Today we’ll continue (previous post) our analysis of the first sentence of Dogen’s “Gabyo” (“Painting of a Ricecake”, or “Images of Donuts”). Let’s consult a Japanese commentary by Nishijima-sensei:

「諸ä»?ã?“れ証ã?ªã‚‹ã‚†ã‚‘ã?«ã€?諸物ã?“れ証ã?ªã‚Šã€?ã€?真実を得ã?Ÿã?Ÿã??ã?•ã‚“ã?®æ–¹ã€…ã?®å®Ÿä½“ã?Œã?©ã?†ã?„ã?†ã‚‚ã?®ã?‹ã?¨ã?„ã?†ã?¨ã€?体験ã?ŒåŸºç¤Žã?«ã?ªã?£ã?¦ã?„る。ã‚?ã‚Œã‚?ã‚Œã?®æ—¥å¸¸ç”Ÿæ´»ã?®ä¸­ã?§ç?¾å®Ÿã?Œã?©ã?†ã?„ã?†ã‚‚ã?®ã?‹ã?¨ã?„ã?†ã?“ã?¨ã?Œä½“験ã?§ã??ã‚‹ã?“ã?¨ã?ŒçœŸå®Ÿã‚’å¾—ã?Ÿäººã€…ã?®ç‰¹å¾´ã?§ã?‚ã‚‹ã?‹ã‚‰ã€‚ã?—ã?Ÿã?Œã?£ã?¦ã€?「諸ä»?ã?“れ証ã?ªã‚‹ã‚†ã‚‘ã?«ã€?ã€?ã?“ã?®ä¸–ã?®ä¸­ã?«ã?‚ã‚‹ã?•ã?¾ã?–ã?¾ã?®ç‰©è³ªã?¨ã?—ã?¦ã?®å®Ÿä½“ã‚‚ã€?ã??ã‚Œã?ªã‚Šã?®çµŒé¨“ã?¨ã?„ã?†ã‚‚ã?®ã?¨é–¢é€£ã?—ã?Ÿå®Ÿè³ªã‚’å…·ã?ˆã?¦ã?„る。

This says, in my translation, “What forms the base of the actuality of the many people who have obtained truth is experience. That’s because the distinctive feature of the people that have obtained truth is that they can experence what reality really is within their daily lives. Therefore, ‘because the various Buddhas are SHO ’ the wide range of material substances in the world also possess an essence related to the corresponding experience.”

Or, roughly, the objects in the world share in the enlightenment of the enlightened?

That’s illuminating, but we still haven’t gotten to where I’m trying to get: something that you could basically put on a bumper sticker. Getting to that point is not, and does not require, doing violence to what Dogen wrote; it’s honoring it and making it real for people today.

Tomorrow, we’ll move boldly onto the second sentence.

Art by John Azelvandre.

I’m having huge fun reading Carl Sagan’s The Varieties of Scientific Experience. These are the Gifford lectures (website) he gave in 1985. Even after more than two decades, this is one of the most cogent, engaging, lucid, approachable, modest, insightful, and encompassing approaches I have seen to the science vs. religion debate.

He summarizes the key neurotheological issues far better than I could ever hope to:

People have religious experiences. No question about it. They have them world-wide, and there are some interesting similarities in the religious experiences tha are had worldwoide. They are powerful, emotionally extremely convincing, and they often lead to people reforming their lives and doing good works, although the opposite also happens…But the question is, can any such experience provide other than anecdotal evidence of the existence of God or gods? … Large numbers of people can have experiences that can be profound and movnig and still not correspond to anything like an exact sense of external reality.

I note also that religious experiences can be brought on by specific molecules. There are many cultures that consciously imbibe or ingest these molecules in order to bring on a religious experience. It’s a very long list of materials. This suggests that there is some molecular basis for the religious experience and that it need not correspond to some external reality.

Let’s say there’s a molecule that produces a religious experience, whatever the religious experience is. How does that come about? Virtually every time someone takes that molecule, he or she has a religious experience. Does that not suggest that there is a natural molecule that the body produces whose function it is to produce religious experiences, at least on occasion? What could that molecule be like? Let’s give it a name, since nobody’s discovered it yet, and of course it may not exist—let’s call it “theophorin”.

