The quintessential rational mind: Buddha | Hacker News Reader

The quintessential rational mind: Buddha

hindu.com

47 pointssree_nair25 comments

The linked article gives no actual support for its claim that the Buddha's was "the quintessential rational mind". It cites a few of his opinions and draws tenuous connections with the findings of modern neuroscience.

It's pretty clear that the Buddha was a clever and insightful chap. It wouldn't surprise me to find that some of the things he said about minds and bodies and persons fit well with contemporary science. It would be interesting to read something about this written by someone with no axe to grind. The hyperbole of the linked article, though? A waste of space.

This is a take I found on modern Buddhism view on science http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhmaK4Q19RY

Though it's only a few minute spot directed rather to non-tech people, it scratches the surface.

I think there's a lot to be learned from buddhism but I don't think the statements in this video add up to much. Why does the notion of space as information promote a more compassionate outlook? Is Rupert Sheldrake is the best person to cite as a buddhist scientist? Is he even a buddhist? Just playing devils advocate here ;)

I can't complain since I don't think hindu.com (or thehindu.com) specifically aims Neuroscientists who know Buddhism very well as their target audience.

I am sorry I have to 1-up that.

Spiritual text has a "goal" in mind. The text is then written very vaguely so that most text is open to interpretation. In the end people seem to make each scripture of any sort apply to current everyday life, even with new evolving views on life, society, new technologies, etc.

The author may be a top-notch neuro-scientist (for all I know), but he's not much of a Buddhist scholar. He's quoting texts that were written approximately 1000 years apart, and attributing them to the same author.

There's a lot of fascinating work being done in Buddhist Psychology; in fact, I'm in the middle of a course on precisely that subject as part of an M.A. in Buddhist Studies. Unfortunately, this article only hints at the subject.

"I'm in the middle of a course on precisely that subject as part of an M.A. in Buddhist Studies" - Are there any books, articles that are more insightful than the linked article that you would recommend ?

Well, it's a huge subject, but a couple of good starting points on the neuroscience angle are the works of B. Alan Wallace ("Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge", for example) or Mathieu Ricard ("The Quantum and the Lotus: A Journey to the Frontiers Where Science and Buddhism Meet", for example).

If, however, you are looking for a more general introduction to Buddhism (and Buddhist psychology) from a rationalist perspective, I'd recommend Stephen Batchelor's "Buddhism Without Beliefs."

Not on psychology but on science and eastern mysticism: Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters, Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics. An interesting general overview of Hindu and Buddhist traditions, Georg Feurstein The Yoga Tradition.

"the day when he attained enlightenment at Gaya in India; and the day he attained Nirvana (Unity with the Absolute) in 480 B.C."

Because attaining enlightenment and nirvana are rational, factual, non-dogmatic "events" that can be dated.

The 'cleaner' copy of the same article: http://beta.thehindu.com/arts/magazine/article435036.ece

A small piece of my weekend project that I'm working on is extracting text from articles. You can try it on this one:

http://toadjaw.com/article?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hindu.com%2F...

Nice. Readability does that too - http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

Yup, that was the basis of my code. With some modifications, I basically ported the javascript to C#.

Nice. Did you just recreate the Readability algorithm or are you trying your own approach?

In large part I ported over Readability. Although It's not exactly the same since I'm doing some additional processing. I started it on Friday and had it finished up yesterday so it's still pretty rough, but working pretty well.

You can try more here: http://toadjaw.com/article

This is great and very useful. Are there plans to add unicode support? http://toadjaw.com/article?url=http://www.tdkterim.gov.tr/bt...

That's horrible, I'll get that fixed. Shouldn't be a problem.

Edit: It's fixed now.

Edit: And maybe not, since my change broke other pages. I'll have to think about this.

rationality can only be evaluated in relation to goals. there is no "one rationality to rule them all". how you evaluate a decision tree depends on where you want to end up.

It would be very interesting (at least for me) if some Eastern hackers here can share their point of view over these subjects, mysticism and modern science, yoga, etc.

I'm tempted to point out that we evolved emotions for a reason. They're basically sugar methods for typically socially beneficial reactions.

Too much rejection of emotions may at best lead one to be a Buddha, or perhaps just dull, or maybe even worst, a sociopath.

Just to be clear, Buddhism is not about the elimination of emotions. It's about recognizing that feelings are not real things, to believe and rely on, or to be afraid of.

Interesting. This sounds quite similar to transcendental idealism, then. Or even Stoicism, or Vedanta. I think Plato would agree with this idea too, seeing his cave metaphor: We are prisoners in a dark cave, facing the wall. A fire burns behind us, casting off shadows from object passing between our backs and the fire. The shadows aren't real (actually, they're the absence of light), but to us, they _seem_ real. Same idea in The Matrix.

Nice.

Plato thought that true reality lay in universal abstractions called Forms, or Ideas.

The Buddhist sutras take the position that "objects of mind" are just leaky abstractions created by our limited minds, which struggle to make sense of the world. The greatest fallacy, in this view, is conflating the "objects of mind" with the real objects (+) they supposedly represent.

(+) Buddhist philosophers in India developed a concept of atomism, which leads to existential riddles like, "If I look at this pile of atoms, and see a chair, is the chair inside my mind, or outside?" (If you answer either way, you're wrong! ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_atomism

http://deoxy.org/koan/76

And, in fact, the way (the way I know of at least) of going about realizing that at a deep, fundamental, instinctual level (instead of just agreeing with it on the conceptual level), is to turn toward your emotions and observe them directly.

There are lots of Buddhist meditation techniques, but, from what I understand, the most fundamental technique is simply observing your experience. It's not about trying to change your experience or get to some idealized state, but to really just look at your experience as it is, rather than how you wished it to be.

Many people have the misconception that meditation is supposed to be some peaceful, blissed-out state. That does happen sometimes, but a large part of it is also sitting with emotions raging inside of you and turning your attention to look at those unpleasant emotions again, and again, and again, resisting the urge to get the hell out of there and find something, anything to distract yourself.

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