Burma
Friday May 9, 2008
Last night I heard from a friend at the Burmese Buddhist Vihara in Birmingham, to let me know that they are running a fund-raising appeal to help get aid to those who are most in need in Burma. The funds collected will be forwarded to the British Red Cross, and I’ve added a copy of the appeal leaflet below if you want to make a donation. Donations can also be made directly via the Red Cross. The website for the British Red Cross is here, and the American Red Cross, for website visitors from over the water, is here.
Download:
emergency appeal.pdf [869.31KB]
Image: Wikimedia Commons
The Ocean of Existence
Wednesday May 7, 2008
Recently I’ve been reflecting on an image that recurs throughout the Buddhist tradition, that of the bhava-sāgara, or the ocean of existence. The Pāli texts are full of ocean metaphors, as a quick glance at the handy guide to similes on the Access to Insight web pages will show; and the image of the ocean of existence is one that finds its way into later Buddhism in Tibet, China Japan and elsewhere. In one quote of which I’m particularly fond, the Hua-yan Sutra says “Sentient beings bob and sink in the ocean of existence. Their troubles are boundless; they have no place to rest”.
The idea of existence as a sea is one that, for me, captures something of the sense we can have – whether queasy or exhilarating – of the profound instability and uncertainty of life, the ebb and flow and swell of our day-to-day existence. This ebb and flow has been recognised in the West ever since the days of the pre-Socratics (Πάντα ῥεῖ – panta rhei – Heraclitus is supposed to have said), but also it can often seem as if the Western tradition has sought to tame the flux, or else has sought to cross over this ocean in the Good Ship Philosophy to attain to solid ground.
At times it seems as if this longing for solid ground – a longing that seems to me to be antithetical to a good deal of Buddhist metaphysics – leads us to see the end of Buddhist practice as equivalent to putting into safe harbour. This is an idea that is not unprecedented in the Pāli texts, but it does not seem to me to be a particularly appealing prospect. After all, what would one do once one arrived at this safe port? Put up one’s feet and spend one’s days puffing on a pipe? And to stake our hopes one some promised land of solid ground that lies over the horizon is, to say the least, something of a gamble.
I prefer a different image. What if there is nothing other than the ocean? What if there is no safe harbour to be had? Here, out on the high seas, we were born; here we live; here we will die. Then perhaps what we need to do is give up hope of dry land, and get to know the movement of the winds and the tides, the ebb and flow of the ocean.
The Udāna has an image that I prefer. Those who have attained to understanding are not likened to sailors who have crossed the ocean and returned to dry land, but instead to great sea monsters who roam the endless depths, who sport and play in an ocean without any shore. They are those who have given up on land-lubber hopes and dreams for good.
(These reflections come from an article I’ve been writing for The Pragmatic Buddhist. I’ll post a link when the article goes online)
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Strokes of Insight?
Friday April 25, 2008
Neuroscience, unfortunately, often proceeds on the back of things that go profoundly wrong with the brain. We know a lot about what the brain does and how it does it from research with patients whose brains have suffered various kinds of damage.
This makes a lot of this research both fascinating and rather melancholy reading. An exception is last week’s New Scientist interview with neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor, who suffered an enormous stroke the size of a golfball in her cerebral cortex in 1996. The stroke left her with virtually no cognitive functioning, but in the years that followed, she systematically rebuilt her brain from the inside out, painstakingly bringing neural functions back ‘online’. This process, however, was not merely one of reconstructing what was there before, but instead (to use what is perhaps a crude metaphor) of taking advantage of the earthquake to do some serious rebuilding of the property.
When the anger circuit wanted to run again, I did not like the way it felt inside my body so I said “no” to its running. Every time it tried to get triggered and run again, I brought my attention back to it – I did not like the way anger felt so I shut it down. Now that circuit rarely runs at all, mostly because I feel it getting triggered and nip it in the bud.
Dr. Taylor herself recognises the connections between this kind of retraining and meditative practices of observing but not engaging with neural circuitry; but along the way, the interview also raises raises all kinds of fascinating questions about the relationship between mind, awareness, the body and the stories we spin about ourselves.
You will need to be a subscriber to New Scientist to read the interview, but you can go to her website here to find out more, or else have a look on the TED website at her interview. Meanwhile, I’ll be getting hold of a copy of her book, My Stroke of Insight
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New Forums
Thursday April 24, 2008
The estimable Loden Jinpa from Down Under has just got in touch to say that he has set up a new forum for Buddhist discussion, with a sub-forum on “fusion philosophy” – a term that comes from Mark Siderits – which may be of interest to visitors to thinkBuddha.
