Computationalism: the Threat to Buddhism in China (and everywhere else)

In a recent comment on the article on intentionality,  a Buddhist from China states that 'Currently, Chinese Buddhism, traditionally a bastion of Mahayana, is booming but also undergoing tremendous intellectual challenge from computationalist philosophies (similar to the issues you addressed in some of your other posts)..'

So we Buddhists need to disprove computationalism,  (aka the 'Computational Theory of Mind), which 'holds that the mind is a computation that arises from the brain acting as a computing machine...  So the computational theory of mind is the claim that the mind is a computation of a machine (the brain) that derives output representations of the world from input representations and internal memory in a way that is consistent with the theory of computation'.
 
Computationalism is a form of materialism (in fact is the logical foundation of all forms of materialism, but more of that later). It denies any spiritual or transcendental dimension to human life. Everything is mechanistic.

The popularity of the Computer Theory of mind seems to be linked to the intensity of hype surrounding Artificial Intelligence.  We are currently going through the peak of another Artificial Intelligence (AI) hype cycle (an 'AI summer').   AI-hype assures us that computers are now so powerful that machine simulation of the human mind is imminent (as it has been for the past 60 years).  

Hype and reality
These AI-hype bubbles seem to occur every decade. In the 1950's the hype was about 'electronic brains' which could do dozens of calculations per second and would soon surpass humans in all mental functions. Then in the sixties, computers were on the verge of being able to understand human language, enabling true nuanced translation between languages, rather than clunky word-substitution. 

In the seventies, the microprocessor revolution was predicted to enable  massively parallel brain-emulators to be built, bringing about the long-promised AI revolution.  The eighties were the decade of expert systems, which would replace human technical and medical professionals by omniscient computers. 
 
In the nineties, we were assured that neural nets would at last provide the solutions to the failures of previous hype cycles.  In the noughties, the interconnection of millions of computers via the internet would finally give enough power to produce a global brain to surpass the human mind, and solve the problems that neural nets couldn't.  The current decade's hype cycle concerns robotics, which promises us that connecting computers to sensors and actuators will at last solve the Hard Problem  and lead to true artificial sentience, within a year or two at the very most - and this time it's really going to happen!

Although 'AI-hype' and 'computationalism' aren't totally synonymous, there is a close relationship (known as 'strong AI').  To see why AI always fails to deliver, and computationalism is a non-starter, and always has been, and always will be, we need to consider the following factors:

Computationalism implies that all mental processes can be modeled by suitable combinations of the members of the instruction set of a general purpose computer, the instruction set being functionally identical to a Turing Machine (TM).     

So, if we can demonstrate any functions and activities of the mind which are beyond the capabilities of a Turing Machine (and hence all its derived instruction sets), then we have demolished the foundations of all forms of computationalism*.
 
When we examine the components of the TM in detail, we find that none of them...

(i) are capable of holding meaning. They do not possess any semantic capabilities, or 'intentionality' to use the technical term.

(ii) are capable of registering qualitative states ('qualia') such as sensations of pleasure, pain etc.

And when we check the basic repertoire of operations that the TM can carry out (and the derived and hence equivalent instruction-sets of general purpose computers) we fail to find any combination of these operations that can operate on the components to produce semantic or qualitative phenomena.  Thus two major functions of the sentient human mind are beyond the capabilities of machines.  These arguments are explained in more detail here, here, here and here.

This is why the Mother of all Algorithms is itself NOT an algorithm, and never could be programmed.


Tail wagging the dog?
The Turing Machine was, and is, an object of consciousness, a mathematical thought-experiment  first imagined by Alan Turing. For many years it remained just that - a mathematical structure with no physical instantiation, existing only in the minds of theoreticians.
 
Computationalism claims ontological primacy for this disembodied object of the mind, making it more basic than everything else, including the inventiveness that first created it.  The computationalists claim (explicitly or implicitly) that the Turing Machine is the foundation of consciousness, yet the TM is itself a product of consciousness. 

Buddhists would believe that there is a phenomenon even more fundamental than the TM, since the TM is an object arising out of thought.  That more fundamental phenomenon is the experience of creating, imagining and thinking about the TM in the first place.    

As the Kadampas put it: 

'..If we check, we can see that we cannot in fact separate out the objects of our thoughts from the thoughts or awarenesses holding them, any more than we can separate out a wave from an ocean or a reflection in a mirror from the mirror itself. There is no such thing as an object not known by mind, which is the definition of object, “known by mind”.

Can you even think of an object that is not known by mind? There is no world outside of our experience of the world. What is going on for you right now, for example, is your experience of what is going on – if you go looking, you cannot find anything going on out there. Your whole world cannot be separated out from your experience of the world – you cannot point to any world outside of your experience of it. As soon as you do, you’re experiencing it.

