The Universe in a Single Atom is the Dalai Lama’s latest book, subtitled “The Convergence of Science and Spirituality.”

I liked this book. It was lots of fun. but pretty disorganized. It contains a lot of interesting stuff about the Dalai Lama’s childhood in Tibet, his exile to India, his international activities after that. But it’s also somewhat of a random mind dump.

If I had to say what the overarching theme of this book was, it would be honoring humanity. The Dalai Lama uses expressions such as “impoverish the way we see ourselves” with regard to e.g. scientific materialism, which he unfairly conflates with nihilism. He contrasts a view of ourselves as “random biological creatures” with that of “special beings endowed with the dimension of consciousness and moral capacity”, claiming that this decision will “make an impact on how we feel about ourselves”.

But…ummmh…we are random biological creatures. I thought Buddhism already accepted that. “How we feel about ourselves” is some grade-school self-esteem issue—do we need to affirm our unrandomness in order to feel good about ourselves?

“Humans may be reduced to nothing more than biological machines, the products of pure chance in the random combination of genes, with no purpose other than the biological imperative of reproduction.’”

Frankly, this sounds more like the Pope than the Dalai Lama.

In the interest of making my posts shorter and more readable, I will stop here, but threaten to analyze the remaining 90% of this book here later.

We’ll take a look at the first line of Genjo Koan to explore some aspects of the translator’s assumptions and tasks.

The first phrase is:

諸法の仏法なる時節

Got that? Or not? Maybe it’s because you cannot read Japanese. Note—I’m assuming that. I’m assuming the reader cannot read Japanese characters and that therefore I need to do something about it. If I did not make that assumption, there would be no translation task. We want to provide something you can understand, at some level, and clearly given its unfamiliar script the original Japanese is not that, for you the Western reader. We’ve now made our first assumption. I’m highlighting this obvious point to emphasize that assumptions run throughout the translation process. They are assumptions about our readership, their capabilities, their interests.

To address this first problem, we’ll perform “transliteration”: converting one writing system to another. A standard transliteration would then give us:

shohou no buppou naru jisetsu

Got that? Or not? Maybe it’s because you cannot understand the words. There’s another assumption—that the reader cannot understand Japanese words and that therefore I need to do something about it. This is the second assumption necessary to provide something usable to the Western reader, another assumption about their capabilities.

To address this second problem, we’ll perform “translexicalization”—converting one set of words to another. That would yield:

all-law subject-particle Buddha-law be time

Got that? Or not? Maybe it’s because you cannot understand the grammar (syntax). Again, I’m assuming the reader cannot understand Japanese syntax and that therefore I need to do something about it. This is our third assumption. To address this third problem, we’ll perform “transsyntaxification”—converting one grammar to another. That gives us:

When all-law be Buddha-law

Aha, we now see something that resembles English. Some people would already call this a “translation”, although perhaps Nabokov’s term “transposition” would be more appropriate. We could actually publish this and plausibly claim it was English, and that we had “translated” it. But do you really get this? Or not? I’ll assume that you cannot understand the terms “all-law” and “Buddha-law”, which we went to such trouble to “translate”.

To make this “understandable”, we need to do something with these words. Leaving aside “all” for the time being, the “law” is the translation of Japanese 法 (hou), which we know comes from the Chinese, which we know is a translation of the Sanskrit dharma. So we can translate this as “all dharmas”, and the Buddha-law part as “Buddha-dharma”. Now we get:

When all dharmas are Buddhadharma

which actually looks like real live English as written by a real Zen master and seems really deep too. It’s a translation. But do you get that? Or not? Maybe it’s because you still cannot understand the words. This is yet another, fifth assumption—that such words are meaningless to the typical English reader. I’m assuming the reader cannot understand “dharma” and that therefore I need to do something about it. This assumption should be no more controversial than the first four, but yet it’s one which many scholars refuse to make.

Of course, many knowledgeable Buddhists in the West will understand “dharma”, or at least think they do. So if I was translating for them, this might be an OK translation, Problem is, they represent about 0.001% of all the people in the world that are potentially interested in what this is saying. What about the other 99.999%? We don’t care about them? Or maybe they should just learn Buddhist terminology first? Dogen was writing for 99% of Japanese people. Is it OK that I should randomly decide that it’s OK to arbitrarily change Dogen’s assumption about his audience? No, I should also come up with an English translation that addressed 99% of people, like Dogen was.

