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A Companion to Buddhist Philosophy

#1
C C Offline
http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc...787&cn=394

EXCERPT: "Companion to Buddhist "is suitable for students of Buddhist philosophy, but it can also serve as a more neutral guide to Buddhist thinking and practice. By neutral, I mean that Buddhism has largely been hijacked by the self-help industry, where it is typically used both uncritically and unreflectively. This self-help tendency may be part of Buddhist ethics, as Sallie B. King emphasizes: "Though Buddhism developed a robust personal ethic, it may well be accused of never having developed a systematic and comprehensive social ethic. Buddhist personal ethics do not translate directly or realistically into a fully functional social ethic" (p. 648). It's an inward practice, believing that truth comes from within. In a paradoxical way, the popular versions of Buddhism tend to forget or neglect key concepts such as impermanence and non-self—that is, inner truth is not linked to a permanent "me."

In the introduction, Emmanuel says Buddhism "is a living tradition that traces its origin to the life and teaching of Siddhattha Gotama (Skt Siddhártha Gautama), the historical Buddha" (p. 1). Not much is known about the founder of Buddhism. Furthermore, as with contemporary figures like Jesus and Socrates, the Buddha never wrote anything. Yet the majority of the authors seem to embrace what apparently was the Buddha's pragmatic attitude toward the values of his teachings. At times, this gives the book a too-polished description of Buddhism, which is fine, although I wouldn't mind a more critical philosophical approach when presenting the underlying philosophy of Buddhism.

[...] The Buddhist philosophy follows a diagnostic scheme: symptom = pain, cause = craving, prognosis = end pain, treatment = the path. According to studies in mindfulness, the path works for many of life's pains. This, of course, doesn't suggest that it is the only path, or that the path is without bumps (e.g. gender issues). Regardless what my comments, "A Companion to Buddhist Philosophy" is a highly welcome mammoth of a book. It is a good starting point and good companion for debate within different philosophies....
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#2
Yazata Offline
I have a copy of this book on my e-reader.

(Dec 22, 2016 01:24 AM)C C Wrote: http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc...787&cn=394

EXCERPT: "Companion to Buddhist "is suitable for students of Buddhist philosophy

It is what it is, a "Companion to Buddhist Philosophy". It addresses issues in Buddhist thought that are of interest to Western philosophers, largely of the analytical persuasion.

Quote:but it can also serve as a more neutral guide to Buddhist thinking and practice.

I don't think that's correct. It shines a light on Buddhism only from one particular philosophical direction. While that does clarify a lot of Buddhist psychology, it's not really a guide to Buddhist practice. There are much better sources on that.

Quote:By neutral, I mean that Buddhism has largely been hijacked by the self-help industry, where it is typically used both uncritically and unreflectively.

I notice that this book review comes from something called 'mentalhelp.net'. So one would expect the psychotherapeutic kind of approach to Buddhism to be emphasized there. So the self-help-hijack observation might in part be an artifact of where the person writing this review is situated. I will agree that Westerners seem to currently favor a very watered-down form of not-quite-Buddhism in the form of 'mindfulness'. Mindfulness is very trendy at the moment and is being promoted to the public as a psychological panacea. That's not a bad thing (mindfulness can be a very good thing in my opinion, if not oversold or misrepresented) but it isn't really Buddhism.  

Quote:This self-help tendency may be part of Buddhist ethics, as Sallie B. King emphasizes: "Though Buddhism developed a robust personal ethic, it may well be accused of never having developed a systematic and comprehensive social ethic. Buddhist personal ethics do not translate directly or realistically into a fully functional social ethic" (p. 648).

It's true that Buddhism kind of resists being hijacked by current political fashions, whether of the left or right. I consider that a virtue.

Quote:It's an inward practice, believing that truth comes from within. In a paradoxical way, the popular versions of Buddhism tend to forget or neglect key concepts such as impermanence and non-self—that is, inner truth is not linked to a permanent "me."

I think that's true. Buddhism has become assimilated with Western pop-psychology, which seems to be all about "self realization". So pop-Buddhism often seems to be all "me, me, me", about making changes in one's sense of self. It's hard to avoid that.

Quote:In the introduction, Emmanuel says Buddhism "is a living tradition that traces its origin to the life and teaching of Siddhattha Gotama (Skt Siddhártha Gautama), the historical Buddha" (p. 1). Not much is known about the founder of Buddhism. Furthermore, as with contemporary figures like Jesus and Socrates, the Buddha never wrote anything. Yet the majority of the authors seem to embrace what apparently was the Buddha's pragmatic attitude toward the values of his teachings.

