Mundgod, India, January 25, 2013 (by Saskia De Rothschild, International Herald Tribune) — Religion and science have not always been easy friends, as Galileo could attest. But over the last week scientists and Buddhist scholars have been working in this small Tibetan enclave in southern India to prove that these two worlds can not only co-exist — but benefit each another.

Singapore -- Now that the year-end holidays have passed, so have the barrage of entreaties to nurture a sense of “good will to all mankind,” to extend our love and care to others beyond our usual circle of friends and family. Certainly, this is a message we are meant to take to heart not just in December but all year long. It is a central ideal of several religious and ethical systems.

While these Buddha-worlds are ultimately the play of luminosity and emptiness of intrinsic awareness, from our present state they must arise from our development of the qualities of enlightened mind. Our mandalas--the one of sand and the one of our living selves-were built by our individual and collective devotion, our determination, and our hands.

According to Lord Buddha's teachings, as long as you don't realize that your real enemy is within you, you will never recognize that the mind of attachment is the root of all the problems your body and mind experience. All your worries, your depression, everything comes from that. If, however, you do see the psychological origin of your problems and understand the nature of attachment and how it works to cause aggression, desire and hatred, your mind becomes very powerful.

One of the most important questions we come to in spiritual practice is how to reconcile service and responsible action with a meditative life based on nonattachment, letting go, and coming to understand the ultimate emptiness of all conditioned things. Do the values that lead us to actively give, serve, and care for one another differ from the values that lead us deep within ourselves on a journey of liberation and awakening? To consider this question, we must first learn to distinguish among four qualities central to spiritual practice--love, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity--and what might be called their "near enemies." Near enemies may seem to be very close to these qualities and may even be mistaken for them, but they are not fundamentally alike.

This article seeks to determine if Buddhism can best be  understood as primarily a functionalist tradition. In pursuing this, some analogies arise with various Western strands--particularly James' 'pragmatism', Dewey's 'instrumentalism', Braithwaite's 'empiricism', Wittgenstein's 'language games', and process thinkers like Hartshorne and Jacobson. Within the Buddhist setting, the traditional Theravada framework of sila (ethics/precepts), samadhi (meditation) and panna (wisdom) are examined, together with Theravada rituals. Despite some 'correspondence' approaches with regard to truth claim statements,

What the Buddha taught was not based upon divine revelation or some other source of superior authority. All his teachings derived directly from his own personal experience that arose from his compassionate efforts to relieve the sufferings of beings. During the years of his meditation and reflection, he directly observed his own mind with the precision and objective exactness that we have now come to associate with scientific research.

American interest in Zen Buddhism is growing. This response to an Oriental outlook must answer to a need. Some people seem to feel that here is the whole answer to what ails the West. There is no hiding the fact that Western civilization, and the United States in particular, confronts not only problems which its science can cope with but also troubles for which more than science is required. There is "more" in the traditional religion and philosophy of the West, but this heritage must be reinterpreted to be adequate now. Wisdom cannot be simply hoarded and inherited. It must ever be sought afresh, with new impetus. Today wise men of the East are stimulating the Western mind, apparently by infusing it with something foreign, but perhaps more by awakening it to resources of its own.

In this last chapter I would like to focus on some of the ideas considered in Chapters 30 through 40, relating them to daily life and to our practice of the Buddha's teaching. I have discussed the Abhidharma extensively, and some of the material is rather technical. Although it may not be possible to make complete use of what we have learned, I hope it will remain in the corner of your mind, and that you will be able to return to it and use it as time goes by.