Unique insights on life and death from one of the Senate’s leading lights.

Tom Coburn (picture; official website) is the Republican Senator from Oklahama whose website says his priorities include “representing Oklahoma values.” Apparently Oklahama values include homophobia: during the 2004 campaign, he alerted Oklahomans to “rampant lesbian debauchery” in the state and warned that “[the gay] agenda is the greatest threat to our freedom that we face today.” And eugenics: Coburn sterilized under-age girls (he’s an MD) without their consent; in one case he says he got “oral consent” but “the nurse forgot” to get it written down.

During the Senate hearings on the confirmation of John G. Roberts Jr. as the 17th Chief Justice of the United States. Coburn took a break from the crossword puzzles he was caught doing during the opening statements to actually “question” the nominee:

Would you agree that the opposite of being dead is being alive?

My my, do we have a philosopher for a Senator here? The unnerving thing is that Roberts actually paused before answering, “Yes,” belatedly adding “I don’t mean to be overly cautious in answering it.”

But Coburn was not actually trying to philosophize about life and death, of course; he was just laying the groundwork for some simplistic posturing and blustering on the abortion issue:

You know I’m going somewhere. One of the problems I have is coming up with just the common sense and logic that if brain wave and heartbeat signifies life, the absence of them signifies death, then the presence of them certainly signifies life.

Hmmm. This is not only overly black and white, but also incoherent. He’s given two criteria, but what about the case where only one is present, such as Terri Schiavo (Wikipedia)? By this logic, does he think she was neither alive nor dead? And where do being pre-alive or pre-dead or in between dead and alive or dead but about to come back to life fit into this picture?
Undeterred, Coburn continues his muddled train of thought:

But for the listeners of this hearing, if, in fact, life is the presence of a heartbeat and brain wave, it’s important for everybody in the country to know that at 16 days post-conception, a heartbeat is present; and that at 41 days, right now, we can assure ourselves that brain activity and brain waves are present.

But if the heart doesn’t start beating until 16 days after conception, why is he against the morning-after pill? By his logic, isn’t the fetus “dead” at that point? (Too bad there’s not a morning-after pill for Senate elections.)

And as the technology improves, we’re going to see that come earlier and earlier.

Huh? Technology is going to make babies in the womb start having a heartbeat earlier?

I make that point because so many of the decisions of the Supreme Court have been made in a vacuum of the scientific knowledge of what life is, when personhood is, when it begins, when it doesn’t, when it exists, when it doesn’t.

So “scientific knowledge” is going to tell us “what life is” or “when personhood is” or “when it begins” or “when it doesn’t”? I’ll have to alert the scientists so they can get cracking on this. And by the way, what does “when personhood doesn’t begin” mean anyway?

And so that was for your information and my ability to put forth a philosophy that I believe would solve a lot of the controversy in this country.

In other words, thanks for listening to my confused monologue and the controversy would be solved if everyone agreed with my jumbled thinking.

I would certainly hope that our electoral system is still functional enough to wash away detritus like this. Then again, America gets the public servants it wants and deserves.

Senator, let me help with that six-letter word starting with A for 8-down: it’s ADDLED.

Pascal Boyer is a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, and the author of Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought, and a pre-eminent scholar of human religious behaviors.

Boyer is an anthropologist and it is therefore unsurprising that he adopts an anthropological focus in his book; what is startling is its utterly unremitting nature, often of nosebleed-inducing intensity.

Boyer debunks most existing theories of religion, and proposes that religions exist because they successfully recruit a variety of low-level systems in the human brain, such as for agent detection, social exchange, knowledge attribution, death management, and attention to the unusual. He views religion not as a source of morality, but rather a convenient canvas on which people project their own folk morality.

This is the most interesting book I have read in some time, and I recommend it highly. What the author has to say is important and well worth examining, hence this rather long post. However, I can’t agree with the author’s thoughts on neurotheology, of which, predictably, he is scathingly critical.

Deep religious experience

I first thought Boyer was never going to get around to talking about deep religious experience. Not until the final chapter, “Why Belief?”, does he address what he calls “exceptional mental events” and “extreme episodes that people usually interpret in religious terms”, bringing in William James’ theory that the everyday religion of the masses is a degraded form of the special experience of mystics and visionaries, which he wastes no time poking fun at:

In this view, the notion of an invisible supernatural agent, or of a soul being around after the body is dead, or of unconscious zombies remote controlled by witches, or of extra organs flying about on banana leaves, all this was first created by some gifted individuals with intense experience.

