Consciousness Mattering (Bloombury, 2023) presents a contemporary Buddhist theory in which brains, bodies, environments, and cultures are relational infrastructures for human consciousness. Drawing on insights from meditation, neuroscience, physics, and evolutionary theory, it demonstrates that human consciousness is not something that occurs only in our heads and consists in the creative elaboration of relations among sensed and sensing presences, and more fundamentally between matter and what matters. Peter Hershock argues that without consciousness there would only be either unordered sameness or nothing at all. Evolution is consciousness mattering.

Shedding new light on the co-emergence of subjective awareness and culture, the possibility of machine consciousness, the risks of algorithmic consciousness hacking, and the potentials of intentionally altered states of consciousness, Hershock invites us to consider how freely, wisely, and compassionately consciousness matters.

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Mick Brown’s The Nirvana Express: How the Search for Enlightenment Went West (Oxford UP, 2023) is a riveting account about the West's engagement with Eastern spirituality across a century. It traces the life of multiple characters that intersected across time and space to create a network of interlinking stories about saints, salesmen and scoundrels all involved in spirituality.

From Edwin Arnold, whose epic poem about the life of the Buddha became a best-seller in Victorian Britain, to the occultist and magician Aleister Crowley; and from spiritual teachers Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meher Baba and Ramana Maharshi to the controversial guru Rajneesh, The Nirvana Express is an exhilarating, sometimes troubling journey through the West's search for enlightenment.

Archit Nanda is PhD scholar in Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London.

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Machine learning, big data and AI are reshaping the human experience and forcing us to develop a new ethical intelligence. In Buddhism and Intelligent Technology: Toward a More Humane Future (Bloomsbury, 2021), Peter Hershock offers a new way to think about attention, personal presence, and ethics as intelligent technology shatters previously foundational certainties and opens entirely new spaces of opportunity.

Rather than turning exclusively to cognitive science and contemporary ethical theories, Hershock shows how classical Confucian and Socratic philosophies help to make visible what a history of choices about remaking ourselves through control biased technology has rendered invisible. But it is in Buddhist thought and practice that Hershock finds the tools for valuing and training our attention, resisting the colonization of consciousness, and engendering a more equitable and diversity-enhancing human-technology-world relationship. Focusing on who we need to be present as to avoid a future in which machines prevent us from either making or learning from our own mistakes, Hershock offers a constructive response to the unprecedented perils of intelligent technology and seamlessly blends ancient and contemporary philosophies to envision how to realize its equally unprecedented promises.

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**Warning: This episode contains potentially disturbing content!**

On this episode of the Black Beryl, I sit down with Justin McDaniel, a scholar of Theravada Buddhist literature and art. Together we explore the darker side of Thai Buddhism, including meditation on decomposing bodies, fetus spirits, corpse oil, and the spectrum of white and black magic. We discuss the logics of rituals, their role in Thai communities, and how a misfit Catholic punk from Philly found himself in a rural Thai monastery.

If you want to hear scholars and practitioners engaging in deep conversations about the dark side of Asian religions and medicines, then subscribe to Black Beryl wherever you get your podcasts. You can also check out our members-only benefits on Substack.com. Enjoy the show!

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia. www.piercesalguero.com.

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The life and works of the mysterious Indian yogin, Saraha, who has inspired Buddhist practitioners for over a thousand years. Saraha, “the Archer,” was a mysterious but influential tenth-century Indian Buddhist tantric adept who expressed his spiritual realization in mystic songs (dohās) that are enlightening, shocking, and confounding by turns. 

