Wk2-12 Kuyken - science and Buddhism
It's a great question and, of course, the Buddha, Siddhartha was, I think, a scientist. I think he was also a psychologist. I think he was also a reformer and a social activist. What do I mean by that? He saw in his own experience and his own attempts to find a way in the world that the systems around him we're not fit for purpose. They didn't do what he thought they would do and his way of working was what the very first psychologists did. We often think of the first psychologists being people like William James, who really used a sort of very empirical phenomenological kind of approach of studying their own minds. And that's essentially what it is. I mean, the Buddha studied in great depth. I mean, I would characterize it as kind of genius, on that kind of same par of people like Einstein. With extraordinary genius, he drew a map of the mind, 2,500 years before other psychologists had another go. And I think what he did was an extraordinary map of the mind. What do I mean by he was a social activist? He was field independent, so to use that psychological idea. At that time there were ideas around gender and there were ideas around castes. And he said, I don't see any evidence that the processes of the mind creating suffering and the processes of the mind stepping out of suffering are any different from somebody from my caste or from another caste, or from a man or for a woman. And so, what we articulated was a model that was way outside of what his social context dictated. So, I think that model of the mind was an extraordinarily interesting and compelling and useful scientific study, and that's what we're picking up now. And I think cognitive science, neuroscience, clinical trials are taking ideas that were articulated then, combining them with contemporary ideas. And finding ways, again, in my area of recurrent depression, to articulate a model of recurrent depression and a pathway to recovery. And people are doing the same thing with other areas as well, NBSR and stress, the work we're doing with young people and the cultivation of resilience in schools for young people. So I think that's the kind of confluence, this confluence of this very age old kind of wisdom and set of practices with contemporary concerns and contemporary science.
