The name of the practice is Lhatong, which can be translated as “further seeing” from Tibetan. Lhatong is traditionally practised with eyes open, focusing on the plane about 1.5 metres in front of you.
for - Buddhism - TIbetan - Dzogchen practice - Lhatong - arising forms are seen as empty and relational, alive, not isolated - from Medium article - Heart Sutra and the nyams of Dzogchen - Aleander Vezhnevets - 2022, Sept 7
Unlike the staged Mahayana approach [1] Dzogchen is best mapped as an exploration of emptiness and form.
for - adjacency - Buddhism - Tibetan - Dzogchen practice - Heart Sutra - from Medium article - Heart Sutra and the nyams of Dzogchen - Aleander Vezhnevets - 2022, Sept 7
adjacency - between - Dzogchen practice - Heart Sutra<br /> - Deep Humanity BEing journey - new adjacency - Interesting to connect Dzogchen with the Heart Sutra, as an alternating exploration of emptiness and form - I wonder if elements of this could be used for Deep Humanity BEing journeys - Going from the familiar ground of forms to the unfamiliar ground of emptiness, then - going from emptiness back to form - then finally cultivating the NONDUAL experience of ONE TASTE for both - This maps to Vajrayana practice: - Sutric path - form to emptiness - Tantric path - emptiness to form - Dzogchen - nonduality of both
I'll talk about some cases in a moment— there's very sudden decomposition when the "tukdam" ends. You can have people who have been in tukdam for 27 days and then on the— as one of the cases that we're gonna be publishing on soon— and on the 28th day there's like very dramatic decomposition. Just boom! It seems to happen.
for - Buddhism - Tibetan - Thukdam - can end suddenly and dramatically - from Youtube - Between Life and Death: Understanding Tukdam - John D. Dunne
And this is one of the big problems right now— [pointing at the slide] tukdam regularly occurs in non-experts, right? You find, you know, people who are not great trained tantric practitioners who know all the commentaries and, you know, who aren't even monks or nuns— who are just ordinary lay people—and they go into "tukdam."
for - Buddhism - Tibetan - Tukdam - ordinary people with no training also go into Tukdam - from Youtube - Between Life and Death: Understanding Tukdam - John D. Dunne
I've encountered several people in the Kagyu and Nyingma traditions who say, "Oh, we, you know 'tukdam,' yeah, people go in 'tukdam,' "but it's like, you know, not that big a deal. It's, we don't care that much." Part of the reason they don't care that much is that the idea that you need to go into this completely, kind of, a state where there's no phenomenal content— that's just a pure clear light mind— actually is something that many of the contemporary practitioners and teachers in those lineages don't agree with.
for - Buddhism - Tibetan - Kagyu and Nyingma schools don't make a big deal out of Tukdam - nondual awareness can emerge with other techniques - key insight - Buddhism - Tibetan - Clear light meditation at time of death - Tukdam - a physiological technique - from Youtube - Between Life and Death: Understanding Tukdam - John D. Dunne
it's said that you can get there by doing like philosophical analysis, but this is using basically physiological techniques to get to the same place phenomenologically. So that's what "tukdam" is theoretically
for - key insight - Buddhism - Tibetan - Clear light meditation at time of death - Tukdam - a physiological technique to get to the same place as philosophical analysis - recognizing nondual, ultimate nature of reality - from Youtube - Between Life and Death: Understanding Tukdam - John D. Dunne
So the concept here is that you're actually no longer even capable of thinking, you're no longer capable of seeing, you're no longer capable of hearing, and so on. All that's left is just this kind of sheer consciousness itself, which doesn't even have a subject-object structure. So for the Gelugpas that lack of subject-object structure is not really relevant. For the other traditions it's extremely relevant, because it's said that if you're going to understand the nature of the mind, the fundamental distortion in the mind is precisely that subject-object structure. So you have to cultivate a non-dual awareness,
for - key insight - Buddhism - TIbetan - Clear light meditation - Tukdam at time of death - no longer capable of thinking, seeing, hearing, etc - all that's left is naked consciousness without even subject-object from Youtube - Between Life and Death: Understanding Tukdam - John D. Dunne
in the Perfection Stage— what's called the Perfection Stage— one is going to actually begin to bring the winds into the central channel. And when one is able to do so and bring them into the heart cakra.
