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Buddhism? |
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DALAI LAMA SAYS SECULARISM IS THE TRUE ROUTE TO HAPPINESS
Nov 2006
The Dalai Lama has come out in defence of secularism. Speaking in Tokyo ,
the Tibetan spiritual figurehead said: “Secularism does not mean rejection
of all religions. It means respect for all religions and human beings
including non-believers. I am talking to you not as a Tibetan or a Buddhist
but as a human being having a friendly discussion and sharing my experiences
on the benefits of cultivating basic human values.”
In a lecture on “A Good Heart – The key to Health and Happiness” the Dalai
Lama emphasises that cultivating secular ethics – which he said has nothing
to do with religion – benefits all human beings. He said strengthening inner
values of warm-heartedness and compassion benefits both believers and
non-believers in leading a happy and meaningful life. He said, “Love and
compassion attracts, hatred and anger repels.” He also appealed for nuclear
disarmament and that the 21st century should be made a century of dialogue.
Underlining the importance of internal and external values for a happy life,
he said Japan has the potential to combine both values with its rich
spiritual tradition and technological progress. “You have a rich spiritual
tradition. The Shinto values of protecting nature and respect for the
environment are relevant to this day. Buddhism as Japan ’s traditional
religion teaches humane values.”
Responding to a question from the audience, he said Japan is the most
relevant nation in taking the lead towards abolition of nuclear weapons as
the country had suffered the deadly impacts of history’s first nuclear
weapon. He also called for a complete ban on arms sales especially to
undemocratic nations. “Peace does not mean absence of conflicts. Differences
will always be there. Peace means solving these differences through peaceful
means; through dialogue, education, knowledge; through humane ways,” the
Dalai Lama said amidst a thunderous applause.
Terry Sanderson, vice president of the National Secular Society, said: “It
is not often that we can raise a cheer for a religious leader, but the Dalai
Lama is sensible to say that a universal ethic is better than one based on
religion. Secularism asks us to keep our religion to ourselves, which
enables us as human beings to share what unites us rather than what divides
us.”
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Science Without Borders
A review by Michael Shermer of The Universe in a Single Atom : The
Convergence of Science and Spirituality by the Dalai Lama (Sep 2005)
Oct 2005
In a 1987
lecture on “The Burden of Skepticism,” the astronomer Carl Sagan
opined:
In science it often happens that scientists say, ‘You know that’s a
really good argument; my position is mistaken,’ and then they actually
change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They
really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists
are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I
cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or
religion.
Well, Carl, here’s a bit of good news, from no less a personage than His
Holiness the Dalai Lama, who writes in the prologue of his latest book,
The Universe in a Single Atom:
My confidence in venturing into science lies in my basic belief that as
in science so in Buddhism, understanding the nature of reality is pursued
by means of critical investigation: if scientific analysis were
conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then
we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.
Listen up, all ye who insist on squeezing the round peg of science into
the square hole of religion; if religious claims are not consonant with
scientific findings, it is wisest to err on the side of science, which
employs self-correcting machinery designed to weed out error, agenda, and
bias. Not only do scientists change their minds in the face of contradictory
evidence, they do so regardless of the religion, race, or nationality of the
scientific colleagues who are doing the contradicting.
Science is international, or non-national, in this sense, a
characteristic His Holiness says is in harmony with the teachings of
Buddhism. “Because I am an internationalist at heart,” the Dalai Lama
explains,
one of the qualities that has moved me most about scientists is their
amazing willingness to share knowledge with each other without regard for
national boundaries. Even during the Cold War, when the political world
was polarized to a dangerous degree, I found scientists from the Eastern
and Western blocs willing to communicate in ways the politicians could not
even imagine.
In my 1999 book, “How We Believe,” I outlined a three-tiered model of the
relationship of science and religion:
- the “conflicting worlds” model, in which science and religion are at
war and one must choose between them;
- the “same worlds” model, in which science and religion are in harmony
and one may have both simultaneously; and
- the “separate worlds” model, in which science and religion are
different methods to deal with different areas of human concern. Since
that time, hundreds of books have been published in the field of science
and religion studies, which has blossomed with its own journals and
magazines, college courses, scholarly conferences, and even an annual
million-dollar cash prize for the individual who most contributes to
uniting science and religion (the Templeton Prize).
