Thursday 28 November 2013

caseforbuddhism.gmail.com

Hello everybody. This is my very first blog, and I'm moved to write it because..well basically because having put in a huge amount of effort and research in writing  my latest book on Buddhism, entitled The Case for Buddhism, which I'm deeply pleased to be able to say,  has already been very warmly received wherever it has been read in the UK and the USA, I feel the very least I can do is to take steps to give it a wider audience.  So this blog is essentially about The Case for Buddhism.

So, briefly, what is the book itself about? Well initially it was started in response to the dozens of requests I received from many parts of the world from readers of my other books on Nichiren Buddhism, The Reluctant Buddhist, and Buddhism and the Science of Happiness, to write a really down-to-earth, absolutely no-nonsense book about a Nichiren Buddhist practice that could be given to the most sceptical, the most disinterested, even the most cynical people, and hopefully hold their attention sufficiently so that even though they might never actually take up the practice, they would understand much more about what it was seeking to achieve, and therefore, at the very least, be more supportive. So that's what it sets out to do, and from the sort of response I have received so far, I believe it could well be achieving that objective.

But as I went along I began to realise that there was also a huge opportunity opening up to do something more, that came about essentially because of the many years I've spent as a television science journalist, writing about difficult and complex bits of science and technology, trying to make them interesting and accessible and entertaining even to a wider general audience. So what's that got to do with Buddhism?  Well let's see.

The fact is that over the past 15-20 years or so there has been a kind of revolution, a quiet revolution you might say, in the simply vast amount of research in sociology,and psychology and neuroscience, to explore and to understand, in ever increasing detail, the motivations and the compulsions that drive human behaviour, and their effects on our sense of self and on how we feel about our lives. The results have been sometimes astounding, sometimes predictable, but always interesting. With immense patience and care, and on a truly objective basis, sometimes with research projects that have run and continue to run for many years, these social scientists have put together an understanding of the nature of human life and motivation that goes way beyond anything that might have been imagined even a few decades ago.

Why is that important to us you might ask? Well I think it gives us a great opportunity that has never been around before. It goes without saying that Buddhism doesn't exist in a bubble. Buddhism is daily life we often say, and its great strength is its claim to continuing relevance despite the vast changes that have taken place in our social circumstances, because, fundamentally, human nature hasn't changed. So we are immensely privileged. We can,  essentially for the very first time, look at the complex understanding that Buddhism has evolved of human motivation and behaviour...accumulated over several hundred years of contemplation and reflection... in the context of the understanding that is emerging from these formal. scientific studies that have been carried out across the world by the social scientists. How do they compare? How do they relate to each other?

So, over the past couple of years I've been exploring as much as I could handle of the social research that has gone on in this area in recent years, and there is no question in my mind but that fundamental ideas about human nature that Buddhism has  been teaching us for centuries, find the most interesting and stimulating echoes and parallels and ampification in the studies carried out by today's social scientists. It's important not to fall into the trap of using words like ' prove' or ' validate' in this context because that would be wholly inaccurate. As far as I am aware there has never been a piece of research specifically to validate a Buddhist teaching . And in any case my argument would be that Buddhist insights about the nature of human life don't need anything resembling validation from modern science. They have proved their value many times over in the toughest laboratory there can ever be...namely human life itself.

But what these research findings do provide is absolutely invaluable, in the sense that they deliver into our hands a set of new, and quite different, and profoundly illuminating perspectives that illustrate the astounding modernity..I really can't think of any other way of expressing it...the astounding modernity of Buddhist teachings about the values and behaviours that enable us to live the most productive and satisfying and value-creating lives of which we are capable, both for ourselves and for those whom our lives touch.

That essentially is what this new book about. In future blogs what I hope to do is to follow the structure of The Case for Buddhism, in taking  a whole series of issues and themes that are central to a Buddhist practice, and looking at them from a strictly Buddhist  perspective, and from a modern scientific one.

Hope to meet you again.
Copyright William Woollard
27.11.13