It's All About The Empiricism, Dude

OK, Terry Pratchett has done it better, but this is still pretty funny:

Tibetan Teen Getting Into Western Philosophy

LHASA, TIBET—Deng Hsu, 14, said Monday that he is "totally getting into Western philosophy." "I've been reading a lot of Kant, Descartes, and Hegel, and it's blowing my mind," Hsu said. "It's so exotic and exciting, not like all that Buddhist 'being is desire and desire is suffering' shit my parents have been cramming down my throat all my life. Most of the kids in my school have never even heard of Hume's views on objectivity or Locke's tabula rasa." Hsu said he hopes to one day make an exodus to north London to visit the birthplace of John Stuart Mill.

Comments

[Mitch Mills]

Don't know if it happens much in Singapore, but in China proper a small but very-noticable proportion of expats I met had come there in furtherance of an interest in Buddhism. Most had a very rude awakening when they met actual practicing Buddhists and went to sacred sights and temples - a totally different scene from back in their San Francisco or London Buddhist study group, to say the least.

There was also a small but very noticable proportion of recently-converted Chinese Christians, mostly young urban upwardly mobile types, and I always wondered what they would make of things if they were plopped down into an evangelical church service somewhere in Middle America.

And then there were the Chinese Amway fanatics, several of whom I met, and one of whom I got trapped next to on a long bus journey. They were exactly like the Amway members I've had the misfortune of spending time with in the states.

[spacetoast]

I don't know too much about Buddhism, but I recently read this book, and enjoyed the hell out of it. The dude is, or was, associated with the Zen center in SF. It's great and funny, and stuff, and people should read it if they haven't. Particularly American folks who have/are done/doing time in the Asia places.

[Des von Bladet]

In my capacity as a native North Londoner, I was curious exactly where, and Wikipedia says "Pentonville" which the Interweb narrows down to Islington. (The Angel is probably the closest tube.)

Does the JSM Society make itself ill on halves of shandy in the nearest tavern on notable anniversaries, does anyone happen to know?

(For philosophical purposes I consider myself French, of course.)

[Des von Bladet]

In my capacity as a native North Londoner, I was curious exactly where, and Wikipedia says "Pentonville" which the Interweb narrows down to Islington. (The Angel is probably the closest tube.)

Does the JSM Society make itself ill on halves of shandy in the nearest tavern on notable anniversaries, does anyone happen to know?

(For philosophical purposes I consider myself French, of course.)

[Doug M]

Mitch Mills' observation brings up something important -- the distinction within Buddhism between its philosophical/meditative core and its mythology/rituals. Most of us are drawn to one and put off by the other. Sometimes we're so put off that we refuse to look into Buddhism at all. This can be a real shame in the case of hardish-core philosophers, a lot of whom seem to hang around this site -- which is why I'm saying it here. A lot of us are unhappy and are made more unhappy by our culture's mindless banality; we try to think our way out of our unhappiness by analyzing the concepts of goodness and value; our thoughts go a certain distance and then get stuck in circles; this again makes us unhappy, but we wager that if we can think twice as hard we'll rocket out of these circles towards happiness; but this doesn't work and we end up in an agonizing frenzy of unhappy thought, the most manic exemple of which I can give off-hand is this mini-essay by Philippe Sollers.

Buddhism takes a completely different approach. Our problem, it says, is not too little thought, but too much frantic scattered thought. If you calm down your mind, the worries that were bothering you in the first place will dissolve. It's not magic and in the end it has little of the spicy exoticism that the Onion article plays on. It works, though. Check it out.

[Doug M]

One more thing -- it's also worth saying that, in way, Buddhism itself is all about the empiricism. The Buddha reproves people who are obsessed with philosophical hair-splitting (e.g. the very funny Shorter Discourse to Malunkyaputta.) For him the question is always: what leads to happiness, and what leads to unhappiness? And here's an empirical experiment we can all perform: Which group seems happier on the whole, the devoted Buddhists we know or the devoted academic philosophers we know?