This adaptation of The Trial tells the story of K., a clerk who is arrested by policemen from an unspecified agency and for an unspecified crime. He’s allowed to continue with his life as usual except from court summons, but his case consumes him. He seeks legal help from a lawyer named Huld, solace from Huld’s nurse, Leni, and advice from a court painter, priest, and another of Huld’s clients.

The Trial is uniquely suited to India. From repealing fines issued by bent traffic coppers, to obtaining a visa (everyday I’m thankful for my overseas citizenship), to buying a house, virtually every interaction with the legal or civic system must be lubricated by a sprawling network of fixers and friends-of-friends. At its best, these bureaucracies are an idiosyncratic nuisance. At its worst, they are weaponised to facilitate corruption and stifle dissent.

So when I settled down in my seat at the Ranga Shankara Theatre (a short walk from my gaff in J.P. Nagar) to read the Director’s synopsis, I was excited by its promise to focus on exactly this contemporary parallel. “When the Right to Information Act [India’s equivalent to the Freedom of Information Act] is diluted repeatedly… to shield governing agencies from public scrutiny, how can one not be reminded of characters in Kafka’s novels?”, writes Vellani.

Sadly, the few attempts at this contemporary grounding were glibly shallow and the overall promise was broken. Perhaps this was a consequence of Vellani’s choice of reinterpreting The Trial as fragmented love stories. K.’s obsession with Leni, in her various incarnations as the court’s cleaner and his lawyer Huld’s nurse, is the play’s central theme. As he grows increasingly bewildered about his case, he oscillates between latching onto her and her purported influence over the court and Huld, and fits of paranoid suspicion about whether her influence is underpinned by sexual relationships.

Leni controlling Huld’s wheelchair.

Vellani stages Leni impeccably. When her and K. are alone, they’re in a perpetual embrace. Otherwise, she is always directly behind the figures she influences and that K. seeks to win over for his case. Despite the dialogue ostensibly concerning his ongoing case, such scenes are physically characterised by K. trying to circle around these figures to access Leni who coyly evades him. Sanjna Banerjee, the actress who plays Leni, effortlessly transitions between a seductive cleaner provoking K. and a dutiful nurse dodging his advances. Here, Vellani’s choice of costume is also effective. Even when they are not interacting, K. and Leni are tied to each other — and to the court — by the reds and yellows they wear that match the court’s insignia.

K. appealing to the audience as he stands before the judge. Observe the parallels between K’s pinstriped trousers and the bars behind the eye in the insignia, and the yellows shared by K., Leni’s tights, and the insignia.

K.’s own moral breakdown is also artfully enacted. He initially pities Huld’s other client, a dejected wretch named Bun whose case has been ongoing for so long that he sleeps in Huld’s back yard. But once K. realises that he’s been sleeping there by the grace of Leni, his compassion sours into jealousy that Leni is helping other people. With this new knowledge, his cruelty towards him is no better than Huld’s mistreatment of Bun. Worse, perhaps K. is beating bun to earn Huld’s favour.

K. initially pitying Bun.

Yet, this isn’t enough to detract from how Vellani underuses those very characters who are part of the legal system and should’ve been central vectors for Vellani to make his political commentary. The policemen explicitly reference the Right to Information Act, but that’s it. In the book, they are whipped for corruption; surely something that Vellani could riff off. Huld and the judge could’ve been pompous, lecherous officials in any country, not just India.

Those politically relevant aspects of the plot are also ignored. K.’s hearings don’t reference specific Indian legal processes. The painter suggests that K. may be accused of sedition. This is relevant to how Indian courts have widely interpreted “disaffection towards the Constitution of India” to justify censorship, but this link was again unsubstantiated. Very strangely, Vellani omits K.’s meeting with a priest who tells him a fable that’s an allegory for his predicament. An Indian reinterpretation of the fable would’ve been the perfect mechanism for political commentary.

Vellani does convey his play’s message that “a person’s struggle to establish his innocence should be…supported by everyone who cherishes the right of individuals…against the arbitrary actions of the state”. But this is a very general sentiment, and not the commentary that was promised. I would’ve minded far less if I found his political commentary to be clumsy. Sadly, I found it all but absent. As a Director, so boldly outlining your play’s purpose in the synopsis sets a very high bar for you to meet. In my opinion, Vellani fell short of it. Without this, his play leaves me entertained but dissatisfied in the important political message it fails to make.

A shortened and edited version of this piece was published in The Fence’s Capital Letter.
Enjoy some musings about a very niche industry.

As I dodged the dominatrix for the dozenth time, her paddle swishing past my tray of champagne as it nearly spilled over an intertwined couple in lace masks, I realised that this definitely wasn’t normal catering work. Neither was it normal modelling work. It sat in a murky intersection of the two. A subterranean world that exclusively hires models for the most exclusive events.

At first, I thought it was a scam. An account with only a few hundred followers commenting under my Instagram post of a modelling shoot and then DM’ing me to ask if I wanted to work at a completely unspecified event ‘for a good rate’. I was sceptical but cash-strapped; always an uneven match. I’m happy I took the risk.

Since, I’ve worked almost one hundred events with various agencies in this shadow industry. Some are serious, like industry summits surrounded by priceless artwork in oil tycoons’ Knightsbridge mansions. Some are glamorous, like fashion launches where London’s A-list celebrities mingle under chandeliers and behind hulking Russian security guards, plucking champagne flutes from mannequins like myself. Some are downright lurid, such as the lingerie event I mentioned earlier.

So, here are some do’s and don’ts if you should find yourself at such a swanky event in the near future.

If you see a waiter with a tray of full glasses, for god’s sake don’t put your dirty glass on it. Go and leave it at the bar or find someone who’s specifically taking away dirties. Nothing’s more offputting than lipstick-smudged glasses next to clean ones. They’ll make guests forsake the whole tray. And trying to manoeuvre in a packed room with a tray of glasses is risky enough without the unsolicited addition of a dirty throwing the whole thing out of balance. One hapless elderly gentleman standing next to me learned this the hard way. At first I thought he was shaking with rage but it was his teeth chattering from the icy champagne down the back of his neck.

For your own sake and everybody else’s, lighten up. One of the paradoxes of these events is that fancier events – particularly the fashion ones – have more uptight guests. I’ll offer a group some champagne. Everybody’s eyes swivel around each other’s; all is silent; the stand-off has begun. If sufficient time elapses without anybody taking a glass, nobody wants to be the first. If somebody takes one, nobody wants to be the last and suddenly everybody takes one. If you want a drink, have one! You’ll feel much less anxious if you do and hopefully stop clinging to your iPhone like a lifeline.

