David Loy

Evil and/or/as The Good: Omnicentrism, Intersubjectivity, and Value Paradox in Tiantai Buddhist Thought (review)

Does Mahāyāna Buddhism have a problem with evil? Buddhism generally focuses on ignorance (a problem of understanding) rather than evil (Abrahamic sin is more a problem of the will). Early Buddhism does have a lot to say about the three roots of evil, which need to be transformed into their positive counterparts—greed into generosity, ill will into loving-kindness, ignorance into wisdom. But the Mahāyāna emphasis on śūnyatā puts a different slant on sam ̇ sāra. The focus on realizing emptiness seems to work better for ignorance/delusion than for evil: wisdom/prajñā involves realizing that everything is śūnya. Then how are we to distinguish good from evil deeds, if from the highest point of view they are equally śūnya? We can get another angle on what is at stake by using the metaphor of Indra’s net, which implies paradoxes for knowledge and value. Every node is a jewel that reflects all the other nodes—but that means ‘‘deluded’’ nodes manifest all those others as much as ‘‘enlightened’’ ones do. We may want to distinguish between those nodes that are aware of the true nature of the net and those that are not, but every node is an effect (and cause) of all the others. One cannot adopt a bird’s-eye view that observes the whole objectively, because the net does not allow for sub specie aeternitas; any perspective we might take is nothing more than one more interdependent node. There is the same problem with distinguishing between good and evil activities. We want to say that there is a significant difference between a selfish action and a compassionate one, but Indra’s net gives us no criterion to discriminate between them, inasmuch as every node manifests the whole as well as every other node, whether or not it knows it or intends it. We can play word games about what is truth and what is delusion, but when we turn to good and evil the stakes become very high. Are we really willing to accept that from the highest point of view crashing a hijacked airliner into a skyscraper is no better or worse than the compassionate acts of a Buddha? In 1016 the well-known Tiantai master Siming Zhili (960–1028) publicly announced he intended to do something that he acknowledged was evil. He defended himself by asking ‘‘What difference is there between the Buddha and the devil? . . . [S]ince the original natures of the two are merged together from the beginning, how could their manifestations be any different from one another? . . . [O]ther than the devil there is no Buddha, and other than the Buddha there is no devil.’’

Buddhism in the Public Sphere: Reorienting Global Interdependence (review)

In a series of important books, Peter Hershock has been developing a new way to understand Buddhist awakening, and using this understanding to offer a fresh perspective on contemporary issues. Liberating Intimacy: Enlightenment and Social Virtuosity in Ch’an Buddhism (1996) argues that enlightenment is not some private, self-contained experience, but a liberation from self-preoccupation into an improvisational virtuosity that emphasizes and transforms our relationships. Reinventing the Wheel: A Buddhist Response to the Information Age (1999) considers the implications of technology, looking at how technologies reconfigure our awareness and colonize our consciousness. They are not just tools: modern technologies change us and, as Ivan Illich emphasized, have thresholds of utility beyond which they reproduce the conditions of their own necessity—that is, they begin generating problems that can be efficiently addressed only with more technology, which in turn generates new problems that can be solved only with . . . (and so on). Hershock’s Buddhism in the Public Sphere expands this critique to address our problems (or ‘‘predicaments’’) with the environment, healthcare, trade and development economics, the media, governance, international relations, terrorism, and education. Hershock begins by reminding us that Buddhism doesn’t view consciousness as something occurring within organisms, but as arising between them and their environments. Instead of being separate beings, intrinsically discrete, we are ever developing patterns of relationship, and our dukkha (‘‘troubles’’) arise from disruption in these relational patterns. This also applies to our institutions. Collective approaches to public issues often trap us in unskillful ways of relating because they emphasize control over appreciative contribution, information exchange over meaningful communication, and autonomous self-sufficiency over ‘‘horizonless’’ intimacy. Hershock’s key insight builds upon the Buddhist emphasis on karma as intentionality: our world is karmic because ‘‘all experienced eventualities arise as outcomes/ opportunities that are meticulously consonant with patterns of our values-intentionsactions’’ (p. 9). This quotation suggests the difficulty with some of his prose, yet wrestling with it is well worth the effort. By changing our individual and collective values/intentions, from a preoccupation with controlling things (often self-frustrating) to an emphasis on more improvisational and ‘‘virtuosic’’ ways of relating to each other, frozen situations open up into new possibilities. A world saturated with our values and shaped by our intentions is never intractable, always a work-in-progress. What really matters is not what things seem to be but their dispositions—that is, the direction they are heading in, which turns out to be the true meaning of their relationships.

The Foundational Standpoint of Madhyamika Philosophy@@@Madhyamaka Schools in India: A Study of the Madhyamaka Philosophy and of the Division of the System into the Prasangika and Svatantrika Schools

This Volume traces the development of one of the most divisive debates in Buddhist philosophy with particular references to the positions of Nagarjuna, Bhavaviveka and Candrakirti.