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September 15, 2003
Is Buddhism good for your health?
In the spring of 1992, out of the blue, the fax machine in Richard Davidson's office at the department of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison spit out a letter from Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama. Davidson, a Harvard-trained neuroscientist, was making a name for himself studying the nature of positive emotion, and word of his accomplishments had made it to northern India. The exiled spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists was writing to offer the minds of his monks -- in particular, their meditative prowess -- for scientific research. [중략]
.... ''In Buddhist tradition,'' Davidson explains, '''meditation' is a word that is equivalent to a word like 'sports' in the U.S. It's a family of activity, not a single thing.'' Each of these meditative practices calls on different mental skills, according to Buddhist practitioners. The Wisconsin researchers, for example, are focusing on three common forms of Buddhist meditation. ''One is focused attention, where they specifically train themselves to focus on a single object for long periods of time,'' Davidson says. ''The second area is where they voluntarily cultivate compassion. It's something they do every day, and they have special exercises where they envision negative events, something that causes anger or irritability, and then transform it and infuse it with an antidote, which is compassion. They say they are able to do it just like that,'' he says, snapping his fingers. ''The third is called 'open presence.' It is a state of being acutely aware of whatever thought, emotion or sensation is present, without reacting to it. They describe it as pure awareness.'' Is Buddhism good for your health?
Posted by gatorlog at September 15, 2003 07:44 PM
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One thing that bothered me about this article was the failure of author to focus on the both the arrogance and bias that was so obviously displayed by those scientists who rejected the study of meditation out of hand.
the dismissive attitude shown by scientists towards studying meditation and its effects should not have been presented as an expression of a healthy scepticism in the field, rather, it should have been exhibit number one indicating the institutional biases that cloud even the so-called "objective" pursuit of science.
why is it that again and again, ancient practices are finally deigned worthy of study by science only after they have been pushed, prodded and cajoled by international superstars the likes of the dalai lama?
one need not go so far as to admit that every religious claim bears some truth, but completely ignoring and rejecting any posibility that the realm of spirituality is worthy of academic interest is not good science! it is subjective bias.
frankly, the billions of humans who have benefited from meditation and buddhist practice don't really need science to tell them that it is beneficial. and i wonder what added benefit will come from this nexus of buddhism and the scientific establishment. the cynic in me wonders how soon the benefits of buddhism will be appropriated by the state for their proper military and economic application in the service of empire.
this all reminds me of the most penetrating advice i've ever received from a mediation teacher ~
even skepticism needs skepticism!
Posted by: Matty Wegehaupt at September 18, 2003 04:56 AM
Matty...
Maybe scientists aren't all so arrogant as you think... or, at least, they don't have a premium on arrogance and bias?
The sciences are useful for telling us how things work. Buddhists will tell you this or that mystical reason for why meditation is good for you, and while they deserve credit for maintaining practices that are good for people, and even in many cases for their (somehow peripheral to this discussion) activism and defense of the environment, their explanations of the mechanics of why those things work are often as erroneous as any other unscientific explanation.
Buddhism was, don't forget, for a long time used by the Chinese rulership (especially the Ming and Qing Dynasties, I think, though I know for sure only of the Qing) as a state-subsidized religion because it emphasized passive resistance and a focus on one's own goal of escaping the bonds of the samsaric cycle. In China, the Qing loved Buddhism because it stopped the people from focusing on materialist problems and solutions, and lessened the enormous tendency to mount revolutions at the spur of any dissatisfaction.
Meanwhile, I wonder if the billions who have benefitted from science's gifts to us (such as soap, hot water, basic medicines, and modern insulation) care much how Buddhists feel when, like with every religion, the explanations offered are set aside for a closer look at the mechanics of the religion's practice.
Sometimes this can be profoundly useful. For example, look at the history of ketogenic diets, used to battle epilepsy in children.
http://home.iprimus.com.au/kuekids/keto/sebook/hotd.html
This diet originated when people investigated the claims of a faith healer, and found that fasting, and not prayer, was the cause of "miraculous" cures from epilepsy. And fasting, it was found, can be correlated to the rise in presence of ketones in the body. And that meant it was replicable, not just dependent on whether one saw the right faith healer or prayed hard enough. And that means that Buddhists, Hindus, atheists, and just about anyone could get treatment for this condition, not just fundamentalist Christians.
And that's a good thing.
I don't mean to be offensive, by the way, I just think that scientific investigation of just about everything is worthwhile and that scientists are, on the whole, no more or less arrogant than people of other professions, including religious leaders and authors and media agents and so on...
Posted by: gord at September 25, 2003 01:09 AM