Graham Priest

speaker

386 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2020 last heard Mar 2020

Graham Priest’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

No recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Elucidations · Elucidations Episode 124: Graham Priest discusses Buddhist political philosophy · 21 Mar 2020 podcast

So there are remarks in some of the early sutras that the Buddha makes about political organization.

And uh there are some early Madhyamaka texts by Nagajuna which gives advice to the ruler.

Uh that's the Ratnavali.

But generally speaking, Buddhism has not gone there.

Interestingly, over the last 70 years we've seen this change.

Because there are a bunch of philosophers who fall under the general rubric of engaged Buddhists, who are people who've taken the Buddhist message to heart and said, okay, it's not good enough just to sit in our bums.

We've got to get out there and improve the world.

So one of the early people who fell into this

category was the Vietnamese Zen monk Tichnat Han who was engaged in the Vietnam War trying to sort of end the war.

But there are other philosophers, Buddhist philosophers who are often thought to be in this league.

The the current Dalai Lama is one of them as well.

So there is a general movement to moving from understanding that Buddhism is not just a personal practice, but it's also it should be a socially engaged practice.

And of course it should always have been like that, just because compassion is the central virtue in in Mahayana Buddhism.

It's just that Buddhist philosophers I think have generally speaking not taken this to heart until perhaps fairly recently.

I mean given the sort of general goal, how to realise that is not at all obvious, as you say.

So this is where serious political debates start.

Now I mean as you look around the world that we currently live in, it's very hard to go past the thought that an enormous amount of suffering that's occasioned is caused by capitalism for all kinds of reasons.

I mean, capitalism functions for the wealthy, we all know about the one percent.

And the ninety nine percent, their well being is not really considered.

Their function is to make wealth for the one percent.

Showing 121–140 of 386 · page 7 of 20