Buddhism in a Global Age of Technology

This is quite a good lecture by Prof. Lewis Lancaster, a distinguished scholar in East Asian Religions at UC in Berkeley. An 1 hr lecture posted on Youtube for those who are interested to know a Western perspective on an eastern religion.

Professor Lancaster is the founder and Director of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI). ECAI (www.ecai.org) is promoting worldwide electronic access to quality research data. ECAI is a partnership of technical specialists and the scholarly community dedicated to the support of scholarship through technology. ECAI is building an infrastructure for retrieval of data over the Internet from servers located anywhere in the world. Guided by the paradigm of the historical atlas, research data is indexed by time and place using temporally-enabled Geographic Information Systems software. User queries retrieve and display data in GIS layers on a map-based interface, allowing comparisons across discipline, region, and time.

Web page:
http://ealc.berkeley.edu/ people/ emeritusprofiles.htm

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很不錯的演講。謝謝無道兄的推薦。

He might be limited by the time of the lecture, but I feel he could have done a better job in explaining the magic key of "this moment" by the end ot the lecture. Other than that, the lecture was fantastic.

  The moment is "sufficient", here and now, whenever whatsoever needs to be done, this has all, and always, been done in this moment-- So this moment, here and now, is sufficient. What else you need to explain more for this moment my friend?

原帖由 Pathless 於 2008-9-24 20:50 發表 [Buddhism in a Global Age of Technology - 菩提樹下 -  backchina.com]  
  The moment is "sufficient", here and now, whenever whatsoever needs to be done, this has all, and always, been done in this moment-- So this moment, here and now, is sufficient. ...

Talking about this moment, nothing is wrong or correct, as it is beyond word explanation. Now he chose to explain it, his words -- these words in particular, wouldn't get across to the audience effectively. You may noticed his sudden change of his lecture  when explaining "this moment" in order to capture the real meaning, but unfortunately he overlooked the audience's disability to follow this sudden change as they lack the experience of seeing this moment. Thus, I think the professor should be consistent in his lecture  and use an analytical manner in explaining "this moment" to make the inexperienced audience to comprehend a little through analytical thinking.

Ah.. I see your point here. For me, his use of a famous story in the Buddhist Canon -- a man shot by an arrow -- to describe the urgency and sufficiency of the "present" moment looks fine to me. Because this public talk was meant to the lay audience, I see the reason why he's trying not to get into philosophical or any unncessary conceptual discussion. What would be your ideas then if you were him? How to make the lay people, without any appreciation of Eastern religions or insight for "this moment", to understand this very personal, experiential moment?

He could take a sudden pause of his speech for five seconds at a moment of the audience's full attention, then came back to ask where were their minds in that five seconds silence and how did they feel.

Just curious, do you personally know Professor Lancaster?

   you may make a good teacher, no kidding.
No, I personally never met Prof. Lancaster. The untrained mind, especially that of the intelligent and intellectual, is used to wander and "react" all the time, and it puts every "instruction" into analysis. So, most likely when you are asking them to stay in stilness to observe their present moment of mind for a few seconds, they would use this to "analyze" your intention behind this query. It is not easy. It is not easy to just stay effortless in stilness. Anyway, I appreciate your valuable input.

Just bumped into a recorded video about Mindfulness by Jon Kabat-Zinn, a Zen teacher, given at the Google headquarter last year.  This talk takes longer than one hour, it nevertheless gives a very good intro on the principles and practice what Mindfulness is.  

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Thanks a lot for the above Video lecture. Very interesting and informative. I will recommend to more people --- a good karma to spread.

  Thanks Bud.