Don’t overcompensate on the drinks, though. You’ll just embarrass yourself and your company. At a recent event I worked, a couple went from blissfully slow-dancing together to a furiously hissed argument behind a statue. They stormed off in opposite directions, leaving a table of emptied cocktails behind them. Know when to call it a night.

The mannequin metaphor earlier is apt. Our identical uniforms — there’s sometimes even hair and make-up artists in the changing rooms — elicits some very entitled behaviour from guests. Being rude looks insecure, not classy. We’re hired for our looks but also for our charm (it’s a low bar). If you treat us respectfully, you’ll get the latter out of us and feel more at ease. I don’t take it personally and am quite pleased when an initially tricky guest realises their attitude after I keep smiling at them. But let’s get there without the preamble.

Eat your fill, don’t be shy. The wastefulness of these events is astounding. I’ve watched helplessly as tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of champagne has vanished down sinks. Trays of canapes prepared by Michelin star chefs are emptied into bin bags carried past homeless people on their way to the skip. It’s depressing, but extravagance is the game. Coy abstinence is just self-deprivation. No matter how much you eat, the organisers will continue ordering the same inordinate quantities.

Behind the opulence and authentic camaraderie between staff, there’s sadness here. It merits only a very small violin in the grand scheme of things, but the precarity is real. Almost all staff are juggling some combination of acting, modelling, voiceovers, and singing and dancing as they scrabble to make ends meet. Ageing beaus fight against the twilight of their modelling careers; in this industry, mid-thirties is getting old. The same faces vanish between event seasons, reappearing more haggard each time. This is everyone’s side hustle until it becomes their only one. The plush carpets swallow my footfalls and sometimes, as I walk the labyrinthine corridors beneath these events, I feel like a ghost in the flickering lights.

“Judge a man not by how he treats his equals but by how he treats his inferiors”. I don’t know who said that, but they must’ve been a model waiter. Take their advice at these events and everybody will have a better time for it.

One year ago, it might have looked like an innocuous advertisement. Just Anduril Industries, a Californian defence contractor founded by a virtual-reality wunderkind, promoting its British operations.

The copy (“defending British interests”) seemed unremarkable enough. So did the Union Jack fluttering in the background.

But flags and slogans tend to have meanings and those meanings tend to change with time. In 2025, as Britain’s far-right resurges and Silicon Valley’s militarists find fertile ground in Westminster, Anduril’s imagery looks less like patriotism than something wrapped up in profit and provocation .

In the past year the idea of “defending Britain” has been hijacked by a new nationalist movement. Not since the marches of the National Front in the 1970s, have the Union Jack and St George’s Cross been so weaponised by far-right groups to channel resentment against migrants and Muslims.

Under the banner of Unite the Kingdom, the 12th September rally saw Britain’s largest far-right gathering ever. And there, amid racist chants and brawls, the flags of England and the Union flew from every lamp-post.

Days earlier, Operation Raise the Colours, a grassroots campaign to hoist national flags across public buildings, had become a social-media cause célèbre, debated on Good Morning Britain and endorsed by none other than US vice-president JD Vance, who urged Britons to “push back against the crazies” opposing it.

Such rhetoric has seeped into mainstream politics. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch declares that Britain must “defend the values, language, institutions and culture that made our country great.” Populist agitator Tommy Robinson speaks of “defending the values that built Britain.” When Elon Musk joined the Unite the Kingdom rally by video link, warning that “violence is coming” and that Britain must “fight back or die”, the overlap between Silicon Valley’s libertarian bombast and Britain’s emboldened far right became impossible to ignore.

Anduril’s patriotic advertisement, launched in the same news cycle, fitted perfectly into that cultural mood music. And Action on Armed Violence’s position is that we believe they knew it would.

Anduril, founded by Palmer Luckey, the billionaire gamer-turned-arms-dealer who boasts of “not losing sleep making tools of violence to preserve freedom”, has become one of Britain’s most energetic foreign lobbyists.

Since January 2023, AOAV has established that Anduril has held at least nineteen meetings with government officials, eleven being with the Ministry of Defence; in the two years before that, it had met only twice. The company has hired at least eleven ex-MoD or armed-forces figures, among them the former operations director of Army helicopter units, and embedded itself within defence-industry associations such as ADS UK and TechUK.

In 2021, it signed a £3.8 million contract to develop an AI “base-protection” system for the MoD, and has since won a £30 million deal to supply attack drones to Ukraine.

The company’s expansion is part of a wider American incursion into British procurement. Palantir Technologies, the data-mining firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, has become Britain’s most controversial tech supplier. In September 2025 it pledged £1.5 billion of investment to make London its European headquarters and to co-develop artificial-intelligence systems for the MoD. Defence Secretary John Healey hailed it as a leap forward; critics called it dependence by another name. The promise of jobs, roughly 350 in total, did little to quiet any scepticism. The issue of ceding sovereignty – something so often raised by nativists and far-right – was rare.

Former Defence Secretary Ben Wallace bucked the trend.

“Court jesters in the UK gov,” he posted on X/Twitter on 12 September, “will lay before Trump gifts of defence contracts with US tech companies Anduril and Palantir—all at the expense of British companies. True defence collaboration is sharing and growing manufacturing jobs. It isn’t some fake London office with a few PR people and ad campaigns abusing our Union Jack.”

Palantir’s own record justifies the unease. The firm already runs Britain’s NHS Federated Data Platform, a £330 million contract linking hospital and patient data. Civil-liberties groups warn that the arrangement grants a surveillance company deep access to sensitive medical information. In the United States Palantir’s software helped Immigration and Customs Enforcement track and deport migrants under Donald Trump. In Britain, the same platform now underpins the Home Office’s post-Brexit border data system.

Both firms have bought an intimacy by hiring those who once wielded power. Palantir hired Leo Docherty, a former Conservative defence minister who was in office when an £80 million Palantir contract was signed. He now advises the firm on “AI trends and geopolitical risk.” Former MI6 chief Sir John Sawers and Labour peer Lord Watson have joined its UK board.

Anduril’s appointments follow the same pattern. The revolving door spins ever faster: a recent study by Transparency International found that more than four-fifths of ex-defence ministers and senior officials move into related industry roles.

The ideological overlap is equally striking. Luckey, a Trump donor, markets his technology as an extension of Western freedom. Thiel, an early backer of Anduril and the driving force behind Palantir, has described democracy as incompatible with liberty and support for the NHS as a form of “Stockholm syndrome.” He helped pour millions into US Republican causes.