To stop at this point and say that the “dharma” translation is “correct” or “loyal” or “strict” is a copout. It’s just being lazy. By doing so, I would be violating Dogen’s implicit audience assumption. Until I do something about “dharma”, I still don’t really have a “translation”, but a “trans-literal-posi-syntactico-lation”. Of course, if that’s all I’m trying to represent it as—fine. If I lack confidence in what Dogen might have been trying to say and am trying to cover my ass—fine. But do we really want “cover-your-ass” translations?

To make this into a true translation—an expression that maps to the mental images and behavioral impact of what Dogen said—we have to go deeper. This is where some people get cold feet, saying this is going beyond “translation” and entering the realm of “interpretation”. Come on. Every single person that reads Dogen’s words is interpreting them. It’s certainly not unreasonable to ask the translator, presumably well-informed, to participate in this interpretive process.

So to make “all-law” meaningful to Westerners, what should we do with the “law” (法 dharma)? Some Buddhist dictionaries list as many as several dozen meanings of the term. But it’s a fair guess that in this case the meaning is “phenomena” or “things”. So we have “many things”, which is indeed how Tanahashi translates this.

But what about “Buddha-dharma”? Tanahashi translates this as is—a major copout; he might as well have left it in the original Japanese characters. Cleary gives us “Buddha-teachings”, which seems to be going too far. Neither translation reflects the 法 common to 諸法• and 仏法. That would seem to be a major oversight. Whatever we want to do with Dogen, we should respect his style, and in this crucially important first phrase of the first sentence in the first chapter of his magnum opus Shobo Genzo he explicitly chose wordings which shared the word 法 (hou, dharma). Certainly this is something we should respect.

Are we there yet? Certainly, Dogen intended for his writings to “mean” something, even if only for himself, as one Dogen scholar I recently met indicated the possibility of. “Mean” for whom? For the people that read them. Dogen was certainly sophisticated enough that he knew that a wide range of people would read his works, and presumably wrote them so that all could “understand” them. It would not surprise me if Dogen intuited that people from the 21st century would read his essays, including people from other cultures—given his experience in China, he was certianly aware of cross-cultural issues. Our duty, then, in translating Dogen, is to realize his vision and produce a version of his thoughts which is meaningful across centuries and cultures. And translating literally using terms such as “buddha-dharma” clearly fails that test.

Here in the West, we have the concept of “God”. No-one knows exactly what it means, but in a way everyone does. It refers to something external, if you prefer, or something internal, if you prefer, an unknown essence. This is precisely the sense of the “buddha” in Dogen’s “buddha-dharma” phrase. In other words, “buddha-dharma” refers to God’s law, or things of God. As such, that is exactly how it should be “translated”. That is why I insist that “shohou no buppou naru jisetsu” should be translated exactly as

when all things are God’s things

That is what Dogen “meant”. It is not “interpretive”. It is the precise expression of Dogen’s intent, to the extent possible, in modern English.

There is one additional step which is possible and desirable: to fine-tune the English style. Again, Dogen’s Japanese was beautiful, flowing, almost poetic. Presumably he adopted this style for a reason—to give his writings greater impact and make them more memorable. By producing clunky English and trying to pass it off as a translation of Dogen, we are denying this prominent aspect of Dogen’s prose.

One aspect of English is that it makes verbs play a more central role in the overall semantics, preferring sentences with an active feeling. In that spirit, in our final, stylistic step, we will move to a verb-centric, English-like syntax, while also reading a bit more into what Dogen is trying to say with his use of “jisetsu” (when):

Sometimes, God shows us a world of things…

Or, perhaps evne

This world of things in godly terms…

Now, we just have to go through this process for the remaining 999 phrases of Genjo Koan.

In my relentless quest to bring the very latest and most objective reporting to Numenware readers, I jumped at the chance to go hear Dr. Deepak Chopra talk in person last night. Sometimes people can get their ideas across much better in person than on the written page (see earlier review of Chopra book). The occasion was his receipt of the Navind Doshi Bridgebuilder Award in an event held at Loyola Marymount University.

