Spiritual - Exercis & BUDDH - Path Con y Contra HADOT 37p Pierre HARTER

Buddhist Spiritual Practices
Thinking with Pierre Hadot on

Buddhism, Philosophy, and the Path
Edited by David V. Fiordalis
Mangalam Press
Berkeley, CA
Mangalam Press
2018 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA USA
www.mangalampress.org
Copyright © 2018 by Mangalam Press. All rights reserved.
No part of this work may be copied, reproduced, published, distributed, or stored

electronically, photographically, or optically in any form without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
ISBN: 978-0-89800-117-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018930282
Mangalam Press is an imprint of Dharma Publishing.
The cover image depicts a contemporary example of Tibetan Buddhist instructional

art: the nine stages on the path of “calming” (śamatha) meditation. Courtesy of Exotic
India, www.exoticindia.com. Used with permission.
♾ Printed on acid-free paper. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO

Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
Printed in the USA by Dharma Press, Cazadero, CA 95421
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
Spiritual Exercises and the Buddhist Path:
An Exercise in Thinking with and against Hadot
Pierre-Julien Harter
O ne of the greatest contributions Pierre Hadot made to the study

of ancient philosophy is the reevaluation of certain writings that
were traditionally excluded from philosophy to show that they had full
philosophical significance. According to him, these texts should not be
disparaged on the pretext that they do not fit a specific conception of
philosophy. On the contrary, they should be taken for what they are,
not as texts missing standards that are external to them, standards
that we impose on them. The reevaluation of these texts was only
possible because Hadot accomplished two reinterpretations. First, he
reinterpreted the nature of philosophy, which, he reminded twentieth
century philosophers, was not primarily an intellectual or literary
effort for ancient philosophers, but an activity external to philosophical
writings, a “way of life” that embodied what the philosopher is, before
whatever he might put in writing. This reinterpretation has functioned
as a “wake-up call” for many philosophers and philosophers-to-be.
His second approach, which will be emphasized here, was a re-
evaluation of the literary genres that convey philosophy. Hadot made
it possible to reread some texts to appreciate their proper and internal
philosophical value, rather than trying desperately to measure them
against habits and rules that had become standard over time and inev-
itably end up excluding these same texts from the philosophical realm.
Philosophy has expressed itself in writing through multiple
genres in the West throughout its history. Apparently, philosophy was
first conveyed through poems, such as in the poems of Parmenides
and later Lucretius. Plato chose the dialogue to stage his philosophical
147
148 Buddhist Spiritual Practices
reflections, a form that was taken up by Aristotle himself (though

we have lost all of Aristotle’s dialogues) and by much later authors
such as Leibniz, Berkeley, and Hume. Philosophy has been expressed
through many other forms: the quasi-monologue of the Apology,
the notes from Aristotle’s classes, lessons and “encouragement
summaries” with Epictetus, sentences and aphorisms with Epicurus
and Nietzsche, meditations with Descartes, and many others. But
of course, the one that has ended up dominating the philosophical
scene is the treatise, from Chrysippus to Kant and Rawls (through
the detour of the scholastic medieval world), and its short offspring,
the journal article, so fondly cherished by analytic philosophers.
Overall this last form has triumphed; it seems the clearest, most
effective way to express ideas and arguments compared to the ambi-
guity of poetry, the polysemy of the dialogue, or the obscurity of the
aphorism. It would be hard to imagine a contemporary philosopher
writing in verses or aphorisms. There is a great chance he would
either be overlooked or not considered a serious thinker. Genres
matter to the content of philosophy.
It is not my intention to discuss the relative benefits of
various philosophical genres. Nevertheless, it remains true that the
domination of the treatise in Western philosophy has brought on
a situation where only texts written in this specific genre are now
considered properly philosophical. Whatever is not written as a
treatise is generally considered unphilosophical, or at least not
purely philosophical. Hadot has helped us to read texts in a new
light by grasping their genuine philosophical significance.
Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations (to use the title given by the tradition),
for example, was considered since the 19th century as a watered-
down version of Stoicism, a late, bastardized, moralizing form
of Stoicism that had forgotten the glorious times where Stoic
philosophers were using Stoic physics and logic, when Chrysippus
was writing treatises about nature and technical aspects of logic
and physics, such as the nature of incorporeals. Marcus Aurelius
was, at best, just a coach or a motivational speaker. Sure, he might
have been a good one, but not a very technical one, that is, not a very
philosophical one. These two went together.
Spiritual Exercises and the Buddhist Path 149
Hadot revolutionized our understanding of Marcus Aurelius.

He was able to show, mainly in his Inner Citadel,1 that the Meditations
were actually built around and framed by all aspects of Stoic philosophy,
that it was not even possible to read them without the background of
Stoic physics and logic. Indeed, the rather short meditations Marcus
Aurelius wrote did not develop arguments as Epictetus or Chrysippus
did; indeed, they seemed not as universal as an abstract treatise is
since they were addressed “to oneself” (eis heauton, as the sub-title
goes), in the manner of a diary rather than a philosophical reflection.
Hadot’s genius consisted in showing that they were still the work
of a philosopher practicing philosophy through and in his writings,
using the resources of Stoic philosophy, whether it was physics, logic,
or morality, the three parts of philosophy according to Stoicism.
Hadot was able to make us look at this text in a fresh way and to
open up our ways of looking at texts to accept more texts into the
somewhat protected enclosure of what is considered philosophy.
This also meant that the relationship between the text and philo-
sophy had to be reevaluated: philosophy was not to be assigned
entirely to the talent of writing good arguments; it had an existence
outside of texts: in the lives of the men (and women, for the very few
examples that are available to us) who wrote those texts as exercises
to train into the philosophical life.
This is perhaps where Hadot can be so useful for scholars of
Buddhism. As Matthew Kapstein has pointed out, along with many
others, we do not need to spend so much effort to prove that there
are texts with abstract argumentation and technical terminology
that could be subsumed under the denomination of philosophy.
For decades now, Western scholarship has worked tirelessly to
highlight Buddhist developments in ontology and metaphysics
(mainly Madhyamaka, and to a lesser extent Yogācāra), epistemol-
ogy (pramāṇa), and, to some extent, ethics. But there are scores of
texts that Buddhist scholars who have considered themselves as
working in “Buddhist philosophy” have left aside, such as texts on
the Buddhist path. These texts have not been considered technical
1
Hadot, La Citadelle Intérieure: Introduction aux Pensées de Marc-Aurèle (Paris:
Fayard, 1997); The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Michael
Chase, trans. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).
enough or argumentative enough to be worthy of receiving the phi-

losopher’s attention.2 They have been left to the care of the religious
specialist, the one who, supposedly, does not need to care as much
about logical consistency and argumentative strength. But it might
be time to move past these prejudices and look at these texts with
new eyes to appreciate the specific philosophical significance we can
find in them. Learning from Hadot means that we need to avoid the
danger of putting the square peg of a text in the round hole of a genre
that it does not fit.
One exegetical tool that Hadot has used to reinterpret ancient
texts is the famous concept of spiritual exercise. By considering texts
not only as providers of arguments supporting a position, but as
illustrations of a certain kind of practice, that is, of a certain kind of
philosophical life, or even as constituting themselves philosophical
training, Hadot shed a new light on these texts. These texts, he argued,
were not just intended to achieve the perfect logical argumentation.
They were also supposed to have pragmatic effects, provoking in
2
It is the conception of philosophy, and especially its distinction with “reli-
gion,” that underlies the issue here. One of the most blatant expressions of
this dichotomy can be seen in Vincent Eltschinger’s article “Pierre Hadot et les
‘exercices spirituels’: quel modèle pour la philosophie bouddhique tardive?”
Asiatische Studien: Zeitschrift der Schweizerischen Asiengeselleschaft, 62 (2008),
485-544, where Eltschinger makes the problematic distinction between
Buddhist philosophy and what he calls “Buddhism,” which is mainly institu-
tional Buddhism. (See especially 529-530.) This distinction seems completely
anachronistic and etic, and separates what Buddhist authors themselves
did not see as radically different. For example, he ascribes the prescription
of meditative practices to “Buddhism,” and not to “Buddhist philo-
sophy,” when the relationship between, for example, the doctrine of emptiness
(which, presumably, Buddhist scholars take to be philosophical) and certain
meditative practices is clearly attested for “Buddhist philosophers” such as Ārya-
deva and Kamalaśīla. In fact, Eltschinger’s distinction would amount to reducing
all Buddhist philosophy to a few texts and questions, such as epistemology and
Madhyamaka. If we were to use this same approach for Greek and Roman philo-
sophy, we would certainly have to “purify” the current philosophical curriculum
from texts written by many Stoics, but also Epicurus, Plato (many parts of the
Phaedo have long been recognized as non-dialectical), and even some parts of the
Ethics of Spinoza (such as the scolium of proposition 10 of the fifth part) where
Spinoza prescribes some specific practices based on his Ethics. This suggests that
the question is at the heart of the definition of philosophy, and in turn justifies a
real discussion of the matter for Buddhist scholars.
the reader specific feelings or dispositions. Pragmatic texts are, for