Waves are the nature of the ocean, not outside the ocean. Appearances are the nature of the mind, not outside the mind...'

Demolishing all forms of materialism
The Church-Turing-Deutsch Principle (CTDP) states that a universal computing device can simulate every physical process.

If the CTDP is true (and it's never been disproved) and computationalism is false (which seems to be the case) then all other physicalist and materialist theories of the mind are consequently false.  It follows that the non-computationalist mind exists outside the scope of the CTD, and hence it is outside the scope of all physical, mechanistic and material theories, no matter how they may be expressed.  By defeating computationalism we have removed the foundation of  all other physical/materialist explanations of the mind.  

Our next (and most important) task is to understand the true nature of this non-physical mind.


* Turing machines and instruction sets
Turing completeness is the ability of a system of instructions to simulate a Turing machine. A programming language that is Turing complete is theoretically capable of expressing all tasks accomplishable by computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine  

In computability theory, a system of data-manipulation rules (such as a computer's instruction set, a programming language, or a cellular automaton) is said to be Turing complete or computationally universal if it can be used to simulate any Turing machine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness

Although physical TMs can be built, they are generally demonstrated to students in the form of emulations using standard programing languages.     Hence, it works both ways, TMs can emulate computer instruction sets, and computer instruction sets can emulate TMs.  

It's quite remarkable just how few instructions are required to provide full and complete computing capabilities - fewer than twenty:  SET, MOVE, READ, WRITE, ADD, SUBTRACT, MULTIPLY, DIVIDE, AND, OR, XOR, NOT,  SHIFT, ROTATE, COMPARE, JUMP, JUMP-CONDITIONALLY, RETURN

Increasing the power of a computer cannot expand its functionality beyond this instruction set, since any general purpose computer can simulate any other computer, albeit slowly.  Hence if machine sentience ('strong AI') were indeed possible, it could have been demonstrated in the 1950's!  Throwing newer, faster more powerful hardware at the problem won't produce any fundamental breakthrough in functionality, just as increasing the working temperature, spin-speed and capacity of your washing machine won't suddenly make it capable of mowing the lawn.


See also Buddhist Philosophy,  Why Materialism is Crap 
and
SWOT Analysis - Strengths. Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats to Buddhism

Purifying the Past with Vajrasattva, the New Year Buddha

The night before

followed by...


...the morning after

NEVER AGAIN!
That's what many of us say on the first of January - and it isn't just about the after effects of New Year's Eve.

Never, ever, again!

New Year is the traditional time for kicking old harmful habits, and resolving to stop causing further hurt to ourselves and others.

A fresh start

Purification
The Vajrasattva visualisation and meditation gives us a fresh start by purifying harmful, negative tendencies and states of mind.

The practice consists of visualising Buddha Vajrasattva (small - about 6 inches tall - not full-sized like a human) above the crown of our heads. He doesn't come from anywhere in particular, he just appears. We believe he is there but don't need detailed visualisations.

Vajrasattva purification relies upon the four opponent powers, which are...

1) Reliance
2) Regret
3) Opponent force
4) Promise

Vajrasattva is the Buddha of Purification.

Reliance
Reliance helps pacify and weaken negative karma, it involves going for refuge and developing a mind of boddhichitta .

Any negative actions we have committed in the past were either towards objects of refuge, or towards sentient beings.

Negative actions against objects of refuge are purified by going for refuge. We go for refuge to Vajrasattva, regarding him as the synthesis of all objects of refuge.

Negative actions against sentient beings are purified by developing bodhicitta. We think of all living beings as precious and dedicate ourselves to their welfare, and to abandoning causing them suffering. We may wish to visualise that we are surrounded by all living beings and they are also purifying by relying on Vajrasattva.

Caring for all living beings

Regret
We develop a sincere regret for all the harmful actions that we have performed against sentient beings. Regret is not the same as guilt. Guilt is a negative state of mind that increases confusion and self-hatred. It leads nowhere and functions only to weaken our will.

Regret, on the other hand, is an admission of our mistakes coupled with a positive intention to learn from them by not repeating them. In other words, we are performing a tantric transmutation by transforming our negative history into our future spiritual path.


Opponent force
The mantra is the opponent force that purifies the actual negativities. We can mentally or audibly recite the long or short mantras. When we are reciting we are requesting Vajrasattva to purify us.

We visualise a moon cushion at Vajrasattva's heart on which is the white letter HUM. Standing around this are the letters of the mantra. From the mantra white light rays and white nectar pour down and purify us from top to bottom, pushing out negativities. All dirty substances leave by lower orifices.

Negative karma leaves as dirty liquid. Mental and physical sicknesses leave as pus, blood, worms and other creepy-crawlies.

Then we feel completely clean, our body is just pure white light.

If we have a particular problem, we visualise that problem being expelled.