Neurotheology

He then begins an anti-neurotheology rant, condescendingly attributing the interest in the neuroimaging of religious experience to the fact that scientists find it more “exciting” to measure what’s happening in a meditator’s brain than some other, more pedestrian, cognitive process. He criticizes the approach of neuroimaging advanced practitioners, whom he derides as “religious specialists” and “virtuosos”, claiming unconvincingly that this is a fixation resulting from “creeping Jamesian assumptions” and based on unvalidated suppositions that “there is some religious center in the brain” or that religious experiences are “special”.

Well, no. If I want to study mathematical reasoning and the brain, it makes perfect sense to take mathematicians as my subjects. And neurotheology researchers do not insist in advance of their experiments that there is a “God circuit” in the brain (OK, maybe some do, or maybe some have that as a hypothesis, but having hypotheses is what science is about).

But after gleefully picking apart his straw-man versions of both advanced religious experience and the field of neurotheology, he suddenly changes gears on us:

That people can experience a sudden feeling of peace, of communion with tthe entire-world…can be to some extent correlated with particular brain activity…it is plausible that such experience stems from a particular activiation of cortical areas that handle thoughts about other people’s thoughts and those that create emotional responses to people’s presence.

But that is exactly what people studying neurotheology are trying to find out.

What’s missing

There is another major missing piece, however. Boyer’s worldview completely lacks any notion of “development” in the individual, notably development which brings improved behaviors that are more successful for that individual. Such development, although admittedly hard to define, is by definition associated with certain changes in brain structure. Certain types of religious experiences or practices, which also by definition involve neural modifications, can be reasonably judged to promote individual development in the sense above. We thus have perhaps the primary hypothesis in the budding field of neurotheology: religious experience or practice and the evolution of the individual are connected by means of the associated neural changes. Our job is to find the nature of that connection.

My flossing analogy may have been a bit off. Lifting weights might be a bit closer. The difference is that you don’t really feel like you get better at flossing over time, or have different experiences of the flossing process. With lifting, one of the things that you metalearn is how to feel your body working and how to do to the exercise in a way that makes it work better. You learn to find and trace an “edge” of performance (and enjoy it). That’s an interesting process in itself, and it also is an important element in you making progress in your lifting and strength/fitness development.

Brad Warner, the “punk” Zen master, is writing another book, a follow-on to his eminently readable Hardcore Zen. He’s published a sample chapter about Dogen’s Genjo Koan.

Brad brings a refreshing new perspective to anything he looks at, and his take on Genjo Koan is no exception. Unfortunately, as a student of Gudo Nishijima (picture), he’s dealing with the Nishijima/Cross translation, not a particularly good place to start. Consider his treatment of the famous three-part syllogism right at the beginning:

Genjo Koan starts off with what sounds like a string of contradictory statements that don’t seem to make very much sense at all. “When all dharmas are the Buddha-Dharma, then there is delusion and realization, there is practice, there is life and there is death, there are buddhas and there are ordinary beings,” Dogen says right at the outset. OK. No major problems there.

Really? What about the problem that no reader understands what “when all dharmas are the Buddha-Dharma” means?

But then he goes, “When the myriad dharmas are each not of the self, there is no delusion and no realization, no buddhas and no ordinary beings, no life and no death.” Wait up! Hold it! I thought there were all those things and now he says there aren’t.

Wait up! Hold it! What on earth could “myriad dharmas each not being of the self” mean? Cleary has “myriad things not all self”, which does not make much more sense, but in his modern Japanese translation, Mizuno says this means “things themselves do not have a fixed essence”. I render it as “once you’ve stripped things of their selves”.

But Nishijima and Cross have gotten mixed up in other ways, right here in just the second sentence of their translation of Dogen’s signature exposition of his thought. What they translate as “delusion and enlightenment” in the first sentence is meigo ari (è¿·æ‚Ÿã?‚ã‚Š), while the “delusion and enlightenment” in the second sentence is originally madoi naku satori naku　(ã?¾ã?©ã?²ã?ªã??ã?•ã?¨ã‚Šã?ªã??).

