— Philosophy —
The Six Perfections
Dale S. Wright
— 2009 —
“
Wright reads the Mahayana paramitas — generosity, morality, tolerance, energy, meditation, wisdom — as a practical, secular ethics of character for modern life.
Decide its fate
⚖The case for it
Wright asks you to treat giving, patience, and attention as things you would actually attempt this week, which turns uncomfortable fast. The chapter on generosity keeps circling one question: whose need is really being met when you hand something over. Reading it is slow work, closer to a workbook than a tour of doctrine, and it pays off only if you are willing to stop and measure yourself against it. Some chapters cover the same ground twice, and the pages on meditation carry the least weight. Still, almost nothing else on this shelf gives you something to try on Tuesday morning.
— the honest librarian
✕The case against
Wright modernizes the perfections so thoroughly that the cosmology falls away, and what remains can read like virtue ethics in Buddhist dress: accessible, but doctrinally thin. Traditionalists will miss the metaphysics; philosophers may want harder argument. A bridge book at risk of belonging fully to neither shore.
— the honest librarian
beyond the verdict
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