The genuine, authentic alternative to dualism is not non-dualism but what we could call "post-dualism". Non-dualism often amounts to the monistic collapse of dualism into one of its poles, thus remaining ultimately dependent on its conditional terms (the terms being that, insofar as a contrast is conceivable, it must be a dualistic contrast i.e. the …
Buddha-Nature as a Logical and Practical Necessity in Process Buddhism
Some claim that the concept of "Buddha-nature" (the innate, pure and potent capacity for every being to become awakened) in Mahayana Buddhism is a supernatural, arbitrary posit and an aberration of the teachings of Early Buddhism. Even some Buddhists who accept the doctrine will relegate it to an "inferior" level of truth or doxographic strata, …
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Inclusively-Transcending the Open/Emptiness of Eliminative Materialism and Panpsychism
The fundamental issue of Eliminative Materialism — the metaphysical view that subjective mental states do not actually exist — is that it cannot eliminate subjectivity from explanations of how consciousness works without also undermining the very thing that makes this elimination epistemically intelligible. If there is no agent of knowledge, how is this very knowledge …
Do Buddhas “see” what we see?
One of the definitions of conventional truth (saṃvṛtisatya) — that domain of truth that ordinary sentient beings like you and I occupy — that Candrakīrti gives is that it conceals the ultimate truth (paramārthasatya) of things — that domain of truth that is the exclusive purview of awakened or enlightened beings: “Because delusion obscures the true nature, …
Notes on a Process Buddhist Theory of Gender
a Process Buddhist theory of gender would be one in which gender is understood as both interdependent with sex and an abstraction from sex; gender as asymmetrically interdependent with sex, where sex includes gender but not the reverse. Buddhism informs the interdependence aspect (sex and gender are mutually dependent notions; you can't have one without …
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Śūnyatā qua Niḥsvabhāva
It's always been curious to me that svabhāva the sort of thing that we can accurately hypothesize about (i.e. make claims about the various properties or qualities that must obtain by an entity with purported svabhāva or the consequences which are entailed if an entity really had svabhāva ) even though under Madhyamaka analysis it is revealed to be impossible and …
Does Process Philosophy Occupy the Third Limb of the Tetralemma?
Late modern scholars of Madhyamaka Buddhism have called Nagarjuna's dialectical negation of conceptual opposites (and other widely deployed Madhyamaka techniques such as the neither-one-nor-many argument) a "bi-negation" which negates both a thesis and its negation (and by implication, any possible combination of the two). Critically, the Madhyamaka bi-negation is distinguished from the fourth limb of …
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Appetition and Craving in Whitehead and Buddhism
In Buddhism there is a critical emphasis on the cessation of craving due to its inextricable link to "duḥkha" or suffering, but there is no direct correlation in Whitehead’s thought pointing to the necessity of ceasing appetition. In fact, appetition is built into the processive universe, for according to Whitehead “all physical experience is accompanied …
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Process Buddhism as a Union of Friends
For me, at their best, Process philosophy and Buddhism engage in the "project of ontology", not in order to try and construct a perfectly itemized, categorical reflection of reality, but to reconstruct experience in service of some greater praxis: the path to awakening in Buddhism and the adventure of civilization in Process. Since both DE-construct …
Surplus Humanity & Futural Communism
The slogan "We are the 99%" emerged during the Occupy movement, thanks in large part by David Graeber, to point to the extreme disparity in wealth between the elite and everybody else. Increasingly though I think the notion of the 1% v.s. the 99% should be imbued with a sense that the issue is not …
Holopoiesis 