example, protreptics, namely texts that encourage their readers to live
in a way that is enthused with philosophy, or that corresponds to a
philosophical position.3 Texts can also have more specific pragmatic
effects by supplying instructions for working on one’s own character
to embody better the ideal philosopher. Marcus Aurelius often uses his
Meditations to imagine himself in difficult situations so as to develop
a certain ethos to react to them, an ethos consistent with his Stoic
principles, for example with an ungrateful or an envious person (no
doubt a common circumstance at the imperial court);4 or he imagines
himself confronted with a catastrophe, like the loss of his child.5 And
all these texts, Hadot claimed, are no less philosophical than a dialogue
of Plato. Philosophy declines itself in different forms, and the spiritual
exercise is one of them.
As duly noted by others, scholars of Buddhism certainly
benefit from the reading of the works of Hadot. He has reminded
academic professionals, and more generally educated readers, that
philosophy is not a discipline reserved to professors of philosophy,
nor limited to the pages of books, no more than history is made by
historians. It is, as English translators have famously put it, a way
of life, which secondarily can find embodiment in writing. Buddhist
scholars thus find in Hadot an ally to interpret the Buddhist tradition
as a kind of philosophical tradition, and the concept of spiritual
exercise certainly works as an effective tool to read and interpret
many Buddhist texts.
The worry voiced in this paper is that, as every instrument
both helps to accomplish an action and limits the action of the
3
One of the most famous protreptics is by the Pseudo-Aristotle. See James
H. Collins II, Exhortations to Philosophy: The Protreptics of Plato, Isocrates, and
Aristotle (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
4
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), book 2,
meditation 1 (hereafter II.1).
5
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, XI.34. This exercise, known as the praemedita-
tio malorum, was common among Stoics. See Hadot, Citadelle, 220-224. Foucault
evokes this exercise in his Herméneutique du Sujet: Cours au Collège de France.
1981-1982. (Paris: Gallimard Le Seuil, 2001), 445. For the English translation, see
Hermeneutics of the Subject, Graham Burchell, trans. (New York: Picador, 2005),
468 and following.
worker to what the tool is made for (the hammer is great to drive
in a nail, but it is useless to twist a screw), the concept of spiritual
exercise might illuminate as well as obscure some aspects of Buddhist
philosophy if we do not recognize its limitations. In particular, this
article will focus on the nature of what constitutes the Buddhist
path (often called “practices”) and the nature of texts dealing with
the path. Thinking with but also against Hadot, we will recognize
that the concept of spiritual exercise can be both insightful and
problematic when applied to understand the nature and content
of Buddhist texts dealing with the Buddhist path. In other words,
the article attempts to demonstrate that the category of spiritual
exercise, used indiscriminately in Buddhist literature, obscures
both the subject matter and the genre of those texts. The concept of
spiritual exercise remains beneficial for Buddhist studies, however,
because it indicates a means to escape a particular conception of
philosophy and expands (or restores) a larger, more stimulating, and
arguably needed, conception of it, a matter to which we will return
in the conclusion.
Clarifying and classifying spiritual exercises in Hadot

A few of Hadot’s critics have noticed that the expression that
made him famous, spiritual exercise, was actually not so un-
equivocal as one would hope.6 As a matter of fact, it took Hadot
some time before he gave a proper definition of the term. It is still
surprising to observe that his groundbreaking article of 1977
that inaugurated his focus on spiritual exercises does not even
give a formal definition of it.7 When he does give definitions, they
6
John Cooper, one of Hadot’s sharpest critics, points in his Pursuits of Wisdom:
Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2012) to Hadot’s inconsistent use of the phrase,
showing that Hadot went back and forth between a loose and a more restricted
usage. See his fifth endnote, 402-403.
7
It is rather part of the “annual report” since it was a notice opening the
annual publication of seminar summaries of the École Pratique des Hautes
Études. See Hadot, «Exercices spirituels,» Annuaire de la Ve Section de l’École
Pratique des Hautes Études, LXXXIV, 25-70. I will be quoting this text from the
version reproduced in Hadot, Exercices Spirituels et Philosophie Antique (Paris:
have a tendency to be quite loose and comprehensive. Here is a

sample of a few definitions he gave of spiritual exercise throughout
his career: transformation of the vision of the world and meta-
morphosis of personality;8 the internal activity of thought and
the will;9 spiritual exercises help to accomplish gradually an internal
transformation;10 exercises that allow the practitioner to come back to
oneself, liberated from alienation;11 voluntary and personal practices
aiming to accomplish a transformation of the ego;12 they can be called
the life according to the spirit;13 they are acts of the intellect or of the
imagination or of the will characterized by their purpose—thanks to
them the individual strives to transform his way of seeing the world,
so that he can transform himself.14
Two criticisms can be and have been made about this diversity:
first, the definitions are not uniform enough, and second, they are so
loose that many sorts of activities could be subsumed under the cat-
egory “spiritual exercises.”15 After all, “the internal activity of thought
Etudes Augustiniennes, 1987), 13-58.

8
Hadot, Exercices spirituels,14: une transformation de la vision du monde et . . .
une métamorphose de la personnalité.
9
Hadot, “Exercices spirituels et philosophie chrétienne,” in Exercices spirituels,
61: une activité intérieure de la pensée et de la volonté.
10
Hadot, Exercices spirituels, 17: Ce changement de vision est difficile. C’est
précisément là que doivent intervenir les exercices spirituels, afin d’opérer peu à
peu la transformation intérieure qui est indispensable.
11
Hadot, Exercices spirituels, 49: Tout exercice spirituel est donc, fondamentale-
ment, un retour à soi-même, qui libère le moi de l’aliénation où l’avaient entraîné
les soucis, les passions, les désirs.
12
Hadot, Qu’est-ce que la Philosophie antique? (Paris: Gallimard Folio, 1995),
276: des pratiques volontaires et personnelles destinées à opérer une transforma-
tion du moi. In Exercices spirituels, 236, Hadot interestingly relates this idea of
the building-up or formation of the self and the concern of the (some) Greeks for
paideia, which he opposes to the modern concern for information or data.
13
Plotin, Traité 38 (VI, 7), P. Hadot, ed and trans. with commentary (Paris:
Editions du Cerf, 1988), 57: l’exercice que l’on peut appeler la vie selon l’Esprit.
14
Hadot, N’oublie pas de vivre: Goethe et la tradition des exercices spirituels
(Paris: Albin Michel, 2008) 10.
15
Cooper made the latter remark, pointing out in particular that with
Hadot’s definition the distinction between exercises that could be categorized as
and the will” can characterize pretty much any mental process, that of
a child as well as a sage. It is significant to notice that, while the 1977
article does not provide a clear definition of spiritual exercise, it does
supply two lists of spiritual exercises that Hadot finds in Philo.16 This
represents well his unwillingness to reduce the diversity of exercises
under a common denominator. This might indicate a real difficulty,
rather than a circumstantial one, with the concept Hadot was trying
to fashion: the fact that these exercises have functions, natures, and
purposes that are distinct enough that they cannot be all included
under the same concept. This diversity offers an opportunity for think-
ing about the different kinds of practices described in Buddhist texts.
Hadot found the concept heuristic and descriptive enough that
he never explicitly acknowledged a problem in that regard. However,
it is useful to make some sense of that diversity of practices by making
some distinctions, and Hadot here is discreetly helpful. First, he has
constantly reminded his reader that he understands the term exercise
in the sense of the Greek word askèsis, namely practice, training,
habituation, and not in the modern sense of an ascetic practice that
implies a certain mortification of the body. More importantly, he made
once a distinction between two very different meanings of the term
exercise: the exercises of formation or “building-up” (exercices de
formation) and the exercises of application (exercices d’application).17
He did not explain clearly how the distinction should be understood,
and there are probably other useful categorizations to be made to sort
out all these exercises. The distinction he himself proposed is never-
theless worth pondering because it throws into relief two different
patterns of exercises, two different dynamics.
religious vs. those that could be categorized as properly philosophical becomes
difficult. This is an interesting point that would deserve a discussion in itself. Why
would such a distinction matter for Hellenistic and pre-Hellinistic philosophers?
Isn’t such a concern an anachronistic worry, and philosophically problematic?
This is obviously a crucial issue where South Asian texts are concerned.
16
Hadot, Exercices spirituels, 18. For more on these lists, see the essays by
Collins and Fiordalis in the present volume.
17
This reference can be found in a radio interview from January 2003
called “La Vie comme elle va” where Hadot discussed the idea of the
“culture de soi.” He himself says that he never made this distinction in his books
and was making it on the fly. This interview is available at <https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=GtvqeTmruAo>.
The exercises of application could be called “top-down