Saraha: Poet of Blissful Awareness (Shambhala, 2024) is the first book to attempt a thorough treatment of the context, life, works, poetics, and teachings of Saraha. It features a search for the “historical” Saraha through evidence provided by our knowledge of the medieval Indian context in which he likely lived, the biographical legends that grew up around him in Tibet, and the works attributed to him in Indic and Tibetan text collections; a consideration of the various guises in which Saraha appears in his writings (as poet, social and religious critic, radical gnostic thinker, and more); an overview of Saraha’s poetic and religious legacy in South Asia and beyond; and complete or partial translations, from Tibetan, of over two dozen works attributed to Saraha. These include nearly all his spiritual songs, from his well-known Dohā Trilogy to obscure but important expositions of mahāmudrā, as well as several previously untranslated works.

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Rewriting Buddhism: Pali Literature and Monastic Reform in Sri Lanka, 1157–1270 (UCL Press, 2020) is the first intellectual history of premodern Sri Lanka’s most culturally productive period. This era of reform (1157–1270) shaped the nature of Theravada Buddhism both in Sri Lanka and also Southeast Asia and even today continues to define monastic intellectual life in the region.

Alastair Gornall argues that the long century’s literary productivity was not born of political stability, as is often thought, but rather of the social, economic and political chaos brought about by invasions and civil wars. Faced with unprecedented uncertainty, the monastic community sought greater political autonomy, styled itself as royal court, and undertook a series of reforms, most notably, a purification and unification in 1165 during the reign of Parakramabahu I. He describes how central to the process of reform was the production of new forms of Pali literature, which helped create a new conceptual and social coherence within the reformed community; one that served to preserve and protect their religious tradition while also expanding its reach among the more fragmented and localized elites of the period.

Rewriting Buddhism is available for free open-access download at uclpress.com/buddhism.

Bruno M. Shirley is a PhD candidate at Cornell University, working on Buddhism, kingship and gender in medieval Sri Lankan texts and landscapes. He is on Twitter at @brunomshirley.

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Scholars of religion have mostly abandoned the concept of "syncretism" in which certain apparent deviations from "standard" practice are believed to be the result of a mixture of religions. This is particularly relevant to Thailand, in which ordinary religious practice was seen by an earlier generation of scholars as a mixture of three religions: local spirit religion, Hinduism, and Buddhism. In part, the perception that Thai Buddhism is syncretistic is due to a misunderstanding of traditional Buddhism, which has always accepted the existence of local spirits and gods. Nevertheless, there are aspects of Thai Buddhist practice that still stubbornly appear syncretistic. Moreover, Thai Buddhists themselves are increasingly adopting the language of syncretism, referring to traditional Thai religion as a mixture of local, Hindu, and Buddhist practices. This raises the question: If syncretism is so wrong, then why does it seem so right?

In Holy Things: The Genealogy of the Sacred in Thai Religion (Oxford UP, 2024), Nathan McGovern answers this question through an in-depth study of the worship of spirits, gods, and Buddha images--all known as sing saksit, or "holy things"--in Thailand. He takes the reader on a historical and genealogical journey, showing how the category saksit began as a term to describe a power that is inherent to gods and spirits and accessible to Brahmans. Only later, when it was used in the nineteenth century to translate the Western concept of the "holy" did it become associated with Buddhist practice. McGovern shows that what appears to be syncretism is actually an illusion. The worship of "holy things" is not a mixture of different religions, but the category of "holy things" is a mixture of different ways of talking about religion.

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Glenn’s latest, Non Buddhist Mysticism: Performing Irreducible and Primitive Presence (Eyecorner Press, 2022), presents a radical reorientation to “spiritual” practice.

Drawing from François Laruelle’s concept of future mysticism and the author’s own previous work on non-buddhism, Glenn Wallis galvanizes a materialist spirituality for the twenty-first century.

Liberated from the punctilious gaze of the masters, delivered into the hands (and hearts) of the reader, this is a spirituality “born in the spirit of heresy rather than sanctity.”

The intended outcome is a subject “fit for the clash with Hell” – a person equipped, lovingly and compassionately, to confront the injustices of the world.

We also look at the great work taking place at INCITE Seminars, a place of practice which all listeners are invited to.

