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David Robert Loy (born 1947) is an American author and authorized teacher in the Sanbo Kyodan lineage of Japanese Zen Buddhism.[1][2]
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Loy was born in the Panama Canal Zone. His father was in the U.S. Navy so the family traveled a great deal. He attended Carleton College in Minnesota, and spent his junior year abroad studying philosophy at King’s College, University of London. After graduation in 1969 he moved to San Francisco and then to Hawaii where he began to practice Zen Buddhism.[1]
Loy received an M.A. in Asian philosophy from the University of Hawaii in 1975, and his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1984 from the National University of Singapore, where he was teaching.[3] In 1984 Loy moved to Kamakura, Japan to continue Zen practice with Yamada Koun Roshi, director of the Sanbo Kyodan. He was professor of philosophy and religion at Bunkyo University in Chigasaki, Japan until January 2006, when he accepted the Besl Family Chair of Ethics/Religion & Society, a visiting appointment with Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio that ended in September 2010.[3] In 1971, he began practicing Zen with Yamada Koun Roshi and Robert Aitken in Hawaii. He completed formal koan study in 1988 with Yamada Koun and received the dharma name Tetsu-un, "Wisdom Cloud".[3] Loy's main research interest is the dialogue between Buddhism and modernity, especially the social implications of Buddhist teachings. In addition to academic lectures, he offers workshops and leads meditation retreats in the U.S. and internationally.
In addition to many scholarly papers and popular articles, Loy is the author of several books on comparative philosophy and social ethics, including:
Nonduality focuses on the nonduality of subject and object in Buddhism, Vedanta, and Taoism, with reference to several Western thinkers including Wittgenstein and Heidegger. The main argument is that these three Asian systems may be different attempts to describe the same (or very similar) experience. The categories of Buddhism (no self, impermanence, causality, eightfold path) and Advaita Vedanta (all-Self, time and causality as maya, no path) are “mirror images” of each other. Ultimately it becomes difficult to distinguish a formless Being (Brahman) from a formless nonbeing (shunyata). Buddhism can be understood as a more phenomenological description of nonduality, while Vedanta is a more metaphysical account.
Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism brings the three traditions together in a synthesis receptive to the insights of each regarding the fundamental issues of life and death and death-in-life. The Buddhist denial of a substantial self implies that our basic problem is not fear of death but fear that we don’t really exist. In response, we become obsessed with “reality projects” (compare Becker’s “immortality projects”) that often make things worse. Later chapters explore the philosophical and psychological implications.
A Buddhist History of the West is not a history of Buddhism in the West but a Buddhist perspective on the development of Western civilization. The Buddhist claim that the (sense of) self is haunted by a (sense of) lack has important historical implications, affecting the ways that (for example) freedom, progress, science, economic and political development have been understood and pursued.
The Great Awakening: A Buddhist Social Theory develops the social implications of Buddhist teachings for our understanding (and response to) collective forms of dukkha (suffering). Today the “three poisons” – greed, ill will, and delusion – have been institutionalized. There are discussions of poverty, economic development, and corporate capitalism; Buddhist perspectives on the war on terror, our criminal justice system, and the connection between Zen and war; and essays addressing technology, deep ecology, and our relationship with the biosphere.
The Dharma of Dragons and Daemons: Buddhist Themes in Modern Fantasy examines the ways that spiritual themes (for example, good and evil, sin and redemption, friendship, time, war and violence, creativity, the meaning of life, the meaning of death) are treated in some of the classics of contemporary fantasy: The Lord of the Rings, Ende’s Momo, the anime of Hayao Miyazaki, Pullman’s His Dark Materials, and Le Guin’s Earthsea.
Money, Sex, War, Karma: Notes for a Buddhist Revolution is a series of short essays that begins with the essential teaching of the Buddha: the connection between suffering and the delusive (sense of) self, usually experienced as a sense of lack. Subsequent essays discuss the implications for the ways we understand money, fame, karma, food, sexuality and romantic love, consumerism, ecology, war, and social engagement.
Awareness Bound and Unbound: Buddhist Essays is a collection of related essays on Buddhist and comparative issues, including language, truth and deconstruction; Taoism, Christianity (Swedenborg, The Cloud of Unknowing), and postmodernism; the karma of women; violence, the clash of civilizations, and the war on terror.
The World Is Made of Stories is a sequence of “micro-essays” and quotations that offer a new way of understanding Buddhism and a new Buddhist understanding of the Way, consistent with what Buddhism says about the human predicament and how it can be resolved. If the self is composed of the stories one identifies with and attempts to live, karma is not what the self has but what the sense of self becomes, as we play habitual roles within stories perceived as objectively real.
Loy is also the editor of Healing Deconstruction: Postmodern Thought in Buddhism and Christianity (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1996), with essays by Roger Corless, Philippa Berry, Morny Joy, Robert Magliola, and David Loy; and the co-editor (with John Stanley and Gyurme Dorje) of A Buddhist Response to the Climate Emergency (Wisdom Publications, 2009), which includes contributions by the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Karmapa, Robert Aitken, Joanna Macy, Bhikkhu Bodhi, Joseph Goldstein, Matthieu Ricard, Lin Jensen, and many others.
Loy appears in the 2003 documentary Flight From Death, a film that investigates the relationship of human violence to fear of death, as related to subconscious influences.
He sits on the editorial or advisory boards of the journals Cultural Dynamics, Worldviews, Contemporary Buddhism, Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, and World Fellowship of Buddhists Review.
He is married to Linda Goodhew, formerly an associate professor of English literature at Gakushuin University in Tokyo, Japan. They have one son, Mark Loy Goodhew.
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