Within Process Buddhism, the sides of Buddhism and Process both debate and dialogue with one another. First, Process articulates reality and experience categorically. Then, Buddhism responds that this speculation obscures the true nature of the non-categorical condition of these categories. Then, Process responds that the Buddhist critique of the categorical and its emphasis on the …
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According to Process thought (particularly through the Pierce-Whitehead-Hartshorne matrix), each and every actual occasion of experience is a perspective which constitutes a genuine subject of satisfaction, a subject born out of a creative synthesis of the many antecedent perspectival conditions of the past with the self-determining creative potential of the present aimed towards some definite …
Some Madhyamaka Buddhists — particularly Prasaṅgikas of Sakya persuasion — can be suspicious or even hostile to the very possibility of something like "Process Buddhism" because they make the same error that the critical "targets" of Process Buddhism (i.e. substantialist and dualistic frameworks) do, which is to conflate ontology with cosmology, rendering them as basically identical …
The genuine, authentic alternative to dualism is not non-dualism but what we could call post-dualism. Non-dualism often amounts to the monistic collapse of dualism into one of its poles, thus remaining ultimately dependent on its conditional terms (the terms being that, insofar as a contrast is conceivable, it must be a dualistic contrast i.e. the …
Some claim that the concept of "Buddha-nature" (the innate, pure and potent capacity for every being to become awakened) in Mahayana Buddhism is a supernatural, arbitrary posit and an aberration of the teachings of Early Buddhism. Even some Buddhists who accept the doctrine will relegate it to an "inferior" level of truth or doxographic strata, …
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The fundamental issue of Eliminative Materialism — the metaphysical view that subjective mental states do not actually exist — is that it cannot eliminate subjectivity from explanations of how consciousness works without also undermining the very thing that makes this elimination epistemically intelligible. If there is no agent of knowledge, how is this very knowledge …
One of the definitions of conventional truth (saṃvṛtisatya) — that domain of truth that ordinary sentient beings like you and I occupy — that Candrakīrti gives is that it conceals the ultimate truth (paramārthasatya) of things — that domain of truth that is the exclusive purview of awakened or enlightened beings: “Because delusion obscures the true nature, …
a Process Buddhist theory of gender would be one in which gender is understood as both interdependent with sex and an abstraction from sex; gender as asymmetrically interdependent with sex, where sex includes gender but not the reverse. Buddhism informs the interdependence aspect (sex and gender are mutually dependent notions; you can't have one without …
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It's always been curious to me that svabhāva the sort of thing that we can accurately hypothesize about (i.e. make claims about the various properties or qualities that must obtain by an entity with purported svabhāva or the consequences which are entailed if an entity really had svabhāva ) even though under Madhyamaka analysis it is revealed to be impossible and …
Late modern scholars of Madhyamaka Buddhism have called Nagarjuna's dialectical negation of conceptual opposites (and other widely deployed Madhyamaka techniques such as the neither-one-nor-many argument) a "bi-negation" which negates both a thesis and its negation (and by implication, any possible combination of the two). Critically, the Madhyamaka bi-negation is distinguished from the fourth limb of …
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Holopoiesis 