What could the selective advantage of a theophorin be? How would it come about? Why would it be there? Well, what is the nature of the experience? The nature of the experience has, as I say, many different aspects. But one uniform aspect of it is an intense feeling of awe and humility before a power vastly greater than ourselves. And that sounds to me very much like a dominance-hierarchy molecule or part of a suite of molecules whose funcdtion it is to fit us into the dominance hierarchives.

I think there is as much difference between the religious experience and the bureaucratic religions as there is, say, between sex with love and sex without love. And of course humans have added something profound and beautiful in both cases to the molecular reflex. Perhaps this account will sound tasteless or unpalatable to many, and if so I apologize. But if we treat the question of the origin of religion and the religious experience as a scientific question, then we must ask, “What essential aspects of the religious experience are left out by this hypothesis?” and note that it is at least in principle testable by finding the theophorin, and you could then of course see a large number of controlled experiments to test that out in great detail.

I’ve been looking at Dogen’s “Gabyo” (“drawing rice-cakes”, or, as I prefer, “drawing donuts”), and, in an extreme case of spending too much time on individual sentences, have gotten stuck on the very first line.

It says, “諸ä»?ã?“れ証ã?ªã‚‹ã‚†ã‚‘ã?«ã€?諸物ã?“れ証ã?ªã‚Šã€‚”

A very initial approximation would be “the various Buddhas are SHO and therefore the various things are SHO.”

Here, SHO means proof, validation, or, sometimes, enlightenment. An obvious interpretation would be that the “various Buddhas are enlightened”, but in what sense would it then follow that that implies that “the various things are enlightened”? Can things be enlightened? Is it because various Buddhas are enlightened that things are enlightened? This would seem to fail the test of obviousness.

Other translators have addressed this problem as follows:

• All buddhas are realization, thus all things are realization.

• Buddhas are the state of experience itself, and so things are the state of experience itself.

• When all the Awakened Ones are realized through Awake Awareness, all things are Awake Awareness.

• When Buddhas experience truth, they experience becoming one with the world.

All of these seem to miss the mark. Perhaps the intent is something like “Those who have found the truth share experience with the things around them.”

Unfortunately, this is only the first sentence of an essay that goes on for several hundred more. If the first sentence took me one month to translate, the entire essay will take a decade!

There is another underlying issue here. We know that this “Gabyo” essay itself is addressing the issue of the relationship between image and reality. Dogen is saying that images—whether mental or physical—are not merely representations of reality, but are a form of reality in their own right. The question is, how do the initial sentences above relate to this overall meaning of the essay? Is Dogen making a point about the nature of the “things” which he will be discussing images of? None of the current translations address this.

How does the drug ketamine bring on visions of God?

Ketamine (Wikipedia) is a veterinary anesthetic. It is also a well-known party drug, known as “Special-K”, related to angel dust. But the drug, developed in the ‘60s, can also send users into other worlds or gave them visions of God, as soldiers in Vietnam discovered when administered the drug as a battlefield anesthetic. Austin quotes one researcher who describes ketamine as yielding a model near-death experience. Some patients report hearing voices , having out-of-body experiences, or losing their sense of self and connection to reality. Large doses can send the users into a so-called K-hole where they perceive, deep inside the mind, ineffable other worlds and dimensions.

An article in the NYT caught my eye when I saw it talked about a study showing that ketamine was a quick-acting antidepressant as well. Scientists had known that it had antidepressant effects in animals (how do you tell a cat is depressed or not?), but had not tried it on humans until now. The study showed immediate (as little as two hours) antidepressive effects, which lasted a week, when the drug was given at sub-anesthetic doses. Apparently the subjects first went off on a little mini-trip, then found themselves undepressed when they got back. This research was done under the auspices of the NIMH; here is the press release

The neurological mechanisms underlying the effect of ketamine are relatively well-known. It is an NMDA receptor antagonist, meaning it blocks the NMDA receptors, found mainly in the hippocampus (which is why it affects memory; many ketamine users cannot remember their trips), and the prefrontal cortex (hence its profound impact on thought). Normally NMDA receptors receive signals of glutamate, the most common neurotransmitter. Irregularities in glutamate function are associated with epilepsy , among other disorders, and may also be responsible in part for depression .

What is missing is any overarching theory of how ketamine could simuiltaneously cause God-like hallucinations and assuage depression, or what the relationship, if any, between the two effects might be. Such a theory would be a key contribution to the biology of religion.

Chinese researchers have analyzed the brains of go players with fMRI (abstract), finding “a modest degree of stronger activation in the right parietal area than in left. This type of right hemisphere lateralization differs from the modest left hemisphere lateralization observed during chess playing.”