exercises.” They consist of applying rules or principles that have
been accepted or incorporated already (the equivalent of the Kantian
determining judgments). One applies in concrete situations the general
principles of a philosophical position already accepted. They are exer-
cises in the sense of implementation, performance, as when we talk
about the exercise of justice. When the judge exercises justice, he is
not making an attempt at justice—although it might be the case if the
final judgment fails to dispense justice. Rather the judge is aiming at
the correct application of laws, at finding the law under which the case
falls.18 The Stoic indifference to indifferent things and self-control,
Plotinus’ contemplation of the One or the Intellect (often conceived of
as “mystical experiences” by scholars),19 or possibly the Aristotelian
theoria, can be characterized as application exercises since they are
the implementations of Stoic principles in the first two cases, and the
actualization of the proper capacity of the soul to contemplate a higher
principle in the Plotinian and Aristotelian cases. For example, when
the Stoic philosopher is faced with financial troubles, he should apply
the principles of indifference towards what is indifferent, i.e., anything
that is not a good, moral will, such as property. For a philosopher who
is already convinced that happiness entirely lies in living a virtuous
life, possessions cannot be cared for too much. Being rich might be
preferable to poverty, but wealth is still an indifferent thing. The state
of indifference is not a training; it is the actual state that the philoso-
pher strives to achieve. In the same way, the philosopher described
in the tenth book of the Nicomachean Ethics as contemplating the
Intellect becomes or has become divine; he is not training for getting
to Heaven later.
But an exercise often has a different meaning in English. A
military, athletic, or musical exercise, for example, is a drill, a practice
18
In other terms, the judge is not a legislator. He is a law-applier, not a law-mak-
er. The analogy needs to be nuanced when it comes to cases of jurisprudence
where the reverse seems to be true: when a case cannot be subsumed under a
law, the judge is forced to work from the bottom-up and to find a non-written law
to such an “orphan case.”
19
Hadot himself calls Plotinus’ experiences spiritual exercises in Plotin, Traité,
57-66.
to train soldiers, athletes, or musicians to be able to perform their

skills later on, namely at war, at a competition, or at a show. Exercises
of formation are exercises that trigger a transformation of the per-
son so that she can face critical situations when they occur, at a later
time. They are, so to speak, “bottom-up exercises:” they accumulate
experiences to effectuate a transformation, to build up a new person.
With these exercises, one is getting transformed, is trying to change
in order to be ready to meet real, future challenges. In the case of
philosophy, the “practitioner” has been instructed about the nature
of reality, one’s own nature, and proper ways to behave. Desiring to
live according to this teaching, he finds himself inadequate, which
prompts the desire for self-transformation so as to live more fully
according to the imparted instructions. (or, as Hadot puts it, according
to the Spirit.) The majority of the spiritual exercises listed by Hadot
are included in this category, or at least can be used in this way: the
praemeditatio malorum, the contemplation of nature, conversion, the
“view from above,” or Plotinus’ effort to detach himself from the needs
of his body. With these exercises, one aims to acquire a certain level
of knowledge, a certain spiritual level, or certain dispositions that are
not yet possessed and that the exercises develop, so that one can face
life eventually.
The praemeditatio malorum, for example, is the “meditation
upon troubles:” the philosopher represents to himself future possible
troubles (like the death of a child, as we mentioned above), so that he
is not taken by surprise when it happens. The idea is that he will then
be able to keep his reason stable and not be submerged by passions,
which is the main trouble Stoics try to avoid. It is an exercise in the
sense that it is a preparation. This is why it is a very different kind
of exercise from the contemplation of the Intellect in Plotinus,
for example, since in that case the contemplation is not a preparation
for an ultimate encounter, but is the encounter that the philosopher
has been seeking.
Hadot did not develop what he meant by this distinction.
There are reasons to speculate that it does not categorize practices
per se, but rather ways to relate to these practices. The same practice
could belong to one or the other category. The Stoic “view from above”
for example, namely the capacity to distance oneself from the present
situation and from oneself and to look at it from the perspective of

the universe, can be an exercise of formation when one is training to
get accustomed to deal with things in a more impartial way or from a
larger perspective. But it can also be an exercise of application when
one holds firmly the Stoic dogma of the rational nature of the universe
and looks at whatever happens to him from the perspective of the
universe, thus avoiding complaints and frustrations. If so, it would
mean that in the Greek case as in the Buddhist case, practices acquire
their specific meanings depending on the individual who follows
them and on the context in which they are being followed, rather than
from their inherent nature. Hadot lays out the conception of a gradual
transformation where practices are used differently along the way.
The philosopher might have already transformed himself so as to be
detached from the pleasures of the senses without being yet able to
adopt permanently a universal view, either through Stoic physics or
the Plotinian contemplation of the Intellect. Transformation is not
just one and total, but a continued and multifarious phenomenon.
We can thus observe that even within the same category,
these exercises can be quite dissimilar. Exercises of formation can
rely on very different dynamics. It is easy to look at the Stoic practice
about death as an exercise, because practices regarding death pre-
pare one for the great confrontation with death, just as a physical
exercise trains an athlete before a big competition. In the case of
death, by definition, it is a final and unique encounter. On the other
hand, it is more difficult to think about Plotinus’ ascent towards the
Good as an exercise. We would probably more easily understand this
practice as a spiritual evolution, a soteriological progress or even a
breakthrough, rather than as an exercise. For Hadot, both practices
are spiritual exercises.
This wide diversity of practices, of ways of performing these
practices, and of ways to relate those practices to individual progress
should already warn us about the difficulty applying the notion of
spiritual exercise to Buddhist texts. There is a fundamental ambiguity
in Hadot’s concept of spiritual exercise, which is why it would be wise
to be cautious when importing this concept in Buddhist scholarship.
While illuminating a part of the Buddhist tradition, it might as well
leave another part in the shade. By emphasizing the unity of Buddhist
practices under the concept of spiritual exercises, Buddhist scholar-

ship tends to neglect the diversity of the kinds of practices.
Spiritual exercises and the diversity of Buddhist practice:

resorting to the path
Buddhist scholars do not need to worry about issues in the histo-
riography of Greek and Latin philosophy, and historians of ancient
philosophy can decide whether such a broad extension of the concept
of spiritual exercise is legitimate or not for their own field. What schol-
ars of Buddhism should be concerned about, however, is whether the
diversity constituting the concept of spiritual exercise is problematic
when it is imported in Buddhist scholarship. The ambiguity of the
concept has rarely been alluded to, and the concept has even some-
times become a naturalized concept.20 It seems rather useful to place
the concept again in question in order to throw into relief differences
between practices that are otherwise lumped together as spiritual
exercises, and to distinguish some practices that should not be counted
as spiritual exercises, which will help us to categorize the whole ques-
tion in a different, and arguably more “emic,” way.
Buddhist scholars who have used the concept spiritual
exercise have generally done so to stress the intent of Buddhist
texts and practices, leaving aside its ambiguity. For example, in his
innovative 2001 chapter, “What is Buddhist Philosophy?,” Matthew
Kapstein is interested in the concept of spiritual exercises because it
allows him to come up with a conception of philosophy that can fit
Buddhist thought. He argues that there are grounds for talking about
Buddhist thought in terms of philosophy less because of the technical
excellence of arguments and rational inquiry achieved by Buddhist
20
See Jimmy Yu, “The Body in Spiritual Exercise: A Comparative Study between
Epictetan Askēsis and Early Buddhist Meditation,” Asian Philosophy: An Interna-
tional Journal of the Philosophical Traditions of the East 24.2 (2014), 158-177. Yu
uses spiritual exercise without even referring to Hadot, as if it were a perfectly
transparent concept. It is true that the practices surveyed in this article, i.e., Stoic
askèsis and Buddhist meditation on the body, are close enough that they can both
fall under the category of exercise—of preparation-exercise, as I explain below.
Nonetheless, this is a sign that the usage of the concept might have passed any
attempt to problematize it.
thinkers (which he recognizes as extremely valuable indeed), and

