Jessica Elizabeth Locke

This article responds to the demographic phenomenon of the growth of the so-called spiritual but not religious (SBNRs). We offer a philosophical analysis of the ways in which contemporary forms of nonreligious spirituality serve as avenues for fulfilling needs for sacredness, meaning, belonging, and/or transcendence. In the course of our argument, we critically engage with literature on the philosophy of spirituality; advance a phenomenological analysis of spiritual yearning, a key experience that we argue underwrites the drive toward nonreligious spirituality; and analyze different forms of nonreligious spiritual practice as expressions of what we call nonreligious spiritual yearning.

This article criticizes the equation of “philosophy” with “Western philosophy” that became a common feature of Western philosophical historiographies starting in the eighteenth century and that has, over the course of the last two centuries, become an identity-constituting force in academic philosophy. The essentially Anglo-European identity of modern-day academic philosophy has serious implications, shaping our perception both of what counts as philosophy and of who counts as a philosopher. To counter the racism that lies at the heart of this identity, we go beyond recent calls for the expansion of the philosophical canon and advocate a more radical position rooted in the unconditional embrace of what we call the groundlessness of philosophy. Since there are no necessary conditions that can effectively delimit the domain of philosophy, philosophy is essentially groundless. It has no transhistorical essence and thus cannot be either logically, historically, or geographically circumscribed. To illustrate this groundlessness, we use the Buddhist non-self doctrine as a heuristic to encourage academic philosophers to let go of the need to find a universal, permanent ground for philosophy to stand on. This ethical gesture has the potential to ameliorate some of the problems that plague the discipline today.

This book discussion reads three works in contemporary Buddhist social ethics alongside one another: Ogyen Trinley Dorje’sInterconnected, David Loy’sEcodharma,and Larry Ward’sAmerica’s Racial Karma. Each of these works contributes to the subfield of engaged Buddhism, which aims to bring Buddhist value theory to contemporary social and political issues in order to effect social change. The rapid development of engaged Buddhism constitutes a particularly rich moment in the history of Buddhist thought, as Buddhist ethics is showing itself to be actively in process—a tradition in the midst of rapid transformation, revision, and cross‐cultural application. This book discussion interrogates these three works with that metaphilosophical and historiographical issue in mind, analyzing the particular ways in which they contribute to challenging and reshaping the traditional contours of Buddhist ethics into a contemporary social and political register. In exemplifying the approaches of translation, extending, and applying, these works demonstrate the creative and experimental moment in which Buddhist social ethics finds itself today. Such adaptations of the Buddhist tradition are historiographically significant as innovations, while also of a piece with Buddhism’s history of intercultural transmission.

This article offers an exploratory exegesis of the Buddhist concept of collective karma. My aim is to provide a thicker philosophical account of what this important but rather tricky concept entails. In Buddhist philosophy, karma is a complex topic that is central to Buddhist moral psychology and soteriology. The most common unit of analysis to which karma applies is the individual, however, and it is not altogether clear in what respect karma can be applied to the scale of a community. As collective karma has been taken up in recent years by theorists of engaged Buddhism, clarifying what exactly collective karma is and entails stands to fortify the theoretical basis that underwrites its application to contemporary social and political problems. The main work of this article is, first, to provide a brief exegesis of karma simplicter, and then to analyze two appearances of collective karma in traditional Buddhist literature. To illustrate the practical ramifications of collective karma, I advance the example of the abolitionist theory of transformative justice as a practice of collective karmic self-fashioning.

In this article I examine views of groundlessness that appear in three very different philosophical traditions: bardo teachings in Tibetan Buddhism, Michel Foucault's heterotopia, and Gloria Anzaldúa's nepantla. While each of these concepts is formulated in response to specific psychological, philosophical, and political questions, I argue that they each describe—in intimate, first-personal terms—experiences of rupture or dissolution of one's own selfhood and/or thought. Using this formulation of groundlessness as a lens for reading these three concepts alongside one another, I offer a descriptive analysis of each of them, drawing out the moral-psychological ramifications of the nonfoundationalist claim that there is no fundamental “ground” to subjectivity or thought. I argue that bardos, heterotopias, and nepantla each exemplify how the rupture of groundless experience can become a vehicle for moral-psychological transformation by serving as an opportunity to recognize the pliability and spaciousness of a dynamic and unfixed selfhood.

Bruce Janz, Jessica Locke, and Cynthia Willett interact in this exchange with different aspects of Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad’s book Human Being, Bodily Being. Through “constructive inter-cultural thinking”, they seek to engage with Ram-Prasad’s “lower-case p” phenomenology, which exemplifies “how to think otherwise about the nature and role of bodiliness in human experience”. This exchange, which includes Ram-Prasad’s reply to their interventions, pushes the reader to reflect more about different aspects of bodiliness.

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes the moral-psychological stakes of Jay Garfield's reading of Buddhist ethics as moral phenomenology and applies that thesis to the pedagogical mechanisms of the Tibetan Buddhist lojong tradition. I argue that moral phenomenology requires that the practitioner work on a part of her subjectivity not ordinarily accessible to agential action: the phenomenological structures that condition experience. This makes moral phenomenology a highly ambitious ethical project. I turn to lojong as an example of a Buddhist practice that claims to accomplish this ambitious task. As a training toward the ethical ideal of bodhicitta, lojong utilizes practices of meditation and contemplation to disrupt the habitual, affective responses that arise from the conventional phenomenological orientation to the world, replacing them with imagined responses of radically compassionate altruism. This ultimately inculcates a transformation of the phenomenological structures that underlie both ethical action and conscious experience, fulfilling the aim of moral phenomenology.