Buddhist Spiritual Practices

Thinking with Pierre Hadot on

Buddhism, Philosophy, and the Path

Edited by David V. Fiordalis

Mangalam Press
Berkeley, CA
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
ix

Introduction
David V. Fiordalis
1

Some Remarks on Hadot, Foucault, and

Comparisons with Buddhism
Steven Collins
21

Schools, Schools, Schools—Or,

Must a Philosopher be Like a Fish?
Sara L. McClintock
71

The Spiritual Exercises of the Middle Way:

Reading Atiśa’s Madhyamakopadeśa with Hadot
James B. Apple
105

Spiritual Exercises and the Buddhist Path:

An Exercise in Thinking with and against Hadot
Pierre-Julien Harter
147
 The “Fecundity of Dialogue” and
the Philosophy of “Incompletion”
Maria Heim
181

Philosophy as a Way to Die:

Meditation, Memory, and Rebirth in Greece and Tibet
Davey K. Tomlinson
217

Learning, Reasoning, Cultivating:

The Practice of Wisdom and the Treasury of Abhidharma
David V. Fiordalis
245

Bibliography
291

Contributors
327

Selected Titles from Dharma Publishing

331
 Introduction

David V. Fiordalis

T his volume appears at a time when Buddhist philosophy is being

reassessed along with philosophy itself. As an academic discipline
in the English-speaking world, philosophy has a “pluralism” problem,
or so a number of authors have claimed in recent years, and greater
engagement with Buddhist philosophy (and other non-western
philosophical traditions) has been proposed as a partial solution to
this problem.1

1 
For instance, David Chalmers, a leading contemporary philosopher of mind,
had this to say in June, 2012, while attending an NEH Summer Seminar entitled
“Investigating Consciousness: Buddhist and Contemporary Philosophical Per-
spectives” led by Christian Coseru, Jay Garfield, and Evan Thompson: “Having
spent the last week thinking about Buddhist philosophy of mind—an enormous-
ly rich tradition that anticipates numerous key ideas in contemporary analytic
philosophy of mind—it’s a little stunning that hardly any of the leading research
departments of philosophy in the anglophone world employ anyone who
specializes in Buddhist philosophy, or indeed in any area of non-western philo-
sophy. How hard would it be to change the conventions so that every department
would be expected to have at least one specialist in non-western philosophy?”
See the blog post by Eric Schliesser, “Can we make philosophy a little less pro-
vincial?” New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science. June 2, 2012. <http://www.
newappsblog.com/2012/06/can-we-make-philosophy-a-little-less-provincial.
html#comments> (Accessed June 30, 2017). See also Jay Garfield and William
Edelglass, “Introduction,” in Jay Garfield and William Edelglass, eds., Oxford Hand-
book of World Philosophy (London: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3-6; Justin E.
H. Smith, “Philosophy’s Western Bias,” New York Times: The Stone, June 3, 2012
<https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/philosophys-western-
bias/> (Accessed June 30, 2017); Jay L. Garfield and Brian W. Van Norden,
“If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is,” New York Times:

1
2 Buddhist Spiritual Practices

Of course, some question whether pluralism really is a problem

for philosophy, or if it is, whether greater engagement with Buddhist
philosophy is the solution.2 Not everyone even agrees on how much
it makes sense to speak of something called Buddhist philosophy.3
Still, assuming we decide to engage the Buddhist intellectual tradition
(call it “philosophy” or something else)—either as a solution to some
modern problem or for other reasons—how we engage it and what
points we choose to engage become important questions to consider.
This volume addresses such questions, and does so by employing a
different set of metaphors and methods from those being promoted
by many contemporary advocates for a philosophical approach to the
study of Buddhism.
Many apologists for the philosophical study of Buddhist
philosophy, set within the framework of “cross-cultural philosophy,”
“fusion philosophy,” or the “rational reconstruction” of Buddhist
philosophy, have focused largely on treating topics and questions
already recognizable to modern analytically-trained philosophers.4
Such an approach has the advantage of being able to demonstrate the
The Stone. May 11, 2016 <https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/11/opinion/if-
philosophy-wont-diversify-lets-call-it-what-it-really-is.html> (Accessed June 30,
2017); Jonardon Ganeri, “Why Philosophy Needs Sanskrit, Now More than Ever.”
Lecture, Yale University, April 6, 2017. <https://www.academia.edu/32354219/
Why_Philosophy_Needs_Sanskrit_Now_More_than_Ever> (Accessed June
30, 2017).
2 
In this regard, it is instructive to read the comments section of the online
articles listed above, and the various comments and links found here: “Philo-
sophical Diversity in U.S. Philosophy Departments (Updated).” Daily Nous.
May 11, 2016. <http://dailynous.com/2016/05/11/philosophical-diversity
-in-u-s-philosophy-departments/> (Accessed June 30, 2017).
3 
Matthew Kapstein, Reason’s Traces (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2001),
comments that “Buddhist philosophy” remains a “strangely hybrid expression”
to which we’ve simply “grown accustomed by repeated usage” (4). More could be
said, but Chalmers’ comment in the note above also points to the larger situation
wherein the notion of Buddhist philosophy has not yet been fully domesticated,
if that is the right term.
4 
The reasons for doing so are potentially many, but would certainly include
making the case for greater inclusion of specialists in Buddhist (and other
non-western) intellectual traditions in philosophy departments throughout the
English-speaking world, besides simply describing and justifying a certain type
of scholarly interest or practice.
 Introduction  3

