Buddha Travels West

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Category: Connect
Published: Monday, 15 June 2020 08:55
Written by Cherry
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The following is an extract from the article 'Buddha Travels West' by Peter Abbs, published in the journal 'Philosophy Now' ( Issue 38, June/July 2020)

Talking about the work of Stephen Bachelor, contemporary scholar and ex-Buddhist monk, Abbs says in his concluding paragraph:

'What matters most for Bachelor is the search for personal meaning. He links this to the historical Buddha, who always demoted large metaphysical questions and their dogmatic answers and promoted an open quest for understanding based on the mindful examination of experience, on meditation, and on work within the sangha - the community. What may be perennially significant in Buddhism is precisely this pilgrimage for wisdom within and solidarity without - a search which in the West has been darkly overshadowed by the blinkered pursuit of objective knowledge and technological mastery. We now need to place alongside science and technology the counterpart of wisdom and the courage to be. Or to express it more politically, we need to marry the political triad of liberty, equality and fraternity with the spiritual triad of being, reflecting and caring. For in our bewildered global age the marriage of two forms of enlightenment is now possible: of the rational and the spiritual ... and our very survival may well depend upon it. (p21)