Exploring Buddhist Philosophy with Jay Garfield

Here is the link to a year of philosophy with Jay Garfield on the Wisdom Experience: wisdomexperience.org/buddhist...
Welcome to another enlightening episode of DharmaChat, where we journey through the profound teachings of Buddhism and explore the intersection of Eastern philosophy with the modern world. In this episode, we have the incredible privilege of hosting renowned Buddhist philosopher and scholar Jay Garfield.
In this Dharma Chat, Daniel Aitken interviews Jay Garfield, a world-renowned Buddhist philosopher and professor of philosophy and religion at Smith College. Garfield is a leading expert on the Madhyamaka school of Buddhist philosophy, and his work has been translated into many languages.
In this conversation, Garfield and Aitken discuss a wide range of topics related to Buddhist philosophy and practice, including:
The nature of reality
The path to enlightenment
The role of Buddhism in the modern world
Specific Buddhist teachings and practices, such as meditation, compassion, and mindfulness
Garfield is a brilliant and engaging thinker, and he is able to explain complex philosophical concepts in a way that is clear and accessible. He is also passionate about his work, and his enthusiasm for Buddhist philosophy is contagious.
This conversation is a must-watch for anyone who is interested in learning more about Buddhist philosophy and practice. It is also a great resource for Buddhists who are looking to deepen their understanding of their own tradition.
Buddhism
Dharma
Philosophy
Meditation
Compassion
Mindfulness
Madhyamaka
Jay Garfield
Daniel Aitken

[@jasonbonifacio2473]

We are lucky to have Jay.

[@williamcallahan5218]

..."What we are, instead, is ongoing, causally connected, conventionally imputed sets of psychophysical processes in open causal interaction with the world, imbedded in a world that makes us who we are." Jay Garfield

[@5piles]

probably hes just talking as a sautrantika. in middleway there is no defining characteristic of a person in the conventionally imputed sets.

[@williamcallahan5218]

"When we start talking about sentience we immediately retreat to the inner, and we say sentience is something about my inner life. And that's that Augustinian Intuition and whenever anyone says something Augustinian I get really worried. That's the idea of inventing an inner chamber in which these things happen. That was Augustine's great genus and it was wrong. Thinking that, I wondered, how should we think about sentience? I thought; sentience is kind of a homeostatic, autopoietic, to use Francisco Varela lovely term, ongoing interaction with the environment around us. That's what we are doing when we are perceiving. We've got this autopoietic, homeostatic interaction with our environment that enables action, that enables us to engage in the kind of behaviors that are appropriate to us. It's a detection, but it's more than just detection, like a kind of motion detector, its a complicated imbedded sort of detection. When you think about it that way organisms are not the only kinds of things that are sentient. Communities are sentient, biosystems are sentient. The Earth is sentient. Thinking about sentient beings in this way allows us to open up a sphere of moral concern well beyond us. And this takes me back to Dogen too. So when Dogen asks the question in response to "what has Buddha Nature?" he says "grasses have Buddha nature, mountains have Buddha nature, the wind has Buddha nature. What's he talking about when he talk abut Buddha nature? He is talking about these things as sentient beings. Why are they sentient? Because, just like us, they engage in this kind of homeostatic interaction with the world around them. This is all coming back to your question. If ecosystems can be sentient beings why can't a suitably sophisticated artificial intelligence? I don't see a reason to exclude them." Jay Garfield @ around 46:55

[@manikarnika7750]

I suspect that Jay's rejection of the concept of self in Kant and Atman (around 11:00) may be funny, but perhaps too glib. It is yet another a "way" of looking at the self that emphasizes a kind of relationship to one's experience in the world designed to make a point. It is not meant to be a truth, only a metaphor. Interesting dialogue, however.

[@benkessler7460]

This is philosophy but it's not Buddhism. Buddha Nature is the most fundamental teaching of Buddhism and Buddha Nature is beyond space and time and does not exist "in" the world, rather the world is inside Buddha Nature. It sounds outlandish unless you practice enough to discover it for yourself through direct experience.