Certainly it can not be just an accident that Dogen chose such different turns of phrase to indicate exactly the same thing within the space of two sentences at the immediate beginning of the definitive statement of his philosophy? And of course, it’s not. The Sino-Japanese compound used in the first sentence is meant to emphasize that at this stage we are dealing with concepts, standing in opposition. With spelling out individual, native Japanese words in pure hiragana in the second sentence, he is indicating the reality and independence of these categories of confusion and wisdom.

Now on to the third and final sentence:

And then just to be even more contrary he says, “The Buddha’s truth is originally transcendent over abundance and scarcity, and so there is life and death, there is delusion and realization, there are beings and buddhas.”

So what in Holy Heck is going on here with this paragraph? I mean, first he says there is life and there is death, and there is a difference between jus’ plain folks and Buddhas. Yet next he says that when we give up the idea of self, all these distinctions disappear. Then he goes right back to what he said in the first line, that these distinctions are real. Well, which is it? Make up your mind, Dogen!

No, he’s not “going back” to what he said in the first paragraph, he’s going a step further. Using the Sino-Japanese form meigo again, he’s now referring to the unity or fusion of the concepts of confusion and wisdom, or delusion and realization, if you prefer.

Next, Brad takes on Dogen’s most famous single passage, one we have discussed here more than once:

So just what is this Buddha’s truth stuff Dogen keeps going on and on about? By way of explanation, the D-man gives us a kooky little passage that goes like this. Ahem. “To learn the Buddha’s truth is to learn ourselves. To learn ourselves is to forget ourselves. To forget ourselves is to be experienced by the myriad dharmas. To be experienced by the myriad dharmas is to let our own body-and-mind, and the body-and-mind of the external world, fall away.”

But just how do you forget your ideas of “self?” You do so, the D-man says, when you are “experienced by the myriad dharmas.” In other words, we do this when we stop concentrating exclusively on how we experience the universe and learn how the universe experiences us. It’s not as impossible as it sounds.

Yes, but the original does not say “experience”, it says “validate”, “confirm”, or, if you prefer, “realize” (証ã?›ã‚‰ã‚‹ã‚‹).

Brad’s in-your-face, comtemporary thoughts on Genjo Koan are well worth reading. But he should pair them with a suitably contemporary (and accurate) translation of Dogen’s original words.

Today is the 60th anniversary of the Trinity Test. Here’s the description from Bobby and the A-Bomb Factory:

As my father returned to Pullman for his sophomore year at WSC in the fall of 1944, the construction at Hanford was complete, at a total cost of $230,000,000 (equivalent to more than ten times that amount in current dollars); the reactor was started up on September 26, 1944. The plutonium manufacturing process had never actually been validated—there had been no time—so it was not surprising that the reactor sputtered and died. It restarted itself, then stopped again. An urgent call went out to Enrico Fermi, the inventor of the process, to analyze the problem and devise a fix, which he did.

The cans taken to Portland and from there by train to Los Angeles on February 2, 1945, contained the first few grams of Hanford plutonium, laboriously extracted from the uranium isotopes produced in the reactors. In California, the cans were turned over to a junior army officer from Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the actual bomb was to be constructed. By May 1945, a system was in place where regular shipments of Hanford plutonium were being made to Los Alamos, using one-kilogram jugs that looked like big thermos bottles, in convoys protected by submachine guns. The scientists at Los Alamos labored mightily and finally produced a test bomb containing Hanford plutonium at its core, which they named “Gadget.” It was detonated at the Trinity Test Site near Alamagordo, New Mexico at 5:29:45 a.m. on July 16. Seeing the detonation, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the head scientist of the Manhattan Project, recalled a line from the Bhagavad-Gita , the Hindu text he had been studying: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The cloud reached a phenomenal height, over 50,000 feet. The blast was certainly a rude morning wake-up call for one particular wild jackrabbit, found dead and partially eviscerated eight hundred yards from ground zero after the blast.

The A-bomb—its history and its existence—provides us with a rich palette of colors to draw our own pictures on topics as varied as the nature of the physical world, war, man’s thirst for knowledge, and death.