more because of “the overriding project of philosophy as a vehicle
for the formation of the person through spiritual exercise.”21 Western
and Buddhist philosophies share the project of reforming the person,
which is essentially implemented through spiritual exercises. The
concept of spiritual exercise is thus elevated to the status of a mark
identifying where philosophy occurs. It might not be the central char-
acteristic of philosophy, but is at least one of its main manifestations.
To illustrate his point, Kapstein refers to different texts that
he takes to present or to induce the practice of spiritual exercises.
He lists Śāntideva’s Introduction to Awakened Conduct (Bodhicaryā-
vatāra) and Tsong Kha pa’s Great Sequence of the Stages of the Path
(Lam rim chen mo), which indeed seem good candidates for fitting
the requirement of spiritual exercises, especially in the sense of
training or drills.22 He then refers to Śāntarakṣita’s Compendium of
Fundamental Concepts (Tattvasaṃgraha), a more counter-intuitive
example given the fact that the Compendium and its commentary
by Kamalaśīla are massive scholastic texts presenting philosophical
positions and their refutations. But in doing so, Kapstein is faithful
to Hadot’s intent: all these texts participate in the same therapeutic
project of Buddhist philosophy, which is why they deserve to be called
exercises. The Compendium can be interpreted as a sort of a manual
that leads someone to review different opinions regarding the nature
of the world, its transformation, its beginning, or the nature of time,
or the self, and so on, and thus to change one’s default view and affirm
the Buddhist view, so that one might be “healed” from wrong views
that cause suffering. Just as a mathematical textbook proposes math
21
Kapstein, “Introduction: What is ‘Buddhist Philosophy’?”, in Reason’s Traces:
Identity and Interpretation in Indian and Tibetan Buddhist Thought (Boston:
Wisdom Publications, 2001), 20.
22
I am not repeating his analyses here. See his chapter, and newer articles
that give more illustrations of spiritual exercises in a Buddhist context: “Stoics
and Bodhisattvas: Spiritual Exercise and Faith in Two Philosophical Traditions,”
in M. Chase, S. Clark, and M. McGhee, eds., Philosophy as a Way of Life: Ancients
and Moderns—Essays in Honor of Pierre Hadot (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell,
2013), 99-115; “Spiritual Exercises and Buddhist Epistemologists in India and
Tibet”, in S. M. Emmanuel, ed., A Companion to Buddhist Philosophy (Malden, MA:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 270-289.
exercises to improve the understanding of a student, the Compendium

allows a Buddhist practitioner to improve his knowledge by refining
his understanding of the Buddhist doctrine and of the faults of other
positions. Reading the Compendium is thus supposed to be, by itself, a
transformative experience.
But here is the problem: if we identify the therapeutic project
as the central characteristic of spiritual exercises, then indeed all
Buddhist practices are spiritual exercises. But there might be a logical
sophistry here: if all spiritual exercises are therapeutic, it does not
mean that all therapeutic practices are spiritual exercises. If it is
perfectly acceptable to recognize the therapeutic intent (or maybe
rather the soteriological intent) of all Buddhist practices, it does not
mean that all Buddhist practices should be called exercises, because
this word cannot account for all Buddhist practices that are found
on the path.
First of all, it seems important to refine the usage of the concept
of spiritual exercise to avoid blurring key differences between certain
kinds of practices described in Buddhist texts. To illustrate the diver-
sity of practices on the Buddhist path, I want to bring up a renewed
distinction between two types of spiritual exercises: preparation-
exercises and application-exercises.23 The first category includes
practices that are trainings preparing for a later confrontation, with
death for example,24 or with desire, when it comes to the meditation
on the repulsive (aśubhabhāvanā). They are trainings, in the sense
that they are not important or valuable in themselves, but only insofar
as they trigger the development of skills, or check whether or how
much one has integrated instructions. To use the same example again,
a math exercise is not important in itself. One can fail at it without
consequences. It does not count for the final grade. Math exercises
23
I am modifying the distinction that Hadot proposed because it does not seem
to me appropriate to oppose formation exercises to application exercises. If it is
agreed that all exercises aim to reform the individual, it means that they all build
up the individual to be a certain kind of person. This is why it seems that a new
dichotomy is necessary within spiritual exercises that will respect the overall
therapeutic purpose of these exercises.
24
See Davey Tomlinson’s article in the present volume for a description of
these practices in the Tibetan context.
are only useful until one has perfectly understood the theorem. Once
understood, they are useless. Football drills are also insignificant with
regard to the final rankings. A player can skip a day of training without
impacting fundamentally the final results of the team. But each train-
ing session is an opportunity to reinforce reflexes, strategy, and team
spirit, or develop physical strength and endurance. What counts is the
real game against another team, which is what drives the training.
The meditation on the repulsive follows the same pattern. It
is not important in itself. The practitioner visualizes repulsive forms
(skeletons, bowels, raw flesh, rotting flesh, etc.) that are not actually
present in front of him. Many texts remind the practitioner that
these visualizations are not real.25 They are only drills to habituate
the mind to disengage from sensual objects that one naturally finds
attractive. Hence, the practice is preparing the ground for actual
future encounters with objects judged attractive. Its point is not to
bring to mind disgusting objects, but to acquire dispositions that will
allow one not to be attached any longer to any object, and thus to be
free. The meditation on the repulsive is not either intended to make
us constantly depressed or disgusted by contemplating filth, but to
counteract tendencies we might have of strong attachment or lust
toward the human body. It is not supposed to produce a disposition
for disgust, which would be just another problematic affliction (kleśa),
namely a strong aversion towards objects. Pushed too far, that would
make the practitioner unable to exert compassion towards sentient
beings. It is rather supposed to produce a renunciation that leaves
us free from the bonds that desire creates on us. Hence, it is not the
repulsive that is important, but the renouncing disposition that the
meditation produces.
This is a perfect example of how Hadot’s analyses can be use-
ful to scholars of Buddhist philosophy. While commenting on some
25
See for example Kamalaśīla’s first Bhāvanākrama where the objects of the
meditation on the repulsive are said to be unreal (abhūte ’pyarthe). See G. Nam-
dol, ed., Bhāvanākramaḥ of Ācārya Kamalaśīla (Sarnath, India: Central Institute
of Higher Tibetan Studies, 1997), 211. Some texts suggest that the practice could
have used actual corpses and be held in cemeteries for example. This does not
undermine the point: even in these cases, the point is not to spend time in a
cemetery. It is to become detached from sensual objects.
meditations from Marcus Aurelius, Hadot talks about his “rhetorical

exaggeration.” What he means is the tendency Marcus Aurelius some-
times displays in dealing with things that creates particularly strong
passions in him, such as good food or sex for example:
When you have savouries and fine dishes set before
you, you will gain an idea of their nature if you tell
yourself that this is the corpse of a fish, and that
the corpse of a bird or a pig; [ . . . ] and as for sexual
intercourse, it is the frictions of a piece of gut and,
following a sort of convulsion, the expulsion of
some mucus.26
In cases where Marcus Aurelius feels that passion is blurring his
judgment and creates strong attachment, he caricatures the objects
stirring this attachment by appealing not only to a reductionist
account of these objects (such as meat being the flesh of an animal
that is not alive anymore), but to an account that stresses a repulsive
aspect of the object (the word corpse suggests the idea of putrefaction,
decomposition already). As Hadot puts it, Marcus Aurelius “bends the
stick in the other way” as an exercise to balance out habitual tenden-
cies.27 By indicating that this is an exaggeration, Hadot suggests that
Marcus is not trying to give a truthful account of reality, but is rather
interested in manipulating his passions and reforming himself.
In the Buddhist case, we could sometimes talk about a medi-
tative exaggeration. Think of the description of the meditation on the
repulsive given by Śāntideva in the eighth chapter of his Introduction
to Awakened Conduct where he pictures the beloved of the meditator
(who can be himself, since he uses the ambiguous “you”) in the most
horrendous way to uproot the deep attraction he (or anybody who
would identify with the “I” of the text) has for the attractive body
of one’s lover:
26
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, VI.13, 47.
27
Hadot, “Les «Pensées» de Marc-Aurèle,” Bulletin de l’Association Guillaume
Budé, 2 (Juin, 1981), 183-191: Il s’agit de vaincre des préjugés solidement enra-
cinés, des terreurs irraisonnées. Pour cela, tous les moyens sont bons. Il s’agit de
redresser des opinions déformées et il faut en quelque sorte les tordre dans l’autre
sens, exagérer pour compenser, appuyer sur certains traits pour rendre le tableau
plus émouvant et plus convaincant.
The saliva and feces of these [women] come from the

same food. Of the two, you dislike feces; why would
you find drinking saliva so pleasant then? (8.49)28
Śāntideva chastises himself for being inconsequent: while he is
disgusted by feces, he desires to kiss women—in other words, «to
drink their saliva” (the honey of the lovers’ mouths, as his commen-
tator Prajñākaramati puts it, following a well-known trope in Sanskrit
poetry)—even though both feces and saliva are the results of the same
decomposing food. That does not mean that feces and saliva are iden-
tified. Śāntideva is aware they are not the same thing, that they have
different characteristics. But they are referred to their common origin.
Śāntideva exaggerates with this pseudo-identification to produce the
effect of disgust. The purpose is not to actually see human beings as
creatures oozing filth, nor to be disgusted by them so much that one
would not even be able to practice compassion towards them—one of
the essential practices for Śāntideva. If the practitioner does not have
sensual attachments, he would not be required to practice this kind
of meditation. In other words, preparation-exercises are time-limited
exercises and can be forgotten once the disposition has been acquired.
Application-exercises follow a different dynamic. They imple-
ment a disposition that is already possessed, which means that they
are not exaggerations and are not abandoned once the disposition is
acquired. In other words, they are dispositions in action. One is no
longer in training. When one practices compassion towards someone
who is hostile, one is not training to be compassionate; he exercises
compassion towards an actual human being who could effectively hurt
him. There is, nonetheless, a sense in which application-exercises are
still trainings, or therapeutic, since the Buddhist practitioner is always
supposed to train his mind to become a Buddha (or another Noble
individual such as an Arhat) and remains a trainee (śaikṣa) until the
final good (niḥśreyasa) is attained. This is why even the death of one’s
child can be an opportunity to transform oneself. Even unfavorable
circumstances can be turned into the path, as so many mind training
28
Śāntideva, Bodhicaryāvatāra, Swāmi Dwārikādās Śāstri, ed., (Varanasi:
Bauddha Bharati, 2001),173: ekasmād aśanād eṣāṃ lālāmedhyaṃ ca jāyate / ta-
trāmedhyam aniṣṭaṃ te lālāpānaṃ kathaṃ priyam. The numbers in parentheses
after the quote above and in what follows refer to chapter and verse.
instructions state.29 But there is a sense in which it is not a training

