Introduction to the Blog

The purpose of this blog is to provide a comparative account and analysis of various spiritual and ethical ideas from around the world. 

I am not an expert in all spiritual and ethical ideas, so I will try to limit my posts to what I know.

In this introductory post, I feel obliged to provide a few definitions, and to clarify the transliteration systems I will be using for terms from Sanskrit, Chinese, and other non-Western languages.  I do not consider this necessary with Greek terms, even though they were originally in a language with a non-Latin script.

"Spirituality": To be honest, I do not like this word.  Its meaning is quite amorphous, and its connotations are almost always uncertain.  However, other words that could potentially serve as alternatives, such as mysticism, yoga (originally, it meant more than just body and breath exercises), metaphysics, and religion, are equally problematic.  In this series, "spirituality" and "spiritual" connote the theory and practice of awakening to higher or more expansive modes of consciousness than the ordinary waking state, whether through union with a divinity, concentration on a specific idea, thing, or phrase, contemplation of the nature of reality, a mindfulness or awareness practice, or any other means.

"Yoga": despite its modern connotations limiting it to physical exercise and breath control (even Hatha Yoga, upon which all or virtually all modern Western yoga practices are based, was not originally limited to these two things), yoga literally means union and/or discipline (it is, in fact, a cognate of the modern English word "yoke").  The early forms of it in classical India included what we would call meditation, concentration, contemplation, morality, and ritual observances.  In the sense in which I will use it, it can refer to all of these things.  In fact, it can refer to everything aimed at achieving "spiritual" goals as I define the term.  (I realize that it is problematic to apply this term outside of its original South Asian context, just as it is problematic to apply terms like spirituality or religion to non-Western phenomena, but without such use of terms to translate or interpret the practices and beliefs of multiple cultures, it would be virtually impossible to understand anything in the world that did not occur in one's culture without first becoming fluent in the linguistic and cultural patterns of every culture and sub-culture and sub-sub-culture, and, heck, every particular family and every particular individual, in the world.)

"Ethics": this refers to the theoretical dimensions of morality.  Ethics is the study of the basis for evaluating actions, ideas, people, and other sentient beings as good or evil, or good or bad.  It is the study of the basis of all value judgments that do not concern inanimate objects and non-sentient life-forms.  Value judgments that concern inanimate objects, non-sentient life-forms, and even the mere form or structure of ideas, people, and other sentient beings is covered by the branch of philosophy known as aesthetics.  In my look at various ethical alternatives, I will do my best to analyze the practical dimensions of each variety of ethical theory.  I will refer to these practical dimensions as "morality."  My look at various moralities will be descriptive first, and evaluative later.

When transliterating Chinese, I will use the Pinyin system rather than the Wade-Giles system.  In the Pinyin system, the capital of China is translated "Beijing," while in the Wade-Giles system it is transliterated "Peking."  The (mythical?) founder of Daoism (which would be spelled Taoism if I were following Wade-Giles conventions) is Laozi rather than Lao Tzu in the Pinyin system.

When transliterating Sanskrit and other South Asian languages of the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family, I will not use diacritical marks.  I will also avoid the use of double vowels to connote longer as opposed to shorter vowels because, frankly, I don't think it aids in the correct pronunciation of words unless one constantly refers to a pronunciation guide, which makes reading tedious. Thus, if you want to know how to pronounce these words correctly in their original languages, you will need to look elsewhere.