A Ku Indeed!

Just got them in the mail today (click pic for close up). The wife and I are pretty excited to go and hear him talk, as are the other people we got tickets for – including my mom, who will be visiting at the time, so I got her a ticket. All in all, though, I must admit that the thought of going to hear the Dalai Lama speak in Arkansas just sounds funny to me for some reason.

Why Buddhism? Why not? I also wouldn’t mind to go hear a Taoist sage give a talk too, but I doubt they come out of the woods for long enough at any one time. Moreover, even if they did hang around for a while, they probably wouldn’t say much.

Finishing up the Dhammapada in class this week, I started thinking an bit about the Buddhist “virtues.” Often times in the literature, the point is advanced that the early Buddhist tradition (Theravada) stresses the importance of cultivating right states of character, particularly states such as compassion, love, impartiality, and joy. In such accounts it is often assumed that there is a connection between doing and practicing the Buddhist precepts (or right actions) as a way of acquiring those virtues.  As a result, you wind up with a kind of ‘cultivationist’ language of virtue – the job of the person is to do what is required to develop and grow the virtues themselves.

I’m not entirely sure that I buy into this reading of the Dhammapada, though that’s not exactly my purpose in this post. Essentially, I’m not sure that the early Buddhist texts are cultivationist at all. Instead, I think a reading can be advanced that sees the job of the person as one of cleansing the mind of what is hateful or grasping. The result of such self-purification of what is negative just is that the mind then reaches out to what is outside of it in terms that can be expressed as compassion, joy and love. So it’s not that virtue is developed by practicing what is right, it’s that virtues are revealed by ceasing to do (or think in terms of) what is bad. Which brings me to the question I’ve been wondering: if this reading were right (which is a secondary concern of mine), would these states be virtues at all? Can you have a virtue that you don’t directly cultivate and grow?

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I’m teaching the early Theravada Buddhist text Dhammapada again this coming semester. To prep, this morning I was typing up some class notes for students to use and I came across a favorite passage that always reminds me of how important it is to not the distractions of the world control the direction of your thinking. It’s in poem three (below), which is on the subject of the mind.

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In the comments section of my previous post on Teaching Chinese Philosophy, Bill Haines mentioned that during his experience teaching at Beida in 1990, students seemed more to enjoy Zhuangzi than Xunzi. His point has made me think a bit about the reactions students have to different Asian philosophies, and about what motivates those different reactions.

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As I read the Theravada Buddhist work the Dhammapada, I find myself thinking of Kierkegaard. Specifically, I find myself thinking of Abraham and the Knight of Faith, and the relationship between their predicament (as described by Kierkegaard) and the life-situation of the potential Buddhist Arahant. Both typologies, the Buddhist and the Existentialist, seem to me to offer as an ideal a way of “walking betwixt the two worlds” in which one lives as the being that one is.

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We’re starting the Dhammapada this week in my Asian Ethics course (we’re done now with the Analects and the Tao Te Ching). As I was reading through the book and prepping some notes, I started thinking about the “four virtues” of Buddhism, namely joy, compassion, impartiality and lovingness. We’re called to cultivate all four, and I found myself thinking: which is hardest to do? Which easiest?

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I’m making my way through the verses of the Dhammapada – in the fall I’ll be teaching it for the first time (in “Asian Ethics”) so I need a fairly decent set of lecture notes. As I go, I’m marking off passages of personal interest to me that I’d like to comment on here. I’m also keeping tabs on verses that strike me as particularly Confucian, or anti-Confucian. In this first post, I want to draw attention to a possible similarity with Confucius, and a potential problem (or at least one that has always bothered me).

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