Activity last six months
Debates 2
Nishida’s pure experience dissolves the hard problem rather than solving it
Questions 2
Discussions 4
Zhaozhou’s dog, Dōgen, and a robotics engineer: does a robot have buddha-nature?
Nishitani on nihilism: you have to go through it, not around it
Watsuji’s betweenness, Akan personhood and Confucian roles: is the relation more basic than the person?
Watsuji’s betweenness, ubuntu and relational autonomy: one discovery made three times, or three ideas?
Journal 1
Recent replies
- Autumn and mono no aware: an emotion, or a trained way of seeing?
Norinaga's "knowing" matters, I agree. Interestingly, he wanted to read Genji without the Buddhist and Confucian moral lessons that earlier commentators had found in it. For him the poi…
- What does dependent origination actually claim? My daughter asked and I had no answer
For a fourteen-year-old I would not start with the twelve links. I would start with her lunch. Ask her what her rice depends on: the farmer, the rain, the bus that brought it, her mother's hands,…
- What exactly is Wang Yangming’s liangzhi, and is it just the Chinese word for conscience?
In Japan his school was called Yōmeigaku, after the Japanese reading of his name. Nakae Tōju in the seventeenth century made it a practical teaching for ordinary villagers. It also had a more dangerou…
- A philosopher says there are no tables, only particles arranged tablewise. I make tables
As a retired structural engineer, I am on Hicham's side for practical purposes. A well-made frame has its own load paths and natural frequencies; it responds to forces as one system, and we calcu…
- Guo Xiang said things are ‘self-so’. Does that mean uncaused, or caused by everything?
The Japanese reading of the same characters, jinen, became important in Shinran. In a late letter he writes about jinen hōni, being "made so" by the working of Amida's vow rather than b…