Danny Fisher, my friend and fellow Patheos blogger, has given a wonderful Dharma talk (above) on the plight of women in the world today and our responsibility for acting now to overcome it. Inspired by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s book, Half the Sky, the talk has been making the rounds and was even mentioned on the book’s facebook and twitter accounts. The central moral challenge of our time has reached a tipping point. Just as slavery was the defining struggle of... Read more
And in related news, I am raising funds for COCO (Comrades of Children Overseas), “a children’s charity which aims to improve the lives of children living in poverty in the developing world through health and education initiatives. With your help we can give children access to the education they deserve and the promise of a brighter future.” Help out. It’s quick. It’s easy. You can give just a buck or pound or euro if you’re living lean. https://www.justgiving.com/Justin-Whitaker My... Read more
Categorical Thinkers This is part five of a series of posts based on a 27 February talk I delivered for the Oxford Center for Buddhist Studies; click for parts one, Introduction and orientation two, Buddhist ethics in the 1970s three, Buddhist ethics in the 1990s and four: Ongoing debates. Despite the warnings that ‘in ethics everything is pretty messy, and there is not much room for […] ethical theory,’ the lure of categorical comparisons seems as strong today as it ever was.... Read more
Meditation should make you a better person right? Calmer, kinder, more empathetic? Well, maybe not. Today at his trial, according to observers, Anders Breivik claimed to be a daily meditator. Helen Pidd@helenpidd Breivik says he meditates “every single day” in order to be “desensitised, blunted”. Started in 2006. (via here) I haven’t the time for a thorough discussion of this point here and now, but it’s worth noting that meditation isn’t exclusively ‘Buddhist’, nor does it necessarily have positive moral effects... Read more
Dave Webster, who teaches Religion, Philosophy & Ethics at the University of Gloucestershire is at it again with a new tumblr (interactive-blog-type-thing) dedicated to the often odd (some would say “wrong” or offensive) use of Buddhist images in the West. Below is my submission (at http://dispirited-dave.tumblr.com/) I know it’s not exactly from “the West,” but it was the first image that came to my mind, and it seems to follow the spirit of Dave’s tumblr, if not the letter. And perhaps it might... Read more
An old but good post (from about a year ago) has received a couple recent comments, and many good and appreciative ones over the month or so after it was posted. So I thought it would be worth posting again: Tricycle’s article on the “Truest” Buddhism. Many of you will have seen this recent article from Tricycle, Whose Buddhism is Truest? If not, I highly recommend it, both for those studying early Buddhism and for all practitioners of Buddhism –... Read more
A friend of mine and an outstanding scholar, Chuck Prebish, was featured in AAR’s Member Spotlight in February and finds himself in the most recent Tricycle magazine with an interview and a guest blog post (with two more posts to come). If you’ve been reading lately, you’ll have seen Prebish’s name pop up in my writings on Buddhist ethics, an area in which he is certainly a pioneer. But along with this, Chuck has helped launch the first major ebook... Read more
Last week, Rev. Zesho Susan O’Connell, Vice President of the San Francisco Zen Center, posted a list of 10 Buddhist Women Every Person Should Know. She began with Mahapajapati (the Buddha’s stepmother and first female Buddhist monastic), and then skips up to the 20th century and over to Western women. All of those mentioned are worth reading about and indeed should be known, not only as examples of great Buddhist women, but as simply wonderful people. I thought a bit more could be... Read more
A good friend of mine brought this study and commentary to my attention today: On Whether the Job of an Ethicist Is Only to Theorize about Morality, Not to Be Moral There, the philosopher of psychology Eric Schwitzgebel proposes five major points about the ethics professors’ apparent lack of moral improvement. These are: It might just be a professor’s job to theorize about ethics, not live them (at least not any more than everyone else). It seems odd that all of... Read more
Contemporary Work and Debates [this is part four of a series of posts based on a 27 February talk I delivered for the Oxford Center for Buddhist Studies; click for parts one, two, and three.] As my paper title (“Wiggling Eels in a Wilderness of Views”*) suggests, the journey of Buddhist ethics, perhaps even more so in the last 35 years, has been a trip through a veritable wilderness of views. This phrase, the ‘wilderness of views’, comes from the... Read more
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