His associate Robert Shillman, the billionaire founder of Cognex, a supplier to Lockheed Martin, is a former board member of Friends of the IDF and the benefactor behind the so called “Shillman fellowship” in 2017 to rightwing Canadian website Rebel Media – now called Rebel News – that gave Tommy Robinson about £85,000 over a year. The money that equips drones also bankrolls demagogues.

The traffic runs both ways. When protesters tried to block Thiel’s lecture at Cambridge Union last year, Nigel Farage denounced the “angry mob” trapping “my friend” inside. A few months later he flew to Washington to testify before the US House Judiciary Committee, railing against Britain’s “authoritarian censorship” under the EU Digital Services Act. His appearance was arranged by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian lobby funded by the same network that backs Thiel and Vance.

For America’s defence-tech tycoons, this convergence of cultural and military power is no accident. It is a strategy.

Britain’s establishment, desperate to project global relevance after Empire and after Brexit, offers a receptive market. A fusion of innovation rhetoric and nationalist imagery lets US firms sell both weapons and ideology under a single banner. When Luckey’s company wraps a Union Jack around its drones, it is not simply advertising. It is aligning the dark undertones of nativism with global profits unshackled from any nation.

The implications extend beyond contracts. Silicon Valley’s entry into Britain’s security apparatus entwines the country with America’s culture wars. In the name of defending freedom, it also imports the late capitalism politics of fear and grievance. Anduril’s automated sentry towers now stand watch on the Channel coast; Palantir’s algorithms manages our NHS’ hospital beds and our UK’s borders. Both endanger blurring the line between civilian and military data, between protection and surveillance.

Civil society has begun to push back.

The British Medical Association called Palantir’s NHS deal “deeply worrying.” Amnesty International demanded its cancellation. Action on Armed Violence warned that war-zone algorithms were being normalised inside civilian bureaucracy.

Yet resistance remains muted. The narrative of “innovation” has political momentum; questioning it risks being cast as unpatriotic. The result is a quiet re-engineering of British defence under American direction. Thiel’s consulting firm (co-founded with the ever-connected Peter Mandelson) once advised Palantir while lobbying for contracts. Mandelson’s subsequent resignation from a diplomatic post after his connection to the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein was exposed barely dented the firm’s progress.

What began as corporate outreach has become something deeper: a meeting of minds between Britain’s nationalist revival and America’s militarised capitalism.

The Union Jack, surely a symbol of civic and patriotic pride, now adorns both far-right nationalistic rallies and the marketing of drone companies. The story of Anduril and Palantir is not only about procurement but about ideology. It witnesses the merging of patriotic language, commercial interest and cultural resentment and turns it into a single, exportable brand.

Britain’s generals may welcome the technological edge. But as Silicon Valley’s engineers and ideologues settle into Whitehall, the question for policymakers is whether they are buying hardware. Or are they importing an entire world-view?

Image sourced from Pixabay.

The other day, I finished reading Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh. Thanks to Kyiga, my little sis, for lending me it in her quest to corral me into reading some “classics” instead of what she sees as my regressive orbits around Irvine Welsh and cyberpunk. I’ll convince her to read Neuromancer one day — or to watch the upcoming television series with me…

Vile Bodies, published in 1930 and set in the late 1920’s, captures the hedonism and uncertainty of the Roaring Twenties as it follows a cast of young aristocrats and nouveau riche — named the Bright Young Things — as they try to party their way into a post-war identity and future. Despite the characters’ desperate attempts at sophistication, forcing down unholy combinations of “sick-making” kippers and cocktails, these cannot distract from the memory of war looming behind them and threat of war looming before them. Interwoven between Waugh’s deft and amusing satirisation thus lies the novel’s darker moods, with characters frequently slipping from gaiety into existential worry such as in one of my favourite quotes: “Soon someone would say the fatal words, ‘Well, I think it's time for me to go to bed.’”

Befitting the characters’ immaturity, these historical insecurities are seldom, if ever, directly expressed by Waugh or themselves. Their social insecurity, however, is laid bare in excruciating and laughable detail, most significantly through a very 1920’s phenomenon: gossip columns. In the novel’s very first “proper” party, two gossip columnists turn to one another and say, “Hullo… Isn’t this a repulsive party. What are you going to say about it?”. After some witticisms are traded, they begin scrutinising the guests. One asks the other, “Who’s that awful-looking woman?”. Their interlocutor reassures them that “She’s no-one”. After some prodding, they admit that “As a matter of fact, that’s my mother” but “I’d sooner you didn’t [put her in]. She’s been divorced twice since then”. Their interlocutor is sympathetic: “My dear, of course not, I quite understand”. Such are the high stakes of the game that even family ties are swiftly renounced.

Emerging alongside relaxation of libel laws in the early 19th century, these gossip columns could make or break an aspiring socialite’s climb. In them, their identities would be thinly veiled — if at all — and their future standing determined by the avaricious court of public opinion. So, when the gossip columnists are on the prowl, “most of [the Bright Young Things], as a matter of fact, wanted dreadfully to be photographed and the others were frozen with unaffected terror that they might be taken unawares”.

In Waugh’s time, the allure and prestige of being selected as worthy enough to be reported on by a gossip column largely derived from their exclusivity — only a select few made it into them. But I wonder what Waugh would make of how the rationale and business model of gossip columns has been entirely inverted by social media. True, celebrity magazines are still popular but only concern uber-celebs. Now, ordinary people do their own promo for free. With tagging and hashtags etc., we draw and display our social environments, painstakingly choosing what we include and exclude. Our images are completely self-curated. A time-travelling gossip columnist from Waugh’s day would be out of a job.

Social anxiety in our age is just as potent as it was in Waugh’s. The difference is that it’s been outsourced to us through social media. Rather than relying on gossip columnists to portray them as the bohemian, urban chic, these apps make today’s Bright Young Things do the work themselves. This outsourcing has killed the sense of mystery and aloofness that’s surely intrinsic to social prestige. Readers of gossip columns would glimpse socialites only fleetingly through the columnist’s eyes as their coattails or hems swished around a banister. Imagine the same socialite alone at home obsessing over a caption or filter for their post. The allure swiftly dissipates.

Read Vile Bodies here:
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.182542

Image sourced from Pixabay, The Digital Artist

When it comes to artificial intelligence, researchers and media alike almost exclusively focus on whether AI is intelligent - but rarely question whether it’s artificial. This was the central theme occupying me throughout my time studying philosophy then neuroscience at uni, and I think it’s the most profound intersection of the two fields: to what extent do artificial learning systems reflect the structures and computations of the human brain? For almost a century, this question has been tussled over by two competing theories: connectionism and symbolism.