anymore, since the practitioner is then facing a real situation, not
a possibility he works on with the help of his imagination. When
Śāntideva declares in the following verses,
Therefore, even if one sees a friend or an enemy be-
having badly, one can reflect that there are specific
conditioning factors that determine this, and thereby
remain happy. (6.33) [ . . . ]
If, disregarding the principal cause, such as a stick or
other weapon, I become angry with the person who
impels it, he too is impelled by hatred. It is better that
I hate the hatred. (6.41)30
Śāntideva aims to induce in the practitioner the vision of causality,
that people are not what they are due to their internal nature, that
they are not simply evil, but that they behave in certain ways due to
multiple causes and conditions that explain the present situation.
Picking up one single aspect (not even the main one, as when some-
one blames the person and not the stick with which that person hits,
the stick being, after all, the direct cause of harm), one is losing sight
of what is happening. It is being ignorant, or not being a Buddha, not
behaving in an Awakened way. The practice of seeing things embed-
ded in a complex network of causal relationships is to be continuously
performed. It is not temporary. This is why it fits better in the category
of application-exercises.
Both types of exercises thus share the goal of transforming the
person, but they differ significantly on how this goal is implemented.
Preparation-exercises are supposed to disappear once the disposi-
tions they aim to foster have been secured. Application-exercises are
using circumstances to implement the acquired dispositions. They do
not go away. Of course, these two types are described as general types
here and a range of grey area exists between them where exercises
29
For example, see the “Seven Line Mind Training” (rkyen ngan byang chub
lam du bsgyur), in Thupten Jinpa, Mind Training, the Great Collection (Boston:
Wisdom Publications, 2006), 83.
30
Śāntideva, The Bodhicaryāvatāra, Kate Crosby and Andrew Skilton, trans.
(London: Oxford University Press, 1998), 53.
can be used either as preparations or as implementations. However

we decide ultimately to categorize specific exercises, the point is that
it matters that we see the great diversity of practices that the label
of spiritual exercise can conceal, as well as the potentially significant
differences among the natures and functions of these practices.
Now, there are yet other kinds of Buddhist practices that
would not be rightfully described as exercises. They are neither drills
nor implementations of acquired dispositions. They are not trainings
to be repeated so as to achieve a certain mastery, but are direct insight
into reality with cognitive and soteriological dimensions. They occur
at critical moments of the path when the practitioner passes on
from one stage of the path to the next, or from one status to another,
such as the moment of the path of preparation (prayoga-mārga)
when the practitioner goes through the four connectors to insight
(nirvedhabhāgīyas), or when the practitioner reaches the path of
vision (darśana-mārga).31 These practices are fundamental. Often,
the way the tradition conceives of them determines the way other
practices, such as the previously mentioned exercises, are informed.
This is why they are not to be neglected. They are what Hadot would
probably call contemplations, and are analogous, mutatis mutandis, to
Plotinus’ contemplation of the Intellect or the One by the soul, or
Aristotle’s theoria.
As mentioned above, by not considering these practices
as exercises, we are parting ways with Hadot, since he considered
Plotinus’ contemplations as spiritual exercises. It is not the place to
discuss Hadot’s interpretations of Plotinus or Aristotle, but we should
justify why the Buddhist practices presently considered are not
exercises.32 The path of vision, for example, is defined by Vasubandhu
31
On these general articulations of the path in late Indian Buddhism, see Robert
Buswell and Robert Gimello’s introduction to Paths to Liberation: The Mārga and
Its Transformations in Buddhist Thought (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
1992), 1-36. See also Jeffrey Hopkins, Meditation on Emptiness (Boston: Wisdom
Publication, 1996), 91-109.
32
I use the term practice with caution. Indeed, a practice is something related
to action (Greek, praxis). Some of the moments of the path referred to here have
cognitive or gnoseological dimensions that are not properly practical, since they
are not dispositions to produce, just like Awakening is not caused. If this is the
case, calling these moments of the path practices would be stretching the word
as the moment of the path where the practitioner sees what he has
not seen before.33 Vasubandhu interprets this discovery as that of
reality represented by the teaching of the four noble truths, whereas
later Indian authors interpret it as the insight into insubstantiality
(niḥsvabhāvatā) or selflessness (nairātmya).34 The path of vision is
not a training to get accustomed to the reality of selflessness. On the
contrary, it is characterized by its uniqueness: never before did the
practitioner see reality as vividly as he sees it on the path of vision,
and never after will he see it differently.35 It is the immediate vision
of reality as it is. It is not a preparation for transformation, but the
so much that everything would become a practice. The same problem appears
in Greek philosophy. If the Aristotelian theoria is properly practical, since the
highest object of contemplation (God) is pure activity, the contemplation of the
One by the Soul in the Enneads is beyond the determinations of receptivity and
activity. What shall we call these “performances,” then? The term contemplation
could be a solution, which plays nicely on the opposition between contemplation
and action. One can also rely on the usual Buddhist trick, and use the word prac-
tice metaphorically, as long as one is aware that the path of vision, for instance, is
a very different kind of practice from the meditation on breath.
33
Vasubandhu, Abhidharmakośa and Bhāṣya, Swāmi Dwarikādās Śāstrī,
ed. (Varanasi: Bauddha Bharati, 1998), 730: adṛṣṭadṛṣṭer dṛṅmārgas (28c).
For more on Vasubandhu and his discussion of the path of vision in the Abhidharma-
kośa, see the chapter by David Fiordalis in the present volume.
34
I mean the authors of the vast literature investigating the Buddhist
path such as the treatises (śāstras) of the Ornament of Realizations (Abhi-
samayālaṃkāra), the Ornament of Mahāyāna Sūtras (Mahāyānasūtrālaṃkāra),
the Stages of Yoga (Yogācārabhūmi), and their numerous commentaries. The
list would be much more profuse if we were to look at Tibetan literature.
On the Mahāyānasūtrālaṃkāra and its treatment of the three prajñās,
see Fiordalis’ chapter in the present volume; he abbreviates the title as
the Adornment.
35
In some sense, the nature of the vision of reality on the path of vision is not
different from the kind of vision a Buddha has. However, in the path of cultivation
(bhāvanā-mārga), the insight obtained in the path of vision is appropriated again
and again, which enables the practitioner to get a more and more subtle grasp
of the insight, which therefore sounds like the insight of the path of cultivation
would be of a refined nature compared to the insight of the path of vision.
Commentators are not always clear about this, but seem to suggest that it is
not the nature, but the extent of the intuition that is deepened on the path of
cultivation. This indicates at least that the path of cultivation can perfectly be
considered an exercise.
moment of radical transformation itself.36 Neither is it the application

of an acquired disposition, but the discovery that the capacity to see
reality is not something to perform, but something already there
that does not entail acting subjects and receptive objects, since all
conceptualizations (vikalpa) of subject (grāhaka) and object (grāhya)
disappear at that moment.37
Despite a possible first mistaken impression, the opposition
between spiritual exercises and contemplations is not between the
practices of the philosopher or the practitioner—namely those who
are still in training, who have not yet reached the end of their quest—
and those of the sage or the Buddha.38 Indeed, the contemplative
practices or transformative moments are often described as belong-
ing to a trainee in both Hellenistic and Buddhist traditions. Plotinus
explains how he falls back in his body from his contemplation of
higher realities.39 On the other hand, the path of vision is generally
not taken to be the end of the path (except in the case of Gautama
Siddhārtha), but is followed by the path of cultivation, which requires
further purifications and realizations. The opposition between the
two is rather on the idea of repeated training designed to acquire a
certain capacity versus the actual possession of a state of being that
does not require any further training.
36
The practitioner reaching the path of vision is still a trainee (saikṣa) from a
larger perspective, namely, he is someone who is not yet a Buddha and still needs
to accomplish the path. But that does not make the path of vision a “training”
in the sense that the path of vision does not prepare for a later, “real” vision of
reality. It is the direct intuition of reality already.
37
I am mainly summarizing the analyses of the Ornament of Realizations and
its commentators here. See Hopkins, Meditation, 96-97; P.-J. Harter, “Buddhas in
the Making: Path, Perfectibility, and Gnosis in the Abhisamayālaṃkāra literature”
(Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 2015), especially chap. 5.
38
I refer here to the distinction between the philosopher and the sage, as
Plato develops it in the Symposium. The sage or knower (sophos) is the one who
possesses wisdom, whereas the philosopher is in an in-between situation, being
aware of his ignorance (thus differing from men who presume they know), and at
the same time desiring to know (philo-sophos).
39
Plotinus, Enneads, Steven MacKenna trans. (Burdett, New York: Larson
Publications, 1992), IV.8.1, 410.
This means that the concept of spiritual exercise is not