To abstract away basic visual processing, the researchers presented the subjects—half a dozen mid-level amateur players—with three alternating go boards, one empty, one with random stone placement, and one with an actual game position

Go playing requires the participation of a network of cortical areas. As shown in Fig. 2c, these areas include the mid-dorsal prefrontal area (BA9), the dorsal prefrontal area (BA6), the parietal areas (BA7, 40), the posterior cingulate areas (BA30/31), the occipital area (BA19), and the posterior temporal area (BA37). These areas are generally engaged in attention, spatial perception, imagery, manipulation and storage in working memory, retrieval in episodic memory, and problem solving [2].

An interesting finding was that the primary somatosensory and motor areas were also activated. The authors’ explanation is that the player is getting ready, in his mind, to pick up a real stone and play it. A similar phenomenon was found when subjects were shown Chinese characters (earlier post): their motor areas indicated they were ‘thinking” of picking up a pen or brush to draw the character!

Concerning the right lateralization, the researchers hypothesize that this may be attributed to the storage component of spatial working memory, global spatial pattern analysis, and sustained spatial attention all being biased in the right parietal areas. They also found lateralized activity in the left dorsal lateral prefrontal area, normally involved in language functions. They hypothesize this may be due to the subjects verbalizing go terms internally.

As topics for futher research, the authors propose neuro-imaging studies of professional go players. They make the fascinating prediction that the pros will show even less activity in the frontal areas, since they know the game so well they are not really thinking as they play.

Zen master Gudo Nishijima (pictured) believes in a world government run by the US military (post).

I can’t tell you how often I’m tempted to write about politics in this blog. I always try to resist that temptation—after all, there are people with much more insightful things to say on such topics than I. With his recent post, however, Nishijima-sensei has given me an opening I could drive a truck through.

Musing on where we find ourselves in the cosmological sense—sitting here on the third planet from the sun—Nishijima hits on the topic of the Cold War, and its remarkable, peaceful conclusion. But his thinking then takes an unexpected leap:

…what I feel so grateful for, is the fact that the USA and USSR reconciled with each other without fighting World War 3 in 1991. Before the reconciliation I could never have expected such a so happy reconciliation of the two countries at all. At that time I thought that, if World War 3 had occured, major parts of the surface of the Earth could have been destroyed easily…therefore it was such a thankful fact that because of the enormous efforts of the USA and USSR World War 3 has been avoided. We could become very joyful in such happy conditions wholeheartedly, we can enjoy so enormously that we, human beings, were not so stupid as to destroy ourselves with the atom bombs which we, human beings, had produced after so long and so eormous efforts.

Gosh. It’s true that we would have had a hard time enjoying ourselves, wholeheartedly or otherwise, if we had been vaporized in a mushroom cloud, but the mere fact of that not having happened does not, alas, suffice to give me “enormous joy”.

I have a rather peculiar idea on human history, that the world history of human beings seems to be similar to a sports tournament of some kind.

Not peculiar at all. Entire schools of thought and professional careers have been based on this idea.

And thinking about the real situation of the world, we can think that the Final Game of the World Tournament has ended without fighting, already. And I guess that the Winner of the Final Game might be USA.

This is a remarkable short-sighted and uninformed viewpoint, which just demonstrates that Zen masters probably shouldn’t be providing us with their political views.

First, there is no “final game”. I’m surprised that an advanced practitioner of Zen would speak in such apocalyptic terms. Dogen himself said in Bendowa that those talking about the “final” period were wrong. The US simply happens to have emerged as the strongest nation at this particular point in time, due to the convergence of a number of historical and economic factors.

But the US has not just won, says Nishijima; it will transmogrify into a world government!

Therefore in such a situation, USA has the possibility to change her Army into the Police of the World, and All Countries in the World will have the possibility to change their Armies into Branch Offices of the World Police. In other words I think that we, Human Beings, are able to begin to have the possibility of establishing the Government of the Whole World.

OK, but only if Donald Rumsfeld can be World Emperor too.

Seriously, America has no idea how to deploy its strength for good in the world. We’ve seen what happens when it tries to be the global policeman. Luckily, other countries won’t even consider changing their armies into “branch offices” of the US military. Long before that happens, the US military itself will implode, as it is already starting to; the US will be unable to continue to support it; and your “global winner” will finally begin to reap the fruits of years of incompetent management (especially during the last five years), neglect, and carelessness as it spirals down the drain economically, ethically, and spiritually.