[Photo by Jack Aeby]

Gambari is one of those uniquely Japanese-flavored words you’ll never be able to translate into English for the simple reason that the concept—an effort which is sustained, slightly stubborn, and perhaps just marginally excessive—doesn’t really exist in our culture. Gambari evokes images of a race—not a dash, but a marathon. Gambari assumes that the probability of winning is somewhat low—an underdog flavor—but that there is realistic hope of doing so if all goes well, although that is not the overriding goal, gambari being its own reward. Gambari has a payoff which is often far down the road, a road on which lurk any number of obstacles, large and small.

Their appreciation of gambari is why Japanese love marathons of all sorts, including the “Hakone Ekiden” ultramarathon run by teams of college boys every New Year’s, and Olympic marathon champions like Yuko Arimori who won silver in Barcelona in 1992, her tiny figure the very picture of gambari as she huffed and puffed across the finish line. On the economic front, the rebuilding of the Japanese economy in the ‘50s and ‘60s was one of the premier gambaris of all time.

Now a Japanese government poll (see graph) reveals that more than half of all Japanese believe that gambari is what society should reward people for—more than accomplishment, and much, much more than seniority. 53.2% of all respondents thought people’s status and compensation should be based on their level of effort (and this was up from the 51.1% the previous year), while only 34.2% thought accomplishment should be the determinant (down from 34.7%). Meanwhile, anyone who believes Japan still functions under the seniority system needs to wake up: only 1.8% of respondents said age is what should govern status and pay, and a mere 7.2% thought it still did in actuality. Effort beat out accomplishment as the preferred driver for societal rewards in every demographic except for men in their 20s.

Western management whizzes ready to take over Japan, beware. It’s not going to work to just toss cash bonuses at your workers to get them hit your favorite new metrics. Underneath the Japanese appreciation of gambari is a realization, one that lurks hidden even within the souls of Westerners, that we are not in complete control of our destinies. Calling this a form of Buddhist-inspired fatalism doesn’t change the fact that actually it’s true.

Put a different way, when as managers we pay for accomplishment, we can’t be sure what really led to the performance we’re paying for. Was it truly superior execution, or was it favorable conditions, a target which was set wrong, a brilliant strategy set by higher-ups, accomplishments of others on the team, or just chance? And we ignore at our peril the corrosive societal effect from seeing some people rewarded unfairly, to an absurd extent in some cases. There is even an internal negative effect on (most of) the people getting the rewards as they discern the arbitrary nature of the booty they are collecting.

There is doubtless a connection between the Japan’s Buddhist heritage and its preoccupation with gambari. The quintessential Buddhist activity of meditation fits the model of gambari perfectly. And gambari’s emphasis on doing your best and then letting what may happen do so, certainly reflects the Buddhist model of interrelatedness and interdependence as well.

Gabyo is one of my favorite Dogen essays. Literally, it means “painted ricecake”, but I would update that and call it “drawing donuts”. In this chapter of Shobo Genzo, Dogen ponders the meaning of the ancient Chinese saying that a painted ricecake cannot satisfy your hunger—or, as I would say, a drawing of a donut can’t fill you up.

Gabyo is the ultimate essence of Dogen’s phenomenological viewpoint, if I may call it that,. He is saying that even a “real” donut is something we “draw” in our “minds”.

The initial paragraph of Gabyo is a tour-de-force introduction to the concept. Tanahashi (in Moon in a Dewdrop) gives a typically opaque, overly literal, basically incomprehensible, and in places erroneous rendition:

All buddhas are realization, thus all things are realization. Yet no buddhas or things have the same characteristics; none have the same mind. Although there are no similar characteristics or minds, at the moment of your actualization numerous actualizations manifest without hindrance. At the moment ofyour manifestation, numerous manifestions come forth without opposing one another. This is the straightforward teaching of the ancestors.

My perhaps overly modern version is as follows. This is not just a rewriting of the Tanahashi translation, but rather is based on the original, with reference to a modern Japanese version.

If you get it, you’re cool, and so things are cool. You are different from things, of course, inside and out. But both you and things pop out when they’re cool because their coolnesses don’t bump into each other. Both can pop out when they pop out only because their poppings don’t poke into each other. This is the wisdom of the ages in a nutshell.

September marks the sixth month of Numenware, with 85 posts in that period, almost exactly one every two days.

I’d like to take this opportunity to convey my warm thanks to all my readers for their interest and comments (and putting up with my occasional idiosyncratic posts about Japanese things—cured sea cucumber entrails, anyone?—and who knows what else).

