MindScience Academy Logo
Search
Close this search box.
Search
Search

Anthropology

Naturalized Buddhism for westerners can encourage a form of bad conscience: it can seem to us that adhering to Buddhism restrictedly to the practices considered to be secular, we can be spiritual without being religious, whereas without realizing we're moved by typically religious drives.
Serme Khen Rinpoche Gesce Tashi Tsering (born 1958) is the abbot of Sera Mey Monastic University in India. From 1994 to 2018 he was a resident Tibetan Buddhist teacher at the Jamyang Buddhist Centre, London.
From the XIX century on, Buddhism has been called to confront challenges and opportunities collateral to the religious and cultural structure that characterized it in the pre-modern period.
Data-driven neuroscience from Buddhist meditation and mindfulness has gained enormous popularity recently. Yet, the transformative potential of man offered by Buddhism, under the fMRI scanner (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) - delimited as an 'object' of study - can become sterile, inanimate, and inert when it is displaced from its performative dimensions, constitutive of its meaning.
The question we try to address here is: do we really understand what Buddhism is?