Category Archives: Buddhism

Matthieu Ricard and Javier Cercas on “La Grande Librairie”: The Truth of Suffering and the Politics of Neutrality

There are moments when an apparently banal exchange reveals deeper tensions in contemporary culture. This is what happens with the recent controversy surrounding Matthieu Ricard —the “happiest man in the world”— and the article by Javier Cercas in El País[i], where he came to Ricard’s defense after the criticism expressed by Dutch historian Rutger Bregman[ii]. At first sight, the debate revolves around meditation, altruism, and personal happiness. But what is truly at stake is how we think about suffering and, above all, how certain European public figures structurally depoliticize injustice through a moral rhetoric of neutrality.

In 2014 I participated in a Summer Research program organized by Mind & Life Europe, the European branch of the foundation created decades earlier by the Tibetan Buddhist leader the Dalai Lama and the scientist Francisco Varela. I had returned to Europe after four years teaching at the Universidad del Salvador, a period marked by my encounter with the philosophy of liberation and a heightened awareness of the historical responsibility of intellectuals. Ricard was one of the main guests. He had just returned from Chile and enthusiastically presented his proposal for an Inner Revolution, inviting us to cultivate inner transformation as the decisive way to change the world.

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Meditation as a Humanistic Discipline

[This entry is the summary of the second meeting of the seminar «Appearance and reality. On Living, Dreaming and Dying», held last Thursday, 17 February 2022].

1. The Current Moral Order and Critical Ethics

In the second session we began with a brief summary of what had been covered in the previous session. In particular, we returned to the notion that there are two perspectives on ethics proposed by the Philosophy of Liberation, and insisted on the idea that this distinction can be fruitfully applied to a better understanding of Buddhist ethics.

In short, the critical proposal of the Philosophy of Liberation can help us to «free ourselves» from conservative perspectives, which tend to create or defend systemic injustices, producing victims voluntarily or involuntarily due to the attachment to the dogmatic formulations of tradition, and to established institutional forms.

Let us remember that Buddhism is, before anything else, an ethic. That is, a system that teaches us how to act, that helps us to distinguish what we should or would do well to cultivate, and what, on the contrary, we should avoid, because it is harmful.

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Buddhism and Philosophy of Liberation

[This entry is the summary of the first meeting of the seminar “Appearance and reality. On living, dreaming and dying”, held last Thursday, 10 February 2022].

1. Introduction

We begin by briefly explaining the programme “Dimensions of Experience”, of which this module is a part. “Dimensions” aims to introduce students to Buddhist meditative practice. However, unlike other courses, the perspective adopted is a critical one. That is, meditation techniques are not simply offered for implementation in our daily lives, but are reflected upon. From our perspective, meditation can be counterproductive and even harmful. Moreover, we believe that a certain interpretation of Buddhist philosophy, in collusion with postmodernism, has been an unwitting ally of neoliberalism and all the evil that this system of social and ecological relations has caused and is causing in the world.

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Standing at the Edge. A response in Six Steps and a Proposal

[The following text is my response and proposal to the event «Standing at the Age» organised by Mind & Life Europe, and broadcast on 26 January 2022. The Youtube link to the event:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOxcy5St-

(1) I have listened very carefully to the interventions of the panellists. I found many valuable elements for reflection. However, I believe that there is an underlying problem that must be explicitly taken on board. It is not possible to talk about standing at the edge without taking into consideration that this edge is a civilisational construction. Is the expression of a very particular «totality with its exteriority», a historically instituted regime of social and ecological relations that dominates not only institutional forms and social practices, but also, in a subterranean way, our own consciousness, our imaginations.
«One world is dying and another has not yet been born». This phrase by Antonio Gramsci expresses the bardo’s experience at the political level.

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