Burke Lecture: Buddhism in a Global Age of Technology

[Music] when they asked me to give this lecture they I got a little bit worried because when I turned in my first proposal the committee said that's a little too academic maybe you can tell us first a general description of Buddhism because people may not know that so of course that's either very hard or very easy this case is pretty hard so I will do my best to do a little bit of an introduction first and then go ahead and talk about Buddhism in this age one of the things that's always interested me about Buddhism is the fact that it was probably we could say the first world religion it was the first religion which broke out of its cultural linguistic Geographic confines and spread far and wide and it was a religion which did a very interesting thing in that it brought together from the old empires of South Asia and the Han Empire of China without the Buddhist tradition those two cultures did not know each other did not have contact did not have translations did not have an ability to understand what was happening Buddhism was also a religion which spread into Central Asia and it was that Central Asian area that allowed it to make this jump so what I've tried to do is to say that Buddhism starts out very limited to the Ganges basin it was just the direct teacher teaching of one founder and the question that I have worked with all my life I think is trying to understand why is it that this became a world religion what was there in this tradition which allowed it to do this and so when we look at how Buddhism spread into all the areas of the world that it spread I've continued to ask that question and I'll try to give you just a few possible solutions I've been teaching long enough to know never to make a universal statement you make a universal statement one counterexample and you're defeated so I won't I'll try to tell you buddhism is multifaceted buddhism is not owned by anybody buddhism is has spread far and wide in such a multiplicity of forms that it's very difficult sometimes to decide how can we index this religion how can we write a metadata as we say in the modern world that fits this religion it's very difficult so as I said it became the first because it's spread I would like to suggest that Buddhism did so because it has portable sanctity some religions have fixed sanctity you can't get away from the homeland you can't change the language if you move about you get ritually polluted there are many issues which fix a religion in one place so what was it in Buddhism that allowed it to have portable sanctity and to have it in spades then just to show you a little bit about how I've been trying to work with this when I started working with the spread of Buddhism I said you know you cannot write a book about this it's impossible you cannot give the complexity of the movement of this tradition in a book just i tried failed tried failed so that's what i've warned the electronic cultural atlas i said somehow or other we have to put it into the new technology where we see it we've got thousands of maps we have thousands of images and so here's the lights of the earth they're geo registered to latitude longitude and I took the ancient trade routes and put them in latitude longitude and laid them down on top of the ancient world a part of the modern world so the the modern world of the lights the ancient world of Buddhism are the lines and the spread of Buddhism belongs in part of those lines so in order to try to understand how Buddhism develop as said I've been working with Korea for a lot of time and what a lot of people don't know I think is that Buddhism moved from Korea to Japan not from China to Japan Korea was introduced to the Japanese by the Koreans so I asked myself the question if Buddhism is portable one of the great portable moments was when it moved from Korea to Japan how did they do it well they set four things they sent monks they sent texts they sent bodily relics of venerated dead and they sent images and those four elements were the foundation I think of the portability of Buddhism in this sense relic veneration the relics of esteemed dad is a tradition which I think the Buddhists really contributed to the West it is no surprise that the first relics of the Christians were st. Thomas from India that's where relics come from so the relic veneration of of an esteemed dead who's not your relative has nothing to do with your family that is a kind of portability because you then are going to go to some shrine where you will mix with strangers they don't belong to your family they come there for the same reason you do so relics which are produced by cremation were used by the Buddhists to spread their tradition mostly pollution fixes you you worry about becoming polluted foreigners pollute you Hinduism you can't go across a big body of water if you're a priest and remained pitts ritually pure you go across the water you're impure Jain monks you can't ride on a horse or ride on a vehicle you cannot do that because it will ritually make you impure pollution fear is something that keeps us fixed we fear others we fear the strange we fear the peculiar the Buddhists had no fear of the greatest pollution of all which is the dead the dead is the greatest pollution that we face in life the dead body it's polluting in almost every culture it creates problems ritually so we are told that Shakyamuni went out to the charnel field where they tossed the corpses for exposure rather than burial and took the rags off of them and dressed himself there was no pollution in the dead