I’ve followed Christopher Vitale’s Networkologies for a few years now. His work is exciting and dense. This post lays out so much of what I’ve been grappling with so well, I’ve decided to make it my first “reblog.”
There is so much that resonates here between what he has uncovered looking at Buddhism through the eyes of contemporary translators and similar glimpses I’ve found notably in the work of David Bohm and Jiddu Krishnamurti.
Towards the end he even makes connections with Ancient Greco/Roman practices that Andrew Taggart uses in his philosophical practice. Beyond that Christopher illuminates the background of looking at philosophy not as a profession but as a way of life.
On the Difficulty of Understanding the Insights in Classical Buddhist Texts
Classical Buddhist texts having something in common with Deleuze, or Networkological thought? I must admit, I’ve spent a lot of time reading Buddhist texts, and never saw these parallels before. But recently I’ve returned to these texts, by means of contemporary advocates that have argued that the core insights of Buddhism tend to get lost in translation between cultures. And after having read some of these texts, I’ve been shocked to see that once these common misunderstandings are cleared up, there’s actually a great deal of overlap between classical Buddhism, and many aspects of philosophy that I find interesting, powerful, and important.
And this is why I’ve found that to approach Buddhist texts in the present day, one needs mediators, people who translate not only the words from one language to another, but who, like Hadot, who can translate…
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Horizons of Significance 