Seminars

Chinese Huayan Buddhism is known for its thesis of universal dependence, according to which everything depends on everything else for its being. This view depicts the ontological structure of reality less like a multi-layered building than like an arch, whose blocks mutually support each other. Yet how, if at all, Huayan Buddhists argued for this thesis remains unclear. This talk examines two clusters of Huayan texts. The first cluster comprises Fazang’s Huayan wujiao zhang 華嚴五教章 (T1866), Huayan jing tanxuan ji 華嚴經探玄記 (T1733), and Huayan jing jinshizi zhang 華嚴經金獅子章 (T1881). These are canonical Huayan texts in which Fazang unpacks the thesis of universal dependence. While they offer a detailed exposition of that thesis, they at most hint at why Fazang reaches the conclusion. The second cluster centers on the Huayan fajie guanmen 華嚴法界觀門, which is traditionally attributed to Dushun but overlaps substantially with Fazang’s Fa putixin zhang 發菩提心章 (T1878), along with its two commentaries: Chengguan’s Huayan fajie xuanjing 華嚴法界玄鏡 (T1883) and Zongmi’s Zhu Huayan fajie guanmen 注華嚴法界觀門 (T1884). These texts contain detailed discussions of the relationship between li 理 and shi 事. Drawing on these discussions, I reconstruct two arguments from li—one through the transitivity of dependence and one through the content of li—and evaluate their strength.

In eighth-century India, Śāntideva articulated a Buddhist ethic of altruism as an extension of nonviolence. Śāntideva was a Buddhist monk and author of the Guide to Bodhisattva Practice (Bodhicaryāvatāra), a classic of Mahāyāna Buddhist ethics. In this text he argues for a Buddhist ethic of altruism as an extension of nonviolence by articulating how to cultivate moral virtue to avoid the reactive patterns of violence. He shows how the underlining cause of violence is confusion and anger, and that a result of violence is unavoidable without undoing the pathology that is its cause. Further, he offers a way to train ordinary reactive habits in order that they be expressed rationally for the mutual welfare of all beings. This paper shows how Śāntideva’s insights prefigure central ideas of the Scottish sentimentalist, Adam Smith, and in particular his notion of “the impartial spectator.” In his 1759 work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith proposed a method to deal with passions like anger by imagining an “impartial spectator” who is not involved in a situation in a biased way but affords an ideal perspective from which one can reframe a scenario in such a way that attention is shifted to include everyone involved, not just the one supposedly wronged. Like Smith, Śāntideva argues for an embodied, rational basis of altruism that draws upon both affect and reason, and thereby lays the groundwork for nonviolence and for compassion as the most rational response to the world.

Early Chinese Confucians believed that in certain circumstances anger is a proper emotion to have, express, and act upon but that it is a potential source of moral error and difficult to control; therefore, it requires special attention and management. Neo-Confucian thinkers in China and Korea accepted and defended these beliefs but offered quite distinctive analyses of what anger is and how it should be attended to, exercised, and managed. They often developed their ideas by reflecting and commenting on the early Confucian teaching of Not Transferring One’s Anger, first seen in the Analects, to explain their views on anger and in particular how to control and direct it. I will describe and explain some representative Confucian views on anger in China and Korea and argue that while the standard neo-Confucian account of anger is not plausible in certain respects, it offers an excellent model or template for thinking about anger and a method for achieving the kind of anger management that we require in order to live well in the contemporary world. I will further argue that the need to understand and manage anger is a particularly pressing problem for people today because, given the nature of our times, for a variety of reasons, it is a much greater liability for wellbeing and humanity than it was in the past.