I thus approached this book with trepidation — what else can be said on
this subject, especially by someone with no background whatsoever in
science? Yet, as I read I grew to respect the author, Tenzin Gyatso, the
14th Dalai Lama, who at the age of 6 was enthroned as the reincarnation of
his predecessor, the 13th Dalai Lama, in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. Born
to a peasant family in a small village called Takster in northeastern Tibet,
the Dalai Lama ended up in an exile that brought him in contact with many of
the world’s leading scientists.
He talks about his youthful encounters with science, especially his
meetings with some of the world’s leading scientists, including physicists
Carl von Weizsacker and David Bohm, and the philosopher of science Karl
Popper. From these encounters, as well as his Buddhist studies, the Dalai
Lama found a way to harmonize science and religion, even while recognizing
(and respecting) their differences. Both science and Buddhism, he points
out, share a strong empirical basis:
Buddhism must accept the facts — whether found by science or found by
contemplative insights. If, when we investigate something, we find there
is reason and proof for it, we must acknowledge that as reality — even if
it is in contradiction with a literal scriptural explanation that has held
sway for many centuries or with a deeply held opinion or view.
Instead of filtering scientific findings through the sieve of his
religion, the Dalai Lama approaches science with humility and openness.
As my comprehension of science has grown, it has gradually become
evident to me that, insofar as understanding the physical world is
concerned, there are many areas of traditional Buddhist thought where our
explanations and theories are rudimentary when compared with those of
modern science.
This book is “not an attempt to unite science and
spirituality,” he explains, “but an effort to explore two important human
disciplines for the purpose of developing a more holistic and integrated way
of understanding the world.”
He begins his exploration by equating science with the worldview of
“scientific materialism,” which “seems to be a common unexamined
presupposition” that includes “a belief in an objective world, independent
of the contingency of its observers. It assumes that the data being analyzed
within an experiment are independent of the preconceptions, perceptions, and
experience of the scientist analyzing them.” Well, not quite. Most working
scientists do make this assumption when conducting their experiments, but
they are well aware that their preconceptions can color their analysis and
interpretation. Reality exists, we can agree. Getting an accurate reading on
reality is another matter entirely.
The Dalai Lama’s other bugbear is scientific reductionism, and here I
feel he has set up something of a straw man.
The view that all aspects of reality can be reduced to matter and its
various particles is, to my mind, as much a metaphysical position as the
view that an organizing intelligence created and controls reality.
This view, he fears, leads to nihilism, and with
it the loss of subjective purpose and meaning.
The danger then is that human beings may be reduced to nothing more
than biological machines, the products of pure chance in the random
combination of genes, with no purpose other than the biological imperative
of reproduction.
I do not fault the Dalai Lama for challenging this view of science, which
does make it difficult to explain such phenomena as the origins of the
universe, life, sentience, and consciousness (each of which receive
individual chapter treatments in his book), and is held by a great many
people, both within and outside of the scientific community. Yet the
solution to these and other problems, in my opinion, is through the new
sciences of complexity, emergence, and self-organization. The Dalai Lama
does not go this route, instead turning to certain Buddhist principles, such
as karma.
Karma, he explains, is easily misunderstood by Westerners. It has to do
with causal action, but “it is erroneous to think of karma as some
transcendental unitary entity that acts like a god in a theistic system or a
determinist law by which a person’s life is fated.” In fact, from a
scientific perspective, karma is just a metaphysical assumption, but “no
more so than the assumption that all of life is material and originated out
of pure chance.” Although he admits that the Darwinian theory of evolution
“gives us a fairly coherent account of the evolution of human life on
earth,” the Dalai Lama also believes “that karma can have a central role in
understanding the origination of what Buddhism calls ‘sentience,’ through
the media of energy and consciousness.”