for - Buddhism - Tibetan - meditation - Perfection stage - bring the winds into the central channel to the heart chakra - from Youtube - Between Life and Death: Understanding Tukdam - John D. Dunne
he made this three-dimensional, so this is the maṇḍala.
for - Buddhism - Tibetan - Mandala - is a 2 dimensional representation that the practitioner must imagine as a 3 dimensional object - This is the generation stage practice - from Youtube - Between Life and Death: Understanding Tukdam - John D. Dunne
And how one is gonna do that, one is gonna become not you. You're gonna become somebody else—specifically, you're gonna become a fully enlightened tantric deity, right? And you, with a sense of what's called dignity or pride, right, the, the... "lha’i nga rgyal," the "pride of being the deity."
for - Buddhism - TIbetan - Clear light meditation - purpose of - deity visualization - become the deity to practice giving up your ordinary thoughts and feelings - from Youtube - Between Life and Death: Understanding Tukdam - John D. Dunne
Unexcelled Yoga Tantra
for - definition - unexcelled yoga tantra - the ultimate practice of simulating clear light meditation while still alive, in the Gelupa tradition of Tibetan Buddhism - from Youtube - Between Life and Death: Understanding Tukdam - John D. Dunne
So what's the first thing to do? It's to stop being ordinary. So they say, "tha mal gyi rtog shes spang ba," "abandon ordinary thoughts and ordinary attitudes," ordinary experience.
for - Buddhism - TIbetan - clear light meditation - practice - how to practice simulation of Tukdam while still alive? - Stop ordinary thoughts and feelings - from Youtube - Between Life and Death: Understanding Tukdam - John D. Dunne
There are different forms of energy, five primary forms and five secondary forms of energy, and they flow in channels in the body. And at the time of death, there, there's a certain kind of configuration of those energies that occur and you can actually, you can, in a sense, force those energies— maybe that's not the right term, but some people would agree with that metaphor— you can force those energies to enter into that configuration through various forms of yogic practices.
for - Buddhism - Tibetan - clear light meditation practice - 5 primary and 5 secondary flows of energy in channels in the body - meditators practice a desired flow configuration at time of death - from Youtube - Between Life and Death: Understanding Tukdam - John D. Dunne
The simulation, however, requires a high degree of control over the winds— "rlung" in Tibetan or "vāyuḥ" in Sanskrit, not "prāṇa," but "vāyuḥ" in Sanskrit—that are involved in the death process.
for - Buddhism - Tibetan - clear light meditation at time of death - can practice while alive a simulated version meditation - requires mastery of the internal "winds" - from Youtube - Between Life and Death: Understanding Tukdam - John D. Dunne
To rehearse that moment, essentially what one does, is you induce a simulated version of this clear light mind.
for - Buddhism - Tibetan - clear light meditation at time of death - can practice while alive a simulated version meditation - from Youtube - Between Life and Death: Understanding Tukdam - John D. Dunne
if we're gonna really understand the ultimate nature of reality, it means to understand the ultimate nature of the mind
for - Buddhism - relationship between - ultimate nature of reality - ultimate nature of mind - from Youtube - Between Life and Death: Understanding Tukdam - John D. Dunne
Gelugpa tradition eventually rejects, really, almost everything about Yogācāra. But tantra itself really emerges out of that perspective, which is essentially that the only thing we have access to is our own experience.
for\ - Buddhism - relationship - Gelupa and Yogacara - from Youtube - Between Life and Death: Understanding Tukdam - John D. Dunne
The only way you can become a buddha is to see the nature of ultimate reality with the motivation of relieving the suffering of sentient beings. And in order to do that, you have to cultivate this wisdom.
for - Buddhism - Tantric logic - Become a buddha - to experience the ultimate nature of reality - to relieve suffering of others - cultivate wisdom - experience ultimate nature of mind - from Youtube - Between Life and Death: Understanding Tukdam - John D. Dunne
from the standpoint of Mahāyāna theory that a buddha is special because a buddha can teach in this incredibly effective way.
