Download Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground (Columbia Series by B. Alan Wallace PDF

Buddhism and Science brings jointly distinct philosophers, Buddhist students, physicists, and cognitive scientists to envision the contrasts and connections among the worlds of Western technology and jap spirituality. This compilation was once encouraged by way of a guideline made by way of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, himself one of many participants, after one among a sequence of cross-cultural clinical dialogues in Dharamsala, India, subsidized by means of the brain and existence Institute. different participants similar to William L. Ames, Matthieu Ricard, and Stephen LaBerge examine not just the culmination of inquiry from East and West but in addition make clear the underlying assumptions of those disparate worldviews. Their essays creatively deal with a extensive variety of themes: from quantum theory’s astounding affinities with the Buddhist notion of vacancy, to the expanding want within the West for a extra contemplative technology attuned to the first-person research of the brain, to the real ways that the mental research of "lucid dreaming" maps related terrain to the cultivation of the Tibetan Buddhist self-discipline of dream yoga.

Reflecting its large choice of issues, Buddhism and Science is created from 3 sections. the 1st provides old overviews of the engagements among Buddhism and sleek technological know-how or, really, how Buddhism and glossy technology have outlined, rivaled, or complemented each other. the second one describes the methods Buddhism and the cognitive sciences tell one another; the 3rd addresses issues of intersection among Buddhism and the actual sciences. at the broadest point this paintings illuminates how other ways of exploring the character of human id, the brain, and the universe at huge can increase and enlighten one another.