How? In Buddhism, the most fundamental unit of matter is prana,a vital
energy indistinguishable from consciousness. So matter, energy, and
consciousness are the same. Since not only sentience, but the origins of
life, consciousness, and morality are inadequately explained by science, it
is useful to employ the notion of karma.
Here I am afraid the Dalai Lama proffers the same empty explanations as
the creationists and Intelligent Design theorists in what we call the “God
of the Gaps.” Wherever there is a gap in scientific explanation — the
origins of life, sentience, consciousness, morality — this is where God, or
karma, intervened. But what happens to God/karma when science fills in the
gap? Are you going to abandon God/karma from your worldview?
In my opinion, God/karma does not explain anything; it is just a
linguistic place-filler until science can discover the actual cause. By
analogy, cosmologists proffer something called “dark energy” and “dark
matter” to account for certain anomalies in their data. But cosmologists do
not stop there. They admit that “dark matter” is just a convenient label for
something they have yet to discover. When creationists or Buddhists speak of
God or karma, they mean it as the actual cause and end of their searching.
Although I applaud the Dalai Lama for his liberal open-mindedness to
science, he still has some things to learn about science. Just because a
current theory or philosophy of science fails to account for a phenomenon
does not mean that science itself should be abandoned. And any attempt to
blend religion with science, no matter how thoughtful and respectful of both
traditions, can only lead to the reduction of the deity to the laws and
forces of nature. A scientist will inevitably search for how, and by what
forces and mechanisms, God or karma operated in the world.
I would caution both Christians and Buddhists alike: Be careful what you
wish for in this endeavor to unify science and religion — you may not like
what you find.
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Meditation Linked with Longer Life
Transcendental techniques cut total risk of death 23% in high
blood pressure sufferers
Betterhumans
5/3/2005
Transcendental meditation has been found to extend lifespan in a study that
tracked hundreds of high blood pressure sufferers for up to 18 years.
The study, conducted by Robert Schneider of the Maharishi University
Institute for Natural Medicine and Prevention and colleagues, found that
transcendental meditation reduced death rates by 23%.
"Research has found the transcendental meditation program reduces risk
factors in heart disease and other chronic disorders, such as high blood
pressure, smoking, psychological stress, stress hormones, harmful
cholesterol, and atherosclerosis," says Schneider. "These reductions slow
the aging process and promote the long-term reductions in death rates."
The randomized trial involved 202 men and women of an average of 71 with
mildly elevated blood pressure.
Subjects participated in the transcendental meditation program, behavioral
techniques such as progressive muscle relaxation, or health education.
Schneider and colleagues found that compared to combined controls,
transcendental meditation practitioners had:
A 23% reduction in the rate of death from all causes.
A 30% reduction in the rate of death from cardiovascular disease.
A 49% reduction in the rate of death from cancer.
The research is reported in the American Journal of Cardiology
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Religion and Science: Buddhism on the
brain
Jonathan Knight writes for Nature from San Francisco.
08 Dec 2004
Many religious leaders find themselves at odds with science,
but the head of Tibetan Buddhism is a notable exception. Jonathan Knight
meets a neurologist whose audience with the Dalai Lama helped to explain
why.
One of the first things people discover when they meet His Holiness the
Dalai Lama is that the head of Tibetan Buddhism likes a good laugh. "He
jokes all the time," says Fred Gage, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute
for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, who met the spiritual leader
for the first time in October. "He has a great sense of humour."
This is probably a good thing. The occasion for this meeting — a research
conference held at the Dalai Lama's headquarters in Dharamsala, India —
included a presentation of evidence that people in good spirits are better
able to control their blood sugar levels. Other talks suggested that
meditation can transform emotions and that daily experiences can alter the
expression of genes. Gage presented his research into how the brain can
remake itself throughout life.
It was the 12th time since 1987 that the Dalai Lama has convened leading
psychologists and neurobiologists to hear the latest scientific thinking in
fields related to the human mind. These meetings are organized by the Mind &
Life Institute in Louisville, Colorado, which was established in the 1980s
to promote communication between science and Buddhism. But much of the
credit for this open communication goes to the Dalai Lama himself.
