Panel V: Ethics

(Text written by Annabella Pitkin)
Meditation appears to be able to provide analytic and therapeutic tools for individuals to understand and develop their own minds. However, according to Indo-Tibetan Buddhist and other traditions, development of one’s own capacities is simply a preliminary to ethical engagement with others. Similarly, certain philosophers within the European phenomenological tradition such as Emmanuel Levinas and his interlocutors have highlighted the interface between epistemological questions and ethical ones.

This session will build on earlier panel discussions to explore the intersection of theories of knowledge about the mind, practical modalities for engaging with the mind, and ethical questions about how conscious individuals can or should relate to each other. Ultimately, conscious individuals do not exist singly but rather in relationship and under conditions of interaction.

Bringing together scholars of science and ethics such as Robert Pollack (biology), Gareth Sparham (Buddhism), Edith Wyschogrod (philosophy), and target essayist Jay Garfield (philosophy & Buddhism), this final panel will consider both the cognitive and ethical implications of the relational dimension of reality.ༀ

Panelist Essays & Presentations:
• Jay Garfield’s target essay.
• Gareth Sparham’s response.
• Edith Wyschogrod’s essay.

Web:
• Religion & Ethics“The Dalai Lama”
• SfN News Release: “Dalai Lama Urges that Ethics be a Guide. . .”
• Dalai Lama Neurons/Mirror Neurons).
• Journal of Buddhist Ethics
• ETHICS UPDATES

※ And please visit the Mind & Reality website for details on the Symposium and audio webcast.

World.Wide.Wisdom.

In his youth, the fourteenth Dalai Lama-Tenzin Gyatso was supposedly quite fond of guns. According to professor of Buddhism Robert A. F. Thurman, the Nobel Prize laureate was (perhaps is still?) captivated by the technology and mechanics of firearms. Incongruent as it may seem, we are all familiar with the NRA mantra: “guns don’t kill people—people kill people.” Similarly, Buddhist philosophy does not attribute any intrinsic killing properties to a “gun” in of itself. Guns—and technology as whole—are void of being intrinsically either good or bad. It is what we might call the emptiness of technology and it is particularly evident in Tibetan Mind Science today.

In 1994 Erik Davis authored an article for Wired Magazine entitled “Digital Dharma.” India at that time had just begun to take step towards becoming the outsourcing repository it is today. Most Indians—let alone cloistered monastics—had little to no contact with digital technology. Yet, amidst the cornfields of Southern India, Davis located a small band of Tibetan monks who were fast digitizatizing the Buddhist canon. “[I]f Buddhist philosophy is to survive and thrive in the 21st century,” Davis wrote, “the dharma must be reformatted for the future.” According to the then ACIP (The Asian Classics Input Project) director Michael Roach, that means not just digitalization, but creating powerful interfaces. “[T]he future of authorship in this tradition will rest with those who design the roadways through huge databases. If you have a hundred thousand pages online, it becomes overwhelming. What do you do with it? You need an interactive system.” To that end ACIP has launched an ambitious hypertexting project and is partnering in a joint multimedia venture called the Tibetan Knowledge Consortium. (For a listing of other Indo-Tibetan digital resources see the links on the sidebar of this blog).

The digitization of texts has most famously and ambitiously been taken up by Google—a full ten years after ACIP launched its initiatives. The announcement of their contract to scan the university libraries of Oxford, Harvard, Stanford, and Michigan, and the subsequent launch of Google Book has led to heated debates about copyright infringement (see Battle Over Books and Steven Johnson’s subsequent analysis), and pessimism about the future of printed matter (see “Science in the web age: The real death of print” in this week’s Nature).

The diversity and plethora of digital resources for Buddhist enthusiasts is astounding. On-line dictionaries(see THDL Collaborative Dictionaries), geographical maps(see THDL Geography Collection), rare artwork(see Himalayan Art Resources), web radio(see Lamrim radio), ancient manuscripts (see Gene Smith & TBRC), and more. The platforms are multifarious and are pushing the very limit of what is possible on the web today. In turn, or perhaps as a consequence of, Buddhist thought and culture is prospering in the West. In Tibet, however, technology seems to be having an opposite affect on indigenous Buddhist practice and culture.