clear presence of systematic reasoning and argumentation outside

the western tradition—something that has been challenged over the
years.5 In this way, scholars can place Buddhist philosophers into con-
versation with modern western philosophers on questions already
deemed philosophical. This is an important step in the recognition
of a global philosophy, but one wonders whether it goes far enough
in advancing the case for a truly pluralistic one. For it presupposes
a particular conception of philosophy that is prevalent in contempo-
rary departments of philosophy in the English-speaking world: the
so-called “problems and arguments” approach to doing philosophy.6
Notice how Mark Siderits, a leading voice for the philosophical
approach to Buddhism, defines philosophy in his textbook, Buddhism
as Philosophy: An Introduction, which is representative of a growing
body of texts seeking to introduce students to Buddhist philosophy:
“Philosophy, then, is the systematic investigation of questions in
ethics, metaphysics and epistemology (as well as several related
fields). It involves using analysis and argumentation in systematic
and reflective ways.”7 Such problems and methods of argument then
form the basis for philosophy wherever and whenever it is found.
Thus, while speaking about the ancient Greek tradition, which he calls
the source of modern western philosophy, and comparing it to the
classical Indian tradition, Siderits says: “They tackle the same basic
questions in ethics, metaphysics and epistemology. And they employ
the same basic techniques of analysis and argumentation. (This is

5 
For scholars of Buddhism, the best-known example is probably the remark-
able statement made by Antony Flew, An Introduction to Western Philosophy (In-
dianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), 34, cited partially in Kapstein, Reason’s Traces,
5, that “Eastern philosophy” is not concerned with argument.
6 
While scholars of Buddhism most likely associate this phrase with Kapstein’s
critique of it in Reason’s Traces, one may find it, for instance, in the title of the
following introductory textbook: James W. Cornman, Keith Lehrer and George S.
Pappas, Philosophical Problems and Arguments (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1992).
My sense from colleagues in philosophy is that introductory philosophy classes
still typically take a topics-based approach, whether or not they focus on readings
from the canon.
7 
Mark Siderits, Buddhism as Philosophy: An Introduction (Indianapolis, IN:
Hackett, 2007), 5.
4 Buddhist Spiritual Practices

why it is appropriate to call them both ‘philosophy’.)”8 Siderits goes

on to say, “To study Buddhism as philosophy means studying those
Buddhist texts that present philosophical theories and arguments.”9
In making this statement, he seems largely to predetermine what it
means for a theory or argument to be philosophical.
At the same time, Siderits wants to define philosophy more
broadly in terms of the pursuit of truth, an ideal he perceives to motivate
its rational methods of analysis and which he wants to extend to the
representatives of the Buddhist tradition: “Buddhist philosophers
thought that their most important claims should be subjected to
rational scrutiny. This is what made them philosophers.” So, for Siderits,
the philosophical approach is defined not only by its questions and
methods, but the extent to which one is willing to subject core beliefs
to critical analysis. “For,” he says, “in studying philosophy we are
interested in finding out what the truth is.”10 In this respect, Siderits
seems to be expressing a norm in philosophy’s self-presentation. In his
defense of the philosophical approach to Indian and Buddhist philo-
sophical texts, John Taber, another major voice in the field, similarly
maintains that a philosophical approach to “historical texts,” or to the
“systems of ideas” or “specific theories” ostensibly found in them, is one
in which the “primary interest in those ideas and theories is whether
they are true.”11

8 
Siderits, Buddhism as Philosophy, 5; parentheses in the original.
9 
Siderits, Buddhism as Philosophy, 11. See also John Taber, “On Engaging
Philosophically with Indian Philosophical Texts,” Études Asiatiques / Asiatische
Studien 67.1 (2013): 125–163. He, too, claims that philosophy is about “the
great questions of reality and human existence” (159), and argues in favor of a
philosophical approach to the study of Indian and Buddhist philosophical texts
on several grounds: such texts add value to philosophy; taking a philosophical
approach is essential to the project of understanding them as works of philosophy
(159, italics in original); it may contribute to a better understanding of their
arguments (135); to some extent, it is necessary to understanding them at all
(129, and note 3, quoting Jay Garfield; 137 and following).
10 
Siderits, Buddhism as Philosophy, 10.
11 
Taber, “Engaging Philosophically,” 134. He even goes so far as to say that a
“truly first-rate philosophical discussion” can compensate for “a more ‘relaxed’
style of [historical, philological] scholarship.”
 Introduction  5

