Links for Wednesday

Mahamudra practice guide, a quote from the Lotus Sutra, and the dangers of value capture

• Donna McLaughlin, a colleague of Vajrayana teacher Ken McLeod has set up a Mahamudra practice site with guided meditations, prayers, and commentary. This looks to be a fantastic resource for Vajrayana practitioners. Related: Ken McLeod is teaching a multiweek course on the Diamond Sutra starting July 2 at the Alembic in Berkeley . If you don’t live in the Bay Area, you can sign up to view the course online. Highly recommend! Also Ken McLeod’s newsletter is great and you should sign up.

• Been thinking about the burning house parable from the Lotus Sutra. It’s sort of the polar opposite of Kant’s view that lying is impermissible under any circumstances. It’s also aligned with a pragmatic / soteriological view of the dharma, that the point of philosophical arguments is to awaken people, not to “win”. Trying to keep that in mind every time I write.

  One day, a fire broke out in the house of a wealthy man who had many children. The wealthy man shouted at his children inside the burning house to flee. But, the children were absorbed in their games and did not heed his warning, though the house was being consumed by flames.
  
  Then, the wealthy man devised a practical way to lure the children from the burning house. Knowing that the children were fond of interesting playthings, he called out to them, "Listen! Outside the gate are the carts that you have always wanted: carts pulled by goats, carts pulled by deer, and carts pulled by oxen. Why don't you come out and play with them?" The wealthy man knew that these things would be irresistible to his children.
  
  The children, eager to play with these new toys rushed out of the house but, instead of the carts that he had promised, the father gave them a cart much better than any he has described - a cart draped with precious stones and pulled by white bullocks. The important thing being that the children were saved from the dangers of the house on fire.

• This is a compelling paper on “Value Capture” by philosopher C. Thi Nguyen. It makes the argument that an excess focus on the quantification and measurement of values at all levels of analysis risks subordinating all of our values to those that lend themselves to measurement¹. We want to deploy perspectives skillfully rather than have perspectives deploy us². When I read advocates of effective altruism talk about their charitable donations as “the best thing they’ve ever done”, it fills me with concern that exactly this kind of value capture is taking place. Personally I have no idea what the “best thing” I’ve ever done is (I have some guesses about the worst, but I’m far from sure there either). For that reason I need to try and do good in every domain of life — whether it’s directly relational (i.e. compassion/kindness) or “large scale”. I’m also going use this as excuse to repost my favorite William James quote, which I included in my first substack post:

"I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, and yet rending the hardest monuments of man's pride, if you give them time. The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost; against all big successes and big results; and in favor of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, under-dogs always, till history comes, after they are long dead, and puts them on the top."

1. This is the danger of CREAM - Consequentialism Rules Everything Around Me. A little Wu Tang humor…

2. In Soviet Russia, ideology has you! For the benefit of all sentient beings, I will try and banish my bad jokes to footnotes.