The debate

Connectionism was first posited in the 1940’s but really took off after 1987 when McClelland and Rumelhart published Parallel Distributed Processing, connectionism’s bold challenge to prevailing cognitive science. In connectionist models, mental representations are realised by certain patterns of activity across highly-interconnected networks of neurons or nodes. It’s meaningless to try to decompose mental representations and evaluate their structure, since it’s the activity patterns that counts. Learning in any domain is underpinned by essentially the same statistical algorithms.

In the intervening period between the 1940s and PDP, an alternative paradigm that we can loosely term symbolism was dominant, thanks to Chomsky’s and Turing’s visionary work throughout the 1950s. In symbolist models, mental representations consist of the application of innate mental rules to highly structured constituents. Decomposing mental representations and evaluating their structure is highly meaningful; it’s the rationale behind the entire enterprise of generative grammar. Learning in language is underpinned by radically - even intrinsically - different computation as, say, motor learning.

Symbolists have long argued that certain linguistic phenomena cannot be satisfactorily modelled by connectionist systems. Take syntactical overgeneralisation, whereby language learners extrapolate a rule beyond the scope of their experience with it (e.g. a toddler saying “feets” after hearing “hands”). This was a central symbolist argument for the existence of innate linguistic rules (in this example, governing pluralisation of common nouns), such as in Chomsky 1957. In their 1988 paper, the classic critique of connectionism, Fodor & Pylyshyn argue that connectionist architectures are inherently unable to model such rule-evidencing behaviours.

Some recent research, however, has found that connectionist LLMs can mimic syntactic overgeneralisation and even outperform expert humans in making judgements thereof. Other research has found them to mimic or outperform humans at other non-linguistic tasks that still require the kind of rule-manipulation symbolists concern themselves with. These successes do support the notion that connectionist architectures can model human cognition, at least in language.

More connected isn’t more resilient!

Let’s turn the question on its head, though. Just as interesting - and much less explored - is whether AI mimics when language goes wrong. A fascinating property of human language functions is that they can be very dissociable. Since 1861, it’s been clear that lesions to brain areas underpinning language production can significantly impair it while leaving language comprehension intact, and vice versa. Critically, this dissociability shows that the neural architecture of human language systems has a certain minimum degree of disconnection.

In fact, across the whole brain disconnection between areas is just as striking as connection. The total number of neurons making connections within a hemisphere is a staggering 6 x 10^9. But there are only around 10^8 axons (neurons’ projections that transmit electrical impulses) in all the brain’s major long-range tracts combined. Of all the cells making connections between different areas across the brain’s surface, only 2% have access to the long-range tracts even within one hemisphere.

I’m not a computer scientist, but here’s my understanding of the upshot of this striking difference between the brain and LLMs in which virtually all nodes are interconnected. LLMs have been susceptible to catastrophic forgetting whereby redistribution of network weightings while learning a new task erases or damages representations underpinning a previous task. Like, say, learning to play the guitar and then forgetting how to play the violin.

Simply adding more nodes or hidden layers (intervening computations between input and output) doesn’t always fix things. Tellingly, catastrophic forgetting is best mitigated when researchers implement in LLMs the kind of post-learning structural changes that actually occur in the brain. For example, during new learning some nodes’ weights are pulled back to their previous values proportionally to how important those nodes are for maintaining previous learning. For very important nodes, it’s then only under very specific conditions that their weights are changed by new learning. This is inspired by discoveries that the brain makes similar adjustments to changes in synaptic weighting that consolidate learning. (If you’re interested, these adjustments in both brains and LLMs are often applications of Bayesian statistics).

Now, the question becomes: under what conditions can LLMs achieve maximal performance with minimal connectivity? And, which network architectures best exhibit the functional dissociability and resilience to damage of the brain? Then, we can seek to implement the computational analogues of increasingly sophisticated neural structures — such as the corpus callosum (which connects the hemispheres), the arcuate fasciculus (the white-matter tract connecting multiple critical language areas), and the various long-range tracts across the cortex — and see how LLMs fare after we selectively damage them.

Why is this important?

Some of you may be asking, “what’s the point of building LLMs on human neural architecture if they can replicate or outperform human cognition anyway?”. It’s a fair question. As discussed, doing so can overcome some of the unique weaknesses of LLMs. But beyond this, experimenting with incorporating and then damaging neural architecture in LLMs lets researchers enhance their resilience and also observe unique behaviours that may only be elicited through breakdown.

The International Energy Agency predicts that demand from AI data centres will quadruple by 2030 and be the biggest driver of data centres’ requiring almost as much electricity as Japan. Even today, ChatGPT (an LLM) consumes 100,000 times more power than the average American household. Clearly, any success in making AI need less power is a major win for the climate.

Most of all, the human brain is the most beautiful and complicated object in the known universe. That’s also true of you, reader. Implementing human neural architecture in LLMs reminds us of the sophistication of human cognition and to be careful when thinking we’re progressing in understanding it.

To the system theorist, system failure is more enlightening than system success. Even if LLMs and AI can beat us on our best days, they’ll never display the graceful dysfunction of machines that are living.

Unsettling faceless deity I saw painted at Norbulingka Monastery, Bylakuppe, Karnataka, India

My Ama-la is Tibetan and a devout Tibetan Buddhist. All but one of my six Tibetan uncles are or were monks. I spent a year-and-a-half of my childhood living in a Tibetan settlement in Karnataka, South India. All my life, I’ve been raised as a Tibetan Buddhist, and as an adult I deliberately practice it. But as I grow older and occasionaly more self-aware, I’m realising my interpretation of Tibetan (and broader) Buddhism contains an implicit yet salient Modernist streak.

These Modernist interpretations can definitely be attractive, particularly for their rational emphasis. Yet they also risk being individualistic, isolating the individual from Buddhism’s rich cosmology of sentient beings and also from the important cultural flavours of whichever Buddhist tradition they hail from. The risk is being a Buddhist in a vacuum, so to speak. Buddhism has at its heart wisdom and compassion; Modernist interpretations can aid the former, but often not the latter.

Tibetan Buddhism is very heterogenous, with some parts more austere and others more colourful. On one hand, it has extremely sophisticated metaphysical frameworks and meditative practices inherited from the Madhyamika school of Northern India; on the other hand, it has a dizzying cosmology bursting with different realms and types of being, inherited from Hinduism and indigenous pre-Buddhist Tibetan religions, that are scattered across ridiculous scales of space and time (a single kalpa, the Hindu and Buddhist unit of time, lasts just over 16million years) [1]. Approximately, these different austere and colourful aspects of Tibetan Buddhism can be mapped onto a continuum, with each practitioner’s interpretation falling somewhere between the poles.