It is striking that a concern for truth would be presented as the

specific basis for a particular academic discipline. Certainly, whether
a particular historical figure really makes (or intends to make) a
particular claim, or why he or she does so, or how the claim fits into
a broader historical context, is a different question from whether or
not the claim is true, but aren’t other disciplines equally concerned
with truth? And what kind(s) of truth (if we can truly speak of differ-
ent kinds)? As we will see, considering the practical contexts in which
truth-claims are made raises another question: how might the pic-
ture change when one is asserting the practical or transformational
efficacy of a particular claim to truth?12
Taber’s thought-provoking discussion shines a light upon
certain tensions that exist between analytic philosophy and the
history of philosophy, especially within philosophy departments,
and he also contrasts philosophy with religious studies, but the
case for the philosophical study of texts once (or still) not con-
sidered to be philosophy can at times feel like an attempt to take
back territory once ceded to other disciplines, echoing the ancient
competition between philosophy (“the love of wisdom”) and phi-
lology (the so-called “love of words”).13 Taber claims that the mod-
ern western engagement with Indian and Buddhist philosophical
texts has been dominated thus far, especially in continental Europe,
by an historical or philological approach; whereas contemp-
orary scholars in the English-speaking West—he qualifies this by
saying “at least [those] outside the field of Religious Studies”—
12 
In a modern western philosophical context, this question (or something like
it) was formulated by the American pragmatists. See William James, Pragmatism
(New York and London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1907), 197-238 (the sixth
lecture), and The Meaning of Truth (New York and London: Longmans, Green
and Co., 1909). James’ discussion in the former of the so-called pragmatic theory
of truth, the original formulation of which he attributes to F. C. S. Schiller and
John Dewey, elicited significant criticism from other philosophers to which James
responded in the latter work.
13 
See James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). Turner’s fascinating intellec-
tual history show how the modern academic disciplines of history and religious
studies, as well as literature and anthropology, among others, emerged from
classical philology, whereas western philosophy represents a distinct line of
development.
6 Buddhist Spiritual Practices

have been more apt to take a philosophical approach toward such

texts.14
This may be true, but the fact remains that for various ideo-
logical, institutional, and logistical reasons, many more scholars of
Buddhist intellectual traditions in the English-speaking world have
been and are still being trained in religious studies or area studies
rather than philosophy (as Chalmers’ comment above suggests).
Moreover, in many graduate programs in religious studies, the study
of intellectual traditions (that is, doctrinal studies, “philosophy,” scho-
lasticism, and other “ideal” representations) is not really in vogue,
the field having shifted in recent decades more toward ethnographic
and historical studies of local traditions, ritual practices, and other
neglected areas. In fact, some say philology is facing a crisis of rel-
evance in the English-speaking world.15 Perhaps those interested in
philosophy and philology are stronger together than they are apart,
and both could benefit from paying closer attention to considerations
of practice, broadly defined.16
Ultimately Taber also argues for an approach that combines
philosophy with philology. “Invariably,” he says, “I find, as I continue
to work more closely with the texts, that it turns out to be something
quite different from what I initially thought and—this is key—
something better . . . When one has this experience over and over
again, one becomes much more concerned with the actual words of
the author one is studying and their precise meaning in the corpus of
his writings and texts of the same period.”17 This seems to be a common
experience shared among many of us who work with the same kind
of texts, including the contributors to the present volume, and I do

14 
Taber, “Engaging Philosophically,” 128.
15 
Sheldon Pollock, “Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard
World,” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 931-961.
16 
I was recently made aware of two books that may be relevant to this discus-
sion: Thomas A. Lewis, Why Philosophy Matters for the Study of Religion—and
Vice Versa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), and Kevin Schilbrack,
Philosophy and the Study of Religions: A Manifesto (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell,
2014). The former includes a reference to the work of Pierre Hadot (90); both
envisage a future cross-cultural philosophy of religion focused on practice.
17 
Taber, “Engaging Philosophically,” 137, italics in the original.
 Introduction  7

not think it comes at the expense of a concern for truth. (To be fair, I
do not think Taber believes it does, either.) Rather, by taking the time
to understand precisely what texts are saying and to appreciate their
connection to the broader dynamics, coherencies, and tensions within
and among various cultures and traditions within history, we allow
for the possibility that the claims expressed in the texts we study are
true. And this, in turn, can prompt us to consider the question of their
transformational efficacy. Finally, such an approach may better enable
us to evaluate our own claims to truth, especially where they may dif-
fer from those in the texts we study, rather than simply resting upon
some type of relativism, whether epistemic, cultural, or disciplinary.
Academic disciplines mark their territory by claiming
particular objects of study and disclaiming others. The case for the
philosophical approach to Buddhist texts has thus often involved the
problematic and anachronistic separation of Buddhist philosophy
from Buddhism as a religion. Siderits implies as much when he names
the aspects of Buddhism that he does not examine: “ . . . we will have
very little to say about Buddhist institutions, their organization and
history. We will say very little about the Buddhist practice of medita-
tion, and nothing at all about such lay Buddhist devotional practices
as stūpa worship.”18 And in a work explicitly written for an audience
of modern western philosophers, Jay Garfield (who has probably done
more than anyone to make the case for the relevance of Buddhism
to philosophy) says much the same thing more explicitly: “There is
much of importance in the Buddhist world that I will ignore, including
much of its attention to soteriological, cosmological, devotional and
practice concerns. For example, I do not discuss Buddhist theories of
rebirth, of karma, or approaches to meditation. That is not because I
take these to be unimportant, or even peripheral, to understanding
Buddhist thought. It is rather because I do not see them as principal