that was a big issue so when the Buddha passed away his demise he was cremated his relics that is his physical body became the basis for the early Buddhist development it was a relic cult first and those relics were moved anywhere and a relic carries its power with it you don't have to have a sacred site to put a relic in you got a relic where you put it become sacred and I think that this is something which the Buddhists as I said they made it into a religious tradition and it spread into Syria and from there it spread into the Christian world so the use of relics became a way for both Christianity and Buddhism to spread because you could take Relic and make a sacred site anywhere you go out in the middle of a desert you could go out in the middle of a forest you build a reliquary you've put the relic there you got a holy site so the cremation in Buddhism has remained very significant and if you want to trace where Buddhism existed all you have to look for signs of cremation the Zoroastrians would never cremate cremation means that you would pollute fire death pollutes you don't want to put fire because it's a basic element so that the pollution of the dead means that all you have to do in Asia is look for cremation where you find that the Buddhists were there I guarantee you where you don't find it the line had been drawn so in a sense East and West were separated by cremation and non creation cremation so these relics after a like Korea a holy monk is cremated then what you do is you go through and look for the relics that is some kind of crystalline forms which remain after the body has been burned and you count them and the enlightenment of that person is determined by how many you find I have a friend his grandmother was cremated - a very good Buddhist but he said we just didn't realize how really holy she was until we counted her relics she had more relics than on any monk or nun you've ever heard of and suddenly she became much glorified in the family because of that today Buddhism still remains a reliquary religion whether you are in Mustang in Nepal whether in Bangkok you're going to see the spires of the reliquaries these are all reliquaries enormous reliquaries like this when in Katmandu Buddhism remains a relic cult in many ways and the relic is extremely important in Korea the most beautiful reliquaries are in glass you know we talked about the Silk Road across eurasia some people say we should call it the glass road the Asian ships silk toward Rome but the Mediterranean ship glass to Asia because the Asians could make marbles but they couldn't blow they didn't have the technology to blow glass so this glass is made in the Mediterranean taken but what do they use it for they use it for relics it is the most precious substance and they put in at precious substances the other thing are images in the beginning Buddhists didn't have images didn't need them they had relics if you got relics you got the body of the person why would you even want an image of them you have their power in those relics you wouldn't have that power in an image so people just simply didn't have have imagery when they were so focused on the bodily relic however when Buddhism began to spread it came in contact with the bactrian Greeks left there by Alexander and also left by the Parthian who employed Greeks to be their mercenary army when Buddhism came in contact with the Greeks one of the things that the Greeks gave the Buddhist was the Buddha image because the Greeks made portrait imagery of their kings and famous people and they said hey if we're going to be Buddhists we want portraits of the Buddha sculptural portraits and they began to make them and as you can see they are real portraits they are look like people whereas in the background you see how are the images where a face is made that's just generic lot of Buddhists do not make portraiture they make generic face this is a face eudora line this way you draw a line that way you put it in the two eyes you put in the nose a little bit like a child drawing a face it's just a generic face so the Buddhist we're really influenced by the Greeks in this regard and they made wonderful portrait images of the Buddha and Bodhisattvas in the form of Greek art now it's provincial art you go to Greece and you look at the Parthenon or you go and look at it in its stolen form in the bridge in Britain and it's fantastic art this is way out there in the provinces they're still tracked to do the same art but it's very provincial I love it I think it's just fantastic art of Gandhara so the Buddhists chose for the Buddhist figure of all things the Roman toga they did not choose a Buddhist monastic robe for the Buddha images they made them look like greco-roman art because that's what the bakhtin Greeks were accustomed to so all I'm saying is that the Buddhist and Christian worlds in the Mediterranean world they've been interchanging things for a long time Asia and we think of Europe and Asia I've stopped thinking that way we should think Eurasia Eurasia is much more realistic so along the Silk Road the Buddhists had to figure out a way to make their way through this terrain if they were going to spread mountains high mountains desert driest on earth Taklamakan they say now it hasn't rained there for 800 years the rain evaporates before it hits the ground it's like Arizona you know you look up there you see it's raining and there's nothing on the ground that's dry as dust it evaporates before it hits the ground of course so on that Silk Road the Buddhists learned how to make images and the first Buddha images were