My conclusion: Deepak is trapped in one of his own quantum discontinuities—between irrelevance and confusion.

I already know that atoms are mostly made up of space. So what? I’ve already heard the analogy about how reality is like a movie being projected on a screen. Who cares?

I don’t understand why Chopra says that, before you “have a thought”, that thought was not in your brain, but lurking somewhere else, in some sea of consciousness. I can’t agree that the “discontinuity” between pieces of physical matter has anything to do with the temporal discontinuities in human processes of perception, and even if I did, what next? I’m at a loss as to what the audience, listening raptly, planned to do with the assertion that photons are the carriers of all information in the universe.

I’m astonished that Chopra doesn’t understand the Heisenberg principle, claiming it states that uncertainty is proliferating. I’m stunned that he mangles Godel’s incompleteness theorem into a proof of the existence of “creative jumps”, which he believes that “gaps in the fossil record” establish the existence of.

I’m amazed that in the cosmology or theology or philosophy or whatever it is that Chopra is trying to construct he fails to answer the most basic question: what is at the root of man’s fall, or, in his terms, the “fragmentation of consciousness”. I find unconvincing his argument that this fragmentation, whatever caused it, is responsible for Hurricane Katrina. I think it highly tautological, and therefore meaningless that the meaning of human existence is to ask “Why?”. I find it very odd that he apparently does not know the meaning of the word “phenomenon”, claiming that “consciousness underlies all manifestations” and then in the same breath calling it a “phenomenon”.

What I’m not surprised about is that people lap up this confused, pseudo-scientific mishmash. It’s merely the much hipper, New Age equivalent of good old religious myth.

Religion contributes to a more stable, healthy, prosperous society. Right?

A recent study paints a dramatically different picture. Published in the Journal of Religion and Society, it pulls together existing studies about the statistical relationship between religious belief at the societal level and metrics of social health. Although it reaches some interesting conclusions, it raises more questions than it answers.

• In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion in the prosperous democracies.

Fascinating, but what is the mechanism at work? Are the people getting gonorrhea the same ones that believe in God, are they the believers’ kids, or are they people way over on the other side of town? Is the mechanism at work here something as simple as zealots preventing sex education in the schools, or is there something about the American style of belief in God that actually promotes unprotected sex and suicide?

• The U.S. is…the least efficient western nation in terms of converting wealth into cultural and physical health.

Doubtlessly true, but what evidence is there that this is correlated with the high index of religiosity? It could be a parallel American personality trait, albeit one correlated with religious orientation, causing this: a deep-rooted tendency towards shooting from the hip, ignoring problems until it’s too late, and living with messiness.

• There is evidence that within the U.S. strong disparities in religious belief versus acceptance of evolution are correlated with similarly varying rates of societal dysfunction, the strongly theistic, anti-evolution south and mid-west having markedly worse homicide, mortality, STD, youth pregnancy, marital and related problems than the northeast where societal conditions, secularization, and acceptance of evolution approach European norms.

Ah, yes. The graphic above shows gonorrhea incidence by region in the US; notice how “red” the “red” states are.

The author is a dinosaur researcher, author, and illustrator. In this study he unquestionably has an agenda related to the evolution vs. intelligent design tiff. His findings include, unsurprisingly, the fact that the advanced secular democracies such as Japan, which do better than the US on the social measures, also share strong belief in evolution. By showing this, he hopes to defang the arguments of those like newly-indicted Congressional leader Tom Delay, who once stated

…high crime rates and tragedies like the Columbine assault will continue as long schools teach children “that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized [sic] out of some primordial soup of mud.

What is the neurotheological, or religiobiological, connection? Possibly none, since here we are in the realm of socioreligion. One could hypothesize, however, that the same biological mechanism which predisposes people to theist beliefs also make them more promiscuous. One starting point would be to analyze the sexual behavior of mentally ill people with religious delusions.