Alexa regularly ranks us in the top 100,000 most visited sites on the web, and lists us as the most popular site in the Top > Science > Social Sciences > Psychology > Psychology and Religion category. Technorati also has us close to the top 100,000 and rising. We’re averaging more than 500 visitors per day now and over 2,000 unique visitors per month. We’re getting linked to more and more and show up on major blog search sites, including Yahoo!’s new blog-enhanced news search.

What’s popular? At the top of the list recently are posts about Bhutan’s Tiger’s Lair, Stigmata, Pachacuti as Builder, God and the brain in your gut, and Computational models of neurotheology.

Perhaps readers have noticed the new tag-based index available on the index page, hopefully increasing the site’s browsability. This uses a service from a company called TagCloud.

As we move ahead, I want to make Numenware more interesting and incisive, continue frequent posting, tighten up my posts for those whose blog-reading time is limited, and, most importantly, focus more on ideas and hypotheses as a way to make some initial order out of all the raw material available to us in this fascinating and critically important field of neurotheology.

Your support is deeply appreciated.

And no, I don’t know where the mural shown above comes from. Corbis’ description of it is simply “graffiti painting of man vomiting”.

Think of meditation in the same way you think of flossing.

Clearly flossing is good for your long-term dental health, although any particular day’s worth of flossing doesn’t make hardly any difference in and of itself. You may enjoy flossing (you need to not not enjoy it), but it would be an odd bird that really got off on the daily flossing, and no-one would expect to have a moment of transcendant dental health while flossing. Try paraphrasing Dogen: “Flossing and dental health are one.” Roll this around in your mouth like a koan.

Sanyo Electric, the sprawling Japanese electronics conglomerate, has its fingers in just about everything. They make TVs and solar batteries and cogeneration systems and air conditioners and digital cameras and phones and semiconductors. They’ll install things for you or deliver them for you or build you a house or send you temporary workers or even put up your folks in one of their nursing homes. Therer are 332 Sanyo companies around the world.

But Sanyo is in trouble. They managed to lose almost $2 billion in 2004, and have a staggering $10 billion mountain of debt.

Now Sanyo has unleashed an astonishing transformation. They’ve elevated a woman—Tomoyo Nonaka—to the post of CEO, with the founder’s grandson relegated to mere President and COO. Nonaka is the most senior woman in the Japanese business world by far, a Japanese Carly Fiorina who still has her job.

And there’s definitely a woman’s hand visible in the visionary new plan that Sanyo announced. There were the obvious things, such as cutting debt, selling stuff, shuttering factories, firing people, cutting costs. What’s more interesting is the new Sanyo vision: Think GAIA, becoming a “company to make the earth rejoice”. “living in global symbiosis”, “leaving a beautiful earth for the children of the future.”

Make fun if you will, but this is a vision of startling breadth. Now it simply remains to be seen how, or if, the company can actually bring this vision to bear to reinvigorate and revitalize its slumping businesses.

There’s more to the vision. Sanyo has grouped its competencies and technologies into broad areas, which it calls “programs”, with catchy names:

• Blue Planet: address global environmental problems
• Genesis III: develop sustainable clean energy society
• Harmonious Society: create a rich society overflowing with love
• Product Circulation: move to a zero-emissions, completely recycled, undamaging product life cycle

Finally, there’s an actual implementation plan, dubbed “Sanyo Evolution Project”, with three parts. The first, known as “Business Portfolio Evolution Plan”, calls for Sanyo to completely review and revamp its business portfolio, focusing on CO2 compressor technology, solar cells, and home appliances, while building five new “solution” areas:

1. Symbiosis and ecosystem solutions
2. Recyclable environmental solutions
3. Global energy solutions

4. New-generation commuter solutions
5. Family relationship solutions
6. LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability) lifestyle solutions

They’ll also refocus R&D strongly based on the new vision. They’ll reorganize their network to lessen product and geographic dependencies.

The second part of the implementation plan is called the “Corporate DNA Evolution Plan”, designed to revolutionize the corporate culture, organization, and management processes. They’ll strengthen the corporate identity and establish a global headquarters with clout. The third part consists of the restructuring steps mentioned at the top of this post.

Sanyo has come a long way since Iue Toshio (ja.wikipedia.org) started making bicycle headlights back in 1947 in Osaka. We certainly wish them well in what they are calling their “Third Beginning”.