made in the image of Apollo it was Apollo Buddha images so we've borrowed from each other for a long time we ought to recognize that as part of our heritage it is our heritage we we belong to all of this now images are sometimes fixed the black madonna for example if you move the black madonna usually she starts to weep she does not want to be moved and in fact if you move a black madonna the chances are very good that the next morning she'll be back in her place you don't move a black madonna in india many of the images of the spirit are fixed to that place because that's where the spirit lives and the image is a house for the spirit so that's in one sense true idolatry true idolatry means that you believe that the deity inhabits the physical image those are fixed you can't move those around the Buddhist had portable image you could take it anywhere you could take the relics anywhere so then you have monastics this is another contribution of Buddhism to the west under the Buddhists they they developed a thing which was called a monastery in our language with professional monks and nuns who shave their heads lived by rule for special robes were took vows of poverty all of that was fully in place long before Christianity and when it spread across the Silk Road I think this is one of Buddhism's great contributions to Christianity where monks nuns and monasteries and we're here on a campus in a way a campus grew the university system grew out of monasteries in Europe we are a kind of monastery and a campus after all and I think that a campus is a Buddhist contribution they are the ones who really invented this idea and spread it across the Silk Road the monastics however have pollution issues and monastics sometimes we're fixed they had to be very careful about in many places cases the idea of coming in contact with spirits foreigners aliens so how do these monastics get across these deserts how do they how do they make it and be able to build all these cities out there in Central Asia blue Buddhism tried to fix their monasteries they said to the monastics you can't farm you can't build a house you have to beg everyday for your food you cannot store your food these were the issues which they face so if you would like that how you going to travel you have to have a layperson with you you cannot travel without them so the Buddhists picked merchants Buddhism is a religion of merchants it was merchants who carried them along the trade routes it was merchants who used them and what did they use them for well they took these monks out there in the middle of the desert they built them a little monastery they put a relic in the monastery they put images in that monastery the monks set it up it was a caravan siree it was a hospital it was school it was everything you have in a Persian Caravan sorry we ought to understand this because we have it here in California the colonial missions that spread up our trade routes from San Diego to just beyond San Francisco with a monastery every day's travel is exactly what the Buddhists set up on the Silk Route these are caravan serotype monasteries spread and they are given power by a relic even these issues are so similar that we need to look at this cross-cultural issues and very carefully I think so the Buddhist monks came in contact with strange people in the drawings in Central Asia we see people dressed every such way who were Buddhist everybody could be a Buddhist and in this one I love it when the Buddha died all the heretics rejoiced so this is a party of celebrating the death of the Buddha at long last with finished with this guy but there are all different types of people they are all representing this the other thing they said was the text texts become portable if you can translate them if the text must be must remain in its original language that fixes it to some degree it fixes it to the community that can read and understand that particular language the Buddhist said what is the teaching the teaching is to be able to say what the case is what is really the case what is the world like that's all you have to say in the teaching you have to tell it like it is so the Buddha is attributed with the saying if the Dharma if the teaching is to describe things as they really are you ought to be able to say that in any language anywhere anytime there's nothing special about that in terms of language so the Buddhist texts were translated into Tibetan into Chinese into login they were put on palm leaves they were put on birch bark manuscripts were still unfurling the birch bark manuscripts as you can see the only way to unfurl and deal with some of those manuscripts is to use the technology of brain surgery you have to take it into the operating room with all the instruments to unroll one of these things Buddhism allowed for printing the first really huge printing project in the world was the Buddhist Canon in the northern Song Dynasty of China a hundred and thirty thousand printing plates were carved their cannon is the largest in the world still you took the Chinese Buddhist Canon it would be about ten sets of the Encyclopedia Brittanica if translated into English that's because not only is the original portable but the doctrine itself if can be said by anybody well said it's the Dharma if you tell it like it is that's the Dharma so their texts have grown in size and will continue and it's still an open Canon so now we come to our global age and I've asked myself the question in the past their texts were portable their people were portable their relics were portable their images were portable but what