Links:

• Original study: Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies
• Author Gregory S. Paul
• Times Online article
• Earlier Numenware post on World Values Survey

Larry King, our favorite geriatric talk show host, revisited the old why-God-lets-horrible-things-happen problem on a recent show, trotting out the Dalai Lama and baby-faced Christian tele-evangelist Joel Osteen to “explain” Katrina. The interesting thing was that both seemed to agree: stuff just happens.

KING: Your Holiness, how do you explain someone who believes in a higher being allowing this to happen to good people?

DALAI LAMA: Of course, from the Buddhist viewpoint, every event, every experience (UNINTELLIGIBLE) such a disaster, which is very, very painful, unspeakable sort of experiences. Are these things also, is it due to our own past karma or actions? And that is, I think, main causes, and the conditions the world climate conditions is changing, that also one factor.

Fine, but this is subject to misinterpretation. He does mean, doesn’t he, that the causal actions in question are generic, not some recent acts of evil on the part of the residents of the Gulf Coast that they are getting punished for, as some commentators, amazingly, have contended?

King continues: “But it doesn’t cause you, your Holiness, to question faith?”

DALAI LAMA: No. Of course, there—I think, for me, as a Buddhist, the real belief of all causality causes conditions, causes an effect, go like that [moving hands in a large circle]. Of course, the—even Buddhist own time, in the very eyes of—in front of Buddha’s own eye, is some people to suffer. That means things happen due to their own previous action of karma…

For the Christian answer, King moved to Osteen, asking “How do you respond to that same question? The Buddha said it’s the natural evolvement of things. What does the pastor say?” (Was Larry calling the Dalai Lama “the Buddha”? And is there really a word “evolvement”?) Osteen’s answer was almost indistinguishable from the Dalai Lama’s, although he omitted the causality twist and focused on God helping you make it through just after He destroyed your entire city:

OSTEEN: Well, Larry, what I believe from the Christian faith is that, you know, God is control. We don’t understand why all these thing happen. I think some of them are just natural disasters and you know, I think that when we come out of this we know that God is right there with us, the he’s the God to comfort us and, I don’t think we can explain this. So, we don’t try to get bogged down in that, we just try to—try to remind ourselves that God is a good God and, he’s on our side and he’s going to bring this through—bring us through these times of difficulty.

KING: Why not question it? If he’s a good God and he’s on your side, why did he flood New Orleans, something he could have prevented?

OSTEEN: You know Larry, I don’t think there’s an answer to all that. I mean you could go and figure out—and try to figure out why are babies born abnormal and why did this happen, that happen? I don’t think you can figure that out, Larry. I mean that’s, the Bible says, “God’s ways are not our ways, he works in mysterious ways,” and so, I don’t—I think that’s where a lot of people get hung up. But you know, part of trusting God is having faith in the tough times. And I think that’s what we—that’s what we do as Christians right now.

How can a major newsmagazine spend nearly 20 pages on a cover story about spirituality in America and shed almost zero light on the subject?

The magazine in question is Newsweek, in its September 5, 2005 issue. What could have been most interesting, the poll, was deeply flawed by poor design. They asked people to categorize themselves as religious or spiritual or both or neither, but never bothered to define the terms! They found that 29% of Americans reports they meditate every day—a ludicrously high number, doubtless inflated by people who thought they were “meditating” if they stopped for a minute on their way past the fridge to think about the girl at work. Although the poll asked people whether they thought God created the Universe (80% say yes!), they didn’t even bother to ask what kind of thing/guy/concept/force people thought God was.

Zen Buddhism does not fare very well at the hands of these feckless journalists. It’s mentioned just three times: once quoting a Time article from the 60s pairing Zen with drugs and psychiatry; a four-line definition, saying “rooted in Buddhism, Zen involves meditation in search of enlightenment. Practitioners often focus on apparently nonsensical questions called koans”; and a bizarre quote by a Jewish scholar claiming that “…Kabbalah…conveys the message that God’s power depends on humanity’s actions. God needs our worship. It’s the same impulse behind Zen Buddhism, Tibetan masters, Hopi Indians.” My goodness, how very confused we are.

Although I realize that neurotheology is not exactly in the mainstream, it still strikes me as odd that not once in 20 pages in a single mention made of the brain, especially since the article focused on the trend towards personal experience. Whether you believe God made the brain or the brain made God or something halfway in between, the brain is still key to this riddle.

