Universal Liberation
Taixu 太虛 was one of the most influential thinkers of modern East-Asian Buddhism. In 1904, at the age of 14, he became a monk at Xiǎo Jiǔhuá temple 小九華寺 in Suzhou, China. Soon after, he developed an interest in modern science, left-wing politics, and Buddhist reform. A decade later (partially due to changing political circumstances) he had himself sealed in a cell in a monastery to study Buddhist scripture and philosophy. After he left his cell in 1917, he revived a Maitreya Pure Land cult, but also continued working for the modernization and revival of Buddhism in China under the...
Buddhism and the State: Rājadhamma after the Sattelzeit (New Paper)
Published today in the Journal of Buddhist Ethics. abstract — Rājadhamma is a list of ten royal virtues or duties that occurs in the jātaka tales and that has been influential in Southeast Asian Buddhist political thought. Like pre-modern political thought in Europe — that is, thought before the Sattelzeit — Buddhist political thought lacks a concept of the “state” and is concerned with kings and similar rulers. Here I propose a modernized interpretation of rājadhamma as virtues/duties of the state. The full text (in pdf format) can be downloaded here.
Some Remarks on the Notion of “Cartesian Dualism” in Continental Philosophy
In the beginning of the 20th century, Western philosophy split into two main schools, analytic and continental philosophy, that – barring exceptions – neither read nor understand each other. My own work and influences are mostly within, or closely affiliated with, the analytic school, but occasionally I read some continental philosophy (as well as some non-Western philosophy). One peculiar term I encountered several times in such reading across scholastic boundaries is “Cartesian dualism”, most recently in Saito Kohei’s Marx in the Anthropocene. To be more precise, it is not the term itself that struck me as peculiar – you’ll find...