Category: EN

November 30, 2012

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…

November 30, 2012

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…

November 30, 2012

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….

November 30, 2012

Reason and the Senses :
A Dialogue Between Buddhism and Christianity
— Conclusion

In the course of this essay series, I have been able to highlight numbers of bridges, and occasionally, certain incompatibilities, between two major religious and spiritual traditions of our world : Christianity and Buddhism…

November 12, 2012

French poet, writer and philosopher Philippe Muray was one of those brilliant artists who waited to be dead to become famous. In 2010, four years after Muray’s demise, the adulated French actor Fabrice Luchini would read some of his poems as a part of his acclaimed theatrical performances…

November 5, 2012

“Khushia” is a short story written in 1940 by Indian novelist Saadat Hansan Manto. The story revolves around a pimp, Khushia, who finds himself destabilized after a brief exchange with one of his prostitutes. Behind the relatively common theme of prostitution, it is masculinity, its foundation and its doubts that Manto critically addresses in this short story…

October 15, 2012

In the mid-19th c., when Karl Marx announced, in the Communist Manifesto and later in his Capital, the emergence of strong movements of revolt by the working class in industrialised England, France and Germany, he certainly did not imagine that the first cases of such uprisings would actually take place far away from Western Europe…

October 15, 2012

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…

October 15, 2012

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.

October 15, 2012

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”…