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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
One of the “innovations” of Process Buddhism is a certain democratization and pluralization of the function of “God” in Whitehead’s original articulation of his process-relational metaphysics. Rather than there being a single divine element offering the value hierarchies by which we can drive our own development, there is…