[Note: Quotes from Nishijima’s blog have been edited for grammar and spelling without changing their meaning.]

Serotonin receptor density in the brain was tied to religious orientation in a 2003 study by a Swedish team (full report and summary ).

But what is “religious orientation”, and what does low serotonin receptor density mean?

The metric used for “religious orientation” was the so-called “self-transcendence” component of the Temperament & Character Inventory, defined as “the extent to which individuals conceive themselves as integral parts of the universe as a whole.” Self-transcendance breaks down further into subcomponents; it was the “spiritual acceptance” subscale which was found to correlate (negatively) with serotonin receptor density in various brain areas. People with high spiritual acceptance numbers “tend to endorse extrasensory perception and ideation,” while “low scorers…tend to favor a reductionistic and empirical worldview.” The scale includes yes-or-no questions like, “I have had supernatural experiences” and, “I believe in a common, unifying force.”

It’s anybody’s guess what this bizarre scale is actually measuing. I’m imagining people who believe in UFOs and astral flight would probably score pretty high. On the other hand, there is no shortage of reductionist Zen masters who would score zero.

Andy Newberg weighs in with a weird comment which seems to say that we might be able to use these results to decide which religion people should be. Do a prenatal brain scan to decide whether to raise Baby as a Scientologist, Methodist, or Wiccan? He opines that the research “may be useful in a number of ways, including guiding people to practices that might better suit their disposition by understanding how people are spiritually different.”

The study’s author puts a politically correct spin on his results:

Farde also indicated that understanding the role of the brain in religion and spirituality may create more respect for plurality and the way we are religious beings. While the research does not explain whether a person has a belief system, Farde said, it might indicate why the person may be more attuned to a charismatic church as opposed to one with more order and tranquility.

But how might the serotonin system affect spirituality? “My favorite interpretation,” Farde told Psychiatric News, “is that the serotonin system regulates our perception and the variety of stimuli reaching our awareness. A person with a weak ‘sensory filter’ is used to various perceptions and may be more likely to accept religious world views.”

Before we even get there, we have to figure out what low serotonin receptor density means. As the study’s authors themselves point out, we don’t really know. It could mean the person has a fewer number of receptors that are more efficient, or a fewer number of receptors to counteract higher levels of serotonin, or lower serotonin levels. They don’t know.

The most generous thing that can be said about this study is that it “points the way to more study”.

The first event in the California ScienCenter’s “Science Matters” series was Religion on the Brain, held on November 4, 2006. It was attended by a thousand people. What an outpouring of interest in the biology of religion! What were these people looking for? Judging from the questions from the audience, some appeared to be scientists, but most were “seekers” in the informal sense—still trying to figure out what all this means. I doubt they were satisfied.

The selection of panelists looked promising: VS Ramachandran, as well as Joan Roughgarden (pictured) from Stanford (author of “Evolution’s Rainbow”), Michael Schermer (Wikipedia ) of the Skeptics Society, and Warren Brown (link), a psychologist and writer on science and religion issues.

Unfortunately, this panel ended up generating neither much heat nor light. VS was given a brief 15 minutes to present some basic research on the brain and religion, then Conan Nolan (bio), a reporter who served as the moderator, dove right into a series of unstructured questions.

Schermer, with whom I’m not familiar, is an agnostic, but apparently adopts a very simplified sociological/anthropological view of the origins of religion. The narrator failed to ask him to clarify his views on the differences between a brain-based view of religion and a societally-based one (or, to state the question another way, which aspects of religion might be brain-based and which societally-based).

We never managed to figure out what Joan Roughgarden’s agenda was, since all we heard from her were answers to ad hoc questions. Judging from those, she seems to be missing a few marbles. She claims that neurobiology (I guess she meant neuroimaging) is over-resolving. In other words, it’s seeing stuff that’s not really there? Or the stuff it’s seeing is random, or doesn’t matter? She made the incredibly odd analogy that having a religious experience is like eating a chocolate bar, and of course both affect your brain. Does it really take a PhD to figure out all the ways that eating a piece of chocolate is distinct from thinking you’ve seen God? Then she made the startling asserting that there’s nothing really extraordinary about the relationships between the brain and God. One is left to assume—she never bothered to tell us—that she thinks that God is out there somewhere and we use our brains to perceive Her in the same way we use them to perceive a butterfly. If she believes that, why did she bother to accept the invitation to the panel discussion?