18 
Siderits, Buddhism as Philosophy, 11. For those interested in such matters,
Siderits recommends a work first published nearly fifty years ago. While there
is value in recommending classic works of scholarship like A. K. Warder’s Indian
Buddhism, one gets impression that Siderits feels such topics are less relevant
to philosophy than the problems and arguments that are the main focus of his
work. We will see, however, that these topics come to the fore when we shift the
framework of analysis in the way we do in this volume.
8 Buddhist Spiritual Practices

sites of engagement with western philosophy, which is the primary

intent of this volume.”19
While noting the potential of such an approach to convince
professional philosophers that Buddhism does, indeed, contain voices
relevant to their own concerns, Karin Meyers has queried whether this
is how we ought to introduce Buddhist philosophy to our students.20
The same question became urgent for me several years ago when I
began to teach an introductory level course called “Philosophy East
and West.” The question for me wasn’t simply how to teach Buddhist
philosophy, but how to introduce students to philosophy from a global
perspective. Recognizing that most of my students have little or no
background either in philosophy or Buddhism (or its academic study),
and that my course might well be their only academic exposure to
such material, how to remain sensitive to the historical dynamics
of power that have shaped how philosophy has been conceived and
presented, for instance, in terms of the East/West paradigm, without
becoming overburdened by the problem of power? How not to per-
petuate a set of stereotypes among students with varying interests,
aims, backgrounds, and commitments? And how to give students an
appreciation for what philosophy is and was, while giving everyone
the freedom to envision for themselves what it could or ought to be?
The French philosopher, philologist, and intellectual historian
of ancient philosophy, Pierre Hadot, whose body of work informs
the various essays collected in this volume, offers some ways to

19 
Jay Garfield, Engaging Buddhism: Why it Matters to Philosophy (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2014), 4.
20 
Meyers raises this issue in an essay entitled, “The Damned Topics of Bud-
dhist Philosophy, Their Contemplative Context, and the Future of our Practice,”
which she presented on a panel devoted to the contemplative context of Buddhist
philosophy, co-sponsored by the Buddhist Philosophy Group and the Buddhist
Critical-Constructive Reflection Group, at the American Academy of Religion’s
Annual Meeting in November, 2016. More specifically, Meyers highlights the
problem of focusing on questions already deemed philosophical while ignoring
or dismissing topics that challenge or disagree with the modern worldview
(primarily “scientism”) that underpins much of contemporary philosophy. She
argues instead for an approach that focuses attention precisely on those points
of dissonance, particularly those arising from considerations of contemplative
practice.
 Introduction  9

address these questions.21 It remains vital to recognize the presence

of reasoned argumentation outside the western tradition, while
giving due emphasis to the prevailing conception of philosophy
among contemporary philosophers, but Hadot provides an alter-
native framework for understanding philosophy as a practice and a
discipline, and in doing so, he gives us a different model for comparing
exemplars of philosophical discourse from the western tradition with
those from Buddhist and other non-western intellectual traditions. At
the same time, his defense of philological methods of analysis encour-
ages students to learn how to read classical philosophical discourses
as much as possible on their own terms.22 As they consider such
discourses in light of the ostensive “ways of life” from which they
arose and which they instantiate, students can become better able
to think about their own formative practices, including those that
constitute their broader educations. Hadot thus provides a way of
thinking critically about the aims and techniques of higher education,
augmenting the highly career-driven model that often dominates the
general conversation on education in the contemporary United States.
Throughout his work, Hadot emphasizes the concept of
“spiritual exercises” (exercices spirituels). By this he generally means
practices that form or transform the individual into a philosopher. He
sees this concept as key to understanding how philosophical discourse
emerges from, supports, and enacts philosophy as a way of life. Taking
this concept as our starting point, the contributors to this volume use
the hybrid notion of “Buddhist spiritual exercises (or practices)” as a
unifying framework. We thus shift the frame of analysis from a fairly
specific set of “philosophical problems and arguments” to “philo-
sophical discourse” as such.
Conceiving of philosophical discourse in light of “spiritual/
transformative exercises” that constitute “philosophy as a way of life,”
as Hadot invites us to do, brings other key concepts to the fore. In
addition to spiritual exercise or practice, and the overarching terms,
21 
For the reader’s benefit, the cumulative bibliography at the end of the volume
contains a long (though not exhaustive) list of Hadot’s work in French and English
translation.
22 
Compare Brian Gregor, “The Text as Mirror: Kierkegaard and Hadot on
Transformative Reading,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 28.1 (2011): 65-84.
10 Buddhist Spiritual Practices