operative enough to describe the whole of the Buddhist path with all
its practices. For instance, it does not comprehend the two categories
of practices, namely spiritual exercises and contemplations. Hadot’s
legacy can thus be useful without being oppressive. We can use it
to interpret some Buddhist practices, but also (while departing
from it) to show how different other practices can be from spiritual
exercises. As some authors, such as Kapstein, have pointed out, the
Tibetan concept of mind training (blo sbyong), for example, corre-
sponds quite well, literally and conceptually, to spiritual exercise.
This similarity offers opportunities for future, fecund comparisons
between philosophical practices in Western philosophy and the
Buddhist world.
It is, however, crucial to maintain a certain teleological unity
between all these practices, a unity that Kapstein formulated in terms
of therapeutic purpose and that he ascribed to spiritual exercises. Since
spiritual exercises have been reinterpreted as covering only a part of
Buddhist practices, it is not possible to take them as representatives
of the whole of Buddhist practice. Rather, I want to argue that we do
not need an etic concept to talk about these practices, and that we can
find a term in Buddhist texts perfectly appropriate: the concept of
the path (mārga) articulates not only all practices together, but also
relates them to the final goal that is Awakening, since a path is by
definition something that leads to a destination. It seems all the more
appropriate to replace spiritual exercises with path when we remember
that Hadot wrote that for the Stoics “philosophy is an exercise.”40 Such
a formula could be translated in the following way: for Buddhists,
philosophy (or the Dharma) is a path.41 Philosophy is not a purely
scholastic practice that would attempt only to build arguments and
respond to objections, but is a way of acting and thinking in accord
with and in search for Awakening. We can therefore also reformulate
the elements that make up the path as means to Awakening, and
40
Hadot, Exercices spirituels, 22.
41
This whole argument has been suggested already by Sara McClintock
in Omniscience and the Rhetoric of Reason: Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla on
Rationality, Argumentation, and Religious Authority (Boston: Wisdom Publica-
tions, 2010), 17-18.
thus avoid the term practice, which may not adequately designate all
these means.
There is really no need to resort to spiritual exercises here,
except if we want to say that since spiritual exercises, through Hadot’s
work and reputation, mark the existence of philosophy, identifying
them as a part of the Buddhist tradition makes this tradition philo-
sophical, and thus facilitates a dialogue between scholars of
Buddhism and scholars of Western philosophy. But we could also
work in another direction and say that it is the notion of path that
expresses best what kind of philosophy one finds in a Buddhist
context, which would, in turn, require that we elaborate philo-
sophically the concept of the path.
A theory of practice: path literature and spiritual exercises

There is another way in which the concept of spiritual exercise
might be detrimental to how we read Buddhist texts. We have been
concerned up to now with certain kinds of means on the path that
do not fall under the category of spiritual exercises. What we have to
consider as well is a certain way to talk about these means, which is
different from how spiritual exercises are presented. I will argue that
some Buddhist texts deal with the path or with practice without being
themselves practical. They offer a theory of the path.
Progress in scholarship is, for obvious reasons, always desir-
able; but it also has sometimes the dangerous potential to turn into
intellectual domination. Hadot somewhat reduces all ethical develop-
ments in ancient philosophy to spiritual exercises. His approach makes
the concept of spiritual exercise intrinsically totalizing: he tells the
reader that the whole of philosophy for Stoics is an “exercise.” Hadot
explains all the meditations of Marcus Aurelius as ways for Marcus to
train in Stoic philosophy and incorporate it into his daily life. In some
sense the meditations are all “spiritual exercises.” If this seems right in
the case of Marcus, does it apply in the same way to Plotinus’ Enneads?
Are Plotinus’ “reports” of his experiences of union or contemplation
with the Intellect or the One to be treated as practical instructions
to incorporate in daily life? Could some texts attempt to address this
rising up towards higher principles (anagogia) in a different way, for
instance, by taking theoretical approaches to map and ground the

whole philosophical position developed by Plotinus?
Again, it is not the place to argue about the interpretation
of ancient Greek philosophy. For our purposes, we should question
whether reducing all discursive elaborations about the Buddhist path
(or even “Buddhist ethics”) to spiritual exercises is the right way to
go. The concern here is about literary genres. As mentioned earlier,
one of the greatest services Hadot paid to scholarship was to reeval-
uate the genre of some texts, such as Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations.
By placing texts back within their proper genres, he helped us to
consider texts in themselves, from the perspective of what they were
trying to achieve, and not from the perspective of what we want them
to be. Thanks to Hadot’s inspiration, we can also reevaluate Buddhist
texts by replacing them within the perspective of their own genres,
and thus seize better what these texts are trying to say. Reading Śānti-
deva’s Introduction from the perspective of spiritual exercises is still a
way to read this text as a philosophical text, albeit not a philosophical
treatise. But to be faithful to Hadot’s careful attention to the speci-
ficity of genres, we might want to read other Buddhist texts not as
spiritual exercises.
Buddhist literature, in all its regional offshoots, contains a vast
corpus dealing with the Buddhist path. Reading this whole corpus
under the category of spiritual exercise would make us miss its spec-
ificity. We would end up identifying talk about the path with practical
instructions, which is only one way to talk about the path. Let us take
the example of the Ornament of Realizations (Abhisamayālaṃkāra,
hereafter, Ornament) as a representative of this literature. This
small work (275 verses) together with its numerous commentaries
(twenty-one Indian commentaries at least, and a great number of
Tibetan commentaries, often amounting to several hundred pages
each) has been a key text for articulating the late Indian and Tibetan
Buddhist conception of the path. As its first verse announces: “The
path to the knowledge of all the modes is taught here by the Teacher.”42
42
Maitreya, Abhisamayālaṃkāra-Prajñāpāramitā-Upadeśa-śāstra: The Work
of Bodhisattva Maitreya, Theodore Stcherbatsky and Eugene Obermiller, eds.
and trans. (Leningrad: Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1929), 1: sarvākāra-
jñatāmārgaḥ śāsitrā yo ’tra deśitaḥ (1.1ab).
Our reflex in approaching this text could be to look for practi-

cal instructions. After all, this is a text about the path to Buddhahood,
and if we identify texts about the path with texts about spiritual
exercises, we would rightfully expect to read something telling us how
to practice the Buddhist Dharma in our daily life. Modern readers of
the Ornament might be tempted to read it that way. For a long time,
the corpus has been ignored partly because it was considered a failed
treatise giving gradual instructions towards Awakening (the Tibetan
genre of lam rim): it was too complicated and too disorganized, since
it did not start with our ordinary condition, but rather with the knowl-
edge of the Buddha (the first three chapters concerns three kinds of
omniscience), and it did not follow a clear step-by-step progress.
This is precisely where identifying the proper genre of the text
is critical to approaching it correctly. The Ornament does not follow a
step-by-step order, starting with our ordinary condition and slowly
progressing all the way to Buddhahood, because it is not a practical
text about the stages of the path (lam rim). It is not designed to tell
its readers how to implement the path, what kinds of exercises one
should practice, and so on. It is a śāstra, a theoretical treatise, as its
title indicates. A śāstra, as Sheldon Pollock abundantly showed, is a
theoretical work, not a practical manual.43 Such a dichotomy between
theoretical and practical was available to South Asian intellectuals to
distinguish between different registers of discourse that were aiming
to achieve different goals through speech. The difficult question for us
is how there can be a theoretical work about a practical object—how
we can talk about a theory of practice.44
43
Sheldon Pollock, “The theory of practice and the practice of theory in Indian
intellectual History,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 105.3 (1985),
499–519.
44
This interpretation develops what Georges Dreyfus explains in The Sound
of Two Hands Clapping: The Education of a Tibetan Buddhist Monk (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003), where he argues that the Ornament re-
sponds to almost no practical needs of the monks who study it. These monks use
it to get a precise and coherent overview of the Buddhist conception of the world
and of the Buddhist path. They debate about its topics as any other treatise offer-
ing philosophical arguments and positions. See, for example, 179: “To construct
such a universe of meaning and to strengthen the faith of participants in such
a soteriological possibility are the main goals of the study of the Ornament and
And indeed, the Ornament is a treatise that offers a theory of