There’s a link here.
Without Illumination
Wednesday April 23, 2008
It’s some time since I given time to reading about Buddhism, my interests of late having been elsewhere, but I was pleased to stumble across a copy of Bernard Faure’s Double Exposure: Cutting Across Buddhist and Western Discourses
So that’s how I came across Double Exposure, a of book that even its publishers describe as “something of an oddity”. Indeed, the description of the book on the Stanford University Press website seems almost to be a kind of parody of those Madhyamika texts that like nothing more than negation: this is not a book of comparative philosophy or religion, it is not a contribution “in a narrow sense” to Buddhist scholarship, it is not a contribution to vague notions of “spirituality”… You get the idea.
Given that I myself like to lurch in a shambolic fashion between vaguely Buddhish speculations and those drawn from the Western philosophical tradition (without any conviction that I truly understand either), the book was both fun and stimulating. It raises far more questions than it answers as it meanders from a discussion of whether we in the West really know what Buddhism is at all, through a consideration of the various “rationalities” of Buddhism, and from there to a consideration of Buddhism and Chinese thought, the major schools of Buddhism, the slippery idea of twofold truth, and so on. By the end, I found myself without illumination, but I’m not sure that Faure’s book aims at illumination in the ordinary (or even in the extraordinary) sense. I seems that it is more concerned with dissolving our assumptions, rattling our cages and leaving the reader with less of a sense of solid ground than at the outset. And that is always an entertaining way to spend a few hours.
After years of immersing myself in philosophy I’m currently feeling a bit queasy when I leaf through philosophy books. I am wondering if I have the zeal, the mad-gleam-in-the-eye that you need to really spend your life banging on about philosophy. All those abstruse arguments! All those damnably clever people convinced that they have the Truth (and that, as a consequence, their opponents are all dolts and dullards)! All that conviction (because even when philosophy profess uncertainty, they do it with a kind of zealous conviction)! All that heaping up of information, all those arguments and counter arguments, all those angels doing the foxtrot on the heads of pins!
Perhaps the fog will clear. But I’m enjoying letting it deepen for a while. And if deepening fog is your thing, Double Exposure is thoroughly recommended…
On Desire
Wednesday April 16, 2008
I’ve just had a review of William B. Irvine’s book On Desire
As you will see from reading the review, I enjoyed Irvine’s book, although not without some reservations. In particular, what the book lacked for me was an assessment of the positive role of desire in human life.
There’s a popular understanding of Buddhism that it is a matter of extinguishing desire. I’m not sure that this is either possible or desirable (and, of course, it raises the famous “paradox of desire” in Buddhism, which is to say, the question of how one can desire to extinguish desire – see here and here). Anyway, the textual story on this is much more nuanced, and for those interested, it might be well worth reading David Webster’s
Meanwhile, have a look at the review on the Metapsychology website.
Image: Arturo Delfin
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Unconscious Decision Making
Tuesday April 15, 2008
I don’t want to bang on about this one topic ad nauseum, but nevertheless, in the light of my previous post and the discussion that it has generated, I thought that visitors to thinkBuddha might be interested in some recently published research into the subject of free will.
John-Dylan Haynes and his fellow researchers at the Bernstein Centre for Computational Neuroscience wired up their subjects to fMRI scanners and asked them to press a button with either their left or right hand when the urge took them to do so. Meanwhile different letters flashed up before them on a screen, and they were asked, after the event, to say which letter was on-screen when they decided to press a button.
This, of course, looks very like the famous experiment by Benjamin Libet concerning the timing of volitional acts. The difference, however, was in the use of fMRI scans. When Haynes’s team analysed these, they found that there was activity in the prefrontal cortex up to an astonishing ten seconds before the decision was enacted, and that this activity could be used to reliably predict which button the subjects later pressed. In other words, our brains decide before we do (this, of course, makes sense of many things in my life: like, for example, why I am writing this in a coffee shop, rather than sitting at home and getting on with the job application forms that are on my desk…). This brings to mind a line from one of Natalie Goldberg’s books about the brain being an involuntary organ. When I first read that, it seemed to make sense of rather a lot.
If you want to find out more, then Wired Magazine has a good article on this research, with proper diagrams and everything, instead of feeble visual puns on the theme of brains/caulflowers. There’s also an article in New Scientist, which you may or may not need to log in to read.
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