Spiritual links
In accordance with Tibetan tradition, the current Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso,
was recognized as the 14th reincarnation of the Bodhisattva of Compassion in
1937, when he was only two years old. Gyatso has long had an interest in
science. When he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, he commented: "Both
science and the teachings of the Buddha tell us of the fundamental unity of
all things." He once said that if he had not been a monk, he would have been
an engineer.
Enthusiasm for science seems to extend beyond the spiritual leader.
Tibetans, surprisingly enough, were the most strongly represented ethnic
group working on the Human Genome Project: although they account for only
0.1% of the world's population, Tibetans made up about 10% of the project's
workforce (see Nature 425, 335; 2003).
For many Buddhist monks, this interest in science is focused on an intense
curiosity about the workings of the brain. Monks typically spend hours in
meditation each day, a practice they say enhances their powers of
concentration. Highly trained monks report being able to focus on a single
object for hours without distraction and to recall complex scenes in
exquisite detail. A question that deeply interests the Dalai Lama, and
indeed some neuroscientists, is whether these phenomena have a biological
basis.
Gage studies the ability of the mammalian brain to change and adapt in
adulthood. Before the late 1990s, it was thought that adult brains were
more-or-less complete. Learning involved the development of new connections
— but no new neurons were born, and when these cells died they were gone
forever. Now it turns out that new neurons do grow and our brains are much
more flexible than was once believed. As a key component of Buddhist belief
is that meditation literally transforms the mind, Buddhists are keenly
interested in scientific advances that could help explain this observation.
Gage's talk on 18 October in Dharamsala — seat of the Tibetan
government-in-exile since 1960 — kicked off a five-day private conference on
'neuroplasticity'. Gage gave a general primer on the complexity of the
nervous system, and then launched into a two-hour presentation of his
research targeted at a lay audience. Next to him, the Dalai Lama listened
intently, making occasional use of two interpreters to translate into
Tibetan things he didn't immediately grasp in English. Also in the audience
were the six other presenters and a handful of Buddhist monks.
Lessons learned
Although the group did not come to any Earth-shattering conclusions about
cognition, they did reach a higher understanding of each other, which was
the main point of the exercise. For the monks, the sessions may help them
deal with modern questions not addressed in traditional Buddhist teachings,
such as the issue of the morality of stem-cell research (see Religion and
science: Studies of faith). Scientists in turn have plenty to learn from the
monks — after centuries of inner contemplation, Buddhists claim to know a
thing or two about how the mind behaves.
Richard Davidson, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison,
and the coordinator of the Dharamsala conference, has learned from the monks
through study. He found that certain neural processes in the brain are more
coordinated in people with extensive training in meditation, an observation
that may be linked to the heightened awareness reported by meditating monks
(A. Lutz et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 101, 16369–16373; 2004).
Gage says that what particularly impressed him was the Dalai Lama's
empirical approach. "At one point I asked: 'What if neuroscience comes up
with information that directly contradicts Buddhist philosophy?'," says
Gage. "The answer was: 'Then we would have to change the philosophy to match
the science'."
So far that hasn't been necessary. And if the reported benefits of laughter
are correct, there is no need for the Dalai Lama to rein in his sense of
humour either. During a discussion of how our childhoods shape who we are,
he observed that he liked to play with toy guns as a child and even picked
on his brother. "I was the mean one," he said, thereby stabilizing blood
sugar levels throughout the room.
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Buddhist Attitude
to God
By Dr V A
Gunasekara at a multi-religious seminar
The
Persistence of the God-Idea, Extract Conclusion
The Buddha's refutation of the
God-concept was formulated some 2500 years ago, perhaps at the very time
that the idea of a single supreme God was mooted in India and in the Middle
East. With the rise of modern science, and the discovery of natural causes
for phenomena, which were formerly ascribed to the action of God, some
philosophers have restated the basic fallacies of the God-hypothesis using
modern science and logic (and not the Buddha's Dhamma) as their point of
departure. Yet many people in the world formally subscribe to the notion of
God. What is the Buddhist explanation for this phenomenon?