We know from the blurb on her new book “Evolution and Christian Faith” that she’s “an evolutionary biologist and a Christian,” and the book “offers an elegant, deeply satisfying reconciliation of the theory of evolution and the wisdom of the Bible.” She has “scoured the Bible and scanned the natural world, finding examples time and again, not of conflict, but of harmony.” In a way I’d sort of like to read this book, but unfortunately I have to draw the line somewhere. Her previous book, “Darwin’s Rainbow,” which discusses evolution and sexual diversity, might be more fun.

Nor was Warren Brown, from Fuller Theological Seminary, given any more of a chance to say what he thought, which is apparently something about of the integration of neuroscience and Christian faith. He has edited a book called Whatever Happened to the Soul, which is said to present a nonreductive physicalist Christian anthropology, whatever that might be.

What was missing at this forum was your basic unapologetic reductionist. Ramachandran doesn’t fill the bill: he resolutely refuses to take a stand on whether God really exists. He even, in answer to a softball question about whether a future God pill would or would not give rise to ethical issues, refused to answer on the grounds that that was not a scientific question.

Perhaps in the future such worthy events can be better planned, better structured, and better executed, perhaps with the participation of a leading blogger about religion and the brain. 🙂

“You always try to fit the original word to your understanding, instead of the other way round. But a good translator cannot be like that.”

I disagree profoundly (previous post) with these words of Mike Cross (website) addressing his teacher Gudo Nishijima in a comment (now deleted) on the latter’s blog. (Cross is perhaps best known as the co-translator of Dōgen’s Shōbō Genzō.)

Actually Mike, translators should neither “fit the original word to [their] understanding” nor the other way around. Instead, the original word(s) and the translator’s understanding should inform and resonate with each other.

Complaining about Nishijima’s rendering of the Sanskrit nirodha as “self-regulation” and proposing instead that it “means” “stopping, checking, inhibiting”, Cross goes on to say, “First you should say what the original word literally means; and then you should explain your interpretation of it”.

Now I know nothing about either Sanskrit or Buddhist theology. But I do know something about language and meaning, and this statement reveals an abysmal lack of understanding of the nature of both. The “original word” does not “literally mean” anything other than itself in its own language. Words are mere linguistic force fields; wet, squishy semantic blobs; kaleidoscopic mappings onto realities which themselves vary among both writers and readers.

Cross continues, “It is necessary to respect the original word more than one’s own opinion”.

Hmmm. I can “respect” the word(s) Genjō Kōan in its own language, but what does it mean to “respect” them when I am translating? The “literal meaning”, taking the “meaning” of “literal meaning” “literally”, is something like appear-become-public-notice. But in the Nishijima-Cross translation this is glossed, instead, as “The Realized Universe”. How does that translation “respect” the “literal meaning” of the “original word” Genjō Kōan? In the translator’s notes, Cross claims that genjō “means” realized . Who’s fitting words to his own understanding now? (Personally, I think “unfolding”, my translation, is a far better translation of genjo than “realized” (past tense), but then again, I do not claim to be “respecting” the original Japanese nor to be conveying its “literal meaning” as Cross does.)

Cross continues his criticism of Nishijima, saying “If people saw your own original translation of Shobogenzo, they would be astonished, because it is so interpretative”. It’s interesting to learn that Nishijima did an original translation into English. I’d love to see it. Interpretive? Well, I hope so. Every linguistic act—writing, translating, reading—is by definition an act of interpretation. And that’s the only way it could be.

The NYT reported in its Oct. 3 edition that your brain is to blame for out-of-body experiences (article).

According to the article: “Scientists investigating out-of-body experiences and other eerie sensations have found no sign of the supernatural. Instead, they are discovering that the feelings are the product of brain chemicals and nerve cells.”

These guys obviously forgot the Newbergian mantra that “our research in no way proves or disproves the existence of {fill in your favorite supernatural figure or religious experience here}.” They better be careful. If people start saying OBEs are the product of (not just “correlated with”) brain chemicals and nerve cells, what will be next?

The article seems a little light, especially coming from Sandra Blakeslee; maybe she was in a hurry. It fails to distinguish between OBEs, which involve “your own” body, and other presences, including those of important people like God. And it resolutely fails to mention Persinger.