Month: October 2025| indianphilosophyblog.org
One of the first things you’d learn in any Intro to Buddhism course is that most Buddhists alive today are part of the Mahāyāna tradition, in which one aspires to be a bodhisattva (and eventually become a buddha). Mahāyāna is Continue reading The lost Buddhisms→| The Indian Philosophy Blog
Term: Two-year fixed contract. Based in Utrecht/Antwerp. Application is possible until Monday, November 3th. Interviews are being planned on November 11-13th. https://protestantstheologischeuniversiteit.recruitee.com/o/postdoctoral-scholarship-holder-in-the-field-of-engaged-buddhism| The Indian Philosophy Blog
How does one know about the self, according to the three main schools discussed in my last post? Buddhist Epistemological School (Dharmakīrti): the self does not exist. The only thing that exists is a stream (santāna) of causally linked momentary Continue reading Cognition of the self→| The Indian Philosophy Blog
Background: This year I taught again a class on Sanskrit philosophy (for the first time since 2021). I only had 12 meetings, of three hours each, hence I had do made drastic choices. The following is the result of these choices (alternative choices could have been possible, e.g., focusing on the Upaniṣads and their commentaries). Comments, as usual welcome! | The Indian Philosophy Blog
If Nāgārjuna, the great Madhyamaka Buddhist philosopher, is known for anything, it’s his doctrine of the emptiness (śūnyatā) of all things. But in his most famous work, Nāgārjuna warns his audience about emptiness: “Misperceived emptiness ruins a person of dull intelligence, like a snake wrongly grasped.” (MMK XXIV.11) If you know how to pick up a poisonous snake properly, you can move it to a place where it will do less harm, or even milk it to help produce an antidote. But if y...| The Indian Philosophy Blog
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 that one of his key interests is the question: “What makes a Continue reading If only Bentham had read the Kāma Sūtra→| The Indian Philosophy Blog
It was thirty years ago, in 1995, that a then-unknown junior academic named Jeffrey Kripal published Kālī’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna. The book took a new look at the stories written about the revered 19th-century Bengali mystic Ramakrishna, from the then-current Freudian lens: it explored passages that it described as homoerotic, and argued that there was a connection between the homoeroticism and the mysticism. Kripal, who was raised Cat...| The Indian Philosophy Blog
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 what that ultimate truth is. The Theravāda Abhidhamma view says everything is ultimately reducible to smaller parts; the Madhyamaka says it’s ultimately just emptiness; the Yogācāra says it’s all mind; Chinese Huayan and Tiantai views have their own trippy takes.| The Indian Philosophy Blog
While Buddhist schools have many different takes on metaphysics – on what the world really is – they all acknowledge a distinction between two truths, or two levels of reality. That is: there is a conventional truth, the one familiar Continue reading Seeing through conventional reality→| The Indian Philosophy Blog
One of the reasons Buddhists emphasize the idea of non-self so much, I think, is they see the kind of danger that can emerge from self-focused approaches like expressive individualism. That danger is when we identify with our bad qualities in a way that stops us from getting better. Buddhists emphasize the lack of an essential self so that we can shed our bad qualities, become better than we are.| The Indian Philosophy Blog