There are
many causes for the persistence of the God-idea. Some of these are induced
by social and other factors. These include the institutionalization of
theistic religion, the use of vast economic resources to propagate it
including the mass media, and the legal right given to parents to impose
their religions on their children. There is also the attractiveness of
vicarious salvation, or salvation through prayer or forgiveness which
permits the committing of many moral crimes for which the doer does not
"pay". We shall not consider these here. From the Buddhist point of view the
root causes are ignorance and fear, with fear itself ultimately the product
of ignorance. Atheistic materialism has failed to dislodge the God-idea not
because of any deficiency of its arguments when compared to those put
forward by the theists, but because it too has not been able to eliminate
ignorance.
The
ignorance (avijjâ) that is meant here cannot be eliminated by formal
education and the propagation of scientific knowledge. After all some
leading scientists are themselves completely deluded by theistic
suppositions. The progress of science has resulted only in a minor
diminution in the power of theistic religion, and in any case theologians
have become adept at "reinterpreting" dogma while the general followers
continue to do what they have always done.
The Buddha
himself grasped the over-pervading nature of ignorance because of his
titanic struggle to liberate himself. He even initially displayed some
reluctance to propagate his knowledge because of the formidable nature of
the task. Nonetheless he proclaimed his knowledge out of compassion for the
world because he felt that at least a few "with little dust in their eyes"
would be able to benefit fully from his ideas. From the Buddhist point of
view the persistence of theism, with all its evil consequences seen in
history, is a necessary consequence of the persistence of ignorance.
While
intellectual and scientific knowledge is not the sole (or even essential)
constituent of wisdom it could in the modern world with high levels of
educational attainment be a good basis for it. But what is really required
is the cultivation of the mind (bhâvanâ, samâdhi). This is usually referred
to as "meditation" even though this term is quite inadequate to convey the
full implications of what is meant. Many modern-day "meditation teachers" do
not give instruction in Buddhist mental culture, and even some of those who
claim to do so may take a literal view of a few classic Buddhist texts on
the subject. The Buddhist path requires a correct balance between three
components: wisdom, morality and mental culture. Progress in all these three
areas must be made simultaneously, and exclusive concentration on any one
these, especially "meditation" of a highly stylized form, is not the
balanced path. The Buddha has asked all his disciples to go to the Dhamma as
their guide rather than to specific teachers. The Buddha's final instruction
to his followers was to "work out your own salvation with diligence" with
the Buddha's teaching (the Dhamma) as the only guide.
The path of
the Buddha cannot be followed if a person is deluded by the notion of God.
This is why a correct understanding of all the ramifications of the God-idea
is essential for anyone seeking to progress along the Buddhist path to total
liberation.
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Quotes about Buddhism's influence and place in the West
From Lama Surya Das's "Awakening the Buddha":
"The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend
personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural
and the spiritual, it should be based on a
religious sense arising from the experience of all
things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity.
Buddhism answers this description... If there is any religion that
could cope with modern scientific needs it would
be Buddhism." -- Albert Einstein
"The coming of Buddhism to the West may well prove to be the most important
event of the Twentieth Century." -- Arnold Toynbee, Historian
"Buddhism has transformed every culture it has entered, and Buddhism has
been transformed by its entry into that culture." -- Arnold Toynbee
"The Dalai Lama seemed genuinely enthusiastic about the foreigners who had
recently come to Buddhism; he said he thought Americans and other
Westerners had an affinity for Buddhism
because they didn't believe anything until it was
proven. The Buddha, he reminded me, told people not to follow anything
blindly, for Buddhism is not based on belief so much as rational
experiment. If, like a scientist, you replicated
the Buddha's experiment, you should get the same
good results -- enlightenment." -- Lama Surya Das, "Awakening the
Buddha," 33. |
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