July 17 Einstein and Buddha (2)

July 17 Einstein and Buddha (2) (English version of Japanese article dated May 30 )

I bought the book titled "Einstein and Buddha:The parallel sayings" edited by Mr. Thomas J. Mcfarlane (1964～　) through amazon.com. It arrived from Gloucester, England, by the
Severn River near the Wales border to the west from London via airmail 7 days after my
order to amazon.com.

The introduction to this book written by Mr. Wes Nisker is very intriguing and
impressive, so I introduce it hereunder. The brief career of Mr. Wes Nisker is written at the bottom.

Introduction by Mr. Wes Nisker

This book "Einstein and Buddha:The parallel sayings" is an exhilarating document-one that validates the wisdom of our species, unites cultures and ways of knowing, and suggests
that humans might actually understand little something about the nature of reality. What
we also have here, in the words of both scientists and spiritual masters, are the outer
limits of our understanding. "Einstein and Buddha" represents an auspicious conjoining of two distinctively different ways of knowing. Generally speaking, from overview of world
culture it might seem as though the Earth was devided according to the two hemispheres of the brain. Asia was assigned the right hemisphere, and its great sages turned their
attention inward, seeking truth through intuition and receptive quietude. in Europe, and
the Mediterranean-the left hemisphere-the search for truth turned outward, and became a
process of deconstructing and analyzing the world, relying on the more aggressive powers
of reason. The Asian wisdom tradition tended to see more wholistically, while the West
was more interested in making distinctions. In our time, modern communications and
travel have served as corpus callosum, connecting the two hemispheres and revealing an
astonishing agreement about the laws of nature and the structure of deep reality. Taken together, we now have what might be called "the full-brain approach". Reading through this
collection, I find myself especially thrilled to realize that the modern phisics has
validated the insights of mystics and meditators. Even though the opposite is also true,
our culture tends to be sceptical about personal revelation, viewing science as the
highest authority, especially when it comes to describing how the cosmos works. It appears, however, if modern phisics is to be taken seriously,that the great Asian spiritual
masters were quite adept at seeing into matter, space-time, and the conundrum of
consciousness. The insights of the spiritual masters may seem quite surprising when you
realize that they saw only with their naked mind, without the use of radio telescopes,
atom smashing machines, or laser photography. Conversely, we should remember that it was
the naked mind in the West that came to invent those powerful machines. Meanwhile, in the West we have long held a view of spiritual knowing as something that happens randomly,
usually involving a lightening strike, a vision of a burning bush, or some such strange
event. In recent decades, however, many Western scholars and seekers of truth have done
extensive study in the Asian wisdom schools and have discovered that, like science, this
other way of knowing involves a cleary proscribed (* Please refer to my footnote.) and
rigorous disciplin. Although it may sound contradictory, we are realizing that mystical
seeing can be learned.
A number of Western Buddhist teachers have even described the path of meditation as a
form of "scientic" investigation, using very specific procedures that lead to
recognizable, predictable results. In many schools of Buddhism, the meditator begins by
developing the quality of "mindfulness" described as "a non-interfering, non-judgmental
awareness" which is exactly the attitude a scinetist is supposed to have when conducting
an experiment. The meditator, like the scientist, attempts to become as objective as
possible about what is being observed, even though in the meditator's case the subject is often one's own self. Furthermore the meditating is replicable with each new meditator
who follows the procedures. As a meditation teacher, I can attest to the results: most
meditators will arrive at similar insights into the nature of reality.
although people will have different conceptual frameworks and therefore different ways to express what they see in meditation, their insights often involve descriptions of reality or the laws of nature. Through meditation, people can realize that "mind" is a co-creator of the world; that rather than any single cause of an event, all phenomena are connected
in a web of relationship similar to what is described in "complexity theory"; that energy comes in "quanta"; that all things are in process and there is no solidality anywhere. As you see in this book, these insights are in close agreement with the latest scientic
theories.
There is perhaps one important difference between the truths of the scientists and those
of the meditator or spiritual adept. While the scientist has discovered that everything
is in constant flux by examining the external world, the meditator will discover this
same truth inside his or her own mind and body, which makes the insight very personal.
The truth of impermanence becomes relevant to the meditator's own life; knowledge about
the workings of the universe turns into wisdom. Of course the swcientist's truth can be
personally transformative as well, and nobody has proven this better than Einstein
himself, but perhaps it happens more frequently in the Asian wisdom schools, where
personal transformation is the whole point of investigation in the first place. The
scientists and spiritual masters are just beginning to converse and compare notes, so any consequences or conclusions are premature. This book is an excellent primer for their
dialogue, and offers all of us a penetrating look at the basis for this meeting of the
minds. One of the great challenges of our time is to unite reason with the human heart,
cognition with compassion, science with spirituality, and here we have the groundwork.
What better way to bring the twos together than through the words of the scientists and
the spiritual masters themselves? May these sayings lead to the benefit of all beings.

* I think "proscribed" ought to be "prescribed", because there are many methods of meditation, but Buddhists follow what Buddha adopted and developed from the many Hindu yoga
postures and breathing methods, that is to say, he adopted the most authodox posture and
breathing method of yoga and developed his own styles, subdividing the breathing method
into several, depending on the spiritual level of the meditator.

The brief career of Mr. Wes Nisker (1942～　）
Author of two best selling books, "Buddha's Nature " (Bantam) and "Crazy Wisdom" (Ten
Speed Press).
He has practiced Buddhist meditation for 30 years (* Please refer to my footnote.) with
various teachers in Asia and the West, and is the founder and editor of the bi-annual
Buddhist journal "Inquiring Mind". He teaches retreats and workshops in Buddhist
meditation and philosophy at venues internationally, and is affiliated with Spirit Rock
Meditation Center in Woodacre, California.

* 30 years up to the year 2002 when this book was published.


I thank Amida Buddha and Shaka Buddha and vow to spread Buddhism.
NAMAMIDABUTSU NAMAMIDABUTSU