Against Merciful Lies
My blog this week is an argument against the notion of "merciful lies", a phrase I took from another blog post by Elisa Freschi.
"To my mind there are three main arguments against merciful lies. Firstly the scenario [in the Lotus Sutra] itself is stupid and offensive; secondly there's no need to construct a religion which lies to us, either on historical or moral grounds; and thirdly we all need to take responsibility for our actions and merciful lies by authority figures undermines this imperative."

Setting Ourselves Apart
My blog this week is a long rambling essay on religious separatism in light of evolution. Setting ourselves apart can be counterproductive. 

Chronology and Buddhism

My blog this week is on the subject of how we periodize Buddhist history. There's no consensus on how to do this. Scholars use a range of different terminology all of which seems to be based on the sectarian concerns of religious Buddhists rather than a more considered approach to history. I argue that we need to drop all the traditionally derived periods and terminology and adopt something more objective based on well established historical milestones and terminology.

One thing I stress is that there seems to be no evidence for a "pre-Sectarian" Buddhism. All evidence, even the texts themselves, point to pluralism. I bring up an old argument about how we are biased to see history as simpler than the present and converging as we go back in time, and how this distorts historical narratives, blinding us to the complexity that exists in every time period.

Book Review.
Restorative Free Will: Back to the Biological Base - Bruce N. Waller.

'He begins by defining free will as "the capacity to effectively explore alternative paths in response to a combination of environmental contingencies and internal motives... [this view] is concerned with "the free will that many species enjoyed and practiced long before humans evolved, the free will deeply rooted in adaptive animal behavior, and the free will that humans share with a variety of other species.'

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/63604-restorative-free-will-back-to-the-biological-base/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter


Some thoughts on the metaphor "The economy is a living organism striving to sustain homoeostasis" and heterodox critiques of equilibrium theory. 

The Myths of Religion and Being Bauddha.

My blog this week is a reflection on the role that religious myths play in the life of a Buddhist (well, this Buddhist anyway). Sort of. I suggest that most of the myths don't really play much part in the central idea of Buddhism: that rather than finding happiness in experience, we only find it when we die to experience. This one emerged from discussions with Satyapriya before he started this current (25th annual) solitary retreat. 

The Heart Sutra Has No Clothes

Here's a thing for fans of the Heart Sutra to think about. In the Sanskrit text there are a number of phrases relating emptiness with form. For example "śūnyataiva rūpam" and "śūnyatāyāṃ na rūpaṃ"

Now, both of these cannot be true. The former says that "emptiness is only form". The latter "with respect to (or "in") emptiness there is no form." This is a flat contradiction.

However, contradictions in Buddhist texts, particularly in Prajñāpāramitā texts, are like the emperor's new clothes. We can all see that they are contradictions, contradictions mean something doesn't make sense, but we assume that a) the texts are profoundly wise; and b) that profound wisdom need not make sense. By this logic the presence of a flat contradiction in a "sacred" text is welcomed as proof that it is profound. The more incomprehensible the better.

Though we see something that does not make sense, we take this incomprehensibility to indicate something profoundly sensible. The Emperor has new clothes.

There's only one way out of this dilemma, which is to say that the Emperor has no clothes on. But those whose careers are built on interpreting and promoting the bullshit, who write about it, preach about it, and teach special practices to realise it, are going to resist. They are the Emperors tailors. They've made something out of nothing and cannot afford to admit it. And the run-of-the-mill folk who desperately want their miserable lives to have some greater meaning and purpose are also loathe to admit that the Emperor is naked. They doubt themselves so much that they're willing to go along with a naked Emperor just in case there is something magical going on that might make life meaningful after all. So they don't raise a fuss either.

Those of us who do say that the Emperor has no clothes on like fools. But having seen the naked emperor, we can't unsee him. A contradiction is a sign of confusion, not profundity. I can even venture to explain how this confusion might have come about, and why the latter phrase is actually a bit profound and the former is just a mistake. But the desire for profundity generally overwhelms the desire for clarity (if there is any desire). Some people seem to resent the attempt bring clarity to a situation. They want magic rather than clarity. It's like they are reading Harry Potter and secretly wishing it were true - like the Cambridge University students (raised on the books and films) who play "Quidditch" on Jesus Green on the weekend - running around the field with sticks held between their legs representing "broomsticks" and trying to throw a ball through one of 3 shoddily made hoops. It's just sad.

I begin to see what Pema Chodron meant about hope being a hindrance. While we are hoping for something else to be true, we never pay attention to what is really going on. 

Rumination, the Stress Response, and Meditation
I'm sure I've told this story before, but in sixth-form biology (some 35 years ago now) we studied a plant and an animal in some depth. For our animal we followed Charles Darwin in studying the earthworm. I gained a new appreciation of these creatures throu...

Translating Pāḷi "Asuññataṃ"

My blog this week is an investigation of a tricky word in a tricky text, i.e. asuññataṃ in the Cūḷasuññata Sutta (MN 121). I cover as many bases as possible: Pāḷi suttas and commentaries; Sanskrit fragments; and the Chinese and Tibetan versions of the text. The words suñña, suññatā and suññato have parallels in Sanskrit śūnya, śūnyatā and śunyataḥ. Figuring out what they mean and which applies here was very difficult. My own analysis suggests that suñña in this context means "absent", especially absent from the world of perception. Thus suññatā means "absence".

In the end an inghtful grammatical analysis by my former Pāḷi pupil Sarah Clelland​ was decisive in deciding that here asuññtaṃ means "presence". I think we've understood the text, but we'll be meeting to discuss it on Sunday and we'll see what emerges from that.

At some point I want to explore further how this kind of text relates to the Prajñāpāramitā literature. My working hypothesis is that the original Prajñāpāramitā text was composed by meditators who spent a lot of time dwelling in the suññatavihāra and were striving to describe the experience and its existential consequences. 

Image Schemas, Metaphor, and Thought.

My blog this week dips into the work of Mark Johnson on metaphors and thought processes. I use some examples from his book The Body in the Mind to illustrate how metaphors work by employing what he calls an "image schema". This is a simple structure that emerges from experience and can be applied to many different events and processes facilitating the use of metaphor.