Promise
The fourth opponent power is the power of promise to gradually abandon harmful actions. We can't purify without making a promise to refrain. Promise purifies the tendency to repeat bad habits which harm ourselves and others. Promise plants the seeds of new tendencies which destroy old tendencies.

At this point we make a realistic promise to avoid negative actions. We don't make promises we can't keep, but make a determination to overcome all negative actions eventually.


Dedication
Finally, Vajrasattva dissolves into us, and our body, speech and mind become inseparable from Vajrasattva.

We then dedicate the merit we have accumulated by practising the Vajrasattva purification to the happiness of all sentient beings.



12 steps
Although we may joke about the after-effects of New Year's Parties, for some people alcohol is a year-long nightmare. The Alcoholics Anonymous 12 step program requires alcoholics to acknowledge they are helpless against their addiction until they go for refuge to a Higher Power.

For Buddhists, Vajrasattva is such a Higher Power who can help to break addicitions to alcohol, drugs, food etc

Wishing all sentient beings

RELATED ARTICLE:

Vajrasattva Mantra Song and Video

Buddhist Christmas

Buddhist Candlemas

Buddhist Halloween

Seasonal Festivals

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Buddhism Subject Index

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Understanding the minds and motivations of the Jihadist bombers

'I have been made victorious with terror!'

UPDATE HALLOWEEN 2017.
ANOTHER ATTACK, THIS TIME VEHICULAR JIHAD RATHER THAN A BOMBING,  WITH A TRUCK AIMED AT A SCHOOL BUS, BUT THE SAME ARGUMENTS APPLY...


I wrote this original analysis of terrorism as a contagious mental illness  four years ago.   The situation has continued to deteriorate since then, with the attacks becoming ever more frequent, and the latest one specifically targeting children, leaving little girls killed, maimed, mutilated and disfigured for life, with faces ripped apart by shrapnel deliberately added to the bomb for that purpose.  Ever since the Beslan attack, the jihadists have been particularly keen to murder and maim infidel children. with more attacks planned for the future.   (For an explanation of the jihadist attitude to child murder/abuse/rape read this)

 

Saffie Roussos, youngest victim of Jihadist human sacrifice

The well-intentioned but dangerous delusion of the 'Religion of Peace'
It is dangerous and deluded wishful thinking, no matter how well-intentioned,  to claim that every major world religion, including Jihadism,  advocates peace, love and compassion at the heart of its teachings, and that all violent manifestations are a corruption of the original faith. 

- It is wishful thinking, because we 'kuffars', as they call us, are vainly wishing that all the jihadists, and their supporters and enablers, are mistaken about the true nature of their faith. 

- It is deluded, because half-an-hour's investigation of the teachings of Jihadism, the character of its founder, and the history of its expansion, will demonstrate that the jihadists are correct. The ideology is indeed powered by hatred, intolerance, ignorance and aggression  Jihadism is an arrogant, expansionist, totalitarian and supremacist faith, commanded to world domination. It always has been and always will be.

- And it is dangerous wishful thinking, similar to the well-intentioned 1930's propaganda that the Nazis wanted 'Peace in our time', which lulled the civilised world into complacency, and allowed the forces of evil to gather strength. Hitler could have been stopped much earlier, and with far less bloodshed, if the appeasers had not deluded themselves, and most of the gullible public, about the true nature of his ideology.  

Malware of the Mind
Perhaps if we were to reclassify jihadism from being a religion, to being a contagious form of insanity, we might find better ways of dealing with it.  Maybe if we regarded jihadism as a public health problem, we could use some of the epidemiological approaches to eradicating it that have been so successful against other contagious scourges of humanity, such as smallpox and polio. 

Using the public health analogy, we could employ immunization. We could deliberately spread the metameme (a meme about memes) to give immunity to more pernicious supremacist memes by stimulating critical thinking in would-be jihadists, much like the harmless cowpox virus can block out the lethal smallpox virus by stimulating the immune system.

The mental infection of jihadism is transmitted by a collection of memes (mind-viruses), which when they come together in an organized, mutually-reinforcing system such as religious supremacism are known as a memeplex.  A malignant memeplex takes over the normal mental processes of its host, just like a virus takes over the normal biochemical processes of the body to ensure its own reproduction and spread, even if it means destroying its host in the process.

As Nobel-prize winning author V.S. Naipaul pointed out, hatred of kuffars is the pivot of supremacist existence, and this is the central meme around which all the other components of the jihadist memeplex revolve.   The hatred is so psychopathically intense that the host will destroy himself in order to further the purposes of the memes.  

