1. In laying out the idea that there may be some value in thinking of philosophy as good for nothing, I drew comparisons between a certain way of conceiving of philosophy and what I take to be the best way to conceptualize Dōgen’s understanding of the practice of seated meditation or zazen. For Dōgen, you sit just to sit, not for some other end (wink wink). If we take seriously Socrates’ claim in the Apology that practicing philosophy is the…

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If We See Things Clearly, Do We See That Suffering is Neither Good Nor Bad?—Exploring Issues with Zen and the Fact/Value Dichotomy

If We See Things Clearly, Do We See That Suffering is Neither Good Nor Bad?—Exploring Issues with Zen and the Fact/Value Dichotomy

Quite representatively of popular Zen writings and teachings, Sobun Katherine Thanas is recorded, in her The Truth of This Life: Zen Teaching on Loving the World as It Is, as saying: I’ve been thinking with renewed interest how difficult it is to see or hear clearly. Settling the mind allows us to see things as they really are, relatively free of emotional or intellectual biases. Clear seeing may not happen the first time we sit, but maybe it will. Our…

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Goethe and Ryōkan as Exemplars of How to Live

Goethe and Ryōkan as Exemplars of How to Live

Writing on compassion in early Buddhism, Anālayo notes that the primary form of compassion was teaching the Dharma, i.e., the Buddhist teachings on the cessation of suffering. But as Anālayo also notes, verbal instruction is not the only way to teach: teaching, “…can also take place through teaching by example” (Compassion and Emptiness in Early Buddhist Meditation, 16). Indeed, teaching and learning by example are extremely important, and often unconscious. We don’t always realize that others, especially children, learn by…

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Controlling for Joy

Controlling for Joy

I often have the feeling that my Buddhist practice is in turmoil. Its high and low tides in response to my sorrow’s moon. Sometimes that moon is full, others new, but most often all manner of shapes in-between. This would likely bother me more if I had not read CS Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters when I was first working through my existential crisis of religion in my early 20s. This short book is a fascinating read, as Lewis relates an…

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Dirty Ontology: The Muddy Waters of “the” Self

Dirty Ontology: The Muddy Waters of “the” Self

“When the water is deep, the boat rides high. When there is much mud, the Buddha is large.” —Dōgen, “The Indestructible Nature in Deep Muddy Water” in the Eihei Kōroku   “Know thyself” is the fairly famous injunction inscribed overhead at Apollo’s temple at Delphi. The meaning of this may be less obvious than it seems, but regardless of how it was intended, we can read it in different ways depending on what we understand by “knowing” and what we…

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Midlife Crisis: Or First Draft of a Book Preface

Midlife Crisis: Or First Draft of a Book Preface

It seems to me that my life, like surely many people’s lives, resembles the trajectory of modernism to postmodernism (to post-postmodernism?). That is, like many people, when I was a child everything was imbued with a robust intrinsic identity and meaning, both of which could be definitively and determinedly known. One of the most obvious examples of this was the faith in the near omniscience of my parents, and once in school and out of the house, in that of…

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The Philosophy Classroom: The Ultimate Safe Space

The Philosophy Classroom: The Ultimate Safe Space

In the past weeks my newsfeed on Facebook has been filled with articles about safe spaces and trigger warnings. My impression from the headlines and comments alone is that most people are understanding these things differently than I and my colleagues do. Very briefly, I understand a trigger warning to be a kind of heads up that the topic to be discussed will go into graphic detail about a topic, e.g., rape, that may “trigger” past trauma. The point being…

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Suffering and the “Full Human Experience”

Suffering and the “Full Human Experience”

If life does not always tend toward the tragic (and I’m not convinced that it doesn’t), then it does tend toward the “son-of-a-bitch!” in a variety of ways. In this vein, Nietzsche recognized that the problem of suffering is not so much that we suffer, but that we crave an answer to why we suffer. And this in the sense of: to what end? What is the meaning of our suffering? —Not only do we experience suffering, but we suffer…

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Realizing the Matrix—On the Possibility and Desirability of “Uploading” Insight

Realizing the Matrix—On the Possibility and Desirability of “Uploading” Insight

There is a special class of knowledge or wisdom that we might call insight or realization. This comes in a variety of forms and degrees. For example, someone tells you how scary it is to be in the water when someone spots a shark. You’ve been afraid before, you’ve been in the ocean before, so you think you have a pretty good idea of what that must be like. But you don’t really realize what it’s like until you’ve been…

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After the Funeral

After the Funeral

Tragic, hard—this life. I do not ask why. I do ask for kindness. I do ask for some level of nuance in the face of uncertainty in the face of death. — Do not give me a child’s reason for believing in your “Amen.” Tell me of how he preached love, charity, and non-violence and my fleshy soul will be moved, eager for more— just do not denigrate or write off this life, so tragic so hard.