Reason and the Senses :
A Dialogue Between Buddhism and Christianity
— Introduction
According to the last censuses, Christianity is still the world’s largest population, counting more than two billion members and representing about one third of the global population. Christianity is still in a “good shape”, due to reinforced religious vigour in areas like Africa or South America…
Reason and the Senses :
A Dialogue Between Buddhism and Christianity
— Part 2
In the realm of metaphysics, compromises are difficult : Buddhism and Christianity are hardly reconcilable. The former generally rejected all notions of God or self, before turning, with Mahāyāna Buddhism, to a full-fledged doctrine of emptiness…
Reason and the Senses :
A Dialogue Between Buddhism and Christianity
— Part 3
It is not as a sensational or a sensible but as a sensuous matter that sexuality is an important question of philosophy. A tradition’s discourse on sexuality can reveal two almost radically opposite loci…
Reason and the Senses :
A Dialogue Between Buddhism and Christianity
— Part 4
Mystics do not inhabit the same location in Buddhism and in Christianity. In the former, they constitute the majority of the spiritual actors, since enlightenment is a process relying mostly on self-realisation….
The Non-Self of Girard – Introduction
According to Girard, the Mimetic Theory and philosophy can’t go together; the Mimetic Theory must go beyond philosophy. More than an ideological disagreement, there is here an actual methodological divergence. Philosophy, he argues, tends to remain at the superficial level of pure intellectual understanding, while other human faculties must be accessed in order to overcome the illusions of an independent desire…
The Non-Self of Girard – Part 1
Anattā is one of the unique contributions of Sakyamuni Buddha, the founder of Buddhism who lived in the fifth century BCE in India. Along with his rejection of the caste system and of the practice of sacrifice, Buddha questioned the existence of the Ātman (Sanskrit) or Atta (Pāli), the self or soul widely accepted in Brāhmaṇism.
The Non-Self of Girard – Part 2
Girard’s comments on Buddhism have been, through his long career, quite sparse. This is understandable: even though particular readers have sensed a possible connection between Mimetic Theory and Buddhism, the topic was probably not one of his main interests. Besides, he minimised this tradition by describing it as a rather morbid soteriological system, which allegedly consists, in his own words, in a “renunciation” led by an intent to get “out of the world altogether”…
The Non-Self of Girard – Conclusion
Following Buddha’s statements about abstract postulations, I would argue that it is not the extent to which our brain can grasp hypothetical views on fundamental metaphysics, but what this brings to our practical embodied life, which must be placed as the end goal of intellectual initiatives. The question is not whether Girard would agree with a metaphysics without selves…
