Time for the yearly roundup. Despite being rather busy with work, travel, family matters, and other worldly affairs, I managed to squeeze in quite a bit of reading regardless. As always, these are books that I finished in 2024, so I started reading the first few in late 2023, and there are a few I've started reading recently that will make it to next year's roundup (possibly next quarter; I keep meaning to do these more regularly, but I end up putting off my reflections too long). I did read a few other books this year, but looking at my past posts, it seems silly to include entries with just a short, perfunctory paragraph amounting to "no comment". So, for future posts of this kind, I am only including books I have comments for.
[NOTE: It's July 2024 as I write this little preface. This sat around untouched for most of my hiatus this year, so rather than go back and try to cook up thoughts inorganically about books I don't remember much of, I'm publishing this "as is", meaning some of these may come across a little fragmentary or just rough in general. To prevent this in the future, I might move to a more frequent book-review schedule, possibly a quarterly basis.]
Another year gone by of reading entirely too much for my own good. As I've done the last two years, I have put together a literary year in review, just quickly running through all the books I finished in 2023. Since that's books finished, that does mean the first few were started in 2022, and what I'm reading now will be counted for the 2024 roundup.
I recently partook of a retweet chain, with the simple premise of "My religious beliefs in 2016 vs now". I get the impression 2016 was chosen instead of "5 years ago" or "10 years ago" because that was a pivotal point in contemporary culture. Many people were radicalized that year, mostly in terms of politics, but also on the religious plane (for sincere motives or otherwise). That being said, I had to really think about what I believed at the time. In light of that, I've decided to take a step back and examine my religious journey up to now.
There are, bhikkhus, other phenomena, profound, difficult to apprehend, hard to understand, but that beget calm; joyful phenomena, not to be grasped simply by discursive thought, phenomena that only the wise man can understand. These are expounded by the Tathāgata, after he himself has known them, after he himself has seen them.
—Dīgha Nikāya 1.3
I have given some thought to writing replies to videos and articles that purport to critique Buddhism. Typically these consist of Christians and Nietzscheans making shallow arguments, or else demanding that everyone subscribe to their dogmas without much argument at all. There are many reasons I have not followed through on any of these, but primarily, we Buddhists have such a radically different view of what is to be done from Christians and Nietzscheans that it's not worth the effort. It would be as futile as a maritime explorer lecturing pleasure-cruise tourists on the proper use of ships.
However, the subject of this post concerns a new critique of Buddhism which is not only intelligent and well-considered, but also comes from what I consider to be a kindred school of thought: Platonism. The writer, Hellenic Saxon (I choose to call him Saxon for the remainder of this post), has composed this article which critiques dependent origination, the middle way, the two truths, and Buddha-nature from a Platonist perspective. As he points out in the opening, there has been no real confrontation between Platonism and any of the schools of Buddhism. If there was any such exchange during the Greco-Indian encounter in antiquity, we have no record of it, and in the modern era, Catholic polemicists seem to have totally abandoned their Platonist heritage. Today really is the beginning of a new encounter between centuries-old Buddhist schools and a burgeoning revival of pure Platonism. Not just for the novelty, but also for the intellectual nature of both schools, this should prove exciting; replying to something as cerebral as Platonic dialectic is not nearly as easy as dunking on Christian dogma. Even if both sides continue to disagree, I have high hopes that this exchange and those to come will prove both fruitful and cordial.
Having said all that, I should make this clarification before anything else: I subscribe to the Theravāda school of Buddhism. As such, the bulk of what follows will treat Saxon's criticism of dependent origination, not the uniquely Mahāyāna concepts that take up the rest of his article (I may come back to them some other time, but for now they are out of my wheelhouse, and the present post has taken long enough to produce). I will also stick to Pāli for technical terms, except where Greek and Sanskrit are appropriate.