the path, gathering different philosophical and religious Buddhist per-
spectives (Abhidharma, Yogācāra, Sūtras, and so on) framed within
and shaped by a Mādhyamika understanding. The literature of the
Ornament is concerned with the Buddhist path in its entirety, which
it conceives as articulated through eight “realizations” (abhisamaya)
that constitute respectively the eight chapters of the Ornament. They
are supposed to map out the entirety of the process of self-transfor-
mation that leads to perfect Awakening. The interesting aspect of the
Ornament is that this map of the path is not a travelogue. Readers are
disappointed with the Ornament if they think that its concern with
the path means that the Ornament gives a step-by-step instruction
about how to get to Awakening. This disappointment results from a
misreading of the genre of the Ornament. If the Ornament is about
the path and about practice, it is not a manual of practice. It rather
presents all the elements necessary for the path to make sense
and to function to its fullest: its presuppositions, its components, its
different tools, its multiple possibilities (the path is not presented in
a linear fashion, but rather (indirectly and directly) with its higher
and inferior levels for Śrāvakas, Pratyekabuddhas, Bodhisattvas,
Buddhas and so on). In other words, the Ornament is a theory of
practice rather than a practical manual. Just as the Critique of Practical
Reason does not really indicate what particular moral actions one
should implement in specific cases, but rather what makes an action
moral (its nature, but also its presuppositions, like the postulates of
God and the immortal soul), the Ornament does not tell the reader
what to do, but it tells the reader what will count as a practice
on the path.
Let us take a look at the manner in which the Ornament talks
about an element of the path, namely equality (samatā).45 To illustrate
other related texts in the Tibetan scholastic tradition.” I further and slightly move
away from Dreyfus’ interpretation in my dissertation. See Harter, “Buddhas,” 96
and 374.
45
I am here developing another and more detailed example than the one
Dreyfus gives in Two Hands Clapping, 177: “For example, the two methods for
generating the mind of enlightenment, which are central to the Stages of the
Path (lam rim, a type of literature directly relevant to meditative practice), are
the difference between practical and theoretical accounts, we will

compare how equality is treated in Śāntideva’s Introduction to
Awakened Conduct and in the Ornament together with one of its
commentaries. Śāntideva’s Introduction is a more practical text, and
could be interpreted with the help of Hadot’s concept of spiritual
exercise. The eighth chapter, the chapter on concentration, actually
dedicates the majority of its verses to giving advice to develop com-
passion. After eighty-eight verses on renunciation, Śāntideva starts
talking about how to develop the mind of Awakening (bodhicitta)
as a practice grounded on the equality of myself with others:
At first one should cultivate intently the equality of
oneself and others as follows: “All equally experience
suffering and happiness. I should look after them as I
do for myself.” (8.90)46
Soon follow the famous verses giving the example of how one part of
the body can help another part despite not being itself in pain. For
example, the hand can help another part of the body to alleviate pain,
as when the hand removes a needle stuck on the foot. The suffering
of the foot is certainly not the suffering of the hand, but the hand still
takes care of it. Less than an argument, Śāntideva is providing an
encouragement here, and this is where we could use the concept of
spiritual exercise most appropriately.47 He urges himself to care for
suffering not because of its location, that is, not because it belongs
to a specific person (especially oneself), but simply because it is suf-
fering. The practical aspect of the text is obvious. This is made even
more obvious through the use of certain grammatical indicators:
the usage of the first person allows the reader to identify herself
with the narrator, and the optative invites her to act. Furthermore,
barely mentioned [in the Ornament]. The real focus is theoretical. The mind of
enlightenment is studied here not as an attitude to be developed but as a function
of its role in the overall Mahayana path.”
46
Śāntideva, Bodhicaryāvatāra, 186: parātmasamatām ādau bhāvayed
evādarāt / samaduḥkhasukhāḥ sarve pālanīyā mayātmavat.
47
Stephen Harris, “Does Anātman Rationally Entail Altruism? On Bodhicaryā-
vatāra 8:101-103,” Journal of Buddhist Ethics 18 (2011), 93-123, develops the
same idea that there might not be, strictly speaking, arguments in the eighth and
sixth chapters of Śāntideva’s Introduction.
Śāntideva resorts to concrete examples (myself and others, the limbs

of the body), which resonate directly with our everyday life and can
be integrated into actions I can perform. The text is practical because
it says explicitly what one can do, or even what one should do. Equality
does not remain an abstract concept, but is applied not only to a
general, concrete situation, but even possibly to one’s own life.
The presentation of the practice of equality in the Ornament
differs markedly from Śāntideva’s. In the Ornament, the concept of
samatā is presented repeatedly in different chapters. Without getting
into the details of the structure of the Ornament, it is important to
understand that the seventy topics of the Ornament (the traditional
number of topics that the Ornament reviews) have different mean-
ings and significance depending on the chapters in which they occur,
because each chapter offers a different perspective. For example, the
concept of samatā appears mainly in the third and the fourth chap-
ters. The fourth chapter presents the concept from the point of view
of a practitioner arrived at the final stage of the path, a practitioner
who has nothing more to learn (aśaikṣa), and concerns the equality
between saṃsāra and nirvāṇa. It is, so to speak, the pinnacle of the
practice of samatā, of which the third chapter presents the general
and less advanced form.48 Let us consider how Haribhadra (ca.
730-800), one of the text’s most important Indian commenta-
tors, explains the topic of equality from the third chapter of the
Ornament in his small commentary:
Practice should be cultivated through equality, and
so he [=Maitreya] presents equality after practice:
Equality towards things like forms is regarded as the
absence of the four kinds of conceit. (3.10cd)
Equality is said to be the sameness of practice, that
is, the fact that there is no objectification in any way
through the conceit of clinging (abhiniveśa) to things
like forms, the conceit of signs (nimitta) like blue, the
48
As a general note, the third chapter presents the realizations of lower
practitioners, Śrāvakas and Pratyekabuddhas, and how the realization of the
Bodhisattvas is superior to the realizations of these two noble individuals.
conceit of elaborations (prapañca), and the conceit of

realization (adhigama).49
Haribhadra gives us a few more comments in his longer commentary,
the Light:
Let it be known that [equality], which is said to be
of four kinds, is the non-objectification of what the
knower and the object of knowledge are by way of
rejecting the conceit of categories like form, the con-
ceit of signs like blue, the conceit of elaborations such
as the so-called twenty-two kinds of forms, and the
conceit of realization such as the one of the connectors
to insight.50
As obvious as the practical aspect of Śāntideva’s text was, this text
should strike us as being highly abstract and theoretical. Technical
philosophical terms saturate the text; third person and impersonal
forms dominate. We are not in the same kind of text. This is because we
are not any longer in the same genre. This entails that the text should
not be expected to achieve the same kind of purpose (prayojana), to
keep up with the Sanskrit poetics of śāstras. Of course, the final goal
(prayojanaprayojana) of both texts is the attainment of Awakening,
and this is why even such a text retains a therapeutic or soteriological
intent. But the direct goal of the Ornament is to present the whole
path with all its topics.51 It is supposed to offer a general and almost
49
Haribhadra, Abhisamayālaṃkāra-kārikā-śāstra-vivṛti: Haribhadra’s com-
mentary on the Abhisamayālaṃkāra-kārikā-śāstra edited for the first time from
a Sanskrit manuscript, K. H. Amano ed. (Kyoto: Heirakuji-Shoten, 2000), 51-52:
samatā-dvāreṇa prayogo bhāvanīya iti prayogānantaraṃ samatām āha/
caturddhā ’mananā tasya rūpādau samatā mateti / rūpādāv abhiniveśa-nīlā-
di-nimitta-prapañcādhigama-mananānāṃ sarvadhānupalabdhiḥ prayogasya
tulyateti samatā.
50
Haribhadra, Abhisamayālaṃkār’ālokā Prajñāpāramitāvyākhyā, Commen-
tary on the Aṣṭasāhasrikā-Prajñāpāramitā by Haribhadra together with the text
commented on, Unrai Wogihara, ed. (Tokyo: Toyo Bunko, 1932-1935), 432: tad
evaṃ rūpādi-padārtha-mananā-nīlādi-nimitta-mananā-rūpa-dvidhā-viṃśatidhety-
ādi-prapañca-mananā-nirvedhabhāgīyādy-adhigama-mananānāṃ pratiṣedhena
jñātṛ-jñeya-dharmānupalabdhiś caturdhoktā vijñeyā.
51
Haribhadra, Light, 4: “Therefore the purpose [of the Ornament] is the
uncommon result of the activity [of learning], in other words, facilitating
complete map of the path, which is why it is not of direct practical