Jihadism, like Nazism, is what political scientists classify as an 'otherising' ideology. Both Nazism and Jihadism derive their energy from dividing the world into them versus us. For Nazism this conflict is Untermenschen versus Ubermenschen, for Jihadism it is Kuffars versus Ummah. Despite the differences in terminology, the results are very much the same.  This divisiveness leads to the classical liberal dilemma of tolerance of the intolerant, or how do you avoid otherising people who insist on otherising you from themselves?

This isn't to say that all supremacists (and especially heretics such as Ahmadiyyas and Sufis) automatically hate us. It's just that 'Kill the unbelievers wherever you find them' is the pivotal commandment of the Koran, with the phrase 'wherever you find them' presumably including children's concerts.   The jihadist hostility towards kuffars is obsessive, about one third of the Koran consists of fulminations against unbelievers!

So the devout supremacist will always have this genocidal commandment ticking away at the back of his mind, ready to explode into Sudden Jihad Syndrome as soon as he becomes mentally unstable.   

For mentally unstable people who have been brought up in Christian, Jewish, Buddhist or Hindu cultures, the internalized commandment 'Thou shalt not kill' may have a restraining influence.    But for the mentally disturbed supremacist, the commandment 'Thou shalt kill!' has the opposite effect. 

This seething hatred of all infidels, whether men, women or children, provides much of the motivation and justification for the jihadist rape gangs and pedophile networks who harass women and girls in Europe's cities. As with the caliphate, the relevant verses in the Koran and hadiths are quoted to justify their sadisticly depraved and perverted lusts, but that's another story.

From the Buddhist point of view, jihadists such as the Manchester bombers deserve compassion just as much as their victims, for their lives are also being ruined by this contagious viral memeplex of self-reinforcing delusions. A rabid dog suffers from the rabies virus just as much as the people he bites. 

And perhaps Buddhism might offer some hope of treatment for potential jihadists. It may be possible to use Buddhist meditation techniques to cut through delusions and weed out malignant memes even after they have become established ( more here)

And finally, another intellectual weapon against the ideology of jihadism is the theory of evolution itself (from which memetics and the metameme derive).  Jihadism is incompatible with evolution. If evolution is true then the Koran is false, and consequently all its incitements to violence are revealed as nothing but the rantings and ravings of a psychopath, rather than the commandments of God.   

Of course evolution is no threat to Buddhism, though Darwinism does raise some interesting questions about what experiences our body censors from our mind. 

See also Malignant memes, memeplexes and the metameme.
and   TERRORISM AND BUDDHISM 

 

Buddhism and OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder)

In Aeon Magazine, Matt Bieber describes how he treated his OCD by using the calming and benevolent rituals of Buddhism to replace the painful compulsive rituals of OCD:

"My OCD had been creating vivid, painful rituals for years. So could Buddhist ritual give me a means to fight back?"

"Our society likes to portray obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) as a cute quirk, a goofy, if irritating, eccentricity. It is not. For the person undergoing OCD experience, it is a form of mental terrorism.

This terrorism takes the form of what psychologists call ‘intrusive thoughts’ — unwanted, painful thoughts or images that invade one’s consciousness, triggering profound fear and anxiety...."

"...These rituals can take many forms. For some people, it’s the stuff you see on TV — repeatedly checking to see if the door’s locked, counting the letters in words until a particular total is reached, avoiding the cracks in the sidewalk. I’ve experienced some of this, but for me, invitations to ritualise tend to be more purely mental — to ruminate endlessly, to replay anxiety-producing scenarios until I find a way to view them that will dissipate my anxiety (which, of course, never happens). The common thread are the rituals, the promise that there’s something repetitive and formalised that I can do to make things feel better..."

"...Some rituals are designed to help us ‘keep ourselves together’. Others are designed to help us fall apart. OCD rituals are the former, and so are many religious rituals. But Buddhist meditation offers a radical alternative..."

"...Unlike OCD, or the rituals of my evangelical childhood, Buddhist rituals work not because they teach us how to stay together, but because they show us how to fall apart.

"...Because the solid ego is a fiction, it requires constant maintenance. We are constantly filtering our experience — excluding information, repressing our feelings, and ignoring our deep connections with other people — in order to defend and perpetuate a narrow understanding of ourselves. In other words, we’re constantly deceiving ourselves about who and what we are.

Why, you might ask, would anyone engage in this kind of self-deception? The contemporary Tibetan Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche said that we are afraid of what we know to be true: that when we look to the centre of our own being, we won’t find anything to hold on to. In his words, we’re afraid that we don’t exist..."   READ IT ALL



Related Article

Can You Trust Your Mind? Does Your Brain Deceive You?

Process and Emptiness: Whitehead and Buddhism.

Process and Emptiness: A Comparison of Whitehead’s Process Philosophy and Mahayana Buddhist Philosophy  by Thomas J. McFarlane


"It is my hope that this paper will foster deeper understanding of both Whitehead’s process philosophy and Buddhist teachings, and help all sentient beings in their creative advance toward Buddhahood."