According to a recent article in the Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun (a subsidiary of The International Herald Tribune), increased availability of modern technology has jeopardized traditional Buddhist culture and religion. “In the midst of this rush to modernize,” says Kazuto Tsukamoto, “Tibetan Buddhism stands at a crossroads.” According the Tsukamoto, the number of senior Tibetan monks with a “geshe” degree (what might be considered a doctorate in Buddhist philosophy) is dropping below the already low post Cultural Revolution numbers. Informants in Tibet told Tsukamoto that finding a geshe in Tibet is as “difficult as finding a star in the daytime.” Conversely, the Tibetan exile community boasts literally thousands of monks studying for their Geshe degree at numerous monasteries all over the Indian subcontinent. In fact a handful of Westerners have recently graduated from the rigorous 15 year program and are currently teaching in the United States.

Despite Tibetan enthusiasm for increased availability of solar energy and novel services such as cellular text messaging in Tibetan, such technologies, the Dalai Lama says (see Charlie Rose interview below) are intentionally being used to disempower Buddhist culture and assimilate Tibetans into China’s Han population. In short: technology doesn’t kill Buddhism—people kill Buddhism.ༀ

Web:
• See this related news (originally reported in Reuters) about what recently happened at a peaceful sit-in at Drepung Monastery in Tibet.
• Don’t miss “Kung Fu Monks Go Modern” in the LA Times.

JAN UPDATE:
• Jack Romano, CEO of Simon & Schuster, weighed in with “The fine print in Google’s plan.”
• See also the NYTimes“China, Still Winning Against the Web.”

FEB UPDATE:

“So Long, Dalai Lama: Google Adapts to China”
“Google loses Internet users over Tibet”

Dalai Lama Visits White House

On Wednesday the the thirteenth Dalai Lama-Tenzin Gyatso met with President Bush and Condie Rice in our nation’s capitol. Previous to this historic meeting, White House press secretary Scott McClellan told reporters that he thought they would probably “talk about issues relating to Tibet.” This meeting is extremely timely because it coincides with mounting controversy over the Dalai Lama’s presence at the Society for Neuroscience on Saturday (see “Convergence & Conflict” entry below), as well as the President’s own trip to Asia next week. Regarding the latter McClellan said, “the president will continue to talk openly and candidly with leaders he meets with, including when he goes to China, about the importance of freedom of religion [and] . . . the importance of promoting human rights and human dignity for all.”

Convergence & Conflict

The decision to invite the Dalai Lama-Tenzin Gyatso to deliver the inaugural lecture in a new series at the Society For Neuroscience’s Annual Meeting this November has stirred controversy in the press and led to a petition of protest from scientists. Entitled “Dialogues between Neuroscience and Society,” the SFN describes the new series as featuring ”. . . leaders from fields outside of neuroscience whose work relates to subjects of interest to neuroscientists.” Rumor has it that the SFN has invited the architect Frank Gehry to deliver next year’s lecture.

The story was first reported in July by David Cyranoski in a Nature article entitled, “Neuroscientists See Red Over Dalai Lama.” Cyranoski subsequently wrote a follow-up piece entitled, “Dalai Lama Gets Go-Ahead,” that was accompanied by a correspondence from a reader in August.

More recently Benedict Carey picked up the story and reported it in The New York Times in his article “Scientists Bridle at Lecture Plan for Dalai Lama.” Buddhist scholar B. Alan Wallace chimed in with an Op-ed that you can read here. See also this NYT “Letter to the Editor” from a neuroscience nurse.

See also:
༄ The Guardian,”. . .Dalai Lama Lecture Angers Neuroscientists.”

Is Karma Intelligent Design?

The Dalai Lama’s new book, The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality received a mixed review from George Johnson in the New York Times Book Review (Sept. 18th, 2005). Johnson, a well known commentator on science and religion, tragically likens Buddhist causality to Intelligent Design, and asserts that Buddhist philosophy of mind was “rejected long ago by mainstream science.”

Buddhists love a good a debate and have responded strongly. B. Alan Wallace of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies posted this essay on the Mind & Life Research Network list-serve. Professor of Philosophy W. Teed Rockwell submitted this letter to the New York Times. I also chimed in with my own letter to the NYT Book Review that was subsequently published.

If you’ve got something to say, let us know about it. Post a comment here, or email me.

Buy The Universe in a Single Atom