Interpretations of Tibetan (and broader) Buddhism which fall towards the more austere poles can be termed Modernist, as posited by David McMahan in his 2008 book, The Making of Buddhist Modernism [2]. McMahan identifies three central Modernist streaks: Western monotheism; rationalism and scientific naturalism; and Romantic expressivism. I understand the last as emphasising and legitimising the individual’s subjective inner world as a source of valid spiritual experience, as contrasted to the Enlightenment’s extra-human rationalism (but don’t quote me on that lol). Such Modernist interpretations simultaneously de-emphasise elaborate cosmology, ritual and ceremony, and indigenous/folk beliefs.

McMahan argues that, since the 19th century, interpretations of Buddhism are increasingly influenced by these streaks. The effect of this is that “elements of Buddhism that many now consider central to the tradition—meditation, internal experience, individual authority—are so constructed because of the gravitational pull of modernity” [3]. Of course, there’s conceptual difficulties in disentangling Modernism from the many Buddhist traditions (e.g. Zen and the Forest Traditions) that emphasised these elements centuries before Modernism existed. But still, McMahan’s argument does accurately describe a shift in at least Western interpretations of Buddhism. And also to an extent mine.

For example, when it comes to interpreting samsara and the realms of rebirth, many practitioners adopt a realist approach: they believe that the 6 realms actually exist in space-time as ours does, and so do the beings that inhabit them. This is probably near-universal among my grandparents’ generation of Tibetans born and raised in Tibet. (Of course, there’s an interesting class stratification in that nomads like them likely only subscribe to realist interpretations while educated classes may also subscribe to other more conceptual interpretations).

I’ve instead always adopted a cognitive interpretation of samsara: the 6 realms and their beings don’t exist in space-time, but each realm and its beings should rather be understood as metaphorical for a state of mental affliction (e.g. the pretna (hungry ghost) realm as symbolising greed/attachment), and samsara itself as the complete set of mental afflictions.

I’d say my interpretation fulfils McMahan’s Modernist criteria: its atheism is even more Modernist than Western monotheism, it’s scientifically naturalistic by not making ontological commitments to other worlds, and the relating of each realm to my own unique mental phenomena relates to Romantic expressivism’s focus on the subjective inner world.

Avoiding any ontological commitments to other realms is surely an advantage of my interpretation and Modernist interpretations in general. But if we commit to the psychological metaphor, it gets harder and harder to retain a sense of these afflictions as we splinter deeper and deeper into the subdivisions of samsara and the metaphorical beings inhabiting it. Conceptually, this psychological interpretation is still coherent: each realm and being is a metaphor for afflictions I can in theory experience and should urgently avoid. But as beings and realms grow more and more distant from the human realm, the identification with them becomes harder. Their distance makes them colourless.

There’s a greater disadvantage of my Modernist interpretation. If my motivation to escape samsara is to have a compassionate basis, as all schools of Buddhism exhort it must, this compassion is for myself or, at most, other humans and animals (i.e. the only beings I interact with). By seeing beings in other realms as merely metaphorical vessels for my own experiences, I thereby limit my compassion. Wouldn’t believing that these other realms and beings actually exist and are also suffering dramatically increase the scale of my compassion and motivation? Wouldn’t such belief also reinforce my gratitude for this rare, precious human life and opportunity to escape samsara? Wouldn’t it make me feel less alone to believe that I am but one of countless beings all driven by the same mental and emotional afflictions? Wouldn’t it increase my reverence for the Buddha’s teachings that they may be the path out of this maze?

Such an ontological commitment is also much more congruent with the rest of Buddhist teachings, in which many schools describe events as unfolding on such dramatic timescales as kalpas. Some Buddhist sutras (including the Diamond and Lotus Sutras [4]) predict dark ages of spiritual degeneration whose duration is quantified in kalpas. The Buddha Maitreya is foretold to appear at a distant time to rescue sentient beings from this dark age, and his teachings foretold to last 360,000 years [5]. Sufficient negative karma causes beings to be reborn in naraka, the different hell realms, where they stay for incomprehensibly long kalpas.

Nowhere, perhaps, are Modernist interpretations of Buddhism more salient than meditation. While historically the majority of Buddhists have not practiced meditation or centrally featured it in their practice, it is at the core of many, if not all, schools. Since the hippie trail of the ‘60’s, influential Western and non-Western Buddhist teachers like Joseph Goldstein and Chögyam Trungpa have taught meditation to Western audiences such that it requires minimal doctrinal commitment. Secular meditation has particularly proliferated online through self-help apps like Headspace. Get this: Headspace had an estimated revenue of $135mn in 2013; following its merger with mental healthcare platform Ginger, its net worth is now $3bn [6].

In Modernist fashion, these New-Age meditation practices represent meditation as a means for unlocking creative impulses, accessing the unconscious, and recognising wonder in everyday moments: they’re internally-oriented. This internal orientation broadly aligns with Theravadan, Forest School, and Zen meditative traditions. But it clashes most starkly with the externally-oriented elements of the meditative traditions of Tibetan Buddhism and Mahayana Buddhism (although the latter certainly have internally-oriented elements). All Mahayana Buddhist traditions have as their goal the liberation of all sentient beings from samsara, and their meditative traditions rigorously include meditating to generate compassion (for example, in Tönglen meditation in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, the object of meditation is the suffering of sentient beings). In Tibetan Buddhism, the practitioner has as the object of meditation their guru whom they imagine to embody Bodhisattvas’ enlightened qualities, and also the bhavachakra (the visual representation of samsara as a wheel).

I certainly believe that secular meditation is beneficial, and meditation definitely isn’t even a uniquely Buddhist practice. But these benefits are likely to be largely cognitive, refining one’s attention perhaps, but not expanding their compassion. It is only through externally-oriented meditation that this latter benefit can arise. Also in meditation, it seems, Modernist interpretations of Buddhism are again counterproductive to the generation of compassion that is indispensable to Mahayana and Tibetan Buddhism.

There’s also much in Buddhist philosophy of mind that could be construed as Modernist, specifically in the interesting parallels between the doctrine of anatta (no-self) and Freudian and Jungian psychology. Briefly, anatta posits that our naïve belief in and seeming experience of an enduring and unique self is illusory. This false self is a conceptual and phenomenological construct that exists wholly relatively and dependently upon ceaselessly fluctuating mental and sensory perception (the five skandhas that compose the mind).

Freudian and Jungian models of the self as strongly influenced by unconscious, more primitive drives have in common with anatta the thesis that the “self” to a significant extent supervenes upon deeper mental and emotional currents. Further, Buddhist and psychoanalytical traditions both characterise these currents as debased, dangerous, and to be tamed.

