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 …
Does Process Philosophy Occupy the Third Limb of the Tetralemma?
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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Appetition and Craving in Whitehead and Buddhism
In Buddhism there is a critical emphasis on the cessation of craving due to its inextricable link to "duḥkha" or suffering, but there is no direct correlation in Whitehead’s thought pointing to the necessity of ceasing appetition. In fact, appetition is built into the processive universe, for according to Whitehead “all physical experience is accompanied …
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Process Buddhism as a Union of Friends
For me, at their best, Process philosophy and Buddhism engage in the "project of ontology", not in order to try and construct a perfectly itemized, categorical reflection of reality, but to reconstruct experience in service of some greater praxis: the path to awakening in Buddhism and the adventure of civilization in Process. Since both DE-construct …
Surplus Humanity & Futural Communism
The slogan "We are the 99%" emerged during the Occupy movement, thanks in large part by David Graeber, to point to the extreme disparity in wealth between the elite and everybody else. Increasingly though I think the notion of the 1% v.s. the 99% should be imbued with a sense that the issue is not …
Blind Spots in Process and in Buddhism
I tend to say that both Process and Buddhist traditions are relatively self-sufficient, and therefore they have no inherent deficiency that would require synthesizing them both in a co-dependent way. They come together in my synthesis of Process Buddhism as relatively autonomous partners in solidarity, integrated yet differentiated based on the functional roles they can …
On Modes of Creative Synthesis
The mode of creative synthesis that Process Buddhism both deploys and exemplifies is not sublation or Hegelian-style reconciliation of contradiction. It is rather what we can term "asymmetrical interdependence," where oppositional contrasts are affirmed to be both mutually or symmetrically implicated at the level of conceptual thought (each depends on the other notionally), but asymmetrically …
Do Process Buddhists Believe in ‘God’?
Sometimes I use the word 'God' in my reflections and I use it both sincerely and ironically. It's ironic because I'm a Buddhist and Buddhists have always criticized and deflated the notion of a monotheistic creator or absolute supreme being. But it's also sincere because I understand what the concept of 'God' is supposed to …
Pan-Experientialism of the Heart-Mind
Perhaps implicit in the original formulation but made explicit through Process Buddhism, the Whiteheadian Process notion that all actual entities in the entire universe feel some level of experience — from the tiniest quantum fluctuation to the most complex organisms and everything in between — resuscitates a more ancient and pre-modern understanding about the nature …
Is Class Society Historically Necessary or Contingent?
The question of whether class society first emerged in ancient times as a necessary historical function of economic development predicated on surplus production, or a historically contingent imposition through voluntary force, seems to implicitly assume a mind-matter, subject-object distinction, one in which the physical conditions of life and life as a living experience are treated …
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Holopoiesis 