Training the Mind and Transforming Your World: Moral Phenomenology in the Tibetan Buddhist Lojong Tradition
Jessica Locke
Comparative and Continental Philosophy September 2, 2018 DOI: 10.1080/17570638.2018.1531468 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Intervention | meditation and contemplation |
| Topics | Buddhism Philosophy of mind |
| Keywords | Education |
| Citations | 6 |
| Key points | Argues that the Tibetan Buddhist lojong tradition fulfills the aim of moral phenomenology by using meditation and contemplation to transform the phenomenological structures that condition ethical action and conscious experience. |
Abstract
ABSTRACT This article analyzes the moral-psychological stakes of Jay Garfield's reading of Buddhist ethics as moral phenomenology and applies that thesis to the pedagogical mechanisms of the Tibetan Buddhist lojong (“Mind Training”) tradition. I argue that moral phenomenology requires that the practitioner work on a part of her subjectivity not ordinarily accessible to agential action: the phenomenological structures that condition experience. This makes moral phenomenology a highly ambitious ethical project. I turn to lojong as an example of a Buddhist practice that claims to accomplish this ambitious task. As a training toward the ethical ideal of bodhicitta (“awakening mind”), lojong utilizes practices of meditation and contemplation to disrupt the habitual, affective responses that arise from the conventional phenomenological orientation to the world, replacing them with imagined responses of radically compassionate altruism. This ultimately inculcates a transformation of the phenomenological structures that underlie both ethical action and conscious experience, fulfilling the aim of moral phenomenology.
Comparable studies
Other theoretical and historical papers on buddhism, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mental balance and well-being: Building bridges between Buddhism and Western psychology. | 2006 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience | 1995 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Buddhist and Psychological Perspectives on Emotions and Well-Being | 2005 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Too Early to Tell: The Potential Impact and Challenges—Ethical and Otherwise—Inherent in the Mainstreaming of Dharma in an Increasingly Dystopian World | 2017 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| From self to nonself: The Nonself Theory | 2016 | Theoretical or philosophical paper |