Why Buddhism must change in the West

Here I offer you a very simple illustration of why Buddhism in the West will become its own school. Let your mind drop into low gear, then look at the following picture, that's been making the rounds on the web lately:



What's going on here? The internal dissonance you're feeling isn't due to any artifact of mind at all; it's purely a result of the established mechanisms by which your brain works. This is important, because it illustrates that while the West has a lot to learn about why what it knows is important*, it also directly shows how the philosophy of the East needs to learn to incorporate mechanisms beyond functional analysis. The functional analysis of the East is fantastic, yielding ideas such as the widely misunderstood term "chi", that the West could never have come up with. Sadly, though, it has its own inherent blinders. A Buddhist might tell you that fundamentally, "all [is] consciousness". The Tibetan Buddhists go so far as to make this an actual cosmological statement. But, "all consciousness" is only true from the perspective of consciousness. It's like trying to understand chemistry when your only instrument is a Geiger counter -- it doesn't lie, but it doesn't tell you the truth either. Nothing in Buddhism will tell you what's happening to you when you see this picture (although it can speak to what happens to you when you react to what happens when you see the picture), but works of modern cognitive science such as Dennett's "Multiple Drafts Hypothesis" (which I happen to think is correct) can do so.

East and West have much to learn from each other. For Western students of Buddhism, this means that while it's important to read the sutras, it's also important to read Western philosophy as well. Sure, it's full of dualisms and often misses the point; but it also speaks on subjects outside the purview of observation, and thus accesses wisdom that we can ill afford to do without.



* I had an interesting conversation with my brother on Christmas in which I stated my discovery of the general truth "the experience of mind is the same". His reaction, as a student of Western history & philosophy, was "duh, we've known that for centuries". There's a lot that the West knows, but that it may not realize is terribly important. In this example, this little truth may not be seen as widely important to Western audiences given the applications of the time, but to a Buddhist, it's one of the "Keys to the Kingdom", if you'll pardon the metaphor.