22 straight hours of Bach’s organ music. All of it. That was the program for BachWerke (7MB PDF program), an ambitious program put on by the Los Angeles Chapter of the American Guild of Organists and St. Cyril of Jerusalem Church last weekend.

The organ (pictured above; larger picture), with 3 manuals and 45 ranks, was built by Rosales Organ Builders, a local company also responsible for the astonishing instrument at the new Disney Concert Hall (picture).

The marathon was good for some serious cortical column manipulation. Saturday evening we were blessed to hear the playing of Bob Mitchell (article), a 93-year-old who got his start accompanying silent movies on the organ.

Although not too steady on his feet and a bit stooped, Bob was transformed as he took his seat on the bench. Playing the Fugue in G Minor (“Little”), the notes hard-wired into his gnarled fingers, he flooded the church with Bach’s ethereal harmonies, transporting listeners beyond time and space.

Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon is due out at the beginning of February.

As one of America’s leading contemporary philsophers, Dennett’s choice of this topic gives it great legitimacy. The book will be a must-read for anyone interested in the area (although personally I’ve always found Dennett’s writings tough sledding).

Dennett is not just out to explain religion here. That would have been a different book, probably very much like Boyer’s “Religion Explained”. No, Dennett wants to stomp out religion. It’s a prehistoric vestige, overgrown belief in ghosts, a bunch of old superstitions gussied up with guys in mitres. Look at the title again: Dennett wants to break the spell. He “elegantly pleads for religions to engage in empirical self-examination to protect future generations from…ignorance” (right). In one interview, Dennett stated: “I have absolutely no doubt that the secular and scientific vision is right and deserves to be endorsed by everybody, and as we have seen over the last few thousand years, superstitious and religious doctrines will just have to give way.”

I’m sympathetic to this line of reasoning as far as it goes, but it does not nearly go far enough. As I mentioned in my review of Boyer’s book, this type of strictly static evolutionary and sociological analysis omits two critical factors from the equation: transformation and transcendence . Looking past traditional religions and doctrines to a spectrum of belief systems, practices, and frameworks, where do they map onto the space of types of personal transformation? And what is the nature of transformative, transcendant experience, and in particular what is its biological basis, if it does in fact have one as neurotheology assumes?

Without looking at questions like these, we are left with a crippled, fragmentary account of religions. We cannot understand Christianity, even as it exists today in its calcified state, without thinking about what happened to Jesus during his 40 days in the wilderness. We cannot understand Buddhist thought without reference to its tradition of introspective practice. And we can understand neither completely without a model of neurobiological precedents or consequences.

Why did Dogen write? Why do we read him? And what do these questions mean for how we should translate him?

I’d like to thank Lisa Melyan for inspiring these questions with her comment on my post Dogen again, discussing the translation of Dogen’s famous syllogism, which starts:

Following the Buddha Way really means following yourself.

Her comment in its entirety:

You say you do not know what it means to be “enlightened by all things,” and perhaps you take issue with the phrase “actualized by myriad things” as well.

These phrases and Dongshan’s “teaching of the inanimate” have jumped out at me as my practice has deepened, and they have the ring of deep truth in my direct experience of reality.

The concept is concrete, not wishy-washy, in my experience. I believe it refers to the ability to respond in all conditions, to start from zero and simply respond spontaneously. When I quickly jump over rocks and driftwood at the beach, I am being enlightened by those things, “actualized” by them- jump here, turn here. No thought. Those who think think think (should I step here, I’m not sure) are stuck at the other end of the shoreline.

Lots of meat here, but I’ll focus on the subtle issues her comment raises about the meaning, purpose, and process of Dogen’s writings and/or their translation. When reading Dogen, on the one hand, we can focus on the fact that, at this moment, I see a page in front of me with squiggly black ink marks forming Roman letters making up English words composing sentences which via some physical and mental process I have developed I interpret and as a consequence experience certain sensations and “thoughts”. I may further experience those sensations as pleasant or rewarding, in the broadest sense of the term. The reward may take the form of a feeling of religious awe, or derive from a sense that I have learned something new that will be useful to me in the future (such as on my path of self-development), be related to “recognition”, a known pleasure factor, or be correlated with a sense of shared consciousness, which may take on added weight in this case since the sharing in question is occurring across a span of more than seven hundred years.

Potentially more usefully, we can also take a deconstructionist tack and view Dogen’s writings and their translations in the context of the societal structure, the implicit and explicit assumptions, and the intentions that generated them. Why did Dogen write Shobogenzo?

