In the Dalai Lama’s continuing dialogue with Western science, I would not be surprised to read one day that neuroscientists have decided that Buddhism’s pure Mind or One Mind is not real. In other words, Buddhists have been deluded for over twenty-five centuries! Poor Buddhists, like the Dalai Lama, really don’t grasp the nature and function of mind/ consciousness that, in fact, mind is an epiphenomenon of the human brain.
I doubt the scientists who flutter around the Dalai Lama, eager to convert him to the wonders of neuroscience and string theory will make any headway in persuading him to dump the Buddha's teaching for science.
The only reason the Dalai Lama admires the West is because the West is good at a few things like inventing (I have in mind Thomas Edison). Take the examples of fly screen, refrigerators, washing machines, radios, airplanes, ballpoint pens, to name just a few items among countless others. Without them life would not be as pleasant. But such devices tell us nothing about what our thoughts are made of. This is ignored by Westerners.
It is only the Buddhists who have dared to plumb the mystery of thought, itself, and behold its clear light substance. By doing so, they have declared the universe is only Mind; what we are perceiving, in other words, is mind phenomena. Unfortunately, the West has been derelict in this undertaking. Westerners see no benefit in seeing the clear light substance from which our thoughts are made from.
If Western science sees Tibetan Buddhists as primitives, educated yak herdsmen, well Tibetans see the long-nosed Westerners as sentient beings who need to be saved from their ignorance; who lack insight into what phenomenal reality is really composed of.
Sansiddah the scientific method doesn't so much "discover truth" using empirical evidence as it systematically tests and discards proven-false hypotheses. Not worth arguing about for very long.
Posted by: Bob Morris | January 11, 2012 at 08:38 PM
The post from February 24, 2009, "I'm in my head", which I just happened to read, is a very interesting discussion of this issue of Mind and individual consciousness.
Posted by: Eidolon | January 10, 2012 at 07:02 PM
It has certainly occurred to me to wonder whether Buddhists concluded that everything was Mind way back in the past because the complexities of the functioning of the human brain were beyond folks' suspicions back then. And please, don't give me some of your easily doled out scorn for wondering this - it is an obvious question that arises when one studies Buddhist "psychology". To say that everything is Mind...what does it mean? Is it the same thing as the individual, personal mind? Are the Buddhists saying that it is the same "sense of identity", only that sense has been confusedly applied to one's individual body, when the real "identity" is literally everything, one thing and all beings? I have a hard time saying why I think this, but I believe that the Buddhist view of "Mind only" is not susceptible of proof that would be recognized as scientific, and weirdly enough, it can't be satisfactorily explained except in very very abstract way, because of the inherently dualistic nature of language. I get the idea that some of what Wittgenstein said about language and philosophy deals with this precise problem.
Posted by: Eidolon | January 10, 2012 at 06:53 PM
Bruce, can you provide evidence that providing empirical evidence is the best way to discover truth? Can you prove with the scientific method the scientific method itself? On what is it grounded? What if truth is only reachable through introspection? Then science will always remain in obscurity, chasing tails.
Posted by: Sansiddhah | January 10, 2012 at 06:06 PM
As I recall from reading an autobiography, HHDL has been interested in science since he was a kid. He is doing the right things for the world in several spheres and we are very fortunate to have him. By the way, science hasn't been "western" for some time. That it is truly global is evident from a list of Nobel Prize winners http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_country.
Posted by: Bob Morris | January 10, 2012 at 05:46 PM