for - Mahayana Buddhism - Lay description - Helping others to help themselves - Youtube - Between Life and Death: Understanding Tukdam - John D. Dunne
for - Tibetan Buddhism - Tukdam - John Dunne - Youtube - Between Life and Death: Understanding Tukdam - John D. Dunne
Bodhidharma is vast emptiness, nothing holy. The way we usually express a version of that is through the idea of no gain, that there is nothing to fix, nothing to accomplish. I particularly try to express that in a psychological sense in which we don’t have to improve ourselves or fix ourselves or remove any underlying defect or fill in any kind of deficit.
for - quote - value in modernity - emptiness - nothing holy - nothing of value - nothing to accomplish Barry Magid - adjacency - value in modernity - emptiness - nothing value - nothing of value - Zen - Buddhism - the sacred - Barry Magid
quote - value in modernity - emptiness - nothing holy - nothing of value - nothing to accomplish Barry Magid - What is the ultimate meaning of Buddhism? - We need to ask that if we’re going to practice it in our lives. - Bodhidharma is vast emptiness, nothing holy. - The way we usually express a version of that is through the idea of - no gain, - that there is nothing to fix, - nothing to accomplish. - I particularly try to express that in a psychological sense in which we don’t have to - improve ourselves or - fix ourselves or - remove any underlying defect or - fill in any kind of deficit.
adjacency - between - value in modernity - emptiness - nothing value - nothing of value - Zen - Buddhism - the sacred - Barry Magid - adjacency relationship - In last night's multi-meaningverse convergence of the Fairschare Commons group, now morphed into the Fellowship of the Sacred Commons (FSC), we spoke of VALUE - It was something Paul brought up - Here in this quotation, we can see that if everything is sacred, then we cannot value one thing over another - If everything is holy, then nothing is holy (holier) than some other holy thing - We can be incomplete, yet complete at the same time, because we are each and every one of us, a unique expression of the sacred (mother)
Brooks, Arthur C. “Three Ways to Become a Deeper Thinker.” The Atlantic, November 21, 2024. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/11/sound-of-one-hand-clapping/680699/.
for - webcast - youtube - Amrit - Sandhu - Ex-Buddhist Monk reveals secret Tibetan Prophecy happening right now! Dr John Churchill Psy.D - adjacency - bodhisattva's universal vow of compassion - Deep Humanity individual / collective gestalt - Ernest Becker - Book - The birth and death of meaning - This adjacency is discussed more in the annotations
summary - A very good interview - Interdiscplinary presentation of psychology and Buddhist ideas - When he spoke about the relationship between the individual and the group, an epiphany of my own work on the Deep Humanity idea of the individual / collective gestalt suddenly took on a greater depth - An adjacency revealed itself upon his words, between - the universal compassion of the bodhisattva - Deep humanity idea of the individual / collective gestalt - the Deep Humanity Common Human Denominators (CHD) as pointing to the self / other fundamental identity - Freud, Winnicott, Kline's idea of the self formed by relationship with the other, in particular the mOTHER (Deep Humanity), the Most significant OTHER
source - referral from @Gyuri
to - Karuna Mandala - - https://hyp.is/Ghid4JwcEe-PK7OOKz5Vig/www.karunamandala.org/directors-advisors
it isn't just about alleviating their own personal suffering it's also about alleviating Universal suffering so this is where the the bodh satra or the Christ or those kinds of archetypes about being concerned about the whole
for - example - individual's evolutionary learning journey - new self revisiting old self and gaining new insight - universal compassion of Buddhism and the individual / collective gestalt - adjacency - the universal compassion of the bodhisattva - Deep humanity idea of the individual / collective gestalt - the Deep Humanity Common Human Denominators (CHD) as pointing to the self / other fundamental identity - Freud, Winnicott, Kline's idea of the self formed by relationship with the other, in particular the mOTHER (Deep Humanity), the Most significant OTHER
adjacency - between - the universal compassion of the bodhisattva - Deep humanity idea of the individual / collective gestalt - the Deep Humanity Common Human Denominators (CHD) as pointing to the self / other fundamental identity - Freud, Winnicott, Kline's idea of the self formed by relationship with the other, in particular the mOTHER (Deep Humanity), the Most significant OTHER - adjacency relationship - When I heard John Churchill explain the second turning, - the Mahayana approach, - I was already familiar with it from my many decades of Buddhist teaching but with - those teachings in the rear view mirror of my life and - developing an open source, non-denominational spirituality (Deep Humanity) - Hearing these old teachings again, mixed with the new ideas of the individual / collective gestalt - This becomes an example of Indyweb idea of recording our individual evolutionary learning journey and - the present self