Renegade Emotion: Buddhist Precedents for Returning Rationality to the Heart

By drawing out the critical implications of a Buddhist understanding of persons and emotions, it is suggested here that we see emotions as relational transformations through which the direction and qualitative intensities of our interdependence are situationally negotiated, enhanced, and revised. Historical and critical precedents are then offered for reassessing the association of reasoning with the practices of definition and argument, and the consequent association of the operational structure of rationality with that of reality. Reason is better seen as an emotion that has long been renegade and that--especially as institutionalized in the form of global, control-biased technological development--can remain so only at considerable social, cultural, and spiritual risk.