I suppose the critical difference is that Freud maintained that we should understand these unconscious drives and guard against their influence, while Buddhism believes that mental afflictions (the Three Poisons of ignorance, greed/attachment, and aversion), and thereby clinging to the self, can be entirely overcome. Here, we see what I think is the deepest difference between Modernist psychology and Buddhist psychology: the former sees spiritual progression as achieved through understanding, valorising, and identifying with the self, whereas the latter sees it as achieved through stopping our preoccupation with the self entirely.

Modernist interpretations definitely shouldn’t be applied to the cultural practices of Buddhist peoples, and rob them of much of their meaning. Culturally, Tibetan cultural practices are inseparable from Tibetan Buddhism. In sang offerings, smoke is burnt as offerings for all sentient beings; prayer wheels are spun to accumulate merit; as a meditative technique, practitioners often imagine their guru to have the qualities of a Buddha; walking kora (circumambulating around a stupa) represents the turning of the wheel of Samsara and accumulates meritorious karma; on Losar, Tibetan New Year, a burning torch is carried throughout the house to expel malignant spirits. These practices have inherent cultural value even if their spiritual aspects are minimised, but from a Tibetan’s perspective, understanding and performing them with their spiritual function in mind reveals their full importance.

Modernist perspectives on Buddhism can eliminate much ontological baggage while retaining much of the sophistication of Buddhist theory (particularly Buddhist psychology). But at the risk of isolating the individual from the other beings in samsara and thereby limiting their compassionate motivation to escape samsara for the benefit of others, and neglecting the important spiritual dimension to Buddhist people’s cultural practices. These risks also hold true for meditation: I meditate lots and it’s benefitted me greatly. Bare equinamity. But my benefit is for others’ benefit, not just mine. Besides, in our current environmental apocalypse, maybe it’s high time we remember beings in other realms. To be a Tibetan Buddhist is to inherit an inextricable intertwinement of spirituality and culture - some of which I freely admit is superstitious and potentially distracting from core Buddhist teachings.
Still, I’d rather be part of a living, embodied tradition than a Buddhist in a vacuum.

[1] Epstein, Ronald B.(2002). Buddhist Text Translation Society's Buddhism A to Z p. 204. Buddhist Text Translation Society

[2] McMahan, David L. (2008), The Making of Buddhist Modernism, Oxford University Press.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Nattier 1991, pp. 35-37.

[5] Bangkok and Lumbini: The Fragile Palm Leaves Foundation and The Lumbini International Research Institute. pp. 122 and 232.

[6] Heater, Brian (2021-08-25). "Headspace and Ginger are merging to form Headspace Health". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2024-03-10.

Image generated using Microsoft Designer.

Chances are, reader, that you’re a 20-something-year-old student or recent graduate in or around London. You’ve also probably been to a jazz night, or at the very least, heard of the various jazz nights across London and the rest of England. They’re an integral part of nightlife. Trendy students and trendy young professionals alike flock to them for a classy night out. But on closer inspection, what is this ubiquitous jazz night?

I think it’s quite a tricky concept to pin down. Not least because I think organisers don’t have in mind people who actively listen to and seek jazz, or blues, or swing, or bebop, etc. Nor does everybody who attends them actively listen to or seek these genres. At least, that hasn’t particularly been mine or my mates’ motives the times we’ve gone. I don’t think jazz nights aren’t designed for jazz lovers and they aren’t particularly attended by them either.

I’m no jazz connoisseur (shame, shame) but from my experience I don’t think jazz nights even play exclusively jazz music. I’ve heard things that can be reasonably construed as folk, arguably interpreted as soul, and occasionally darkly cast as R&B. I’m sure many jazz nights have featured outfits that don’t even have the full holy trinity of piano, sax, and trumpet, or have some more eclectic instruments rarely seen in classic jazz ensembles. Of course, a jazz night needn’t play exclusively jazz music to still warrant being called a jazz night. But surely all these very sonically different “jazz nights” can’t be playing the same thing.

Then, if jazz nights don’t exclusively play jazz, and aren’t marketed to nor attended by jazz lovers, what’s going on? How can we reconcile their evident appeal with their apparent indeterminacy? After all, everybody loves a jazz night.

I think it comes down to two aspects of jazz, one conventional and one inherent.

Jazz is inherently very vague. Don’t get me wrong, we can speak of jazz music as a coherent and distinct genre. I’m not an anti-realist about jazz. But I think there’s another way to understand jazz which illuminates the haziness of jazz nights. Miles Davis said that “If you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note that you play that determines if it’s good or bad”. To my layman’s knowledge, jazz can thus be defined negatively as rebellion against traditional musical genres and styles, rather than trying to define it as one in itself. This could explain why jazz nights are so amorphous.

Jazz is also conventionally recognised as cool, almost universally so. I’ve never in my almost-23-years heard anyone say they don’t like jazz, and if we go with its negative definition, such a sentiment would philosophically be very hard to express. How do you say you don’t like something that has very few positive features? (“Positive” in the philosophical sense of “inherent”.)
Liking jazz is sophistication. Liking jazz is classy. Liking jazz is conceptually unassailable.

Given jazz’s inherent vagueness and conventional coolness, then, perhaps these are what reconcile jazz nights’ appeal yet indefiniteness. Jazz’s coolness means jazz nights attract such a trendy crowd. Cue the skinny scarves and Vogues. And possibly the pretentious film chat from donnies in the smoking area.

And jazz’s inherent vagueness means you don’t actually need to be able to justify exactly what you like about jazz or what jazz is. Of course, maybe that’s jazz’s whole point. Or, to be tongue-in-cheek and cynical, maybe that’s why anybody can go to a jazz night and be safe if interrogated.

Vagueness and coolness interact. The mysteriousness of jazz adds to its glamour. Jazz night goers can share in a mutual apprehension of jazz’s sublimity that conveniently avoids having to say what it is or why they like it. They have a kind of musical-spiritual bond that each understands without having to explain. Louis Armstrong said, “If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know”. I wonder what he’d make of this article.

Coolest is the jazz night goer who, when being asked why they like jazz, places their finger to their lip and gestures around them to the music’s brilliance.

Jazz mysticism. An apophatic epistemology of jazz. Jazz but Wittgensteinian.

We can even formalise this in a fun way. If we’re defining jazz as flouting of convention, the further it gets from the jazz norm (“actual” jazz), the jazzier it becomes. Therefore, theoretically, as jazz nights play less and less “actual” jazz (and I claim no knowledge of what that is), the less and less goers can be expected to say what they like and why they like it.

