There is a familiar conceptual slope down which philosophers of a certain temper slide when they come to the analysis of religion, and perhaps they do so on purpose, because we like to bring the discussion round to what we can talk about, and if we are sufficiently dominant we become the ones who define what it is proper to say, though the consequence be the stilling of other voices, who may have spoken with understanding.

In this paper I continue an enterprise begun in earlier work (McGhee, 1988, 1989) in which I attempt to naturalize into a western philosophical context concepts that derive from the practice of Buddhist meditation. In particular I shall try to make use of the notion of samādhi (sometimes translated as ‘concentration’) and vipassanā or insight.

In Shakespeare’s narrative poem, The Rape of Lucrece, written when the theatres were closed, at a time as it might be of quarantine and social distancing, the object of Tarquin’s lust is not a flute-girl from his own household, the injustice of whose obligations would pass unremarked, but the virtuous, patrician wife of an indiscreet fellow soldier boasting in effect that he has something that Tarquin has not: she belongs to another man, she is Collatine’s, his exclusive and beautiful treasure, faithful and therefore unavailable, so the object of envy and a challenge to Tarquin’s vanity. There is perhaps the thought of the enjoyment of taking someone by force, who will chastely protest but will finally yield. There would also be revenge, for an affront to his vanity, yes, but also for a yet to be spoken and only dimly recognised criticism of his way of life that has therefore to be stifled and overwhelmed.

The proper setting for philosophical reflection on ‘mindfulness’ is to recognize its role as one of the five ‘indriya’ that I have suggested yield a trajectory towards wisdom and virtue away from the toils of folly and depravity. It offers an explicitly non-theistic form of the idea of philosophy as a way of life or spiritual practice. The reference to the five indriya also makes available a language of interiority and demeanour that may augment the resources of the ancient conception which philosophers have turned to in response to the crisis of religion whose language of ‘spirituality’ has allegedly been compromised by its connection with a rejected or unavailable world picture. Later in this chapter, I shall discuss some reflections by the British poet Ted Hughes on what he calls the ‘translation’ or ‘translocation’ of language about God and the metaphysical into the language of the self and the psychological.

Talk of the natural sentiments of humanity seems ‘secular’ enough, as does talk of metta and its intentional forms, though of course such intentionality needs to be informed. Moreover, the various ways in which our emotions are suppressed or wrongly informed makes sense of the idea of self-addressed imperatives by a moral agent with recalcitrant impulses they realise make them unreliable, Although the moral sentiments, including metta and dana (or generosity) are thus overlain or stifled, they seem sufficiently ‘natural’ to be primitive in relation to what we call ‘morality’ and do not seem on the face of it to require any kind of religious or, more specifically, theological underpinning. But religious questions have been raised about the viability of a secular approach and we shall look at such questions in what follows since they put pressure both on our conception of ‘religion’ and our conception of ‘secularism’.

The Buddhist aspects of these issues have been relatively submerged, although I have focussed on the crucial question of the relation between ‘knowledge and vision of things as they are’, on the one hand, and the obstacles to that possibility in the form of the ‘three poisons’, on the other. I have referred to the significance of energy and its diversion into various forms of distraction, and discussed the conditions for the possibility of listening and hearing, as well as das Offene and ‘freedom’. Perhaps not unexpectedly, some of these themes emerge in the work of Martin Heidegger, in particular in his writing about what he calls ‘the essence of technology’ (1977), marred though it is by his anti-Semitic diary entries.

One of the attractions of Buddhism for former theists is the salience of its images of liberation – the serenity of the Buddha figure, the representation of self-possession and calm; a compassion founded in some kind of knowledge unavailable to the rest of us. It is a dangerous attraction, because it can prompt a facile imitation, a too-precipitate and self-regarding appropriation of a demeanour that, if it is a genuine possibility, comes only after struggle, and doesn’t pre-empt it. It is precisely not the demeanour of Prince Siddhartha as he notices the mendicant disappearing into the forest – an image of a possible resolution of conflict that had then to be explored and tested, a process, however, that is presented in the literature as successful – and thus presenting us with the existential necessity for the critical scrutiny of a claim to truth, something ‘worthy of questioning’.

In a powerful essay on T. S. Eliot, the poet Ted Hughes (1994) talks of ‘the desacralized landscape’ that followed the Great War.

I want to return to the point about the primacy of demeanour and agency in all this, to the idea of how a person actually regards others, their attitude, how they speak, how they listen, as opposed to how they reflectively express themselves. Gaita himself has expressed discomfort with the ‘preciousness’ of a word like ‘precious’, preferring the less precious ‘sacred’ as applied to human beings. ‘Inalienable preciousness’ is the term we see in Mulhall’s question. As I said earlier, such words belong to a very particular register of intimacy outside of which they evaporate rapidly. But the term ‘sacred’ fares little better; indeed, most articulations are going to start sounding precious through continued use outside the exchanges of intimacy and even they can grow stale.

Daya Krishna’s excursion to that conference on the philosophy of religion is worth pondering; philosophers from the former colonies of his generation were certainly welcome, in Oxford or Cambridge or London, but the expectation was that gifted young thinkers from the East would benefit from exposure to the influence of Analytic philosophy and carry it back to their own countries in an early version of post-colonial soft power. There would have been little expectation that the influence would go in the other direction. We have to imagine a lone Indian at this symposium, at which the cultural co-ordinates within which the questions were framed were remote from those of the Indian traditions.

There is innocent and there is not-so-innocent talk of self, but much ambiguity abounds: ‘finding myself’, for instance, is that innocent or conceptually dubious? Let us start with someone who uses ‘self’ as a verb, Gerard Manley Hopkins.

It should be clear by now, particularly to Buddhist readers, that these ‘disregarded moments’ in the Western tradition reflect the experience of samatha meditation as a practice which is intended to calm the passions and make way for the possibility of ‘insight’. It is the experience of a silencing of the passions which makes way for other possibilities, a silencing which comes about, for instance, in aesthetic contexts. But these phrases, ‘the possibility of insight’ and ‘other possibilities’, stand urgently in need of content, though our direction of travel has been towards an increase in ethical awareness. Taking up the practice of samatha meditation requires some kind of motivation, and an obvious moral reason for wishing to bring about an abatement of the passions is that they disturb and undermine not only moral agency but the attitudes upon which such agency depends.

In his Critique of Judgment, Kant talks of exposure to ‘the sublime in nature’, where the very things mentioned by Spinoza as dominating and distracting consciousness, suddenly appear of small account. ‘Nature’, he says.