Emily McRae

This volume of essays offers direct comparisons of historic Western and Buddhist perspectives on ethics and metaphysics, tracing parallels and contrasts all the way from Plato to the Stoics, Spinoza to Hume, and Schopenhauer through to contemporary ethicists such as Arne Naess, Charles Taylor and Derek Parfit. It compares and contrasts each Western philosopher with a particular strand in the Buddhist tradition, in some chapters represented by individual writers such as Nagarjuna, Vasubandhu, Santideva or Tsong Khapa. It does so in light of both analytic concerns and themes from the existentialist and phenomenological traditions, and often in an ecumenical spirit that bridges both analytic and continentalist approaches. Some of the deepest questions in ethics, dealing with the scope of agency, value-laden notions of personhood and the nature of value in general, are intertwined with questions in metaphysics. One set of questions addresses how varying conceptions of selfhood relate to moral values ; another set of questions addresses how a conception of oneself or one’s selves should or should not affect how one thinks of happiness, or eudaimonia, or – in classical Indian terms – artha, sukha or nirvana. Western philosophy has featured discussion of both, but some would argue that certain traditions of Asian philosophy have offered a more sustained and even treatment of both sets of questions. The Buddhist tradition in particular has not only featured much discussion on both fronts, but has attracted many contemporary philosophers to its distinctive spectrum of approaches, and to what is – from many ‘Western’ points of view – a seemingly subversive analysis of ego, selfhood and personhood, whether in metaphysical, phenomenological or other incarnations.

Both Stoic and Buddhist ethics are deeply concerned with the ethical dangers of attachment, including (i) the destructive consequences of overwhelming emotionality, brought on by attachment, both for oneself and others, (ii) the dangers to one’s agency posed by strongly held, but ultimately unstable, attachments, and (iii) the threat to virtuous emotional engagement with others caused by one’s own attachment to them. The first two kinds of moral danger – overwhelming emotionality and threatened agency – have informed Stoic models of detachment, as illustrated in their concepts of ataraxia (freedom from disturbance) and apatheia (freedom from strong emotionality). In this paper I draw on Buddhist texts to present a third model of detachment, which responds primarily to the third moral danger of attachment, the danger of not loving well. On this model, detachment enables and enhances proper love and compassion and is conceived of as a tool for virtuous emotional engagement. This model challenges some influential interpretations of Buddhist conceptions of detachment that reduce them to one of the Stoic models, either the extirpation of emotions or resilience to threat to agency.

