Bob Thurman, Buddhist

I watched the TED video of Bob Thurman tonight, and was struck by the depth of his philosophical insight. There’s something refreshing about having someone critique the very basis of our view of what humans are, and how our interactions are governed by our personal philosophies, and the prevailing fundamental assumptions of a society such as the U.S. Based upon this video, I would say his wikipedia article very accurately describes him in being “…highly-regarded for his lucid, dynamic translations and explanations of Buddhist religious and philosophical material, particularly that pertaining to the Gelukpa (dge-lugs-pa) school of Tibetan Buddhism and its founder, Je Tsong Khapa…” (wikipedia article).

Whenever I find someone like this that has such insight, I try to find more of their material. Here’s what I found:

• Bobthurman.com – while this isn’t the best designed page, it has a fair amount of material including some essays. I started reading the one on Human Rights and Responsibilites (*.pdf) – fascinating stuff.
• Podcast – already up to show #38 right now! The RSS feed only goes back to Show #15, unfortunately, so I suppose I’d have to go to the website to manually download previous episodes. I’ll never understand why people set media rss feeds to have only a certain number of items in the line… makes more sense to just have everything there. A blog, on the other hand – such as Boing Boing, with its enormous turn-over rate – I can understand having a limited number of items…
• Vidcast – subscribe through iTunes, blip.tv, and even a subscription link for the democracy player (now Miro)!

I haven’t yet listened to / watched any of this additional media, but I’m downloading all of it I can get!

In any case, I’m cautiously optimistic that Buddhism will influence me in some ways. The essay on human rights touches a fairly core issue for me as an agnostic, and the entire discussion of whether individuals should have inalienable rights (an idea of locke’s) or whether happiness/liberty/etc. are something only attainable through a culture of ingrained duties and social contracts is interesting. Some of what he talks about I don’t quite understand since it gets more into the abstract about what humans are as beings / compassion, etc… but I’m sure this has more to do with me just being unfamiliar with this line of thought.

I’m somewhat skeptical of buddhism since I’ve seen some strains of thought there that are purely based on some assumptions which I don’t consider to be necessarily universally acceptable, but we’ll see. Buddhism is a fairly fragmented concept since it has permeated many cultures in asia and meshed and evolved with newer politics and philosophies, so perhaps I’ll find something new and more acceptable in Thurman’s strain of buddhism. Anyway, cheers to enlightenment!

~ by David on 2007 October 1, Monday.