ནག་པོ་ཆེན་པོ། (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Splendour of Negation: R. S. Bhatnagar Revisited with a Buddhist Tinge
Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research, 2020
Negation has occupied a unique place in the history of ideas. Negation as opposed to truth-conditional affirmation has been very much present in Indian and Western thought from very early times. R. S. Bhatnagar of happy memory (1933–2019) in his “Many Splendoured Negation” (Bhatnagar in J Indian Counc Philos Res XXII(3):83–906, 2006) had shown many a facet that could be construed in “negation”. This paper is an attempt to revisit the notion of negation that R. S. Bhatnagar brought to light and to further the germane thought that he had outlined in his concise exposé. Though Bhatnagar had stated that there could be negative and positive functions of negations, a vigilant reading of his article shows that the primary import of Bhatnagar is to examine the positive function of negation. According to R. S. Bhatnagar, even death, which could be the negative in its most feared form, the reality of which, has the positive effect on the soul force in its commitment to live well and die well....
Failing Well: Accommodating Vices in an Ideal Vedic City
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2017
Since the early 1970s, the small town of Mayapur in West Bengal has been home to a multinational Gaudiya Vaishnava community of International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) devotees, popularly known as the Hare Krishnas. Although the land of Mayapur is understood to be sacred and therefore conducive to spiritual life, devotees often struggle with the practices and prohibitions that are deemed indispensable for their salvation. They are also, however, both prone to and adept at articulating their inability to live up to the ideals of Krishna consciousness, so much so that narrating failure itself becomes a privileged mode of moral self-cultivation. Devotees inhabit the moral system not simply by conforming to a set of Vaishnava ideals but by articulating their failure to do so consistently within Vaishnava moral narratives that account for the aperture between precept and practice. In other words, they inhabit the moral system by failing well. This article contributes to recent debates in the ethical turn that center on the twin problems of identifying and locating ethics. I suggest that beyond a focus on virtue, the anthropology of ethics must also account for how people relate to vices, and how moral systems accommodate the problem of moral failure.
"'And Who Will Show Me the Way?': St. Antony’s Alchemy of the Inner Mountain and the Pathless Abyss
Sacred Web , 2021
The experience of St. Antony of Egypt can be seen to exemplify an aspect of Sophia Perennis that deserves our keen attention, enhancing the familiar emblem of diverse paths leading up a mountain, only to converge at the summit; through various thematic parallels between Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Daoism, we find that whilst their ultimate unity remains transcendent, the immanence of the Divine ensures that there be many places where distinct paths providentially intersect. For height entails depth, as yang implies yin; any integral spiritual journey is ineluctably a dilation of the soul: to travel upward demands plunging within, until the outer and the inner, virtue and vision coalesce. Upon the soul’s dissolution in Spirit, the face of the Other is beheld as a mirror of our own, their mutual transparency reflecting the One Countenance; this is developed in the apophatic dimensions of Rheno-Flemish mysticism, and manifested in recent figures of Thomas Merton, St. (Mother) Teresa of Calcutta, and Dom Christian de Chergé.
Judaica Metropolitana
In a well-known Hasidic parable attributed to the Ba'al Shem Ṭov a great King builds a closely guarded partition (Hebrew meḥiṣa) and places treasures here and there; He sits within behind a veil. Seekers are deterred by the high wall and its guardians or distracted by the chests of riches, and only the King's son perseveres and finds Him, realizing also that the barrier is but an illusion (Hebrew aḥizat 'einayim). The parable has an affinity to that of the Prodigal Son, best known in the Gospel according to Luke in the New Testament, and in one version the agonized son cries out to his royal father with Psalm 22:2-the same as the cry of Jesus on the Cross. Scholars have long discerned something from Indian philosophy in the concept of illusion in the story; but the present essay proposes a precise origin in the Buddhist story of the Phantom City in the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka Sutra, the Lotus Sutra of the Good Law, which became the tale of the City of Brass in the Islamic collection of stories The Thousand and One Nights and entered Christian, then Jewish, literature from there.
Nihilism, Rhetoric, and the Rationality of Religious Tradition
In Man’s Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl makes a remarkable claim based on his experiences in the Nazi death camps. He claims that all human beings are free to decide how they will respond to their external circumstances, no matter how terrible those circumstances might be. This essay will consider not the truth or falsity of this profound ontological claim. Instead, I will consider a far more obvious point: that this kind of claim only functions rhetorically when it is spoken by a person like Frankl, someone whose virtue has been proven by the most extreme suffering. To take a contrasting example, if a white, middle-class man from Canada were to argue as Socrates argues in the Gorgias, that it is better to suffer injustice than to inflict it, even to the extent that it would be better to be tortured to death than to become the tyrant of a city – it is unlikely that an audience would take these arguments seriously. As such, it would be perfectly rational for such a speaker to cite the authority of someone like Frankl, someone who had retained his or her dignity even in the furnace of extreme suffering. Moreover, for the kind of claim that Socrates makes in the Gorgias, the appeal to traditional authority would be the only way to make it rhetorically plausible – because only someone who has “merited the victory of an unjust death” (to quote Boethius) would have grounds to say that it is better to die than to become unjust. From this, I argue that the members of a culture that has lost touch with its own traditional authorities will find themselves unable to plausibly argue for the kind of claims that both Frankl and Socrates insist are true.