ABSTRACT There are many kinds of moral mistakes, including wrong actions (such as stealing, killing, lying, and so on), but also maintaining false beliefs about morality, moral misperceptions and misattention, and morally problematic ways of feeling and thinking. According to Buddhist moral psychology, such mistakes are understood as due to misunderstanding (avidyā), either directly or indirectly. This article will present and defend the fourth-century Indian Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu’s account of misunderstanding as the active opposition to moral knowledge that creates and sustains false beliefs, problematic emotions, and fragile identities, which, in turn, lead to moral mistakes. This article argues that making moral mistakes, although different in kind from making non-moral ones, still can promote moral and spiritual growth in the right conditions. This article argues that we should resist having an “abstinence-only” approach, or even an “elimination” approach, to making moral mistakes. Instead, we should think about how we want to relate to the moral mistakes we (inevitably) make and how we want to change in light of them.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feeling IgnorantA Phenomenology of Ignorance1Emily McRaeWhat does it feel like to be confused? What does it feel like to ignore something? These questions, although not prioritized in Western epistemologies, nevertheless matter in our lives. We often use our feelings as feedback on our epistemic states. Feeling ignorant is a reason to think we are ignorant and can motivate us to do something about it. Such feelings are fallible, of course—we can feel like we know something we do not in fact know—but they provide rough, practical guidance to tracking our own epistemic states and motivations. In fact, feelings of ignorance may be central to the activity of learning. It is doubtful that we could learn effectively without them.But the affective profile and phenomenology of ignorance are rarely theorized in Western accounts, in large part, I suspect, because of the pervasive dichotomy of "thinking and feeling" that historically has dominated Western philosophical approaches to the mind. This dichotomy encourages us to sort phenomena according to their boundaries, and, if we must choose, ignorance seems to be more of an epistemic event than an affective one. Luckily, though, we do not have to choose. Buddhist psychological taxonomies, as I will show, are drawn along different lines. This positions Buddhist moral psychology to be a productive framework to investigate ignorance, since it allows us to attend to its epistemic, affective, and somatic contours.This paper focuses on the affective component of ignorance: what ignorance feels like, when and why these feelings arise (and when and why [End Page 26] they do not), and what feeling ignorant, particularly in moral contexts, can do for us. Drawing on the fourth-century Indian Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu, I examine the phenomenology of ignorance and argue that how ignorance feels depends on our epistemic access to our ignorance (whether and to what extent we know that we are ignorant) and the object of ignorance (what our ignorance is about). I argue that ignorance has a complex affective profile: it can feel a lot of different ways, ranging from unpleasant fogginess to clueless confidence. This complex affective profile makes ignorance difficult to spot, especially in ourselves, and marks a difference between ignorance and other problematic mental states, such as hatred or resentment, that have a more straightforward phenomenology. Understanding the connection between the object of ignorance, the epistemology of ignorance, and its affective phenomenology allows us to take on the project, essential in the Buddhist philosophical traditions, of locating and addressing our ignorance. Without careful attention to these three components, it is possible, and likely, to simply ignore our ignorance. I conclude with the suggestion that the ability to attend to our ignorance requires the cultivation of equanimity.This investigation into the affective side of ignorance requires the introduction of a core Buddhist philosophical and psychological category: the dysfunctional states (kleśa; nyon mongs). This is not only because the category of kleśa is a productive framework for understanding the phenomenology and epistemology of ignorance, as I will argue in the next section, but also because traditional Western categories of reason and emotion, or thinking and feeling, are not up to the task of investigating the affective aspects of ignorance. This dichotomy makes a division exactly at the place where my inquiry in this paper begins, for ignorance—as an affective, epistemic, and somatic experience—straddles the divide between thinking and feeling. The category of kleśa includes ignorance, along with other states that Western taxonomies would classify as emotions, such as hatred or envy. This allows for an investigation into features that ignorance may share with emotions without the commitment to the cumbersome claim that ignorance is (or is not) an emotion in the Western sense.The KleśasThe kleśas are dysfunctional states that cause wrong actions and suffering. They are typically divided into primary and secondary kleśas, where the primary kleśas are the root dysfunctional states and the secondary kleśas arise from the primary ones. Different texts and traditions include different kleśas as primary and secondary, but all agree that ignorance, desire, and hatred are among the primary kleśas...

In The Case for Rage, Myisha Cherry makes the case for a specific kind of rage, a qualified anger at racial injustice that she calls Lordean rage. Drawing on Audre Lorde's classic essay ‘The Uses of Anger’, Cherry develops the concept of Lordean rage as a productive, liberatory anger and defends it from a variety of objections, ranging from neo-Stoic concerns about anger's capacity for destruction to contemporary worries about the misuse of anger by white allies. The brilliance of the book, I think, lies in its capacity to integrate a wide range of philosophical perspectives and arguments, including those from feminist and critical race theory and analytic philosophy of emotion, and present them in a way that speaks directly to our political and historical moment. The audience for this book is broad: anyone who has ever felt anger at racial injustice will have a stake in this book.Cherry begins with some philosophical distinctions to help delineate the contours of this kind of anger. Lordean rage has a particular object—racial injustice—and a specific motivational stance: ‘It aims at nothing less than transforming our world’ (p. 40). (She leaves it as an open, and interesting, question whether a variation of Lordean rage occurs in other cases of oppression.) For these reasons, Lordean rage demands a non-trivial degree of optimism and hope. It also requires a basic respect for both the victim and the perpetrator of racial injustice (p. 37). This last criterion distinguishes it from other motivating kinds of rage, such as ‘wipe rage’, which seeks to eliminate the object of the rage and ‘narcissistic rage’, which is only concerned with injustices that immediately effect oneself. These distinctions, and other helpful ones, are the subject of Chapter 1, which argues against the tendency to understand anger as a homogeneous or uniform phenomenon. We can’t, Cherry argues, paint anger in such ‘broad strokes’ but need a more nuanced account of how different kinds of angers are operative in different kinds of contexts.