Why did Dogen write?

It’s reasonable to assume that a highly actualized person like Dogen had a crystal clear internal model of what he was doing—he was presumably not simply writing out of boredom. Perhaps Shobogenzo was a form of meditation for our medieval master, a type of private painting, with the scroll as canvas and calligraphic ink as paint, a structured way for him to clarify and build out his own thinking? I have no doubt that his writings do involve that aspect, but when you consider that Dogen devoted the greater portion of his life to building and running Eiheiji as a place for teaching and practice, we have to conclude that a major objective of his in writing Shobogenzo was teaching—to convey some kind of message, or provide some kind of insight, or offer some kind of motivation, to students of the way.

This interpretation is supported by the fact that Dogen gave explicit instructions on the order of the SBGZ fascicles, placing Genjo Koan at the beginning, something he hardly would have worried about if this was his private notes. Elsewhere as well, he explicitly states that his objective is to teach others.

Even a document the objective of which we agree is to teach or communicate could have very different meanings depending on exactly who it targets. Was Dogen addressing advanced master students, monks, laypeople, amateurs like us? Dogen switched gears over the years on the issue of whether shukke (leaving your home and entering the priesthood) was a prerequisite for making meaningful spiritual progress, as he aged moving towards the position that in fact it was, so it’s likely that he did not think beyond the monks at Eiheiji when considering his target audience, but in reality the monks at Eiheiji in the first half of the thirteenth century were probably much like those there today: many had to be there to learn the family business; others entered the priesthood out of an accident of birth; the majority were probably just going through the paces. I suggest that it was those people—not so different from you and me—that Dogen was targeting with SBGZ.

Implications for translators

We see, then, that Dogen’s magnum opus was a teaching document targeting the average student. What does this imply about how it should be translated?

It’s too much to hope that we will uncover a forgotten fascicle, “Instructions for the Translator”, as the manuscript of Bendowa was discovered, three centuries after Dogen’s death, hidden in a Kyoto monastery. Of course, it’s understandable that Dogen saw fit to leave instructions for the tenzo (cook), but not the translator; the tenzo is in many ways the linchpin of the monastery, as well as being an extremely challenging position from the point of view of practice. Given the huge volumes of Chinese Buddhist literature that he clearly knew in depth, not to mention the fact that he studied in China and probably spoke the language fluently, Dogen must have understood the question of translation, but sadly failed to leave us with any clues as to how we, as translators, should proceed.

But if we are correct that Dogen wrote SBGZ to teach the average student, certainly that must also be the goal of a translation. This means that our translations should not make unnecessary use of expert jargon. You may say that the words Dogen used, perhaps manpou (myriad dharmas), to take just one example, were expert jargon, but they were most assuredly not—such words were familiar everyday terms to the people of that era.

The purpose of this post is not to praise my own translations, but a religious teacher who has asked me not to use his name commented on my Genjo Koan translation as follows:

Also, I like the fact that you do not use terms like “dharma,” the use of which I think is a cop-out…Unlike many other translations on the market, you help people become clear instead of becoming confused.

Translating manpou as “myriad things” also qualifies as a “cop-out”, absolving the translators of the need to figure out what it means and how to render it in a meaningful way in the target language. But actually it’s worse than laziness, because it confuses and distracts the reader, completely contradicting Dogen’s intent, namely that his writings teach. Readers who have read enough of this type of translation may begin to imagine they actually “know” what this construct means. Translators also use these literal translations, as far as I can tell, as a means to give their work more of a “religous”, “scriptural” patina.

Because that’s what this is, scripture, right? It’s a really important, religious book, about really holy, religious stuff, written by a really sanctified, religious guy, right? For us Westerners that attended Sunday School or its equivalent in our childhood, “scripture” retains a unique emotional smell, no matter how far we have come from our Judeo-Christian roots. The biblical verses “God created the heavens and the earth”, or “The meek shall inherit the earth”, resonate in our minds far beyond their surface meanings; they are songs of angels, the voice of God, still yielding that old internal tingle. So it’s not surprising that Western translators of Dogen, working with something that obviously has heavy “scriptural” aspects, would, consciously or not, choose a style which invokes their own scriptural tradition, both in terms of vocabulary and phrase structure.

Which is particularly ironic since Dogen is precisely the one who warns us against scripture, such as in Bendowa, where he cautions us:

Make no use of incense or bowing or chanting or ceremonies or scriptures.

