The Buddhist Praying-Wheel

17 Buddhist Bioethics

Describing anything as ‘Buddhist’, including in this case a distinctively Buddhist bioethics, is fundamentally problematic from both a historic and Buddhist point of view. Historically, the Buddhist tradition has evolved in dozens of countries for 2500 years, with no one tradition having clear doctrinal authority over the others. Internally, even if a common Buddhist ethics was implicit in the ...

Portraits of Buddhist Women

Mismatch repair: The praying hands of fidelity

High-resolution crystal structures have recently been solved for the mismatch binding protein MutS of Escherichia coli and its Thermus aquaticus homologue; they show how these factors recognise such structurally diverse substrates as base-base mismatches and insertion/deletion loops.

Binocular Spatial Localization in the Praying Mantis

The way in which mantids localize the direction and the distance of their prey has been analysed, to clarify the importance of binocular interactions. The results suggest the following major points: 1. Binocular interactions coordinate monocular directional information, such that the direction in which a mantid fixates its prey is intermediate between the image directions in the two eyes (Figs ...

Journal of Buddhist Ethics

I argue that central Buddhist tenets and meditation methodology support a view of free will similar to Harry Frankfurt’s optimistic view and contrary to Galen Strawson’s pessimistic view. For Frankfurt, free will involves a relationship between actions, volitions, and “metavolitions” (volitions about volitions): simplifying greatly, volitional actions are free if the agent approves of them. For...