meeting the old self - When this happens, new adjacencies can often surface - In this case, due to my own situatedness in life, the universal compassion of the bodhisattva can be articulated from a Deep Humanity perspective: - The Freudian, Klinian, Winnicott and Becker perspective of the individual as being constructed out of the early childhood social interactions with the mOTHER, - a Deep Humanity re-interpretation of "mother" to "mOTHER" to mean "the Most significant OTHER" of the newly born neonate. - A deep realization that OUR OWN SELF IDENTITY WAS CONSTRUCTED out of a SOCIAL RELATIONSHIP with mOTHER demonstrates our intertwingled individual/collective and self/other - The Deep Humanity "Common Human Denominators" (CHD) are a way to deeply APPRECIATE those qualities human beings have in common with each other - Later on, Churchill talks about how the sacred is lost in western modernity - A first step in that direction is treating other humans as sacred, then after that, to treat ALL life as sacred - Using tools like the CHD help us to find fundamental similarities while divisive differences might be polarizing and driving us apart - A universal compassion is only possible if we vividly see how we are constructed of the other - Another way to say this is that we see others not from an individual level, but from a species level
we do feel at least most of us, most of the time feel like some kind of unified, centralized inner perspective
for - self - as unified, centralized inner perspective - Michael Levin - adjacency - self - as unified, centralized inner perspective - multi-scale competency architecture - Buddhism - spiritual practice - self actualization - illusory body - illusory self - enlightenment
adjacency - between - self - as unified, centralized inner perspective - multi-scale competency architecture - self actualization - Buddhist practice - illusory body - illusory self - enlightenment - awakening - adjacency relationship - Indeed, from both the mundane and the spiritual, religious perspective, the unified self as a fundamental assumption - "self-development" and "self-actualization" are terms that are only meaningful if there is a unified self - Is the Buddhist ideas of - awakening - enlightenment and \ - penetrating the illusion of self - based on a kind of experiencing of the multi-scale competency architecture itself? - What does "spiritual awakening" mean in the context of multi-scale competency architecture? - For instance, WHO is it that actually awakens? - Is it consciousness from the SAME level, a lower level or ALL levels of the multi-scale competency architecture that a multi-cellular conscious, sentient being such as a human INTERbeCOMing? - If it includes consciousness from lower levels, then it may be billions or trillions of cellular consciousnesses that are awakening to the higher order consciousness it composes!
the dzogchen contemplative system brings about extraordinary results that merit further research
for - definition - Dzogchen - Great Perfection
I was raised Catholic, you know, very, very devoutly Catholic. My family was. I went to eight years of Catholic schooling. I had to step away from the church when I realized I couldn't say all the things 00:21:39 that we were being asked to say. I've, these days I've been studying Buddhism for many years
Husserl discovered Buddhism about, at about 1924. So he was given the book. A translation of the Sutta Pitaka in German. And the author of the translation asked him to give a command, a preface. 00:13:52 And in his preface, Husserl wrote the following sentence. Buddhism looks purely inward, in vision and deed. It is not transcendent but transcendental.
summary
Let us at this point simply note that the Māra drive seems reducible to a wish to maintain the status quo (“sentient beings suffer, and they shall keep doing so!”) whereas the Bodhisattva is committed to infinite transformation.
Defined in this way, “stress” turns out to be a compelling translation of the Sanskrit term duḥkha (otherwise often rendered as “suffering”), which describes a treacherous world inhabited by restlessly craving beings.
Another feature of this vision that aligns well with Buddhist ideas is the lack of a permanent, unique, unitary Self [68]. The picture given by the evolutionary cell-biological perspective is one where a cognitive agent is seen as a self-reinforcing process (the homeostatic loop), not a thing [69,70,71].
the bodhisattva vial which is which is huge 01:16:56 um it's this it's this commitment it's it's a medical it's the commitment to enlarge your cognitive apparatus to enable bigger goals to enable you to pursue bigger goals with more compassion
I've 01:04:30 been interested in these kinds of things for a really long time both from the perspective of uh kind of Eastern thought about philosophy of mind and and things like that and more broadly questions of uh of of uh concern and 01:04:44 compassion and and things like that
biology Buddhism and AI
My overall objective in this paper is to
Humanistic Buddhism
Humanistic Buddhism
They get to see everything, and nothing
This reminds me of esoteric transmission, in the sense that the ghost is only visible to those who are already prepared to see it.