If j represents deviance from “actual” jazz, and e represents how much a jazz liker can be expected to explain themselves, e = 1/j. Representing C as the jazz night goer’s coolness, C is inversely proportional with e.

Then we get the very jazzy equation:

Don’t worry, I don’t have some pathological bone to pick with jazz nights or with people who go to them. I’d be a hypocrite and soon warring my mates if I did. I’ve just had this idea brewing the last couple jazz nights I’ve gone to and thought it’d be fun to expand.

Kyiga, my sister, makes a great further point. This coolness is also why at lots of jazz nights, nobody’s actually dancing. They’re just doing that dead two-step. You know the one I mean. Surely this is directly attributable to a “too cool to dance” mentality (to be fair, that may well be unconscious) that often pervades jazz nights.

Back in the heyday of African-American jazz and jazz nights before the genre came into contact with stiffer white audiences, it was all about dancing. You didn’t go there to all sway in front of the band facing the same way. You went there to frenetically dance with your mates. The actual jazz band was there to be heard, not stood in front of and watched.

Jazz’s vagueness is what makes it so rich and adaptable. But its coolness is what makes jazz nights increasingly flavourless. To its original African-American creators, jazz was their natural sound. Not the mystical genre that’s largely been mystified by white audiences. As Nina Simone said “Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music”. People, we need to resist this. If there’s one headline of this article, it’s: MAKE JAZZ NIGHTS UNCOOL AGAIN. Stop deeping them as oh-so-cultured.

It has to be said that, theoretically, you could also define jungle by its subversion of traditional styles (i.e. in how it warps and chops hip-hop drum samples, etc.). There’s actually quite an interesting take on jungle as jazz in the digital age. Some of the best jungle producers were trained in jazz. LTJ Bukem [1], unarguably one of the greatest jungle producers of all time, was.

Empirically, jungle ravers’ liking of jungle may well be underpinned by the same kind of ineffable mutual consensus as jazz night goers’ liking of jazz. This is empirically investigable:

“Oi mate, why do you like jungle?”

But I have other mates who’d definitely be sore if I extend this parallel, and I’m much more into jungle than jazz myself. So I’m stopping here.

You’re always safe going to a jazz night. Jazz’s vagueness is a get-out-of-jail card for having to explain what you think it is or why you like it. But don’t be too cool for jazz school. Jazz nights are for participants, not audiences. Next time you and your mates roll out to a jazz night, remember my words. And for the love of God, leave that two-step at the door.

[1] https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DZ06evO3v6qKI?si=929c846022c0419a

Image sourced from Microsoft Office.

Having just moved to London this October and trying to get a foothold, I ended up working at an undisclosed pub in Islington for a month. It was this experience that got me thinking about managers. Almost all working people have some kind of manager. They’re a central figure in the workplace who can often massively influence its productivity and social fabric. Some are lovely, some are arseholes. Managers, for all their (often arbitrary) power, are still humans.

However, here we aren’t interested in managers as individuals but rather in their role and effect on the places they work. We’re primarily concerned with whether managers generally help or hinder their workplace, and how necessary they even are at all. Productive leaders or useless bureaucrats: how defensible is the manager?

In hospitality establishments, people who have been somewhere longer tend to be allocated nicer jobs. My pub wasn’t any exception, and as the new guy my role was as barback and floor staff. I would load and unload the dishwasher, and collect and restock glasses and tableware. I didn’t see anything particularly problematic about this. I wasn’t the only person with these specific roles, and every member of staff found themselves sometimes doing it.

What was problematic, however, was how many people wanted to be serving drinks compared to how many wanted to be barbacking. Since barbacks exist to enable bartenders to solely focus on bartending, and barbacking is more labour-intensive than bartending, there should obviously be more of the former than the latter. Even more obviously when the pub is busier.

However, efficient allocation of labour wasn’t to be. Everybody wanted to bartend and nobody wanted to barback. This was even truer when the pub was very busy: a birds-eye view would see a melee of staff jostling behind the narrow bar and a few solitary barbackers teetering their way through the throng.

I can’t really blame other staff members for wanting to bartend. I sometimes escaped the uphill tedium of barbacking by bartending, too. I also understand the intuition that a pub wants to serve as many drinks possible in as short a time. But without sufficient barbacking, ramping up serving will only make the bottleneck approach faster - as it did many times while I worked there. Better to ensure a steady supply of glasses etc. to fuel steady serving. However, it isn’t up to ordinary staff to orchestrate labour to achieve this, especially on stressful nights. This falls squarely to the manager.

Which is why I was very indignant to often see certain (not by any means all) managers sloping off to the staff room during these busy periods, ostensibly to perform manager duties like admin or ordering new stock. At this pub, managers performed both general duties (bartending and barbacking) and specifically managerial (admin) duties. Their performing both duties was precisely what allowed them to shirk general duties for managerial duties when general duties were needed the most. The Kafkaesqueness of this absurd situation is not lost on me: staff jostling to get behind the bar more than customers jostling to get to it; managers giving themselves precisely those tasks that are the least urgent. (In darker moods, I suspected they created some from scratch). Around half the staff at my pub were managers - a ridiculous amount.

This shirking is a striking example of what John Gall in his insightful critique of management theory, Systemantics [1], calls the Big-Bang Theorem of Systems Cosmology: Systems Tend To Expand To Fill The Known Universe. When the situation demands allocating labour to general duties, organisational structures which assign managers both managerial and general duties let managers pick and choose which duties they attend to.

How can this be overcome? Specialisation. If managers must exist at all, they should exclusively concern themselves with managerial duties - as well as perhaps meet-greet-seat duties in hospitality industries. This way, there is clear distinction between actual work on one hand, and derivative work on the other hand (work derived from actual work, such as assigning tasks to workers or ensuring production targets are met). Actual workers can specialise in actual work, and managers can specialise in derivative work. Insufficient differentiation between these two types of work creates the situations described by Putt’s Law [2] in The Successful Technocrat: people manage what they do not understand, or understand what they do not manage.

Such situations are also created by tragic occurrences of the Peter Principle expounded in 1969 by satirist Laurence J. Peter [3]: workers skilled at their assigned job are promoted to jobs they are unskilled at, and their usefulness eventually plateaus. The lesson from the Peter Principle is that promotion rewards the worker at the expense of the system. Instead, an organisation should reward the skilled worker to incentivise them to stay in their current position. Many of the managers in my pub were probably perfectly fine barbacks or bartenders - they were only promoted because of the Peter Principle, after which their increased pay gave them no incentive to return to their previous roles.

