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Modern Education as Foundation of Buddhist Modernity W.Waldron Middlebury College, USA. ABSTRACT Modern Education provides children with an understanding of how the world works that reinforces more than it challenges traditional Buddhist worldviews and hence is indispensable for enabling Buddhists to fully engage with the modern world. It does this in several ways. First, the sciences demonstrate the universality of cause and effect in the natural world. This is not only largely commensurate with Buddhist notions of interdependent causality but also entails that things lack any unchanging essence. That interdependence entails essencelessness is implicit in all the sciences and modern Buddhists can and should make this explicit. Second, the social sciences emphasize the constructed nature of personal and group identity and illuminate the personal and social conflicts that arise from attempts to secure such identities. This is commensurate not only with Buddhist notions of personal selflessness but also with the deleterious consequences of self-grasping. That the construction of identity leads to suffering and conflict is implicit in all the social sciences and Buddhists can and should make this insight foundational. Third, many people perceive an unbridgeable gulf between the humanities and the sciences. While the sciences fruitfully analyze the material world in terms of impersonal causal regularities, when they apply this kind of analysis to human experience, it seems to strip us of our sense of agency, identity and purpose. This has provoked reactions against both science and rationality. Buddhist thought, however, has strongly developed a ‘science of mind’ that successfully integrates causal analyses with human experience. This, too, can and should be one of the essential lessons of modern Buddhist education. Conclusion: throughout the history of Buddhism, Buddhist thinkers have engaged in vigorous debate with the religious, intellectual and scientific worlds around them. They have both been enriched by and have deeply enriched these other traditions and in the process become important, even central, parts of the cultures of India, Nepal, Tibet, Thailand, Burma, Vietnam, China, Japan, etc. But this has happened only because they have deeply engaged their surrounding cultures, bringing Buddhist insights, analyses and sensibilities with them. This is no time to stop. More than ever, Buddhist cultures needs to engage the modern world, in all its pain and glory, with all its achievements and shadows. Not only do Buddhists need modernity, but the modern world needs Buddhism. Education, in the broadest sense of the word, is the vehicle for that.
CURRICULUM VITAE William S. Waldron EDUCATION
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