It's also fitting that tantra is often narrowly equated with tantric sex.
The absolute in the relative and the relative in the absolute
Title: The absolute in the relative and the relative in the absolute Author: Judith Ragir Date: ?
Aristotle argues that virtue is achieved by maintaining the Mean, which is the balance between the two excesses. Aristotle’s doctrine of the Mean is reminiscent of Buddha’s Middle Path. Aristotle’s doctrine of virtue is “golden mean”. Courage, for example, is a mean regarding the feeling of fear, between the deficiency of rashness (too little fear) and the excess of cowardice (too much fear). Justice is a mean between getting or giving too much and getting or giving too little. Benevolence is a mean between giving to people who don’t deserve it and not giving to anyone at all. Similarly Buddhism aims not to eradicate all feelings but to liberate it from its attachment to false values. He gave the concept of the Middle Way, a path between the extremes of religious asceticism and worldly self-indulgence to move away from false values. Aristotle and the Buddha reached very similar conclusions as to how we should conduct our lives, if we wish to find happiness and fulfillment as human beings. However, for Aristotle the mean was a method of achieving virtue, but for Buddha the Middle Path referred to a peaceful way of life which negotiated the extremes of harsh asceticism and sensual pleasure seeking.
Aristotle's theory of the golden mean is similar to Buddha's middle path
His Holiness the Dalai Lama has said that it’s wonderful that so many different religions exist in the world.
Buddhism recognizes that all religions share the same aim of working for the well-being of mankind.
the pain of avoiding the unavoidable, which so many of us do, can actually be worse than the fear of surrendering to the inevitable
en pointe
Immunizations and Religion | Vanderbilt Faculty & Staff Health and Wellness. (n.d.). Retrieved August 17, 2021, from https://www.vumc.org/health-wellness/news-resource-articles/immunizations-and-religion
Śūnyatā, the teaching that all things are barren of intrinsic meaning, is a core tenet of Buddhism.
Zak Stein, who is a contributor to the aforementioned book Metatheory for the 21st Century, is one of the strongest proponents of post-Integral metamodernism in terms of ‘social justice’ (a term that the IDW has helped nullify). In the Integral conference debate in 2015, the “weak argument” Stein proposes is that Integral should at least become more informed about what capitalism is. The “strong argument” is that Integral should be, at the very least, post-capitalist. Given that Integral was doing neither, the way people used terms like “green meme” and “second tier” became, Stein says, substitutions for actual thought.
This is also kind of true of e.g. Buddhism and many other spiritual traditions: they don't have a very thought out socio-political vision. Instead they have an advanced form of the "personal is political". I suspect this is part intentional, part accidental. Getting involved in critiques of capitalism, at least at a detailed level, tends to get political quickly and getting political in general a) risks obsolescence (and being wrong) b) risks alienating potential participants c) risks being wrong (and dangerously wrong, e.g. being misused to justify, say, authoritarianism).
All that said, I think this is a major lacunae both of Integral and spiritual traditions.
In effect Zhu Xi found a means of smuggling a needed element ofBuddhist transcendentalism into Confucianism. This new philosophy,both eminently rational and humane,
neo-confucianism = confucius + buddhism (daoism?)
Early China’s cosmology (her theory of the universe as an orderedwhole) shows striking points of difference with Western thought. Forexample, the early Chinese had no creation myth and no creator-lawgiver out of this world, no first cause, not even a Big Bang. As JosephNeedham says, they assumed “a philosophy of organism, an orderedharmony of wills without an ordainer.” This view contrasts with the in-veterate tendency elsewhere in the world to assume a supernatural deity.Westerners looking at China have continually imposed their own pre-conceptions on the Chinese scene, not least because the Chinese, thoughthey generally regarded Heaven as the supreme cosmic power, saw it asimmanent in nature, not as transcendent. Without wading further intothis deep water, let us note simply that Han thought as recorded in classi-cal writings built upon the concept of mankind as part of nature andupon the special relationship between the ruler and his ancestors, con-cepts that were already important in Shang thought over a millenniumearlier.