makes food is important in today's world why is it that people are attracted to Buddhism in a global age of Technology Buddhism is suddenly having an enormous revival in Asia I can tell you that from joy to Vietnam I the over there and I was staying in one of the monasteries and it was ancestor day and everybody was there to light incense I couldn't get into the place I lived there and I couldn't get through took hours for me to wait for this thousands of people to leave so why is it what makes it still portable in today's world well first of all I think that it's text can be put on the internet and they are they can be put on a cd-rom I put help put the Korean Canon on cd-rom it's 52 million characters it took us 10 years to do it when we finish they had big celebration in Korea in the Olympic basketball stadium filled with people who came to witness this and then they came by carrying this large crystal stupa form six monks carrying it very heavy and what's in it the cd-rom they have made it a spiritual object so Buddhism can spread to a cd-rom as well as a manuscript or printing it's still portable even in our age but I think the thing that makes Buddhism perhaps the most available to the present day world is the fact that it has some very unique features in its teachings one of them is it's the only religion that I know of that spends an enormous amount of time in its scripture talking about what talking about how we see the world physically I mean they're talking about the eye sending an impulse to the brain and the brain processing that impulse that's why tomorrow I want to talk about cognitive science and the Buddhist what religion would say this is the beginning of enlightenment is to understand how your senses work physically if you don't know how your senses work physically and you don't know how the brain is working then you don't have chance I mean they're very open about it so consequently almost every time they open their mouth the first thing they did is say well there's the eye that your than those and there's the sense feels for them and there's a consciousness that results from them so perception became a big issue and then the question is of course from them was to say you know people accuse them of saying that there's no external world or it's illusory and all that Buddhists never deny the external world never I guarantee you they never deny the external world but what they say is you will never see it you will never see it directly all you can experience is the brain chemical electrical reactions to the data that comes from the senses and that is all human experience is you don't have it we don't have the ability to go beyond that so the illusion is not the external world the illusion is our brain creates for us virtual reality and it does it so well that by golly you really it really looks like you're there you know if I didn't know better I would think that this is a room full of people so this cognition process for the Buddhists was exactly I think what cognitive science says today you have an external it light reflects off the eye the eye sends an electrical impulse to the brain the brain processes it in some way and you have consciousness and say I see you of course I don't see you I see that electrical impulse in here that's the illusion the illusion is I see you out there the reality say the Buddhist is we have to accept that I whoever I am see you whoever you are in here today in the world what used to be private is now public it used to be that I could say I don't know what you think and I don't know what's going on in your brain guess what more and more I can know what's going on in your brain I can hook you up to the machines I can see the pattern of brain activity the electricity the flow of blood I can see all of that and I know pretty much that haha you just saw something because that part of your brain lit up I know you saw it don't tell me you didn't so what was once private is becoming more public what is consciousness still a big question is it this moment where the nerves in the brain drop the little chemical from one to the side to the other is that consciousness the Buddhists spent a lot of time thinking about this if we don't know what's happening to us then we don't know things as they really are and how do we know things as they really are we have to know our perceptions and how they come to us so today recently there was a conference on consciousness in Washington they invited the Dalai Lama he went the scientist said that Allah we really like to test these meditators but we don't want just you know your grassroots meditator somebody who's out here we want the best and you must have them will you let us test them now Lama said sure happy to the meditators weren't too happy but he said you gotta have to let them test you you're gonna have to meditate while you're hooked up with respirators with all of this gear so this is one of them that's being done at Harvard NIH is now funding this kind of support for this this kind of issues in which we are trying to understand what is it that happens when somebody meditates because it now appears that concentration and mindfulness make an enormous difference in the way in which we live our lives in which we learn and how we handle life situation and it we need to know more about it our senses of course can give us pain and so we say I cut my finger and the Buddhist keeps saying you understand it's not your finger that hurts but that's really it's your brain that's hurting your brain tells you ouch and I then that I said oh it's my finger in Vietnam