Aristotle argues that virtues of character do not arise in us by nature, whereas Mengzi holds that we natively possess several incipient dispositions or "sprouts" (duān 端) on a trajectory toward full virtues. What happens when we press Mengzi's position against Aristotelian reasons for skepticism about such innate moral tendencies? Two objections arise. The first concerns the trajectory's continuity: Aristotle's commitment to the unity of the virtues means that a native disposition resembling a single virtue cannot, on its own, be on a continuum with the full virtue. Since Mengzi does not appear to share this commitment, the objection has limited force against him. The second objection, concerning the trajectory's direction, cuts deeper: Aristotle holds that "natural virtues" without practical wisdom are harmfully fallible, which seems to challenge Mengzi's assessment of morally unreliable dispositions as directed more at full goodness than otherwise. I argue that Mengzi has resources to sustain this asymmetrical assessment — resources that come into view once the sprouts are understood as nascent abilities to get things right.

This paper develops a Buddhist meta-theoretical account of political coercion as a stage in a set of sedimented karmic feedback loops, in which historically conditioned patterns of perception, affect, and response are stabilized in institutional form and transmitted across generations. Karma is understood here not as moral desert but as causal inheritance. Drawing on contemporary psychology of trauma and moral disengagement, and on Buddhist analyses of ignorance (avidyā) and attachment to views (dṛṣṭi-upādāna), I argue that coercive institutions externalize and universalize threat-conditioned demands for closure by encoding them into law, security practices, and authoritative decision-structures. Coercion thus becomes not merely an instrument of compliance or domination, but an affect-regulating and epistemically structuring form of social organization that stabilizes narrowed fields of moral and political perception. In relation to liberal theory, this account explains why coercion repeatedly erodes capacities—fallibilism, evidential responsiveness, and tolerance of uncertainty—that liberal legitimacy presupposes. In relation to critical theory, it supplies a moral-psychological and affective genealogy of why domination can be experienced as stabilizing and even desirable. In relation to conservatism, it interprets the valorization of hierarchy, authority, and moral certainty as the ethical naturalization of trauma-adapted cognition. The paper introduces “karmic perception analysis” as a method for tracing how ignorance and view-attachment become embedded in institutional form, and it advances a set of design principles for interrupting these loops and advancing non-coercive politics as a practical program of collective de-traumatization.

This talk presents material from an ongoing book project tentatively entitled Sages, Heroes, Monsters, Fools: On the Wisdom of Ancient Kings. A survey of global wisdom literature, the book traces the ancient obsession with kingly wisdom, a battleground wherein kings, princes, officials, scribes, ritualists, philosophers, etc., negotiated the problems and paradoxes inherent in monarchic rule. More specifically, the talk picks up a particular thread within this global discourse, the idea that kingship places kings at a profound epistemic disadvantage. In the writings of Mei Cheng, Han Fei, Aśvagoṣa, Isocrates, Plato, and Xenophon, we encounter a kingly catch-22: on the one hand, kings have the greatest need for wisdom; on the other, their power and privilege doom them to a state of perpetual naiveté. So how can kings escape the epistemic trap?

This paper presents a debate between a 9th century Nyāya philosopher, Jayanta Bhaṭṭa, and his Mīmāṃsā interlocutor, on the nature of doubt. In particular, the debate centers on the question of whether, when a cognition arises, we are necessarily in doubt about its epistemic status. Jayanta’s Mīmāṃsā interlocutor argues that the mental state of doubt is characterized by indeterminacy and involves a dilemmatic structure whereby the mind wavers between two or more incompatible judgements (i.e. is the object in front of me a tree trunk or a person?). On the other hand, through looking at a specific case of doubt, Jayanta argues that doubt need not have the standard dilemmatic structure nor the accompanying experience of ambivalence. In particular, Jayanta argues that there is doubt about the epistemic status of a cognition just in case the epistemic agent has not ascertained the epistemic status of that cognition. After unpacking this debate, I relate it to contemporary discussions of doubt. Ultimately, I argue that Jayanta’s account of doubt, while unintuitive, yields some unexpected advantages over more familiar and intuitive conceptions of doubt.