Another implication for the translator of the fact that Dogen is addressing the typical student is not only that we should avoid overwrought vocabulary and sentence structure, but that in trying to figure out what Dogen is saying in his original medieval Japanese we should prefer an interpretation which matches a scenario where he is preaching to the average practitioner—a guideline of no small import, considering the paucity of other clues at our disposal in trying to decipher Dogen’s dense, opaque, and unconventional language. Many translators, however, take exactly the opposite tack—they prefer (or invent) an interpretation which is most complex or superficially “Zen-like”, as if Dogen had been addressing only the small number of fully enlightened beings on the planet.

I am not saying that SBGZ should be interpreted at the least-common-denominator level, or that what Dogen is saying is simple or trivial. SBGZ is, in fact, a tour de force presentation of an integrated philosophical and religious view of the utmost profundity. But Dogen’s genius lies precisely in his ability to present those ideas in a way which resonated deeply with the typical practitioner of his day. And so by the same token, the responsibility of those who take it upon themselves to translate Dogen is to map his squiggles from eight centuries ago into a form that accomplishes the same effect for Western students in the 21st century.

In a future post, I’ll apply the thoughts above to Lisa’s insightful comments.

Numenta is an intriguing new startup that plans to commercialize technology based a model of human memory developed by Jeff Hawkins, he of Palm Pilot and Graffiti fame, in his book On Intelligence (see also the book’s website).

According to the website:

Numenta co-founder Dileep George has created a mathematical formalism that follows and extends Hawkins’ biological theory. This formalism is a variation of Belief Propagation, a mathematical technique invented by Judea Pearl. Belief propagation explains how a tree of conditional probability functions can reach a set of mutually consistent beliefs about the world. By adding time and sequence memory to each node of the tree, belief propagation can be morphed to match Hawkins’ biological theory.

We may be seeing the very beginning of a second “AI” boom, one rooted this time in actual neurobiological research, or at least in models inspired by, or plausibly informed by, schemes of brain functioning.

A friend to whom I was explaining neurotheology asked me what the major competing hypotheses or schools of thoughts were in the field. I think there are two: reductionism vs. holism; and direct vs. indirect instrumentalism.

Reductionism (in the scientific sense) says that religious experiences are an entirely physical process we can (eventually) explain scientifically; holism posits there is “something else” there.

The second contrast is between direct instrumentalism, which says that the brain contains evolved structures which directly relate to, or “cause”, religious behavior and experience. Indirect instrumentalism, on the other hand, says that the “hard-wired circuits” in the brain support certain generic human behavioral patterns from which the religious behavior or experience in turn derives.

But today let’s take a look at the reductionist vs. holist dichotomy. Persinger is often cited as an advocate of the former, which, informally, holds that religious behavior/experience is derived from, and explained by, physical characteristics and behaviors of the brain (or entire organism). Newberg, in contrast, represents the holistic viewpoint, which asserts, or at a minimum leaves open the possibility, that “brain scan images are merely detecting the effect of a divine presence or fundamental level of reality on the human brain.”

Of course, philosophers have spent entire careers investigating the meaning of, and types of, reductionism. That’s because it’s complicated. Some of the problems in reductionist explanations include:

• How does an identifying an underlying construct constitute an “explanation”? If we say the construct is the “cause”, then we still need to explicate the meaning of causality.

• The explanation may itself need to be explained. We run the danger of recursing endlessly, or at least down to the subatomic level.

• If the explanation dissects the phenomenon into components, we also run the risk of missing non-compositional (“emergent”) aspects of the overall phenomenon.

• The explanation must demonstrate that it is superior to other, competing explanations.

• The explanation could be successful but not useful. For instance, most people have some degree of existential wonder or doubt, that they feel the need to comprehend or assuage, but a reductionist account of religion might not help them.

• Finally, a reductionist explanation may be perceived as insulting, or belittling value systems that some hold dear. Although this objection is political in nature, to the extent that science itself is political, it may be best not to alienate such people with an overly reductionist standpoint.

In the case of neurotheology, regardless of the abstract merits of a reductionist approach, to which I am sympathetic, Persinger and his fellow reductionists do themselves no favors to the extent they trumpet neuroimaging results of meditators without asking what intermediate explanatory structures might exist or how meditation relates to religious experience and behavior as a whole; they identify “God genes” based on skimpy statistical evidence; and they fail to place religious behavior and experience in a social, historical, and anthropological context that might lead to alternative renditions.