ABSTRACT: Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy is compared with Mahayana Buddhist philosophy. After briefly introducing the philosophies of Whitehead and Buddhism, some similarities between them are examined. The primary areas of convergence are

(1) Impermanence and process as fundamental aspects of reality

(2) The emptiness and lack of substance of things

(3) The relational and dependent nature of things

(4) The notion of ignorance and mistaken perception

(5) The possibility of freedom from ignorance and mistaken perception

(6) The emphasis on subjective and experiential aspects of reality

(7) The fundamental limitations of language and philosophical systems in characterizing reality. The paper concludes with a discussion of an important distinguishing feature of Buddhist philosophy, namely, its dialectical method of criticism.

Read it all here  




 
For general background see Buddhist Philosophy

Australian Muslim leader calls for murder of Buddhists

From Atlas Shrugs 

Muslim cleric in Australia: "Oh Allah, count the Buddhists and the Hindus one by one. Oh Allah, count them and kill them to the very last one."

Hate speech and genocide
Islam divides people into two antagonistic groups - Muslims (collectively known as the Ummah) versus Kaffirs (aka Kufr, Kuffars, Infidels or non-believers).

Kaffirs are subdivided further - Jews and Christians who accept the supremacy of Islam are known as Dhimmis, and are allowed to live as second-class citizens, provided they pay the extortionate Jizya (infidel tax) to their Muslim masters. The state of being a submissive Dhimmi is known as Dhimmitude.

Buddhists, Pagans and members of all other 'non-Abrahamic' religions, together with secularists, and those Jews and Christians who do not accept Muslim domination, are regarded as Harbis - targets of war. 

Islam is at permanent war with Harbis, even if the Harbis don't actually do anything to annoy Muslims. The Harbis' mere existence is itself an act of war. A Harbi has no rights, not even the right to live.


Dar al-Harb and Dar al-Islam
Areas under Muslim control are known as Dar al-Islam. Areas under Harbi control are known as Dar al-Harb - the domain of war. The Koran commands Muslims to wage perpetual war (Jihad) against Dar al-Harb until the entire world is Dar al-Islam. These attacks are ordained by Allah and are non-negotiable in the long term, though the practice of taqiyya (holy deception) allows temporary deceptive peace agreements (’hudna’) to be made if the forces of Islam are too weak to attack the Harbis successfully.
(In fact Buddhists are desrcibed as 'Mushrik' - idolaters - a Muslim term of abuse which places mushrikun even lower than 'najis kafirs'.)


Buddhists as Harbis
Buddhists have always been favorite targets because:

(1) The Koran (Surah 9, ayah 5) commands that polytheists and idolaters should be murdered wherever they are found. Buddhist statues and icons provided the perfect excuse for a bloodbath. Modern Muslims continue to believe that since Buddhists are not monotheists they must be forced to convert to Islam or be killed.


(2) Being pacifists, Buddhists were unable to defend themselves.
 
Islamic theology has a long history of uncompromising hostility towards Buddhism, and includes doctrines which have 'sanctified' the slaughter of  Buddhist sangha and destroyed Buddhist civilizations throughout Asia. More here,




See   No future for Buddhism in an Islamized World

"Change and decay in all around I see..."

From Lankaweb  

Ill-digested science and garbled Buddhist metaphysics
- R Chandrasoma

"In the world of physical knowledge an overarching law is that called the Second Law of Thermodynamics (The Law of Increasing Entropy) which says that in a closed physical system, disorder or chaoticity alone can increase with the passage of time. Any overall initial organization can only weaken as the system ages. Note the important caveat – given by the words ‘overall’ and ‘closed’. Within a closed system there can be subsystems that are anti-entropic – in which order increases at the expense of the general trend of disorder in the system as a whole. Life – and living systems – are oases of ant-entropic complexity in a physical universe that is running down. Indeed, this is the striking fact – that life (and complexity in general) has prevailed in a universe governed by physical laws that do not give any hint of this potential. The rise of complexity and organization in a universe governed by physical laws that predict the very opposite is the central mystery of the universe as we know it. To suggest (as does Prof. Suwanda H J Sugunasiri in a recent contribution to LankaWeb) that perishibility and decay constitute the essence that unites science and religion is a misdirection in both areas of knowledge. Let us note, first, that religion and science are ‘non-overlapping magisteria’ and the concepts of the one are not readily transferable to the other. Thus, the three cardinal attributes of all that exists are anicca, anatta and dukkha according to the grounding metaphysics of Buddhism. Of these, the first (anicca – the process or fluxional nature of all aspects of nature) and the second (anatta – the denial of enduring essences) can link with basic notions of science such as system dynamicity and integration – but dukkha is a purely religious term and hinges upon the metaphysical reaction of a conscious agent to the inexorably fluxional nature of things and events. When the Buddha reflected sadly on the fact that ‘all component things are subject to decay’ he did not have in mind the Law of Increasing Entropy – he alluded to the fact that the Eternal must be Unchanging and final ‘release’ of a karmic being comes with the total cessation of the Birth-Death cycle that enslaves us. (Nirvana). This vision goes well beyond science and its understanding of the dynamics of change. The numinous is categorically different from the mundane.