In this chapter I analyse two Buddhist moral psychological categories: the brahmavihāras (the four Boundless Qualities), which are the main moral affective states in Buddhist ethics, and the kleśas, or the afflictive mental states. Based on this analysis, I argue for two general claims about moral psychology in Indo-Tibetan Buddhist ethics. First, I argue that Buddhist moral psychology is centrally interested in the psychology of moral improvement: how do I become the kind of person who can respond in the best possible way to the moral needs of myself and others? Second, and related, Buddhist moral psychology focuses on the skills of moral perception and attention. Moral philosophical arguments, I argue, are generally offered in the context of self-cultivation exercises and not, as they often are in Western ethics, as models of moral deliberation.

Buddhist philosophical traditions share the Hellenistic orientation toward therapy, particularly with regard to therapeutic interventions in our emotional life. As Pierre Hadot and Martha Nussbaum have ably argued, for the Hellenistic philosophers, philosophy itself is a therapy of the emotions. In this paper, I shift the focus of the contemporary philosophical literature on therapies of the emotions, which investigates almost exclusively the Hellenistic philosophers, and instead draw on the therapies developed by Tibetan Buddhist philosophers and yogis, in particular Gampopa (1079–1153), Tsongkhapa (1357–1419), and Patrul Rinpoche (1808–87). The texts I use are in the genre of Tibetan literature called lo jong (blo sbyong), or mind (blo)- training (sbyong). I argue that the philosophical analysis of the Tibetan Buddhist therapies gives us a model of moral improve- ment that is both novel and promising. This model focuses on the morally improving agent’s capacity for self-awareness and relaxation, her playful approach to emotional-ethical obstacles, and the cultivation of sophisticated, context-sensitive and appropriately flexible judgments about her emotional-ethical life. I also offer a rough taxonomy of Tibetan therapies of the emotions, which will serve as a vehicle to understanding the view of moral improvement described above.

In Nancy Sherman's discussion of the history of empathy, she notes that it was the English translation of the German Einfühlung - originally a term in aesthetics - which translates literally as "feeling one's way into another." According to Sherman's analysis, the main idea in these early usages of empathy in Western psychological contexts "is that of resonating' with another, where this often involves role taking, inner imitation, and a projection of the self into the objects of perception" (Sherman 1998, 83). There is a deep recognition in Indo-Tibetan ethics of the moral significance of one's ability to "resonate" or "feel one's way into another" and no shortage of ethical practices of role taking, "inner imitation," and projecting of the self into objects of perception. These practices transition from the egocentric to an orientation sensitive to the needs of others is a major part of the Mahayana Buddhist conception of moral development, as is apparent in the ideal of bodhicitta (see Section 3).

The Essential Jewel of Holy Practice is a vibrant philosophical and ethical poem by one of Tibet’s great spiritual masters. Patrul Rinpoche presents a complete view of the path of liberation from the perspectives of the Madhyamaka understanding of emptiness and the Mahāyāna ideal of compassionate care refracted through the Dzogchen perspective on experience. This yields a sophisticated philosophical approach to practice focusing on the cultivation of clear, open, luminous, empty awareness and of liberation leading to the transformation of one’s moral capacity and sensitivity. Patrul Rinpoche’s verses speak intimately and directly to the reader and inspire one to develop one’s mind for the sake of ethical perfection and liberation. The translators’ introduction provides a foundation for reading the poem and their commentary to the verses assists the reader in understanding Patrul Rinpoche’s allusions and technical terms.