philosophy and religion, the essays contained herein consider such

terms as institution and school, self and person, Buddhist path, dogma
and rule-based behavior, meditation (in its various types, discursive
and non-discursive), study, reason, reading, genre, and wisdom. Some
of these terms can translate specific Buddhist terminology, while
others are used hermeneutically to understand Buddhist discourses
in a broader comparative context. Still more key terms have no clear
equivalency in English, such as abhidharma (Pāli: abhidhamma) and
śāstra, indigenous terms for specific and more general genres of
Buddhist and Indian theoretical discourse. By leaving some of them
untranslated, we invite readers to engage with the Buddhist intel-
lectual tradition on its own terms. Such an appreciation for terms
and discourses in their own contexts—perhaps an indication of
our disciplinary training and biases—also explains why we have
often included the original language (even for Hadot’s French usage)
in our footnotes.
The recent rise in the philosophical profile of the Buddhist
tradition has also coincided with an incredible upsurge in popular
and scientific interest in various types of meditation practices de-
rived more or less directly from Buddhism. Such practices, broadly
conceived, are being touted for their transformative potential, and
contemporary scientists are pursuing methods of assessing their
ostensive effects upon the person. The question is no longer whether
meditation practices affect a person, but how, how much, which
practices, and for whom. As Buddhist meditation—its history, theory,
and varied styles of practice—is increasingly studied, more voices,
including traditional and contemporary Buddhist ones (as well as
those of the contemporary scholars of Buddhism themselves), are
contributing to the contemporary discussion. The present volume
can also be seen as a contribution in this regard. Even if one decides
ultimately to go beyond Hadot’s terminology, as several of the
contributors suggest, conceptualizing the relationship between
Buddhist intellectual traditions and its practices of self-trans-
formation along lines suggested by Hadot may provide a basis for
further investigations.
In the process, we must clarify for ourselves what we mean
by practice and how it relates to what we sometimes call theory.
 Introduction  11

Take, for instance, a question I have often heard from students and
people outside the discipline: “do you practice Buddhism, or do you
only study it?” The question might seem innocuous, but it suggests the
uncertain status the academic study of religion continues to hold in
the United States. By contrast, it would seem odd to ask a philosopher
or historian, for instance, whether she practices philosophy or history,
or simply studies it, or to ask a biologist: “do you practice biology, or
do you only study it?” It is simply assumed that to study is to practice.
Whatever the internal tensions within such disciplines—such as we’ve
begun to see for philosophy (philosophers are apparently not histori-
ans and vice versa)—the separation between practice and study as
it relates to an academic approach to religion remains fraught with
broader politics of identity and truth.23 Debates regarding the nature
and purpose of our scholarship reflect broader questions about our
claim to authority within the academy and society.
Perhaps the problem with the question framed in this way
is that it juxtaposes practice and study in ways that are potentially
misleading. Not only is practice reduced to some (often vague) notion
of meditation, but it is also set in opposition to something (equally
vague) we sometimes call theory. In our culture, students, religious
practitioners, and the general public often seem to value practice over
study, as if practice gives one greater insight into truth or authority to
speak for tradition, but we do not always think out the implications of
such a stance. For instance, what to do when practitioners disagree,
as they often do, about nature of their religion? Then there is the
apparent isomorphism implied between practice and identity; that
is, between being Buddhist and engaging in some sort of ostensibly
Buddhist practice. This ambiguity often leads to questions about
lineage: who is one’s teacher or to which practice community does
23 
See José Ignacio Cabezón and Sheila Greeve Davaney, eds., Identity and
the Politics of Scholarship in the Study of Religion (London: Routledge, 2004). I
imagine this situation may be different at some religiously affiliated institutions,
which in some cases may require faculty and students to sign specific statements
of faith; however, this only shifts the inquiry to the issue of religiously affiliated
institutions’ statuses within the academy and society at large. Our society is
still struggling with how to speak openly about religious commitments, and
such openness or frank honesty has to be one of the preconditions for critical
reflection.
12 Buddhist Spiritual Practices

one belong. Similar questions arise when we try to speak of theory

apart from practice, or replace practice with belief in the isomorphic
relation with religious identity. This volume also addresses these
kinds of problems, for Hadot insists that one must consider theory
and practice in light of each other, and the Buddhist discourses and
practices we analyze in this volume likewise demand that we consider
their relationship.
Among the claims made in its pages is that one must pay
close attention to the institutional frameworks that condition specific
ways of life and the intellectual discourses that arise from them. In
this respect, one may note that the University of Chicago and certain
members of its faculty have left a strong imprint upon the volume. I
was first introduced to Pierre Hadot’s writings by Matthew Kapstein
during my time as a graduate student at the Divinity School, and
Pierre-Julien Harter and Davey Tomlinson have also received their
graduate training there. The University of Chicago can also claim
among its distinguished faculty Arnold Davidson, who was highly
influential in the dissemination of Hadot’s ideas, editing and writing
an introduction for the 1995 publication, Philosophy as a Way of Life,24
which largely introduced Hadot to an English-speaking audience.25
Tomlinson specifically notes Davidson’s influence on him, but we all
owe him an intellectual debt. Finally, Steven Collins, trained at Oxford
and an eminent contemporary scholar of Buddhism in his own right,
has taught at Chicago for many years.
While some of the contributors to this volume share a con-
nection to Chicago, it is perhaps to the broader academic study of
Buddhism that we all bear the greater allegiance. Some of us have
also previously demonstrated an interest in thinking about Buddhism
using concepts and techniques informed by reading Hadot. Sara
24 
Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to
Foucault. Edited with an introduction by Arnold I. Davidson. Michael Chase, trans.
(Oxford, UK, and Malden, MA, USA: Blackwell, 1995).
25 
Davidson actually initiated the project of introducing Hadot to an English
-speaking audience a few years earlier with the publication of a short essay and
a translation: Arnold I. Davidson, “Spiritual Exercises and Ancient Philosophy:
An Introduction to Pierre Hadot,” Critical Inquiry 16.3 (1990): 475-482; Pierre
Hadot, “Forms of Life and Forms of Discourse in Ancient Philosophy.” Arnold I.
Davidson and Paula Wissing, trans., Critical Inquiry 16.3 (1990): 483-505.
 Introduction  13