Let me conclude with a few words about the metaphysics of decay that is hugely over-emphasized in ‘popular’ versions of Buddhism. It is true that we are finite beings living briefly and, perhaps, dying ingloriously. Yet there is burgeoning and beauty in nature that briefly defies the universal law of decay. A beautiful flower, a young prancing animal or a haunting melody bespeak of an aspect of nature that rises above the ugly reality of time and decay. Its brevity and transience does not diminish its importance as a glorious aspect of the puzzling reality in which we are trapped as mortal beings. This must be celebrated even when the metaphysics of sorrow seem to overwhelm us."




From The Zennist 

Buddhism distilled

"I hate to be the bearer of bad news but Gautama the Buddha put forth a substance theory or if you prefer a less challenging term, he puts forth an essence theory.  Incidentally, for me, this puts Buddhism into the realm of science insofar as the Buddha directly cognized a unique substance.  Let’s not forget what the broad definition of science is.  It is “knowledge or cognizance of something specified or implied” (O.E.D.). 

More specifically, such an awakening by Gautama whereby he became the Buddha was the cognizance of an all pervading substance which was not composed or asankhata/asamskrita, in contrast to the composed.  It also implies that the universe exists within a spiritual medium which is mind-like.  Even our most subtle thoughts occur within this enveloping medium, the substance or essence of which is only Mind (cittamatra).

About his ministry, to make a long story short, the Buddha tried to show composed things have no actual substance or essence.  They are empty and illusory.  More importantly, he taught that our psychophysical body is not the first-person or our authentic self, the self being the immediacy of substance which, in our unawakened human condition, we are unable to recognize.  Because of this, we are unable to distinguish our real self from our composed psychophysical condition which is the false self or anâtman.  This further leads to our rebirth into composed states where again we are unable to recognize our self in this encompassing deception.

In this context, the importance of meditation cannot be overstressed.  To put it simply, meditation, when accomplished, is the awakening to the universal substance that Gautama cognized.  The adept has passed through all fluctuations of mind to arrive at pure Mind itself which is irreducible.  At this arrival, one sees that Mind is free of suffering which has always been oneself.  One no longer blindly journeys (samsara), incomplete and ignorant (avidya) clinging to a false self which is composite."

Buddhism leads approval poll in France

Here's an interesting item on transcultural interaction from Frontpage Magazine:

Questioned by the agency Tilder and the Institut Montaigne, in the context of the program “Place aux idées” broadcast on Tuesday evening on LCP, 87% of French people have a positive image of Buddhism, 76% of Protestantism, 69% of Catholicism and 64% of Judaism. So more French people have a positive view of Buddhism than they do of their own religion.

It's interesting to speculate why Buddhism should be so popular in France.  One of the reasons may be may be that philosophy enjoys a much higher status in French education, and French culture in general, than it does in much of the rest of Europe and in the Anglophone countries.  

Unlike other Europeans, the French are required to be prepared to "philosophise"  before moving on to university.   For four gruelling hours, every student in their last year of “lycée” is asked to respond in writing to one philosophical question. Examples from previous years include, “Can a scientific truth be dangerous?” and “Is it one’s own responsibility to find happiness?”

The study of philosophy in France has a core role in secondary education. In “terminale” – the last year of high school – it is a compulsory subject for all students. Those studying humanities do eight hours of philosophy a week, while pupils studying science and technology do just two hours.

Since Buddhism is a rational and philosophical religion, this may be part of its transcultural appeal to the philosophically-literate French.

The interaction between Buddhism and Philosophy in French intellectual life is exemplified by the popularity of The Monk and the Philosopher, a dialog between Buddhist Monk Matthieu Ricard and his philosopher father. 


TIP - If some aspects of Buddhist beliefs seem unfamiliar, obscure, or confusing, then bear in mind that Buddhism is a process philosophy.   Difficult aspects of Buddhism often become much clearer when viewed from a process perspective.



Related Articles

Is Buddhist Philosophy Neglected in the West?

Mind and Meaning in English and French 

Shared Heritage - Hellenism, Humanism and Rationalism

Rational Buddhism

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Buddhism Subject Index

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Cash-strapped healthcare system looks to Buddhism to cut costs

From The Guardian

"Back in 1965, a grad student in molecular biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology stumbled across a class of five people on Zen Buddhism. He'd never heard of Zen and knew nothing of Buddhism. Nearly half a century later, that grad student, Jon Kabat-Zinn, has arguably done more than any other individual to put Buddhism into the mainstream, not just in America, but in dozens of countries around the world. Now, Downing Street policymakers are keen to hear more.