South Asian authors in the tradition of Buddhist epistemology defended causal and empirical accounts of mind and knowledge similar to the approach of contemporary cognitive science. These views could make an updated version of their outlook well suited to respond to the practical and intellectual questions posed by artificial intelligence (AI); but there are important objections to such a project. The tradition faced a problem of apparent self-referential inconsistency: its core thesis that there are exactly two types of epistemic warrants, perception and inference, could not be validated either by perception or by inference. Moreover, Dan Arnold has argued that the commentator Dharmottara saw the inadequacy of, and so quietly abandoned, Dharmakīrti’s causal understanding of knowledge. These objections can be answered. Self-referential inconsistency can be avoided by retreating from an empiricist theory to an “empirical stance” grounded in early Buddhist texts. Arnold’s interpretive claims about the key passage in Dharmottara are highly dubious. In fact, the contours of recent progress in AI provide considerable support to empirical approaches to knowledge over rationalist ones. And the development of computer vision supports Buddhist views of perception against criticisms from Uddyotakara and Kumārila. There is room for hope that a modernized form of Buddhist epistemology could be helpful in meeting the challenges of a dawning age of AI.

The recent literature has witnessed a somewhat surprising development in the Western understanding of Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka Buddhism: it has been argued that the full-blown PSR – the principle according to which everything has a reason for its existence – is at work in Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (MMK). This is surprising because the PSR is commonly taken to be the hallmark of rationalism, whereas Nāgārjuna is not typically associated with a rationalist tradition. Indeed, it is not uncommon even to take Nāgārjuna as advancing a radical kind of anti-rationalism. One means by which we might resist this conclusion is by establishing that although for Nāgārjuna everything has a reason it is not the case that everything has a sufficient reason. Evidence for such a view might be found in Nāgārjuna’s antifoundationalist metaphysic. I argue that although promising, appeal to Nāgārjuna’s antifoundationalism does not secure the means by which we can deny the consistency of the metaphysic of the MMK with the PSR. In spite of this negative conclusion, however, much of value is learned along the way. In particular, I argue that what is at issue between the PSR-embracer and the PSR-detractor (of a certain stripe, at least) is not the PSR itself, but an ancillary principle that connects reasons with sufficient reasons.

Why does Mengzi tell rulers that their love of wealth and women poses no obstacle to ideal rulership, even as he venerates sage kings who seemingly lack such desires? How can he advocate for universal moral response in the child-in-the-well scenario while explicitly rejecting impartial concern? Why does he advise King Xuan to avoid looking at sacrificial oxen—effectively telling him to ignore his compassionate impulses—if moral sprouts are meant to guide ethical action? And why does he reject merit-based appointments, favoring hereditary offices, while advocating ethical transformation of government? These persistent interpretive puzzles have led some scholars to conclude that Mengzi’s philosophy is fundamentally conflicted. In this talk, I propose that these puzzles dissolve when we shift our focus from theoretical systematization to dao construction. Rather than seeing Mengzi primarily as a theorist of human nature, a virtue ethicist, or a political philosopher, I argue he is best understood as a constructor of dao: an engineer of workable frameworks for guiding conduct and organizing social life. Like an engineer, Mengzi builds with available resources—human psychology, institutions, cultural forms—within real-world constraints, prioritizing sustainability over theoretical purity. This “pragmatic constructivist” reading explains Mengzi’s characteristic patterns: motivational permissiveness (redirecting self-interested desires rather than suppressing them), institutional conservatism (preserving Zhou structures while fostering ethical renewal), and accommodation of natural family attachments (without making them the normative foundation). Instead of demanding universal emotional expansion, Mengzi engineers coordination mechanisms that work with human nature, social realities, and political structures as they actually exist. I aim to show how this engineering approach resolves longstanding interpretive difficulties and reveals Mengzi as a systematic social engineer whose methodology remains relevant for contemporary debates on moral and political progress.