Fascinating. Such a profound difference in thinking (and the Chinese is much more accurate in base intuiton, i think).
Western thought got trapped in causation, in division, the law of the excluded middle, in agency.
That quote: "a philosophy of organism, an ordered harmony of wills without an ordainer."
No wonder Buddhism found such fertile soil in China.
hindrances
Five hindrances:
dance
Rathar than dice throwing? - a dance is not completely random but somehow predictable.
I'll drive for 2 hours
Brother, you gotta walk. A quote from, Chap. 11, Buddhism For Dummies:
A woman named Kisa Gotami lived in the Buddha’s time. The death of her young son upset her so much that she went mad with grief. Clutching his lifeless form, she wandered from place to place looking for some medicine to cure her beloved child. Her friends felt sorry for her and said, “Gotami, why don’t you approach the Buddha? Perhaps he can help you.”
With infinite compassion, the Buddha told Gotami, “Go to town and bring me one tiny mustard seed. However, make certain that this seed comes from a house where no one has ever died.”
The distraught mother immediately began searching house to house for the seed. Although everyone was eager to help her, they all had the same story to tell. “Last year my husband died,” said one. “Three years ago, I lost my daughter,” said another. “My brother died here yesterday,” said a third. Everywhere she went, Gotami heard the same thing.
At the end of the day, Gotami returned to the Buddha empty handed. “What have you found, Gotami?” he asked gently. “Where is your mustard seed? And where is your son? You’re not carrying him any longer.”
“Oh, Buddha,” she answered, “today I have discovered that I’m not the only one who has lost a loved one. Everywhere people have died; all things must pass away. I realize how mistaken I was to think that I could have my son back. I’ve accepted his death, and this afternoon, I had his body cremated. Now I’ve returned to you.”
It is said that the Buddha then accepted Kisa Gotami as his disciple and ordained her as a nun in his order. Her understanding of reality deepened with her practice of Dharma and she soon achieved nirvana — complete liberation from suffering.
After that — well, of course, for him there just isn’t any After That....”
In page 248 of Melford Spiro's book "Buddhism and Society: A Great Tradition and Its Burmese Vicissitudes", he writes: "In normative Buddhism there is no soul; hence, nothing survives death of the body."
Sexual assaults and violent rages... Inside the dark world of Buddhist teacher Sogyal Rinpoche
Despite the Beats' use of B
Why, though? Kerouac was a lifelong scholar of Buddhism, and so were other Beats like Ginsberg and Snyder. Indeed, Gary Snyder officially became a Buddhist and a disciple of Miura, and Ginsberg had a student-teacher relationship (together with a friendship) with the known Buddhist master Trungpa Rinpoche. This should be enough to consider them, at least at some points in their life, as Buddhists.
authentically Buddhist. Though the Beats lack a center, a center is not necessary (or even desired) - there is no such thing as a "center" to Buddhism, and if Buddhists believed there were a center, they would be bad Buddhists, because Buddhists are supposed to avoid "essentializing" and realize the inherent emptiness of concepts
Central point about Buddhism which strictly relates to Beat spirituality.
ent as a literary phenomenon, the only book-length treatment of Beat Buddhism I w
The book is called "Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation" (Carole Tonkinson). Consider finding or getting: https://www.amazon.com/Big-Sky-Mind-Buddhism-Generation/dp/1573225010. It contains essays, poems, photographs, and letters between different authors: seems very interesting and useful!
How does this relate to my thesis? Spirituality would need to be an essential part of my thesis, since I wish to consider how the lifestyle of authors of the Beat Generation blurs the defines between what is usually considered "life" and what is usually considered "literature". If I aim to show that they were "practical artists", or "performative artists" in some way (need theoretical background here), their spirituality would be an essential part of this definition, as it was an essential part of their life.
See how in the essay "Prose Contribution to the Cuban Revolution" he says "That's the karma I wanted, to be a saint" (The Essential Ginsberg). Being a saint comes before being a writer.
we argue that “consciousness” contains no top-down control processes and that “consciousness” involves no executive, causal, or controlling relationship with any of the familiar psychological processes conventionally attributed to it.