relevance. A different kind of text or teaching is needed to impart
practical instructions about the path. Map is not territory, as Jonathan
Z. Smith has taught us, but neither is it a travelogue.
What is Haribhadra saying about equality then? He talks
about equality as the topic that is presented directly after the topic of
practice or application (prayoga). The topic of application introduced
the idea that practice, for a Bodhisattva, should be implemented in
a certain way. What counts is not just what the Bodhisattva does,
which is what lower practitioners are concerned about (according
to the Ornament, a treatise dedicated to the path of the Bodhisattvas,
for Bodhisattvas, and from the point of view of Bodhisattvas). What
counts is how the Bodhisattva does it. The topic of equality illus-
trates this understanding of practice. Equality is a way of practicing
(samatā-dvārena) in which one does not once get caught in objec-
tifying even practices. As the Light makes clear, this would mean
objectifying the practitioner and his practice, in other words reify-
ing the practitioner as being a good practitioner because of his or
her “being a practitioner,” or reifying the practice as good because of
the kinds of actions one does. Haribhadra does not provide concrete
examples here to instruct how to practice equality. He rather provides
the principle for its possibility: the absence of conceit (mananā),
which is also the absence of objectification (anupalabdhi). Equality,
namely, taking all phenomena of saṃsāra (and nirvāṇa, as the fourth
chapter makes it clear) as fundamentally the same (tulya), that is, as
fundamentally empty without special ontological weight, is possible
only if one does not reify them, whether it be in daily life (abhiniveśa),
or as categories of Buddhist Abhidharma (nimitta), or even as cate-
gories of the path (adhigama). Equality can thus be practiced on any
object whatsoever. The manner counts more than the content.
Śāntideva’s and Haribhadra’s treatments of equality are quite
dissimilar. But does that mean that they talk about two different kinds
of equality and that the comparison is purely verbal? For Haribhadra,
the understanding of all topics in a summarized form—an understanding

that internalizes what needs to be learned” (ataḥ pratipādya-saṃtāna-
gataḥ saṃkṣepataḥ samastārtha-sukhāvabodho ’sādhāraṇam iti kriyā-
phalaṃ prayojanaṃ).
equality is an ontological consideration; for Śāntideva, the equality of

oneself with others rather induces a sort of identification of myself
with others: I should care for others as much as I usually do for myself.
This seeming distance between the two usages of the concept does not
mean that the two authors are talking about different kinds of things.
The argument is rather that the two texts differ in their approach.
Śāntideva’s approach is practical in the sense that it aims to train the
mind of the reader to develop compassion and lessen attachment to
oneself. Equality is a question of training, of habituation, as verses
one hundred and ten to fifteen make very clear. By describing this
practice, Śāntideva proposes a spiritual exercise to his reader. One
could even argue that the reading itself is already a spiritual exercise:
one changes one’s perspective through imagination, and thus induces
transformation. Haribhadra’s approach is theoretical: his problem is
rather to find how to account for the practice of equality, what it is,
and what it presupposes. His position is that the practice of equality
is characterized by the absence of four kinds of conceits, or by non-
objectification (a characteristic added by his interpretation that
is not present in the verses of the Ornament). This might ground
theoretically the spiritual exercise of practicing equality, but it is not
itself a spiritual exercise. Without recognizing these two different
approaches, which translate the different genres to which these
texts belong, we could miss the specificity of the Ornament and of
its analysis of equality. This is why the concept of spiritual exercise
cannot be the only concept through which we interpret practice, and
in the case of Buddhist texts, the path. There is also a non-practical
way to talk about the path.
Conclusion
The concept of spiritual exercise is certainly illuminating, but it
can also obscure our understanding of Buddhist literature. It is
a useful concept for modern interpreters of philosophy because
it restores an understanding of philosophy that the past two
centuries have sometimes narrowed, and allows us to talk about
some Buddhist texts as philosophical, texts that otherwise would
just be pushed into the religious or literary basket.52

By utilizing the concept here, I have been somewhat playing
Hadot against Hadot. While still recognizing the irreplaceable contri-
bution of the concept of spiritual exercise, even for Buddhist Studies
scholarship, I have been trying to push back against it, arguing that
it does not account for all kinds of Buddhist practices and that it is
not the proper perspective from which we should be talking about
some Buddhist texts. I have tried to stay faithful to Hadot, however, by
recognizing how important it is to pay attention to the genres of texts.
If we wanted to see in the Ornament a manual of practice, just like if
we wanted to see in Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations a treatise making
arguments to further and reinforce Stoic philosophy, we would be
frustrated, and, more importantly, we would consider that these texts
fail to deliver their promises. But if we can understand the Ornament
on its own terms, as analyzing the path without being a practical man-
ual, we will have a chance to understand its proper perspective, and
maybe, its philosophical perspective.
Is this whole discussion motivated by a desire to label these
texts philosophical then? Sometimes labels do matter. In this case,
it is not because this label bestows upon the texts we are dealing
with a certain dignity. Rather, it is because it sheds light on their
dimension of practical training grounded on rational inquiry and
analysis. It tells us something about how to read a text, and how the
text “wants to be read.”53 In texts (re)presenting spiritual exercises,
philosophical inquiry shows itself as the cause that makes those
texts possible: philosophy is furthered in action by being embodied
in practices described in these texts. In texts like the Ornament,
philosophy comes as a “theoretical grounding” for practice: the
52
This is the reason why such a reflection necessarily questions the
usual boundaries between religion, philosophy, and literature (at least), as
Kapstein has sufficiently reminded us.
53
A similar argument is made by Stanley Cavell to an objection raised by
Richard Rorty about the unnecessary worry Cavell seems to have, according
to Rorty, about whether to classify some texts as philosophical or not. Cavell
responds that his “caring in principle [is] not at all which texts get on a list but
rather how a text is to be discovered and taken up.” See Stanley Cavell, This New
Yet Unapproachable America. Lectures after Wittgenstein after Emerson (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1989), 3-4.
Ornament reflects upon what makes a practice a means on the path,

to what kind of path among many it belongs, and to what kind of
destination it leads (such as the supreme Awakening of a Buddha
or the inferior omniscience of a Śrāvaka). It enables us to look at the
path from a philosophical perspective, and expand also the domain
of philosophy, still largely a Western province in the Academy. This
is why the term philosophy is still operative in Buddhist scholarship,
because it identifies possible ways to read and interpret texts, and
maybe, to go along with Hadot once more, how to live with them
as well.

Spiritual - Exercis & BUDDH - Path Con y Contra HADOT 37p Pierre HARTER

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Spiritual - Exercis & BUDDH - Path Con y Contra HADOT 37p Pierre HARTER

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Buddhist Spiritual Practices

Thinking with Pierre Hadot on

Edited by David V. Fiordalis

Copyright © 2018 by Mangalam Press. All rights reserved.

No part of this work may be copied, reproduced, published, distributed, or stored

Mangalam Press is an imprint of Dharma Publishing.

The cover image depicts a contemporary example of Tibetan Buddhist instructional

♾ Printed on acid-free paper. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO

Printed in the USA by Dharma Press, Cazadero, CA 95421

Some Remarks on Hadot, Foucault, and

Schools, Schools, Schools—Or,

The Spiritual Exercises of the Middle Way:

Spiritual Exercises and the Buddhist Path:

Philosophy as a Way to Die:

Learning, Reasoning, Cultivating:

Selected Titles from Dharma Publishing

O ne of the greatest contributions Pierre Hadot made to the study

reflections, a form that was taken up by Aristotle himself (though

Hadot revolutionized our understanding of Marcus Aurelius.

enough or argumentative enough to be worthy of receiving the phi-

the reader specific feelings or dispositions. Pragmatic texts are, for

Clarifying and classifying spiritual exercises in Hadot

have a tendency to be quite loose and comprehensive. Here is a

Etudes Augustiniennes, 1987), 13-58.

The exercises of application could be called “top-down

to train soldiers, athletes, or musicians to be able to perform their

situation and from oneself and to look at it from the perspective of

practices under the concept of spiritual exercises, Buddhist scholar-

Spiritual exercises and the diversity of Buddhist practice:

thinkers (which he recognizes as extremely valuable indeed), and

exercises to improve the understanding of a student, the Compendium

meditations from Marcus Aurelius, Hadot talks about his “rhetorical

The saliva and feces of these [women] come from the

instructions state.29 But there is a sense in which it is not a training

can be used either as preparations or as implementations. However

moment of radical transformation itself.36 Neither is it the application

This means that the concept of spiritual exercise is not

A theory of practice: path literature and spiritual exercises

instance, by taking theoretical approaches to map and ground the

Our reflex in approaching this text could be to look for practi-

And indeed, the Ornament is a treatise that offers a theory of

the difference between practical and theoretical accounts, we will

Śāntideva resorts to concrete examples (myself and others, the limbs

conceit of elaborations (prapañca), and the conceit of

complete map of the path, which is why it is not of direct practical

the understanding of all topics in a summarized form—an understanding

equality is an ontological consideration; for Śāntideva, the equality of

just be pushed into the religious or literary basket.52

Ornament reflects upon what makes a practice a means on the path,

You might also like