The 1502 project | Love of All Wisdom
Who was the first person of African descent – the first black person – to set foot in the Americas? In what capacity did that person come, and when? If you have been in the United States …| Love of All Wisdom
Who was the first person of African descent – the first black person – to set foot in the Americas? In what capacity did that person come, and when? If you have been in the United States …| Love of All Wisdom
In the mid-2010s in the English-speaking world there arose a left-wing social and political movement that has become enormously influential, one you are likely familiar with in one form or another.…| Love of All Wisdom
The liberation of women from traditional subservient gender roles has been the crowning achievement of the 20th century. That process of liberation is not complete, and will likely not be for some …| Love of All Wisdom
The OED’s first definition of “woman” is “an adult female human being”. Webster says “an adult female person”. It has become a commonplace on the right, of late, to feel so very clever by defining “woman” as “adult human female” – roughly but not exactly following the dictionary definitions – and then watch others struggle to provide their own definition. UK activist Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull put up billboards proclaiming as much; director Matt Walsh even made a whole...| Love of All Wisdom
A common paraphrase of H.L. Mencken says: “For every complex question there is an answer that is clear, simple – …Continue reading →| Love of All Wisdom
If Nāgārjuna, the great Madhyamaka Buddhist philosopher, is known for anything, it’s his doctrine of the emptiness (śūnyatā) of all …Continue reading →| Love of All Wisdom
Following up my talk on psychedelics and mysticism, Osheen Dayal of the Canadian branch of MAPS just interviewed me on …Continue reading →| Love of All Wisdom
Daniel Pallies, a philosophy postdoc at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, recently wrote a blog post entitled “The inexplicable appeal of spicy food”. Pallies, from his bio, indicates th…| Love of All Wisdom
It was thirty years ago, in 1995, that a then-unknown junior academic named Jeffrey Kripal published Kālī’s Child: The Mystical …Continue reading →| Love of All Wisdom
Last month I had the good fortune to attend a weeklong conference of Buddhism scholars in Leipzig, Germany – a wonderful opportunity in many ways, not least that one gets to be in a world far remov…| Love of All Wisdom
The rise of qualitative individualism in the West coincides relatively closely with Western interest in Buddhism. Nietzsche and Emerson, two of the most influential qualitative individualist thinke…| Love of All Wisdom
We think these days a lot about Buddhist ethics, which often involves some thought about Buddhist politics. We tend to think a lot less about Buddhist aesthetics. Now there’s an obvious expla…| Love of All Wisdom
While I was working in Thailand as a young man, my closest friend there was a pious Christian who had recently converted, as an undergraduate. He took a short vacation in Malaysia and came back dee…| Love of All Wisdom
I’ve repeatedly returned on this blog to the concepts of Ascent and Descent, derived above all from Ken Wilber’s work and to a lesser extent from Martha Nussbaum’s. I have found t…| Love of All Wisdom
As a religious studies grad student, I used to joke that if you wanted to say someone was a bastard, you called him a Protestant. If you wanted to say he was a filthy bastard, you called him a libe…| Love of All Wisdom
We are surely familiar with the pattern by now: members of an Asian tradition are concerned about supposed corruptions in their tradition which depart from the intentions of the tradition’s h…| Love of All Wisdom
I presented about Disengaged Buddhism at the International Association of Buddhist Studies conference in August. My talk was paired with a presentation by Frédéric Richard on a topic that did not i…| Love of All Wisdom
I am an amateur at Indian aesthetic theory. I have not studied it much; I can read its Sanskrit source texts, but with some difficulty given how much they allude to literary and dramatic works I do…| Love of All Wisdom
Last fall in my house we had some serious bad news: my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. (There have been a number of ways in which I have hoped to emulate Ken Wilber, but this sure wasn’…| Love of All Wisdom
One of the most common slams made against modernist (Yavanayāna) Buddhism is that it is “Protestant.” I’ve previously written about how there’s more to Buddhist modernism th…| Love of All Wisdom
Even if one accepts Śāntideva’s idea that political participation is harmful to a good life, that doesn’t mean that one must be finished with political thought. For there’s anothe…| Love of All Wisdom
In previous years I’ve insisted that Christmas has a significance and value to North American life well beyond Christianity. It is a ritual that brings families together – something Con…| Love of All Wisdom
One of the first posts I made on this blog examined Dale Wright’s methodological approach of naturalized karma. This is a way of continuing to use the concept of karma, and thereby remaining …| Love of All Wisdom
Last week I spoke of a philosophical single-mindedness shared by modernists, evangelical Protestants, Salafi Muslims and St. Augustine, and this week I’d like to reflect on it further. What these v…| Love of All Wisdom
Today’s post follows up on those from two and three weeks ago, and there’ll be another one next week. I intend the four posts, taken together, to make a statement about the continuing i…| Love of All Wisdom
I’ve often heard it said, rightly I think, that Buddhism cannot do without a concept of karma; it is too central to Buddhist thought. I don’t see this as a big problem in itself, even f…| Love of All Wisdom
Justin Whitaker’s blog pointed me to some interesting recent discussions of what it means to be a Buddhist, among Buddhist bloggers mostly of the Yavanayāna persuasion. Blogger Marcus (no las…| Love of All Wisdom
I’ll begin with happy news: I’m engaged! This weekend I proposed to my beloved Caitlin, and I’m delighted to say she accepted. Now, I’ve tried to be explicit that this is a …| Love of All Wisdom