Order at EyeCorner Press

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In Buddhist cosmology, pretas make up one of several categories of rebirth. They are best known as "hungry ghosts," pitiful beings with miniscule mouths and bloated stomachs whose state of extreme starvation is a result of stinginess and immorality in a former life.

But they were not always portrayed in this way. Of Ancestors and Ghosts: How Preta Narratives Constructed Buddhist Cosmology and Shaped Buddhist Ethics (Oxford UP, 2024) traces the construction of the Buddhist realm of the pretas through narrative literature composed in Pali and Sanskrit in the first millennium of Buddhism's development in South Asia. By exploring issues such as where the departed go after they die, how the living can assist the dead in the next world, and how the departed fits into a karmic cosmology, Buddhist monks used these stories to construct the preta realm and, with it, Buddhist cosmology as we know it today. In the process they established themselves as religious experts concerning the dead. Of Ancestors and Ghosts illustrates the importance of narrative for the construction of religious cosmologies, showing that cosmologies come into formation over a long, cumulative process.

Far from being simple morality tales, preta literature helped develop and articulate Buddhist understandings of actions and their fruits. In the process, these narratives portray ethical cultivation as inherently connected to the cultivation of bodies. As a result, stories about pretas speak to the vast range of embodied experiences in the Buddhist cosmos, including the intersection of human/non-human identity and class, caste, gender, and sexuality. These stories help model and elicit aesthetically informed embodied experiences that are themselves ethically formative. As a result, preta literature highlights the enduring importance of emotions and embodiment on the Buddhist path to awakening.

Personally, for me as a NBN host, this book models for us, a care-based research paradigm that takes seriously seemingly "supernatural" or "superstitious" narratives NOT as raw materials but as mirrors to reflect upon the limits of our own scholarly practices and as theoretical resources to expand existing ways of producing knowledge. 

A transcript is available here. 

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Nāgārjuna (c. 150-250), founder of the Madhyamaka or Middle Way school of Buddhist philosophy and the most influential of all Buddhist thinkers aside from the Buddha himself, concludes his masterpiece, Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, with these baffling verses:

For the abandonment of all views

He taught the true teaching

By means of compassion

I salute him, Gautama

But how could anyone possibly abandon all views? In Buddhism Between Religion and Philosophy: Nāgārjuna and the Ethics of Emptiness (Oxford UP, 2024), Rafal K. Stepien shows not only how Nāgārjuna's radical teaching of no-view or “abelief” makes sense within his Buddhist philosophy, but also how it stands at the summit of his religious mission to care for all living beings. Rather than treating any one aspect of Nāgārjuna's ideas in isolation, here his metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics emerge as a single coherent and convincing philosophical-religious system of thought and practice.

Grounded in meticulous study of original texts from classical India and China but innovating on the theories and methods underpinning contemporary scholarship East and West, this study shows how profoundly important voices from the diverse religious and philosophical traditions of the world have until now been diminished, distorted, and silenced. In opening up truly global horizons of existing and co-existing in the world, this work challenges the very ways in which we think about religion and philosophy.

* Elucidates Nāgārjuna's thought in its Buddhist context, integrating his views on belief and intention, language and mind, action and attachment, selfhood and suffering, violence and peace, emptiness and Buddhahood

* Presents a trenchant critique of the Christian and Western assumptions still dominating the study of religion and philosophy today

* Introduces and clarifies ideas of pivotal importance to the history of Buddhist thought in India, Tibet, China, and Japan

Readers may also find a related edited volume equally fascinating, Buddhist Literature as Philosophy and Buddhist Philosophy as Literature

Prof. Rafal Stepien is also leading a collaborative project, " The Ethics of Empty Beliefs: Chinese Buddhist Philosophy in the ‘Period of Disunity’" that has openings for postdocs and will host several workshops on studies of Sanlun and its influences in Sinophone spheres. 

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