I think this ideas is somewhat similar to the mind as a "sixth" sense of Buddhism, that allows for perceptions of thoughts and awareness.
This is more a ‘dark side’ of the secular mindfulness movement than of mindfulness per se (though there have been precursors of the issue in Zen).Most (all?) schools of Buddhism teach mindfulness in a broader ethical context which includes conscious cultivation of compassion & empathy as you write.But Buddhism also often claims that mindful insight reveals compassion to be intrinsic to the mind. Ethics then falls out of phenomenology, and its cultivation is therefore more like sharpening the senses than it is cultural indoctrination. This seems like its most interesting and important claim.
It was shocking to hear, especially from a guy who has spent four decades doing mindfulness meditation in the foothills of the Himalayas. For Ricard, the Buddhist approach to mindfulness – unlike its secular counterpart – doesn’t have this problem of being ‘mindfulness without morals’, as it emphasises concepts such as compassion, caring, empathy and altruism.
There are a lot of people speaking about mindfulness, but the risk is that it’s taken too literally – to just ‘be mindful’. Well, you could have a very mindful sniper and a mindful psychopath. It’s true! A sniper needs to be so focused, never distracted, very calm, always bringing back his attention to the present moment. And non-judgemental – just kill people and no judgement. That could happen!Ricard was only half-joking, because he knows that secular mindfulness courses have become popular in military training and amongst Wall Street bankers, who hope it will keep them calm and give them the edge when the financial stakes are high. He then told me about a study at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig showing that taking a mindfulness course can help you deal with stress but has no discernible impact on pro-social behaviour.
Flanagan explains why Buddhism should be so appealing to philosophers. It offers a metaphysics anchored in such robust principles as impermanence, no-self, and the ubiquity of causation, an epistemology that is thoroughly empiricist, and an ethics that prizes compassion, while at the same time claiming "that there are logical connections between these three" (206). A philosopher working at the intersection of multiple "spaces of meaning" would find that these logical connections open up new possibilities for enhancing, refining, and expanding the range of philosophical arguments and possibilities.
EudaimoniaBuddha and eudaimoniaAristotle are different, though perhaps complementary, experiments in living. By stressing the difference between these and many other ways of being-in-the-world, Flanagan is not championing the sort of ethical relativism one typically associates with Gilbert Harman or David B. Wong.
It is primarily this synthesis of normativity and causal explanation that makes Buddhism special. If for Aristotelian flourishing comes from living a life of virtue (understood as human reason embodied), Buddhist moral concerns and aspirations for freedom are informed by such metaphysical principles as the no-self view (which Flanagan interprets in terms of psychological continuity and connectedness), the impermanence of all phenomena, and interdependent arising
As a participant in the activities of the Mind and Life Institute, Flanagan is also privy to what those, like the Dalai Lama and his entourage (who both embody and represent one specific tradition of Buddhist theory and practice), say behind closed doors, so to speak. That is, he knows that even some of Buddhism's best known representatives are keenly aware that Buddhism might perhaps be an unfinished project and that some of its doctrines should in fact be revised to take into account the findings of cognitive science.
The neuroscientific data, he argues, is inconclusive. Buddhism provides at best a modus vivendi that shares many features with the Aristotelian model of virtue ethics and, as such, is less special than some of its more ardent proponents would have it. It does not mean, however, that Buddhism does not offer something unique and special; it just isn't what those who champion the science of happiness think it is.
I do think it is a philosophy for everyone, and I am convinced that the world would be a better place if more people prioritized their moral development over the acquisition of external goods. That said, there are clearly people for whom Stoicism immediately “clicks,” it comes natural, and others for whom it doesn’t. Then again, Stoicism isn’t the only positive philosophy of life. Buddhism is an excellent alternative, if it speaks more clearly to one’s personality or cultural background. What the world needs is more compassion (love in the broad sense, as you were saying earlier) and use of practical reason to solve human problems.
Engaged Buddhism has to constantly invent “what the Buddha would have said” about them. Second, Engaged Buddhism inherits Mahayana’s weakness. Engaged Buddhism is all about having good intentions; it mainly fails to take effective action.
What the Buddha would have said? Tantric attitude: I'm the Buddha!