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Sarvāstivāda and the Chinese Sarva Sūtra
The Sarvāstivāda School ostensibly forms part of the background against which the Prajñāpāramitā literature developed. Indeed many see the early Prajñāpāramitā texts as taking the time to refute...
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Sarvāstivāda Approach to the Problem of Action at a Temporal Distance.
In recent weeks I've become a bit more involved in a distributed discussion about the twin Buddhist doctrines of karma & rebirth. This has been in response to apologetics defending traditional...
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Where and Why Did the Sarvāstivādins Go Wrong?
image: wisegeekIt's widely thought that both the Perfection of Wisdom texts and the writings of the Madhyamaka School attack the Realist position taken by the Sarvāstivāda School. The difficulty we...
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Water, water everywhere...
I've been thinking a lot about how a failure to understand science affects the arguments against materialism. In Buddhism we often make the argument that you cannot understand Buddhism unless you have...
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Vitalism: The Philosophy That Wouldn't Die
It's very much part of the modern Buddhist landscape to read passionate polemics against materialism/physicalism or "scientism" or even rationalism. However these polemics typically come with...
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Crossing the Line Between Death and Life
In discussing Vitalism and science I mentioned the threshold between living and dead matter. I've already written at some length about the idea of life after death. I've argued that we need to consider...
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Spiritual I: The Life's Breath
I've been arguing against using the word spiritual in relation to Buddhism for a while now. My contention is that the word has all the wrong connotations for Buddhism, we don't believe that humans have...
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RIP MIchael Dorfman
Michael DorfmanThere's a thread on Reddit saying that Michael Dorfman, a long time reader of and commenter on this blog, and a penpal of mine, died on Christmas Day 2013. He was 49, a year older than...
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Spiritual II: Frames.
In order to better understand the word spiritual I want to try to look at it in terms of frames. George Lakoff defines framesas "mental structures that shape the way we see the world." (2004, p. xv)....
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Spiritual III: Demesnes of Power
Caged or Fleeced?from right-wing journal The Spectator, arguing for more individualism. So far we've looked only at what the word spiritual means and what frames it is associated with. In other words...
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Why Artificial Intelligences Will Never Be Like Us and Aliens Will Be Just...
"Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsym-pathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly...
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Is Experience Really Ineffable?
What could this possibly be?There's an old story from India that seems to crop up everywhere. In Buddhist literature it is found in the Udāna (Paṭhamanānātitthiya sutta) and possibly elsewhere. The...
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The Antarabhava or Interim State as a Vitalist Concept
Soon after I became involved in the Triratna Movement (the FWBO as was) in 1994, I remember speaking to one of the Dharmacārins about my experience with my father's corpse three years earlier (I...
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Buddhism and the Observer Effect in Quantum Mechanics
This essay is a follow up to one I wrote in 2010 called Erwin Schrödinger Didn't Have a Cat. It might be worth refreshing your memory of that one first. Plus I've continued to add notes since writing...
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Demonising Our Religion
Thai Buddha Amuletfor warding off evil spiritsI started writing this essay before my series on Vitalism and it got overtaken by that project and so comes a little too long after the publication of the...
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Ethical Modes in Early Buddhism
In the texts of early Buddhism we find several kinds or modes of morality. One of which is mainly aimed at being a good community member and one of which is aimed at preparation for meditation. In this...
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Pulling Wings Off Fairies
GalileoOn 7 January 1610 Galileo began a series of observations of Jupiter through his new telescope. He lived in a world in which people in Europe believed the earth was at the centre of a perfectly...
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Physicalism, Materialism, and Scientism
ConfuciusTsze-lu said, "The ruler of Wei has been waiting for you, in order with you to administer the government. What will you consider the first thing to be done?"The Master replied, "What is...
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Thinking Like a Buddhist about Karma & Rebirth
One of the things that most strikes me about discussions with Buddhists is how seldom they seem to think like Buddhists. All too often Buddhists merely unthinkingly assert Buddhist doctrines and do so...
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Roots of the Heart Sutra
Edward Conze was of the opinion that the oldest layer of the Prajñāpāramitā textual tradition is probably the first two chapters of the Ratnaguṇasaṃcayagāthā (Rgs). He sees it as closely related to...
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