today one of the most moving things for them is is the fact that a Vietnamese monk during the Vietnamese war burned himself without showing any signs of pain I don't know if you've ever seen the video of him burning but it is incredible he burned sitting in his Lotus posture with his mudra for three minutes before he fell over how did he do it how could somebody because other people tried it thereafter a lot of people burn themselves you know that they commit suicide and they scream and rise in pain they should never do it you know they don't know how to do it they haven't yet they don't have the right to do that he he could turn off the brain and the pain sensor in his brain he could turn it off undoubtedly so if somebody has said he could be fire if he had ever thought I am on fire he would have hurt being fire was not the pain it was the consciousness that I'm on fire so the teachings of the Buddhist are in contrast to its practices in some sense practice or such things as meditation meditation can obviously go very deep we can modulate our sensory material we can probably even modulate the structure of our brain that's what they're trying to explore is that possible to do that the teachings of Buddhism are are very often connected with causality you know cause is one of the great crises of our time we have two big crises in my estimation one of them is cosmology and the other is causation what is caused is it a force or is it a concept that's the big question that we try to answer the Buddhists have many many statements about causality they don't all agree with one another so I'm not trying to present that there's one big thing but for example we in this country are faced with a big problem in our public school system and in our political system with the issue of first cause what caused this world and we've got the whole issue of evolution and intelligent design before us it's not just a a religious issue it's a big political issue it's a cultural issue it's a social issue we face it at our schools we face it in all that we do and I decided that it's probably become the best thing I can say is that when it gets into cartoons you know it's right in the middle of our social life and so intelligent design in terms of what a lot of people now begin to look at is to say it's really hard to get the reality of the world and its creations into the intelligent design box it just won't fit very easily Einstein of course poor Einstein you know he really wanted a general theory he really wanted to unite the quantum level with the molecular level he said there must be a law which operates in both how can we have laws which did which disco here you move from the molecular to the quantum and all the rules of the molecular world disco here you move from the quantum to the molecular and all the quantum theories disco here he hated it he hated it said how could God do this you've got to have obviously we don't understand it he felt that you have to have a notion of God he really did Einstein really wanted that but the Buddhists in terms of their causation say you're never going to get it that's what they say I'm just a reporter here I'm not an enlightened person so I don't know but the Buddhists say this they had a creation idea in India ishvara ishvara created the world so the Buddhist said well that's a big thing to do pretty nice period of cosmos but everything has a cause and if you don't believe that you can't talk to the Buddhist everything has a cause so they said the cause of each bar would be greater than ishvara himself let's worship the cause of ishvara but then there's the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause of and you can never reach the end of it so the Buddhist said you will never find first cause you will never find an uncaused effect and that's why they are considered to be atheistic you said you just can't get there and it's not worth your while to even try because you're not going to make it they also said that causality is like a chain it's links and those links can cause all kinds of pain and suffering and struggle and you can have a chain reaction accident you know here in California we're always having them and the only way to do it is you have to break the chain of causation in that sense but that's just one of their ideas of causation that it's a chain of events in another way they were like Hume they said you infer that if there's smoke on the mountain there's fire there because you've seen smoke and fire in the kitchen so you can infer it but of course we know that things that and together are not causal necessarily you know the rooster crows every morning besought before sunup so you would you say aha I've got the cause of sunrise it's the rooster crowing because it always occurs before the sunrise so therefore it must cause it relation does not mean causality cause says pearl at UCLA causes the greatest mystery of our time we simply do not understand causality and when we do we get Simpsons paradox Simpsons paradox is you get two things that stand together and it's like when people said to the joy of many of us if men who drink red wine live longer parade down to the wine shop immediately to buy red wine right then somebody comes along and says no no man to drink red wine or richer have a better diet and better healthcare that's why they live longer it ain't the wine in fact people who've been who are richer have better healthcare have better diet who don't drink wine live longer than those who do drink wine in that group in other words Simpsons paradox says you add a third element and you'll