McClintock first incorporated his work into her 2002 dissertation

at Harvard, and again in the 2010 book based on her dissertation,
Omniscience and the Rhetoric of Reason.26 Maria Heim, who also
received her graduate training at Harvard, draws upon Hadot (and
Foucault) in her 2014 publication, The Forerunner of All Things.27
Trained at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, James Apple first
signaled his interest in Hadot with a 2010 article that prefigures a
number of the ideas he develops in his essay in this volume.28 It may
be that Hadot’s work speaks to the contributors in part because our
disciplinary trainings, while undertaken at various institutions and
under the tutelage of various teachers, have instilled in us a similar
set of intellectual concerns and methods.
Within the academic study of Buddhism, Georges Dreyfus is the
first scholar of Buddhism I know to have mentioned Hadot.29 Kapstein
(in Reason’s Traces, cited above) and McClintock (in her dissertation)
contributed the initial, groundbreaking discussions. These treatments
first elicited a thoughtful critique from Vincent Eltschinger,30 whose

26 
Sara L. McClintock, Omniscience and the Rhetoric of Reason: Śāntarakṣita
and Kamalaśīla on Rationality, Argumentation, and Religious Authority (Boston:
Wisdom Publications, 2010).
27 
Maria Heim, The Forerunner of All Things: Buddhaghosa on Mind, Intention,
and Agency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
28 
James B. Apple, “Can Buddhist Thought be Construed as a Philosophia, or a
Way of Life? Relating Pierre Hadot to Buddhist Discourses on Self-cultivation,”
Bulletin of the Institute of Oriental Philosophy 26 (2010): 191-204/96-83. I recall
James mentioning to me in passing that he first discovered Hadot’s work in the
personal library of his grandfather, a theologian.
29 
Georges Dreyfus, “Meditation as Ethical Activity,” Journal of Buddhist Ethics
2 (1995): 28-54, especially page 30, where Dreyfus mentions the work of Hadot
and his use of “spiritual exercises” to describe types of meditation practiced
within the Greek philosophical schools. Dreyfus also calls for the elimination
of boundaries between academic disciplines so that we can better understand
meditation practices on a continuum with other practices of daily life; he also
cites Foucault’s notion of “technologies of the self” (31), mentioning it in connec-
tion with the meditation practices described in the Tibetan “path literature” (lam
rim), beginning with Atiśa.
30 
Vincent Eltschinger, “Pierre Hadot et les ‘exercices spirituels’: quel modèle
pour la philosophie bouddhique tardive?” Études Asiatique / Asiatische Studien
62.2 (2008): 485–544.
14 Buddhist Spiritual Practices

essay subsequently generated responses from both Kapstein and

McClintock in later publications.31 This formative discussion is
referenced or described several times in the chapters that follow,
for instance, by Collins, McClintock, Apple, Harter, and myself. The
whole volume can thus be seen as continuing a scholarly dialogue on
the merits and limitations of a project that draws upon one or another
aspect of Hadot’s work in thinking about Buddhism. Indeed, perhaps
one could speak here, as Heim and Collins do in their essays, of
Hadot’s conception of philosophy as an open-ended dialogue.32 Here
we continue that dialogue, not only with each other, ourselves, and our
present and future readers, but also with the past authors, Buddhist
and otherwise, whose work we engage in conversation. In this respect,
I hope our work can also be said to demonstrate what Meyers calls, in
her essay cited above, “a participatory approach” that involves, among
other things, an “openness to discovery and personal transformation,”
“an intellectual humility comfortable with uncertainty,” and “a kind
of self-reflexivity—questioning our assumptions, examining our own
historical and cultural situatedness, and becoming conscience of our
living relation with the traditions, persons or ideas we study.”33

The Essays
Steven Collins opens the volume with a wide-ranging essay on Hadot
and Michel Foucault, whose later work employs concepts drawn
from Hadot, particularly “spiritual exercises” which Foucault dubs
“technologies of self.” Collins considers the usefulness of both
31 
Matthew T. Kapstein, “‘Spiritual Exercise’ and Buddhist Epistemologists in
India and Tibet,” in Steven M. Emmanuel, ed., A Companion to Buddhist Philosophy
(Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2013), 270–289; “Stoics and Bodhisattvas:
Spiritual Exercise and Faith in Two Philosophical Traditions,” in Michael Chase,
Stephen R. L. Clark, and Michael McGhee, eds., Philosophy as a Way of Life: Ancients
and Moderns—Essays in Honor of Pierre Hadot (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell,
2013), 99-115; McClintock, Omniscience and the Rhetoric of Reason.
32 
Indeed, more scholars are contributing to this ongoing dialogue: most
recently, Christopher W. Gowans, “Buddhist Philosophy as a Way of Life: The
Spiritual Exercises of Tsongkhapa,” in Steven M. Emmanuel, ed., Buddhist Philos-
ophy: A Comparative Approach, 11-28 (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2018), first
published online in June, 2017.
33 
Meyers, “The Damned Topics.”
 Introduction  15