The so-called holists, however, hardly come out looking better. Wrapping themselves in the cloak of religious acceptance, some attempt to make a virtue out of fence-straddling. Typical of this fuzzy-headedness is Newberg’s statement that “whether the brain may be derived from some fundamental or divine level of reality is a question that remains to be clearly answered”, a bizarre assertion given the absence of any clue about what that “fundamental or divine level of reality” could possibly be. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that he is simply pandering to believers in supernatural beings or unspecified universal forces.

Personally, I believe that as the study of the biology of religion progresses, with more innovative hypotheses and carefully designed experiments, eventually leading to a coherent theoretical framework, generating verifiable predictions such as demonstrably more effective types of meditative practices, we will reach the point where we do understand the physical processes that “explain” religious behavior and experience, probably as mediated or influenced by generic human behavioral structures. At the same time, however deep that scientific understanding is, it will not satisfy the human yearning to understand existence, which, after all, the current depth of scientific knowledge about cosmology or evolution has not managed to satisfy either. Humans will doubtlessly continue to pursue a variety of fruitful, meaningful ways to quench their thirst for existential knowledge.

The picture above is since Matisse’s Joie de Vivre, considered an examplar of reductionism in art, from the way it breaks the underlying scene into its component physical or visual aspects.

Matsuhisa is Nobu’s sushi place on La Cienega in LA. Notice that I say “place”, not “restaurant”, because the word “restaurant” calls forth a very specific semantic matrix, where the focus is entirely on the food. Think of Iron Chef USA; the chefs are rated on Taste, Presentation, and Creativity. The food must dazzle, it must amaze. It’s performance art on your plate. Look at how Wolfgang has stacked those beets into a tower! Yes, that’s worth $200! It’s food as sex, the meal as fellatio of a particularly imaginative variety.

Good sushi, in contrast, like the inner lining of a silk kimono never revealed to the outside world, excels precisely to the extent it actively fails to assert itself. One enters the sanctum; experience unfolds; time unwinds; conversation ensues; libations lubricate; sushi materializes.

Matushisa is, very simply, the best sushi place in LA. It tries only to be a sushi place, and succeeds beyond all expectations. The excellence of the experience is in the detail. The ultimate simple piece of finely marbled toro rests on an otherwise unadorned clump of vinegared rise. The chef sequences the food you are served perfectly. The waiter discreeetly replaces one soy sauce dish with another between courses.

I must congratulate Nobu on his choice of Hokusetsu (“north snow”) sake, one of the finest jizake in Japan, one seen all too rarely at other restaurants.

Of course Nobu is creative. The yellowtail with jalapeno dish he originated has now been stolen by every sushi shop worth its gari . His modestly named “new style sushi” takes fresh fish flesh and cooks it briefly and deliciously in hot sesame oil. But these dishes both tell us something about the food we are eating, rather than simply being gratuitously “creative”.

All of this excellence comes at an amazingly reasonable price, far from the bloated $500/person tab at places like Masa , and possibly even less than you would pay in Japan for an equivalent, or inferior, sushi experience.

Providing introductory or preparatory instruction.

Today let me introduce you to some neuroscience resources I’ve found useful.

Mind Hacks is a website linked to the popular book of the same name, by Tom Stafford and Matt Webb. It’s readable, fun, and informative. These guys must be good, since they were smart enough to introduce Numenware to their readers.

Although not specifically about neuroscience, The Loom is a general-interest science blog by Carl Zimmer, a popular science writer whose most recent book is Soul Made Flesh, an account of the origins of neurology in 17th century. This site is far from mere daily musings: each article is well-researched and well-written but not too long. My favorite recent article is one on the fantastic diversity of beetle horns and how they evolved. Carl is really leveraging the blog format in an interesting way to extend the ways in which he can get his ideas out and connect with readers.

Carl’s critical review of Dean Hamer’s The God Gene is worth a look.

Scientific American Mind is an irregularly published new magazine whose subtitle is “Thought, Ideas, Brain Science”. The most recent issue has interesting articles on topics such as sign language, and how it is parsed and generarated using Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas, just like spoken language; neurolinguistic programming; Koch’s consciousness research; neuromarketing; and magnetic brain stimulation, with today’s most disturbing factoid: a DoD project to develop a TMS helmet that will animate exhausted soldiers back into battle.

Scientific American desperately needs a new web strategy. They think the web is nothing more than a way for people to buy articles for $3 each, after being allowed to read one or two paragraphs. I don’t think so. At least put some content up to make the site more bookmarkable and visitable. Or start a blog.

“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

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.