About
My scholarly interests span a from specific concerns in Buddhist Studies, and today most specifically in the study of Theravāda Buddhism and its Pāli scriptures, through more general questions in comparative religion and the efficacy of religious faith, to broader philosophical issues regarding the nature of consciousness and reality, and within this to different ideas from Indian philosophy that attribute a foundational role or an ontological primacy to consciousness. These questions are all important to me personally, just as much as they are professionally and academically.I hadn’t planned on becoming an academic. Once I reached academia, as a young and passionate inquiring spirit, I never stopped being excited about the issues I was researching; so here I am writing this text. My BA was in psychology, pursuing my destined vocation as a therapist. But it was just too boring and the scans of rat-brains just didn’t satisfy my curiosity, while the nature of human soul, psyche and mind, and of life more generally, really mattered to me. I easily found myself in the Humanities, started studying Tibetan and discovered Buddhism. It has been a slippery slope ever since. My papers at the end of the BA were all about Buddhism (e.g. Buddhist readings of Don Quixote or Mark Rothko), and the BA became an MA, and the MA a PhD, since once I discovered Nāgārjuna I had to read him in Sanskrit. My early publications were on related brands of Buddhist philosophy, but I did not publish my full dissertation as a book (I’ll have to get back to that some day), as I had to figure out what the Buddha taught Nāgārjuna.
At this stage, different questions regarding the concerns of early Buddhist philosophy, the nature of the Buddha, different practices in Buddhist religion, and especially the composition of early Buddhist scripture, began to fascinate me and led to diverse publications. These include my first book with Cambridge on the relation between philosophy meditation in early Buddhism, and my new book with Oxford, which discusses the creative vectors alive in the shaping of Buddhist scripture and outlines a new theory for the creation of the Buddha’s discourses, which I call The Play of Formulas. Further work along these lines is cooking.
At the same time, some of my deeper philosophical interests began seeing the light of day, and I have been begun working in the field of consciousness studies and addressing questions in the study of religion. In my teaching, these themes receive more attention, and publications are in the making. Ultimately, the two vectors in my thinking – the more focused concern in Buddhist Studies and Indology, aside the more general questions in the study of religion on the nature of scripture and the efficacy of belief, together with the deepest questions regarding consciousness and its nature to reality – are meant to combine. Learning to chant Buddhist texts has proven a particular profitable method of internalization and of study.
I live in the village Matta’ in the Jerusalem mountains with my wife Yara and our five Children, Nahar, Inbal, Laila, Be’er and Geshem.