authors in comparative studies involving Buddhist traditions. He also

discusses Hadot’s critique of Foucault, and both scholars’ opinions on
the value of cross-cultural comparative work. He touches on particu-
lar problems of translating French into English, focusing specifically
on the sense of selfhood implied (or not) by the use of self-reflexive
pronouns, but he connects this technical discussion to broader issues
of comparative method, especially as it pertains to practices of self-
formation and their connection to what he calls “regimens of truth.”
Here he introduces the reader to Hadot’s conception of spiritual exer-
cises and briefly compares it with a representative Buddhist example:
Buddhaghosa’s Path of Purification (Visuddhimagga). He next raises
the issue of the institutional settings in which “Buddhist spiritual
practices” ostensibly occurred, briefly comparing what we know of
Buddhist institutions in ancient South Asia with the current state of
our knowledge regarding the schools of ancient Hellenistic philo-
sophy. Throughout his essay, Collins emphasizes the need to pay close
attention to linguistic usage and the importance of placing intellectual
discourses within their historical, institutional, and practical contexts.
Sara McClintock follows Collins with an essay focused on the
slippery and often ambiguous notion of the philosophical school.
Beginning with the recognition that Hadot’s conception of philo-
sophy as a way of life entails the claim that philosophers live within
schools, she usefully distinguishes three main senses of school, the
first pertaining to membership within a specific institution, the sec-
ond signaling a broader sense of belonging to a practice community,
and the third indicating a theoretical hypostatization represented by
what we typically mean by a “school of thought.” In the process, she
draws attention to some of the many complexities of identity forma-
tion involved in being part of a school, whatever the specific sense,
while at the same time continuing to address Eltschinger’s challenge
to connect Buddhist intellectual discourses to the concrete historical
circumstances in which they ostensibly arose. She does so, first, by
clarifying what it could mean to say that philosophical discourse is a
transformative exercise, and then by emphasizing the need to under-
stand such discourse as an activity always undertaken by embodied
individuals within some sort of school, whether it is institutional,
communal, discursive, or some combination of such schools.
16 Buddhist Spiritual Practices

James Apple, whose essay follows McClintock’s, also takes

up the challenge posed by Eltschinger’s critique, which he usefully
characterizes in some detail after summarizing what he sees as the
benefits of an approach that draws on Hadot. The central challenge
is, again, connecting the abstract level of intellectual discourse to the
concrete level of real-world institutions, communities, individuals, and
practices. To answer this challenge, Apple offers a study, translation,
and close reading of a particular Buddhist text, the Special Instruct-
ions on the Middle Way (Madhyamakopadeśa), by Atiśa, the tenth-
eleventh century scholar-monk who played a key role in reestablishing
Buddhism in Tibet during the second transmission. Apple interprets
this short text in light of Hadot’s concept of spiritual exercises and the
indigenous Buddhist concept of the three types of wisdom (on which
see Fiordalis’ essay, described below). Apple sees this text as a set
of instructions intended to prescribe a practitioner’s training regime
from discursive to non-discursive practices within an overarching reg-
imen of self-transformation. He argues that the text reflects an actual
situation of teaching and reception, drawing his evidence from early
Indian and Tibetan commentaries, some of which only recently having
come to light, which trace to early Tibetan practice communities that
followed Atiśa’s teachings.
The next essay, by Pierre-Julien Harter, continues the focus
upon spiritual exercises as a means of interpreting Buddhist intellec-
tual discourses, but Harter begins by raising the important question of
genre. He credits Hadot with enabling modern scholars to recognize the
plurality of historical genres in which philosophy has been expressed,
even in the western tradition, a move Harter sees as opening the door
to an appreciation for a broader array of Buddhist texts as expressions
of philosophy. However, Harter focuses upon a different plurality, the
one contained within the very concept of spiritual exercise itself,
even if we limit ourselves to discursive practices. For instance, he
points to a distinction Hadot made between ‘formative exercises” and
“exercises of application,” and goes on to explore how Buddhist
intellectual discourses could be interpreted in terms of different
types of practice. He discusses various Buddhist discourses and prac-
tices (the meditation on death, meditation on the repulsive), making
a distinction between “preparation-exercises” and “application-
 Introduction  17