get the opposite result it's like the one that Perl uses it is it boys who smoke at higher grades boys whose mothers smoked get lower grades you add the other element and you get a complete reversal because standing together doesn't mean a lot so I've tried to think about Buddhist Karma am I just a prisoner of karma my past is affecting me in creating so I've thought in one way karma is like cellular automata that is you start out with some dots you have a rule the dots follow that rule and you have all kinds of patterns began to emerge and this is cellular automata you can have beautiful designs that emerge because you say where you have a black one in the next line make it white where you have two blacks make it two whites you write all these rules and man named Wolfram who invented the wonderful software called Mathematica Wolfram has run cellular automata through his computers for something like twelve million times and he comes up with swirls and tree forms and he says the whole world is just made up of cellular automata we have rules the rules are being observed they are slowly emerging Karma's a little bit like cellular automata you do something and the rules says you've started something you've said it in motion and you'll get a result and that result will be you would think predictable wouldn't you cellular automata like rule 123 you cannot predict isn't that interesting you got a rule and you can't predict what it's going to produce for you so here you've got three different things they all started off with same dots just change the rule and what do you get very great differences so in one way the CREM ik causal relationship in buddhism was to say yeah you do something and it sets in motion kind of natural laws and certain things will result but you can't really predict what they're going to do because it's one too many you can't predict the Buddhist I think have also said that and this is something which were just now beginning to deal with they have said it's endlessness that we live in endlessness and we're only beginning to understand what endlessness would really mean if you write an algorithm for endlessness anything is possible up to by 99.8% that's why they talk about parallel universes in endlessness 50 trillion billion years of activity the mathematical probability that you will get a repeat is very high so when you deal with endlessness it's another issue you're into a different world in one way but that's the world that we face so the Buddhists love to use the Hall of Mirrors they love fractals they loved all of that complexity to say this is really what what it's like it's multitudinous it's reflective it's like endless mirrors we are dealing in a world in which we are trying to figure out what causes what so if you get endless mirrors which one causes which how do you deal with causality when you've got this kind of issue so the Buddhists came up with the idea that what we have is interactive causality each crystal reflects all others and is in turn reflected by them that is we live in a holographic world and this world that's holographic is that we are in a situation where the Buddhists say we have multiverses Buddhists were talking about multiverses over 2,000 years ago we're now beginning to face that do we have a universe or do we have a multiverse do we just have this Big Bang universe of ours so one of the issues which the Buddhists have always said about endlessness is if you want to make patterns and you want to make predictions you got to draw a box and put your data in that box because you can't make a true pattern unless you have all the data contained therein you can't have a software written that isn't larger than the data if you've got endlessness you can never know the pattern you never can know it so the Buddhists had their cosmology and their cosmology was this we in the West have fought with whether or not the earth is the center of the universe whether the Sun is the center the Big Bang and going out there to the cosmos the Buddhists say this there are multi verses they recognize that they said this is just one this universe is contained inside another one and it's so big we'll never see it we'll never even know it's there we're like an atom and a grain of sand on the beach of that bigger universe which encapsulate sus and there's one that encapsulates it and one that encapsulates it and so when you say large and small what do you mean large with regard to all of it am i large in terms of this little ant on the floor what is large what is small these are all relative terms they're just convention we just have to have something to live with so the Buddhists say yes you can do that but you have to understand that we live in a continuum that we do not know where to cut off and draw a pattern from it now does that leave us Buddhists in a situation which a lot of people feel our modern age of cosmology and causality is leading us where we will have only relativity we will have no way to determine our ethics and morals we'll have no way to decide how to live because we have done away with any idea of centrality we put ourselves in this situation of a continuum that's endless and I think that Buddhism is portable in the modern world because it says first of all we've lived for over 2,000 years without any idea of a first cause and we've had ethics we've had morals we've lived a good life we've enjoyed it we've had the idea that we are just in a continuum of multiverses what we've had morals we've had ethics we've had a good life we probably really need to hear what the Buddhists have to say in a