"That first class took the top off my head. I found a sense of largeness beyond my little preoccupations of what would happen to my future, or my relationships," says Kabat-Zinn. "It opened up a new dimension of being which could offer more meaning and enable me to interface more effectively with society in a way which could be healing and transformative."

Kabat-Zinn's enthusiasm for that dramatic breakthrough is still palpable as he talks of how as a scientist he resolved to find a way to bring those benefits to millions of others. What he evolved over the next 15 years was the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programme; an eight-week set of meditation and yoga practices in classes and at home, which instil the basics of paying close attention to the current moment.

"I was teaching molecular biology of muscle development in medical school at the time, and began to ask doctors: 'What percentage of your patients do you help?' They thought it was about 15% to 20%."

So Kabat-Zinn set up a clinic to help the untreatable majority. "Patients turned up with all kinds of conditions: hypertension, cancer, anxiety."

As a scientist, Kabat-Zinn knew he needed evidence; anecdotes and testimony were not going to be enough to persuade the American health establishment. "I wrote up the chronic pain results first because they were astonishing." Since then, a steady stream of academic papers, books and, more recently, randomised control trials, have helped pave the way for hundreds of MBSR programmes in hospitals and medical centres across the US.

Kabat-Zinn's work has spawned a cluster of different applications of mindfulness training, including for addiction, the elderly and parenting. In the past couple of decades, Kabat-Zinn has collaborated with psychologists in the UK who have adapted his work for Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), which has won recognition from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice), as a treatment for depression.

All of which explains why our interview is happening in Westminster, where Kabat-Zinn has a string of meetings with senior politicians before he heads to Downing Street for a session with policy advisers. There are good reasons for the policymakers to be listening closely, as Kabat-Zinn and his colleagues have a compelling proposition: mindfulness has unlimited applicability to almost every healthcare issue we now face – and it's cheap..."  Read it all 



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Debating Buddhism with Materialists

Alan Turing, father of the computer

"When the body dies, the 'mechanism' of the body holding the spirit is gone, and the spirit finds a new body sooner or later, perhaps immediately."  - That's what Buddhists believe, and also what Alan Turing believed.

Alan Turing was the mathematical genius who laid the theoretical foundations for modern computer science.  During the Second World War, he used his talents to crack the Nazi codes, and shortened the conflict by years, saving the lives of millions of people who would otherwise have died in combat or extermination camps. 

Turing was well aware of both the strengths and limitations of all information processing machines, and devised a simple thought-experiment known as the 'Turing Machine', that clearly demonstrates the absolute limits of what all machines, and indeed all physical systems, can and cannot do.

So when materialists tell you that the 'mind is just the brain' (a biophysical computer) or 'the mind is software running on the hardware of the brain', refer them to this discussion of the Turing Machine.   Even if it doesn't immediately convince them of the validity of the Buddhist view, it will clearly set out the boundaries of debate, and make materialists question their fundamental assumptions, which they may mistakenly believe to be 'scientific'. 

- Sean Robsville 

Buddhism Subject Index

Buddhists Have Most Sex

From Pantheos

Do Buddhists have most fun? Or are they less inhibited? Or are they just most honest and least hypocritical?  FULL ARTICLE


Memewhile...

 

Buddhism will disappear from Sri Lanka, Thailand and Burma

Sri Lanka Buddha Statues will be destroyed like those at Bamiyan

From an article by Shenali Waduge

"Given the present trends we foresee a future date where Sri Lanka will be termed a “once Buddhist” nation as Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Maldives, Malaysia, Indonesia and probably Thailand and Burma in time to come will face. Yet, many Buddhists in Sri Lanka are not prepared to be passive observers and watch in silence their religion and culture fade away into the sunset without any resistance on their part...

...The gradual diminution of the place held by Buddhism is what has finally awoken the Buddhists of Sri Lanka. The politicians have chosen to side with the vociferous demands made by minorities because it comes with various tags that lure politicians towards appeasing their wishes ignoring the silent majority and taking them for granted as well as ignoring their own duty towards preserving the Buddhist history of Sri Lanka. We now need the injustices to be addressed and rectified because since colonial times and for 508 years now a 2600 year Buddhist civilization has been put into the background and it is time to restore the status quo of Buddhism and Buddhist culture as it existed in the pre-colonial era.

