Buddhist History - Week 5

Apologies for belated posting. Summer holidays and retreat beckoned. Here's the recording of our meeting on 30 August, continuing our study of the second 500-year period of Buddhist history (from Conze's "Buddhist History"), from 0 AD to 500 AD. Among other topics, we covered:

• Mindfulness in the Mahayana and mindfulness in "insight meditation" traditions
• The integration of practice into daily life
• The importance of nonduality and going beyond extremes

Buddhism at Google?

Google is at the forefront of many management, organisational and HR innovations (including developing a remarkable quantitative approach to recruitment), so any leadership development initiative at Google is usually worth paying attention to.

It's therefore noteworthy that Google University now has a "school of personal growth" as one of its four main faculties (the others focus on workplace essentials, leadership development, and Google life and culture). It's run by Chade-Meng Tan, a software engineer who is also a Buddhist, and includes instruction in mindfulness meditation from Norman Fischer, a zen priest and one of the Dharma Heirs of Suzuki Roshi (author of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind). Tan said

The school's ethos could be a blueprint for workplace education, as "Google wants to help Googlers grow as human beings on all levels - emotional, mental, physical and 'beyond the self'."

Tan's predecessor, Monika Broeker, notes that - like most things in Google - this program has been subjected to intense quantitative scrutiny to assess its impact:

“If you want executive management support, you better back it up with data,” Broecker said. “We did a lot of research as to the effectiveness of our programs. One of the questions [we researched] was whether we could show that people who had gone through our programs were happier in Google than people who had not gone through our programs. And we definitely had data that showed that this was the case.”

Read more at Guardian Online and Chief Learning Officer Online.

Being and Mindfulness

This week's New York Times features an article by Judith Warner on 'Being and Mindfulness', a fascinating snapshot of how meditation and mindfulness is (mis)understood in the West. Judith paints an image of Buddhist practice as "extreme solipsism" leading to a state that is "cold and forbidding, and above all terribly, terribly dull":

Mindfulness is supposed to bring people together. By embracing your essential humanness, getting in touch with and accepting your body, sensations, emotions and thoughts, you are supposed to join with, and empathetically connect to, all humanity ... But in real-life encounters, I’ve come lately to wonder whether meaningful bonds are well forged by the extreme solipsism that mindfulness practice often turns out to be.

Some of us experience our emotions always in capital letters and exclamation points. This isn’t always pleasant but, to go all mindful for a moment, it is what it is, and if you are one of these people then probably one of the great pleasures of your life is finding others like you and settling in with them for a good rant. A world devoid of such souls can be cold and forbidding, and above all terribly, terribly dull.

Thankfully, the Times' readers weren't happy to let such confusion go without comment! There are many excellent and enjoyable responses to her article - 589 in all - most of which are inspiring and insightful, although there are a few that demonstrate even greater confusion or misunderstanding than Judith. Taken as a whole, it's a great read - strongly recommended!