global age of technology to say to us that if we are fearful of relativity and we are fearful of multiverses and we are fearful of the fact that we just can't tie causality down and make sense out of it that we then are going to be left bereft chaotic without anything to live by here's a religion that says yes and how do you do that and basically you this is their answer we are in this room if we try to write the history of why we're here and the history of everybody in this room and how you came to be here tonight we'd never reach the end of it we'd be writing for centuries tracing every single thing and if we said why are we here we're here because of the Big Bang we're here because our parents saw each other and got married we're here for because I got in the car and drove here but you can never fully get the whole history of the cause for this event but the Buddhists say there's one thing you should know and it's crucial we are here whether we know the history of it we must always be aware of the moment because it's that moment that is the magic and the secret of life this moment is sufficient whatever causes to be here it happened we know that we are here and that's why the Buddhist keeps saying if you are somebody who's hit by an arrow you're not going to stand around and say wait before you remove that arrow doctor now tell me what kind of wood it's made from and who made it and how did it get shot from the bow and no you say the sufficiency of the moment is I got an arrow in my head for God's sake pull it out that's what we want so for the Buddhists and for meditation and why do you meditate and why do you try to and how do you live in this world of complexity and chaos and inability to to pattern it understand that the moment you return to the present this moment you're centered this moment for the Buddhist then becomes the sacred moment it's that moment of complete sufficiency nothing else was needed whatever it was it's been done and what was done is already passed I know that so I feel that the Buddhists have a lot to say about the modern age I think they have a lot to say in our age of technology I think they have a lot to say in terms of how to handle this complexity in which we live and their teaching is very simple perception causality and the fact that we live in a multiverse of cosmesis that's our state but so is this one - thank you [Applause] I actually have two questions here the first one is whether you hit read the book by the Dalai Lama I think he had co-authored it I think it's called the universe and a single atom which kind of blends a lot of these science the discoveries in science over the last hundred years with Buddhist thought specifically with the nature of reality emptiness etcetera and my second question is I think it's a wonderful gift Oh the work that you've done I didn't know who you were who you were before I came here but um in terms of putting Buddhist scripture um into a form that is accessible my question then is how does that interact with the need for communities of people to study Buddhism interact with it have some kind of community in which to learn Buddhist texts have a teacher etc I I've not read that particular book by the dollar I've heard the title I have I admit to you I have not read it but I'm sure probably it said some things similar to what I said tonight with regard to the to the role of digital work in 1988 I was sitting on my deck I live at the beach up in Northern California I was sitting on my deck and enjoying life and then the thought came to me my karma is to be born in the digital age [Music] that's my Karma and that's your Karma it's all of our Karma and I suddenly said to myself I don't want to miss it this is this is a turning point in human history this is equal to the invention of writing the invention of printing invention of paper and this is it and I had an experience I helped a project where we put into the internet historical maps of Japan and we'd had that collection 400 year old maps really paintings from Japan at Berkeley for 50 years during 50 years of time 25 people registered to use that collection where we put it on the Internet it helped that the New York Times made it a front-page story by when we put it in the Internet we had 27,000 hits in the first 24 hours and since then we have had over 2 million hits nobody can stay outside of this media this if Buddhism is to be a portable religion in our time it's got to be there and it is the Buddhists are ahead of almost everybody else in many ways if you go in and you put in Zen you'll get more hits then you'll get if you put in church it's amazing isn't it so I want to allow people to have access the we put our material online I insist that everything I do is made free I do not believe in putting barriers between ourselves and what's in the Internet I have decided that as a professor I have been paid to do my research by the people of California and from my federal grants from the people of the United States and I firmly believe that everything I produce as well as everything that every other professor produces under such circumstances should made free without intellectual property copyright and made available to the world I feel that very slow [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 102,391

Rating: 4.854897 out of 5

Keywords: Lewis, Lancaster, Buddhism, religion, religious, studies

Id: cX2f6QHkU-I

Length: 57min 11sec (3431 seconds)

Published: Wed May 28 2008

Reddit Comments

[u/michael_dorfman]

This is a great lecture-- highly recommended.

[u/theeightfoldwrath]

Fantastic lecture!