“Why Has Bodhidharma Left for the East?” is Yong-Kyun Bae’s spellbinding, succulent commentary on the meaning of life.

Zen aficionados may relate to the Zen setting. A dying master, an adept, and a child live together in a mountain retreat.

Beyond the story or the message of this film, however, is the breathtaking cinematography. The director is said to have spent seven years planning the film in great detail, resulting in a “script” ten times longer than normal—then spent another three full years shooting the movie. The result is a visual feast of lush, compelling imagery. A trained painter and teacher of painting, Bae has created a film which is in itself a painting.

I lay no claim to any definitive interpretation of this film, but to me it spoke about the human being and the necessity of his relationship to society. Just to make sure we get the point, although the monastery is remote, Bae places a bustling city at the foot of the mountain. The old master is so uncomfortable in society that even the main monastery is too much for him; he retreats to an even more isolated hut deep in the mountains where he meditates with his back against frozen ice, hastening his decline. The adept leaves his blind, widowed mother in the slum of the city to selfishly pursue his own enlightenment. The child. an orphan whom the master brought back to his mountain retreat almost as a pet, is deprived of every normal childhood pleasure—in the mountains, he is missing not only ihs parents but his entire social context.

A major subtheme in the film is the boy accidentally killing a bird, which he then buries, later noticing that maggots are devouring its corpse. Far from being a symbol of a child learning about death and evanescence, this scene emphasizes how impoverished the boy’s environment was—one bird dying is literally the sum total of his emotional learning experience that he could have in such an isolated environment.

Although the film speaks within the context of Korea, I am sure, about the nature of our involvement with society as we grow or attempt to do so, the lessons it teaches us apply equally, or even more so, to the West.

Interestingly, the director makes reference to the West in his notes as quoted on the Milestone Films website:

The action takes place around a monastery where an old Zen master lives. The central interest of thiswork is absolutely not Zen in of itself — in effect, Zen assumes the role in this film of an environment of profound significance. I chose this setting because it is of great interest and beauty and is perfectly suited to express my search for life’s meaning.

The teachings of Zen Buddhism allowed the Far East to develop its own culture and esthetic, but Zen also influenced many Western thinkers. One can discover examples in existential philosophy (especially in the writings of Martin Heidegger), in the psychology of Carl Gustav Jung, in surrealist art and in contemporary music and art.

I am also deeply interested in Erich Fromm’s assertion that the way of Zen is in harmony with the goals of Western psychoanalysis — self-fulfillment. I am convinced that, contrary to the extremely rational methodology of psychoanalysis, Zen allows the discovery of the reality of things and the foundations of the soul.

The movie was chosen as “One of the Ten Best Films of All Time” by three international film critics in the 1993 “Sight & Sound” Critics’ Poll.

IMDB listing

I must be getting cranky. I’ll pick up a book and find myself arguing with the author right from the first page, sometimes even the first sentence. That’s what happened with Living with the Devil: A Meditation on Good and Evil, a book on Buddhism by Stephen Batchelor (shown), who is a Buddhist teacher and writer. He starts:

This is a book for those like myself who find themselves living in the gaps between different and sometimes conflicting mythologies—epic narratives that help us make sense of this brief life on earth.

Hmmm. I don’t “find myself” living in any such “gaps”.

Whether the myths we inherit from the past come from a monotheistic religion such as Judaism or Christianity or a nontheistic tradition such as Buddhism, they share the view that a human life is fully intelligible only as part of an immense cosmic drama that transcends it.

This seems like a funny thing for someone with Zen training to say (Batchelor was a Zen monk in Korea for three years, after also studying Tibetan Buddhism). I don’t think Buddhism says that human life is “fully intelligible”, with or without any “immense cosmic drama”.

Both believe hidden powers to be at work—whether of God or karma makes little difference—that have flung us into this world to face the daunting task of redeeming ourselves for the remainder of eternity.

No, I don’t think Buddhism holds that there are “hidden powers”. And certainly it’s wrong to equate God, whoever/whatever He/She is, with karma. We were not “flung” into this world (if we were, from where?). And what exactly are we supposed to be “redeeming ourselves” from?