exercises,” and distinguishing both types of discursive exercises

from a different type of theoretical discourse, exemplified by the
Ornament of Realizations (Abhisamayālaṃkāra). While he appreci-
ates the usefulness of the term “spiritual exercise” as a means of captur-
ing various aspects of Buddhist practices, intellectual and otherwise,
Harter argues that the Buddhist tradition contains its own term, “path”
(Sanskrit: mārga), which he says better encapsulates the diversity of
discourses and practices that constitute Buddhist philosophy.
Maria Heim’s essay, which follows Harter’s, again raises the
issue of genre. She follows Hadot in connecting genre to orality and
dialogue, aspects of traditional philosophical discourses that also
seemingly reflect traditional authors’ concern with community.
Further exploring the concept of genre as a way to read Buddhist
discourses, she asks how the traditional Buddhist commentators on
the Pāli Canon, Buddhaghosa and Dhammapāla, conceptualized the
relationship between genre and discourse as it applies to the interpre-
tation of two of the three “baskets” (Pāli: piṭaka) into which the Canon
was divided: the Buddha’s “Body of Discourses” (suttanta) and the
unique Buddhist genre of abhidhamma. She explains how the commen-
tators view both as expressions of the Buddha’s omniscience (a term
also found in a key passage from Harter’s essay), but distinguish them
insofar as the Suttanta expresses the Buddha’s omniscience through
highly particularized and contextualized teaching situations while the
Abhidhamma represents a more abstract, systematic, technical, and
decontextualized (though still finite) expression of the Buddha’s omni-
science. Heim explores in detail how Buddhaghosa and Dhammapāla
conceptualize these different genres of Buddhist discourse and the
methods required to access the wisdom they contain. She wants to
shift the framework for analyzing specific Buddhist genres from view-
ing them as containers of content to interpreting them as entailing
specific methods or “knowledge practices,” a felicitous expression that
dovetails both with the “practice of wisdom” found in my essay on
Vasubandhu’s Treasury of Abhidharma (Abhidharmakośa), and with
Collins’ expression, “regimens of truth.” Heim argues that paying
greater attention to the methods by which the Buddhist intellectual
tradition interprets its own texts can increase our ability to appreciate
their “unique philosophical potential.”
18 Buddhist Spiritual Practices

Following Heim, Davey Tomlinson takes the spiritual exercise/

practice of the so-called meditation on death as the starting point for
a comparison between certain practices found in the ancient western
philosophical tradition, and interpreted in the modern period by Hadot
and Foucault, with practices found in the Buddhist tradition, particu-
larly those represented in the tradition of the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Tomlinson identifies not one but several varieties of such meditations
on death in the Buddhist tradition. Some are akin to what Hadot and
Foucault find in the western tradition: practices that seem intended to
reorient one’s attention to the present, altering one’s valuation of life;
in other words, meditating on death as training for life. Other types of
meditation on death found in the Buddhist tradition are quite different,
Tomlinson argues, and interpreting them in their proper context (as
Hadot advocates doing for the ancient western philosophical texts that
are his focus) requires that one take seriously the doctrine of rebirth,
something advocates for a philosophical approach to Buddhism do not
always seem prepared to do. When a tradition accepts rebirth (like the
Buddhists or the Pythagoreans), Tomlinson argues, training for death
can really become training for death, conceived not as the final end, but
as a special opportunity to engage in certain types of transformative
practices. (Here we could fruitfully apply the distinction Harter draws
between preparation-exercises and application-exercises.) Tomlinson
thus shows how thinking about Buddhism with Hadot can illuminate
and challenge assumptions about the world often taken as given by
many contemporary western philosophers, including Hadot himself.
My own essay follows Tomlinson’s, and brings the volume to
a close. Beginning with a reprisal of Hadot’s conception of spiritual
exercises as a way to connect philosophical discourse to philosophy
as a way of life, I note that Hadot opts for a list-based set of criteria
for such exercises rather than a formal definition.34 I extend his discus-
sion by questioning the relationship between philosophical discourse
and philosophical practice in terms of the tension within philosophy
between the search for truth and personal transformation, explicitly
drawing on Collins’ discussion of “regimens of truth” to highlight how
34 
On list-based formulae, compare Luis O. Gómez, “Seeing, Touching. Count-
ing, Accounting. Sāṃkhya as Formal Thought and Intuition,” Études Asiatiques/
Asiatische Studien 53.3 (1999): 693-711.
 Introduction  19

“spiritual exercises” remain focused on truth, and thereby provide a

good analogy for Buddhist “practices of wisdom,” which are the main
focus of my essay. To explore this analogy, I turn to Vasubandhu’s
Treasury of Abhidharma, where one finds a similarly list-based defini-
tion of the three types or practices of wisdom. I situate Vasubandhu’s
discussion primarily within an intertextual context, rather than a
concretely historical one, but I argue that his theoretical discussion
assumes the particular institutional and practical context of the
Buddhist monastic community and its (ideal) way of life.
Institution and genre thus imply one another, and my focus on
the genre of abhidharma is a deliberate one: I contend that it reflects a
unique type of systematic theoretical discourse, loosely comparable to
the philosophical treatise, but also with connections to discursive types
of meditative practice. The threefold typology of practices of wisdom
thus frames practices of reason, like those found in the Treasury of
Abhidharma itself, and places them on a continuum of practices—from
physical or moral habits, to non-rational and rational discursive prac-
tices, to discursive and non-discursive forms of meditative cultivation—
all intended to bring about a particular transformation of the individual
in accordance with a specific vision of the true nature of reality. In this
way, I push further into Buddhist theoretical discourses looking for
alternative means of thinking about the connections (and tensions)
between theory and practice. Echoing McClintock, I suggest that such
an alternative approach could then inform contemporary conversa-
tions about, for instance, the techniques and purposes of education, while
at the same time making a contribution to the historical understanding
of Buddhist philosophy on its own terms.
In summary, the essays contained in this volume invite readers
to engage in a dialogue on what it could mean to speak of “Buddhist
spiritual practices;” that is, Buddhist practices of formation and trans-
formation. We hope they will also encourage reflection on the important
questions of how such practices connect to philosophy, religion, and
other categories we typically use to understand ourselves and our
world, and how they illuminate the Buddhist path and its practitioners,
historical manifestations, and productions.