Pragmatism is (one of) the approach(es) found in the Pali canon, the oldest surviving collection of Buddhist tradition, recording the traditions of the Buddhist monastic community in the first Buddhist centuries. Textual scholars believe that it contains several strata of tradition (the vinaya very early, the abhidhamma rather late) but that much of its approach probably does originate with the Buddha himself. Personally, one of my own hermeneutic principles is to think that the Buddha's own unique input is probably most likely in the places where the Pali canon is strikingly different from Vedic and Jain tradition. (The no-self doctrine, for instance.) Where Buddhism agrees with the surrounding traditions may or may not reflect the Buddha's own teachings, or it may represent ideas absorbed from the surrounding intellectual environment. I can't prove that the pragmatic strand came from the Buddha himself but I have no reason to doubt it. It was certainly present in the early monastic community.  

Quote:At times, this gives the book a too-polished description of Buddhism, which is fine, although I wouldn't mind a more critical philosophical approach when presenting the underlying philosophy of Buddhism.

Does this reviewer want a more critical textual-historical approach or a more critical philosophical approach? Those aren't the same thing. For as long as Western scholars have studied Buddhism, many have tried to pry out what they consider the original Buddhism of the Buddha from the Pali canon. These have usually turned out to be exercises in the writers' own imagination. It isn't unlike the 'search for the historical Jesus' quest in modern Christianity in that regard. Nothing definitive ever emerges.

A philosophical approach is something different. Many Western philosophers have started engaging with Buddhism as philosophy. Unfortunately, the Pali canon doesn't typically present Buddhist doctrines in terms of what moderns would recognize as philosophical arguments. So those arguments once again have to be reconstructed. And doing that requires encyclopedic knowledge of the discourses (there are thousands of them assembled in no particular order) that few Western scholars possess.

My own personal view is that the key to philosophical understanding of the early discourses might be the Kathavatthu. This is one of the latest texts in the Pali canon, part of the Abhidhamma. It was clearly written a couple of centuries after the Buddha and records a whole collection of doctrinal disputes and philosophical controversies that existed among the monks at the time, and states what its author considers the orthodox position is on each of them. Even if we don't accept that the orthodox position is identical to the Buddha's original position, the text does shine a light on how the earliest Buddhists conceived of the issues and where the earliest ambiguities may have been. If I was pursuing a Ph.D in Buddhist Studies, my dissertation topic would likely be a textual and philosophical examiniation of the Kathavatthu and the ideas it contains. It's hard to find the text these days, let alone anyone seriously studying it. (The only English translation that I've seen is the 1915 Pali Text Society version.)  

Later Buddhist writers like Vasubandhu, Dignaga and Dharmakirti are obviously philosophical and do present philosophical arguments, so most contemporary Western philosophical scholarship seems to concentrate on their ideas. (Contemporary scholars often favor Tibetan interpretations of them, since the Tibetans preserved a scholastic commentarial tradition on them down to modern times.) But these figures are later, in some cases the better part of a thousand years after the Buddha. They represent a much later and perhaps highly mutated version of the original tradition. And they worked in a particular intellectual context, where Buddhist philosophers were responding to criticism, often from Hindu philosophers of the Nyaya school. But these later Buddhist writers do present arguments and address issues that are identifiable to moderns as epistemology, metaphysics, logic and philosophy of language. Often they present highly original takes on these issues, so they are indeed of great interest to many contemporary philosophers. (I get a little annoyed when contemporary Western scholarly writers refer to these later ideas as "the Buddhist view" of whatever it is, as if there were no others.)    

Quote:The Buddhist philosophy follows a diagnostic scheme: symptom = pain, cause = craving, prognosis = end pain, treatment = the path.

That's the famous 'Four Noble Truths'. It's found all over the Pali canon, so pervasively that it was obviously familiar and fundamental to the earliest community, and hence highly likely to have come from the Buddha himself. Of course, it wasn't exactly 'pain' or 'craving', it was 'dukkha' and 'tanha'. Those Pali words didn't mean quite the same thing as the English words that they are translated into. So fundamental issues of interpretation arise. What exactly did the Buddha/earliest Buddhists mean? What were they talking about and why were they saying it? How does it all fit together philosophically and psychologically?
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#3
C C Offline
Very informative reply.

(Dec 22, 2016 06:28 PM)Yazata Wrote: I was pursuing a Ph.D in Buddhist Studies, my dissertation topic would likely be a textual and philosophical examiniation of the Katthavatthu and the ideas it contains. It's hard to find the text these days, let alone anyone seriously studying it. (The only English translation that I've seen is the 1915 Pali Text Society version.)


I'm frustrated by the lack of English translations for even some popular European textbooks that were used circa 3 centuries ago.
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