For me this is overly reminiscent of the unlikely creation myth I was taught as a child. That particular cosmology held that a flesh-and-bones God and his wife, living on a distant planet, copulated and created non-physical “spirit children”, including me. The spirit children embodied some kind of eternal essence of each person, which had existed from the “beginning”, in exactly what form is unclear. Those spirit children hung around until humans down on Earth themselves copulated, creating physical bodies that the spirit children came down and inhabited, deprived of their “premortal” memories, to be subjected to a test of obedience and faith to determine their eventual eternal status. I’m not kidding, there are really people that believe this.

Batchelor then goes on to facilely, relativistically, and post-modernistically conflate modern day science with such fairy tales:

A dominant myth of modernity is provided by the scientific understanding of the world, so compelling that we refuse to acknowledge anything mythical about it at all.

Sure, it’s useful to have a perspective of science as a contingent belief system. But science is fundamentally distinct from religious myths in its nature.

Human knowledge is invariably limited and partial…Whatever a person knows is mediated through his senses, his reason, his brain. No matter how well it can be explained, reality remains essentially mysterious.

But this misses the point that at their heart the mythic explanations are different from the scientific ones in their nature. And something merely being mysterious does not mean that the explanation has failed, or that the explanation is a “myth”—unless you want to call any belief system a myth.

I do not believe in God any more than I believe in Hamlet. But this does not mean that either God or Hamlet has nothing of value to say.

But Hamlet is a fictional character in a play—we all know that. We don’t need to “believe” in him or not. We know that his lines were written by Shakespeare. God, on the other hand, cannot be defined. We cannot even say what it means to “believe” in Him/Her. We don’t know what He has said or is saying, or what relationship what is written in the Bible has to this “God” idea.

Whew. That was all just in the first three pages. The rest of the book is mainly about the Devil, which is not a useful metaphor for me in any of the cultural or religious guises presented here. I guess I should have thought about that before buying the book, since the title, after all, is “Living with the Devil”.

I’ve adopted a new pattern for reading books. I skim them, I jump around, I skip parts. Sometimes I just put them down—life is too short. And, sad to say, that is what I ended up doing with this book as well.

58% of the American population now say that God’s importance in their lives ranks 10/10. Church attendance is up.

Good news? Hardly. For one thing, while spending more time sitting in church we are still electrocuting retarded black teenagers and killing Iraqi civilians with smart bombs. And much of the increased interest in things spiritual is frittered away listening to lectures in buildings with stained glass windows or dabbling in ESP, UFO’s, astrology, or yoga.

On a related note, in 2001 59% of all Americans said they were deeply interested in the meaning and purpose of life—a higher percentage than other societies, and up from 46% in 1995. What accounts for this fixation? In his new book, America’s Crisis of Values: Reality and Perception, Wayne Baker presents a novel theory: we are desperately trying to resolve the contradiction between the traditional and the self-expressive.

A contradiction which is uniquely American, as the fascinating World Values Survey shows. According to the four surveys carried out in 80 countries over the last 25 years, the USA ranks below zero on the traditional vs. secular/rational scale—far below our industrialized sister countries and at the same level as Poland. (Japan is tops here.) At the same time, America falls on the high end of the survival vs. self-expression scale, which you would expect given its level of economic development. The chart below shows this in the form of the so-called Inglehart Values Map.

Baker is saying, in other words, Americans’ fixation on meaning and purpose is pathological, a desperate, misguided, and ultimately futile attempt to bridge the gap between an almost medieval religious traditionalism and the self-expressive possibilities of modern society.

750 years ago, Dogen repudiated religious discimination between the sexes, saying, “The desire to hear Dharma and the search for enlightenment do not necessarily rely on the difference in sex.”

I wish more of our current religious “leaders” had figured this out.

Dogen also had trenchant comments to make on sexual objectification:

Some people, foolish to the extreme, think of a woman as nothing but an object of sensual pleasure…A Buddhist should not do so. Both man and woman become objects, and thus become equally involved in defilement.

Dogen made these comments in the Raihai Tokuzui fascicle of Shobo Genzo. Translations are by Hee-jin Kim, from Dogen, Mystical Realist.