Separating actual and derivative work not only increases efficiency - it also better delineates how blame is assigned. If the pub encounters bottlenecks or cock-ups, fault lies either with how the actual workers are labouring (e.g. if the barbacking is lazy) or how the system is structured (e.g. if the workers are inefficiently organised). Managers should be blamed for the latter fault. However, if managers are also performing actual work, determining whether cock-ups are caused by actual workers, the system, or managers becomes much murkier. Curbing the manager makes the entire system fairer. (Interesting that efficiency and fairness seem to drive each other. Perhaps management theory could be considered an unrecognised branch of Ethics…).

Systems get in the way. As soon as a task is artificially divided between people, maintaining this division prevents it being completed most efficiently. This is inevitable, but managers participating in the task makes things worse (especially for highly specialised or technical tasks). Instead, managers should recognise the system’s unique blindspots and pitfalls and minimise their damage as much as they can. (Incidentally, this makes a competent manager best placed for customer service since they have an overarching insight into where things go wrong). Once system objectives have been established, managers should also ensure that every member of staff understands and works towards them.

Crucially, if the system is by some miracle working, do not get in the system’s way. Successful systems are never due to the manager’s continued efforts. They are due to managers arranging the system and workers in the best initial configuration, and then swiftly stepping back.
In a word, managers should not be workers. They should first be architects, and then caretakers.

Well, I hope this has been thought-provoking, and maybe even cathartic. You and I operate in complex systems everyday, not least of all in our jobs. If your job is frustrating you, chances are at least part of it is muddled labour allocation overcomplicating things.
So, managers: assets or liabilities? In most complex systems, almost always liabilities. At best, a necessary evil whose rare benefits ironically come from minimal intervention. I hope you don’t think I inherently dislike managers. They’re often also just fulfilling the role assigned to them. I just resent organisational structures in which a manager can pick and choose when to be an actual worker. They should be one or the other.

[1] Gall, J. (1977) Systemantics. Wildwood House. PDF.
A sincere must-read for anyone interested in how to make things work.

[2] Putt, A. (2010) Putt’s law and the successful technocrat: How to win in the information age. Hoboken: Wiley-IEEE Press Imprint John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.

[3] Peter, L.F. and Hull, R. (1969) The peter principle. New York: William Morrow.

Image source Adobe

In Dharamshala, robes and dreadlocks alike swim past each other through the mountain air and the rickety streets. SIM-cards and incense sit side by side on the hawkers’ shelves, and the sound of Indian or Tibetan rap emanating from their tinny speakers mingles with the chants of prayer coming from the nearby temples.

But in this maze of race and creeds, no one species stands out more than the hippies.

The sandals, the tattoo of the Sanskrit “OM”, the outrageously long prayer-bead necklaces that would have put my devout Tibetan Buddhist grandmother to shame. All the motifs were there, and my sister and I played an inverted game of Where’s Wally of spotting the differences between them.

They tend to graze in Dharamkot. Dharamkot is a sprawl of open-air cafes and hostels in which one can lounge on one of the many scattered divans and admire the mountainous views while breathing in the fresh air mixed with a whiff of Himalayan hashish. I’ve spent some pleasant afternoons there myself.

Between cups of chai, I got talking to some of the hippies. Their eyes lit up with a fervent zeal as they told me about the many discount yoga courses and meditation retreats advertised on the walls between the painted Buddhas and Zodiac drapes. With many a “dude” and “totally” just in case I wasn’t getting it, they said how much they enjoyed the courses and how much they’d improved their wellbeing.
But when I asked them whether they’d been getting into the spiritual traditions behind them, I was often met with blank stares – with the exception of one guy whose Theory of Everything sounded like he’d put the Bhagavad Gita and a poorly-written physics textbook in a blender and was reading out from shreds at random.

I soon recognised a disconnect between the activities the hippies were doing and the traditions they were surrounded by.More to the point, I recognised a disconnect between theory and practice.

For I could see they were feeling good, drifting around with serene half-smiles crinkling their hooded (often redded) eyes. So while they were clearly enjoying their practice, they didn’t cognitively understand it nor its benefits. This is problematic. If the benefits are not supported by analysis, this subjective wellbeing gained from their practices will remain transitory and easily lost – worse, it can give the illusion of genuine insight and discourage critical reflection.

I might sound sanctimonious or judgemental, and I hope the discerning reader can tell I’m being deliberately satirical, but I’m trying to raise a deeper philosophical point here. And this is where we bring in Je Tsongkhapa.

The 14th century Tibetan monk known as Tsongkhapa is arguably the most important figure in Tibetan Buddhism. He was the Great Synthesiser who resolved the conflicting interpretations around the Madhyamika view of emptiness, establishing a clear ontological foundation of Tibetan Buddhism and reinstituting metaphysical and epistemological analysis within the Tibetan method.
He simultaneously integrated these insights with the Tibetan meditative and yogic traditions, thereby preserving the bridge between the two as paths to enlightenment. There is a comparison to be made with Aquinas seeking to provide a rigorous Aristotelian philosophical foundation and method to Christianity while preserving Christianity’s content.

Tskongkhapa’s philosophical concerns were directly inspired by his observations of the state of Tibetan Buddhism in his time. In an open letter named Queries from a Pure Heart Calling Attention to Crucial Religious Issues, he lamented what he saw as excessive emphasis placed upon practice and insufficient attention to theory.

Many Tibetan monks sought to make a name for themselves as meditative or yogic masters, immersing themselves in these practices without first understanding the philosophical framework around them. Worse, Tsongkhapa says, some monks did so in a performative way to show off their prowess and attract students and enhance their prestige. Thus the practice becomes increasingly divorced from the theory.

Not only is such a divorce between theory and practice detrimental for the quality of an intellectual tradition, it’s also damaging to the individual practitioner. Yoga and meditation have immense potential to better one’s quality of life, but their practice should be combined with conceptual analysis to truly understand their nature and benefits. Or else the subjective feelings of their benefits will be illusory and depend on the context of practice.

The further danger is that these subjective feelings of benefit can make us complacent. We sit back and congratulate ourselves, thinking we have cracked it already, and this disincentivises us to double-check our satisfaction. Thus this imbalance can be self-perpetuating and take us further and further from progress.

The hippies can’t stay in Dharamshala forever. All yoga courses must come to an end, and that mountainous view and hashish air will at some point be replaced by the sights and smells of their old or new lives. If their benefit from their time here is to be enduring, they should reinforce their practice with understanding of the spiritual traditions they are drawn from.

Maybe I should invert my own advice. I can write about as much Buddhist theory as I want, but not applying it to my own life and conduct makes me a Substack Sophist. If the Dharamshala locals see some incongruous Air Max among the usual sandals outside the temple entrance, you know why.