Buddhist ethos stress the need to establish a compassionate society where both man and animal exist side by side in peaceful co–existence. In such a society violence is eschewed and non–violence and Ahimsa is promoted towards all living beings. Ideally this should be the moral aim of Sri Lanka.  It is a perfect way for all the people in Sri Lanka to move forward. The Buddhist moral community embraces all living beings. This is the message of the Buddha. Our forefathers embraced it. We are morally bound to follow this noble tradition.  All that we now ask is for people to reflect and conclude that this path is the best path to follow which ensures lasting peace and peaceful co-existence."

Full article



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Bamiyan before and after

Click for larger image

Buddhist Halloween

Buddhist Halloween?

Should Buddhists celebrate the ancient Celtic Druid festival of Halloween?

What's the connection between this pre-Christian Druid festival and Buddhism?

Buddhism teaches that the mind is not a physical entity.

Consequently,  physical factors can neither create nor destroy it.



The mind exists before conception, and survives after death to be reborn into another body.

The Druids were ancient Celtic priests who shared the Buddhists' belief in rebirth and the indestructibility of the mind.




They regarded the seasons of the year as being a metaphor for the death and rebirth of the human being.

Halloween represented the death of the old year and was believed to be the time of year when the veil separating the human and ghost realms was at its thinnest.



Yule (the winter solstice) was the time of conception of the coming year and Imbolc (Candlemas) was the actual birth of the New Year, with the appearance of the first lambs and green shoots.

The period between Yule and Candlemas was the gestational period when the new animal and plant life, though growing and stirring, was still hidden in the body of its mother, or in the case of vegetation within the body of mother earth.


The significance of Halloween to Buddhists now becomes clear. In the Druid system the period of seven weeks between Halloween and Yule is the gap between death of the old and conception of the new year. This corresponds to the 49 days of the bardo.


Halloween thus symbolises the entry of the disembodied consciousness into the intermediate state between leaving one body and occupying another.

In traditional Buddhist beliefs the bardo-consciousness will experience hideous apparitions - ghosts, demons etc.


If the mind reacts with panic then a samsaric rebirth, possibly in unpleasant realms, is inevitable.

However if the bardo-being recognises these apparitions as hallucinations - projections and reflections of its own negative karma resulting from evil actions - then liberation remains possible.



The reasons for the Druidic custom of dressing up as ghosts, demons and so on may be to symbolise that these scary bardo apparitions are in fact nothing other than aspects or appearances of the person's own self.

In tantra, gruesome visualizations are used to purify negativities






Among Western Buddhists, the festival of Samayatara, the female Buddha of the Northern direction associated with midnight and the wisdom of action, is commemorated at Halloween.

From Buddhizing Halloween by Ataraxia

"...The point here being, of course, that as Buddhism has moved into new cultural spaces it has adopted the forms of those cultures, using them to express peculiarly Buddhist themes and sometimes supplanting their original meanings entirely [1].  Naturally, as Buddhism becomes rooted in the West we should expect the same treatment to be applied to Western cultural forms, even though by all accounts it appears to be appalling to many culturally conservative Buddhists that Westerners should want to practice and celebrate Buddhadharma in ways that resonate for their own cultures.  But, speaking for myself, I see this as a good thing - I am not Tibetan/Japanese/Chinese/Thai/etc. and I do not wish to be [2].

Which brings me to an upcoming and super-fun holiday: Halloween [3]!  If there is any holiday that I want/is a good candidate for being Buddhized, this is it.  There are several reasons why this is so:

• Although the broad outlines of the origins and meaning of Halloween are known, they are not believed in.  The holiday is widely celebrated by Western (at least, North American) society, but is largely devoid of meaning.  Indeed, the actual meaning of “trick or treat” never occurred to me until I was an adult – it had always just been a phrase that got you candy (which was good enough).
• More specifically, Halloween has no Christian content, which makes Buddhization much easier for two reasons.  First and most importantly, to Buddhize Halloween will not cause outrage among/backlash from the Christian community.  Secondly, there’s no metaphysics that will need abandonment or difficult reworking in order to fit with Buddhist thought.
• The West needs to take the dark side of life more seriously.
• There are tantalizing hints of existing traditions that could, by mere suggestion, be transformed from simple fun into meaningful ritual.
• It’s so so so fun.

I can think of a few obvious ways this could be done:

• Teachings about hungry ghosts/hell realms.
• Pointing out the emptiness of ‘external’ perceptions (what’s behind the mask?).
• Transforming emotional reactions, demonstrating purity of the world (the old peeled grapes as eyeballs, spaghetti as brains, etc.).
• Chod practice!
• Death and rebirth teachings/meditations."

Dr Yutang Lin blessing a ghost to leave a haunted house and be reborn in the Pure Land

Giving of fearlessness - bringing peace to haunted houses





Festival of the Hungry Ghosts





The Halloween Monk



Halloween Asian Style



Halloween and World Religions

Buddhist Blog on Halloween


Tibetan Buddhist Halloween

Thai Halloween Party May End

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