Grief can be more complicated than we often make it out to be. In the wake of my father’s death, …Continue reading →| Love of All Wisdom
Buddhists have never agreed on an overall metaphysics. They have long agreed that prajñā – accurately seeing things according to the ultimate truth – is hugely important, but they differ greatly on…| Love of All Wisdom
While Buddhist schools have many different takes on metaphysics – on what the world really is – they all acknowledge …Continue reading →| Love of All Wisdom
One of the reasons Buddhists emphasize the idea of non-self so much, I think, is they see the kind of …Continue reading →| Love of All Wisdom
Like most of those around me, I feel the pull of expressive individualist ideas: I think it is a hugely important part of being human to be ourselves and express ourselves, in ways that express our…| Love of All Wisdom
Advertisement for BU’s Day of Engagement. Four years ago, Ibram X. Kendi was the academic star of the moment, topping the bestseller lists, receiving a MacArthur Genius Grant, and being hande…| Love of All Wisdom
Having discussed the history of standpoint theory, I now want to dive into it more philosophically. While I have plenty of outsider’s objections to standpoint theory, here I want to explore w…| Love of All Wisdom
Being gender-fluid, in a certain sense I transition and detransition my gender every week (just not medically). It feels only natural to me to think that people who’d undergone full-time or m…| Love of All Wisdom
I’m delighted to be giving a talk at Psychedelic Science 2025, the annual conference of the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies. The conference (June 17-20 in Denver) promise…| Love of All Wisdom
Last winter my wife and I made a wonderful trip to Sri Lanka. Before I say anything about the trip’s philosophical implications, I just want to note that you should go there if you have the m…| Love of All Wisdom
Weterners who have studied Buddhist philosophy and ethics, even when we have done so at length, are often thrown for a loop when we read the Mahāvaṃsa. This text – one of the most historically orie…| Love of All Wisdom
Last time I discussed Jan Westerhoff’s potent objection to naturalized Buddhism: if there is no rebirth then we can end our suffering simply by committing suicide. Westerhoff takes this objec…| Love of All Wisdom
Years ago, in a difficult period of my life, I had looked for philosophical help and explicitly found it in Buddhism and not Daoism, rejecting Daoism and its sudden-liberation views in about the st…| Love of All Wisdom
My previous post examined the problems that led me to move away from utilitarianism, including its Rawlsian variant. Happily, I also found solutions. While working at the UN in Bangkok, I spent a l…| Love of All Wisdom
A while ago I identified what I considered the Social Justice movement’s first tenet: that the most urgent issue facing the world in the 21st century is inequalities of race and gender (inclu…| Love of All Wisdom
In my view the most important thing to acknowledge about the 2010s movement around racial and gender issues is that it exists – something a surprising number of people try to deny. Support it or op…| Love of All Wisdom
A few years ago I attempted to depict the new race/gender movement of the 2010s in a way as neutral, bland, and inoffensive as possible. I got strong pushback even on that much, with a denial that …| Love of All Wisdom
Ron Purser’s critique of modern mindfulness is thoroughgoing, and extends beyond chastising its skepticism of political engagement. Purser also criticizes modern mindfulness on other grounds,…| Love of All Wisdom
The Buddhist propositions that Evan Thompson articulates go deep. They proclaim three flaws of all the things around us, in ways that (Buddhist tradition has typically claimed) make them unwor…| Love of All Wisdom
It has taken me far too long to read Martha Nussbaum’s Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice – long enough that, in characteristic Nussbaum fashion, she has already authored …| Love of All Wisdom
One of the things that helped me realize the need for self-improvement by not-self-improvement was regular practice with the excellent Headspace meditation app, created by a former Tibetan monk nam…| Love of All Wisdom
The most important lesson I ever learned was back in Thailand in 1997: that the biggest contributor to my unhappiness wasn’t external problems like being single or unemployed, but my own ment…| Love of All Wisdom
When Donald Trump first rose to rapid popularity in American politics, many people were shocked and had no explanation. I was not among those people, for a couple of reasons. Among them: one way to…| Love of All Wisdom
On Stephen Walker’s recommendation, I’ve been turning to the articles of Chris Fraser in order to understand the difficult Daoist thinker Zhuangzi. (Happily, Fraser makes most of his ar…| Love of All Wisdom
Judging by the comments, many readers found my diagnosis-prognosis post to be dark and pessimistic. Going back to the post, it’s not hard to see why. I endorse there the dark view of our exis…| Love of All Wisdom
Since reading Martha Nussbaum’s Anger and Forgiveness, I have found myself continually more attracted to her concept of transition-anger. That is: the main, and perhaps only, place where ange…| Love of All Wisdom
It’s not hard to see why the Catholic Church condemned Meister Eckhart for heresy. One of his teachings, in particular, is shocking even today: the good or blessed man, properly “poor i…| Love of All Wisdom
It doesn’t sit very well with many modern readers, including myself, to put a high value on shame. We often find shame to be something that cripples us, makes us burn with embarrassment in a …| Love of All Wisdom
The phrase negation of the negation is best known from Karl Marx’s work, as when he uses it to describe capitalist production in Capital. It’s an odd phrase that seems simply redundant …| Love of All Wisdom
There are probably few people in the English-speaking world unfamiliar with the Serenity Prayer. In its best-known form this prayer asks: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I ca…| Love of All Wisdom
