Sam Harris is Wrong: Theravada Buddhism
08 December 2015 [link youtube]
Youtube Automatic Transcription
I actually studied the politics of Islam
of the Muslim world at the University of Toronto before September 11th 2001 and at that time I had a very memorable University professor dr. ramin Jahan Begley and he's actually now a little bit famous I guess he was a little bit famous back then too um he's one of these guys who tries to kind of reinvent Gandhi's philosophy of non-violence to have a salient message for the Muslim world in our times his hearts in the right place that Professor John beg Lew I got to see how his whole life changed after September 11th 2001 because at that time the University of Toronto had a completely dismissive and contemptuous attitude towards politics in the Muslim world they didn't really have any interest in politics anywhere outside of the United States and Canada and then suddenly after September 11th 2001 they wanted to make it into a big deal to have some kind of expanding Department or some kind of research interest in that area so I got to see those struggles I got to see as that professor struggled to get even half 1/2 credit course taught on the politics in the Muslim world and the department the other professors had this sneering attitude towards it like this was the most marginal and trivial thing imaginable to have a course discussing the politics of places like Egypt and Libya and Syria and Iraq and Iran to have just one course one half credit course on University calendar that seemed to be too much to ask in the year 2000 and then you're by the end of the year 2001 2002 suddenly all their attitudes have changed one of the guys who has come up and become a major or public intellectual on the wings of the world's concern over Islam is this guy Sam Harris I've heard him complained that really he wants to be a public intellectual engaged variety of ethical issues and questions and that he resents the fact that he's been painted into a corner in dealing so heavily with his LOM and I've heard him complained that he finds his own voice rather boring on the subject of his LOM that he's tired of talking about it and so on I disagree I think that that is his area of greatest strength and yes he has the most practice in talking about it over the last 15 years shall we say he has obviously refined his ability to engage with those issues and to discuss them both with hostile audiences and with people who are more sympathetic and willing to engage in debate and discussion with him simply put you know Sam Harris is sincere but he's not too bright those of us who are vegan and who are familiar with his excuses for not being vegan in the recent past were not too impressed when he finally grudgingly decided to try to become vegan again quite recently so this exposed us to a side of Sam Harris's act and Sam Harris's intellect that is just not too impressive if you search within my own channel you'll see I did make one earlier video poking some fun at Sam Harris for his intellectually unimpressive excuses for why he continued to eat meat even when he himself said he believed it was morally wrong I wrote a letter to Sam Harris today and I'm gonna read out a little piece of it in just a minute here um the real test of someone's intelligence I think is their adaptability to applying the skills they already have outside of their own area of greatest strength I think Sam Harris is very familiar with the critique of Islam he's obviously familiar to a great extent also with the critique of Christianity and yet when he turns his attention to Buddhism he is a complete [ __ ] he seems to have no critical faculties whatsoever now for those of you don't know Sam Harris is a vocal atheist and he's also a very harsh critic of just New Age philosophy cult groups but not just cult groups um poorly supported mystical beliefs in general he's supposed to be a skeptic the word skeptic has been so badly degraded in its meaning and significance in my lifetime boy but anyway he aspires to skepticism and yet you find on the subject of Buddhist meditation he is a soft-hearted true believer who talks about his 20-year friendship with a guy who's associated with the bar Center and other frankly disreputable white Western meditation guru organizations that sell a badly bastardized version of Buddhism to affluent white Western folks now why am i using words like white and Western here why are they significant in talking with Buddhism well whether you are Pro Buddhist anti Buddhist agnostic or neutral there are certain warning signs when you're looking at a religious group there are certain warnings that make you evaluate the evidence in front of you in a different way with a different set of concerns in many ways the Catholic religion we could say is a worrying religion they have a history of unbelievable violence persecution Wars etc but if your own teenage son your own teenage daughter told you that they were going to join the mainstream Catholic faith you would probably not be that worried despite that history in many ways Catholicism although there are a lot of things I dislike about Catholicism as a religion in many ways it is shall we say a destabilizing force in the world in that it is very conservative and slow-moving they very gradually shifted from denying the existence of evolution to accepting the existence of evolution you might not have noticed that when the Catholic Church instructed its priests to no longer claim that evolution is only a theory nothing much changed in the world but you know very slowly they admitted that you know the earth orbits around the Sun and theory of evolution is OK and not an offense to God and man but these same characteristics make it sort of non-threatening however if your teenage son or daughter told you that they were joining a splinter faction of Catholicism a small separate group that does not recognize the legitimacy of the Pope and does not recognize Italy as the center of Catholicism but has some totally different set of doctrines then you might be concerned not necessarily because the group is a cult it would simply be a warning it would simply be something that raises concerns now even within Islam likewise if you had a friend let's say your brother your sister decides to convert to Islam if they're converting to one of the big mainstream forms of Islam you probably would not be that worried any of the big major boring institutional slow moving forms of Islam even though you may personally disagree with Islam I myself I don't like the contents of the Quran I don't believe in the existence of this God and so on but that is not to worrying whereas if they told you they were converting to a small splinter group that doesn't recognize the legitimacy of any of the conventional authorities in Islam maybe even a group that doesn't recognize the authority of the Quran itself now you've got questions now you've got concerns right there were red flags here even if it turns out this particular splinter group is completely harmless you've got to ask questions about its legitimacy its assumptions its religious practices that would not arise for mainstream Catholicism mainstream Islam now why is that for one thing it's because the large mainstream groups also have mainstream sources of scrutiny of skepticism being applied to them as terrible as the sexual abuses by the Catholic Church have been to use a more specific example the Catholic Church within Ireland the Catholic Church within Spain an amazing recent history within my lifetime of sexual abuse still that abuse was examined by the mainstream newspapers by the police ultimately it was a focus of investigation etc and small splinter groups whether they're cult groups or new religions factions that have broken off their secrecy and their lack of accountability to a higher authority their lack of accountability to the newspapers is because nobody's interested in them and their lack of authority to the Pope and the you know institutional structures the Pope has to try to enforce orthodoxy all of those things make a small splinter group more worrying if your friend if your brother if your sister converted now these things do exist for Catholicism they do exist for as long they do exist for Buddhism these types of splinter groups are lack of a better term the deny the legitimacy of the mainstream religion a a long time ago when I was a kid there was a famous singer called Sinead O'Connor I don't think many people remember her today but she was a very famous very successful singer recording artist we now say um she was Irish and she broke off from Catholicism to join a small group that many people consider a cult and famously she went on television and she tore up the photograph of the Pope and so on okay whirring one of my university professors not the one I mentioned earlier actually one of my white Western University professors converted to Islam and he converted to a peculiar small splinter group of Islam that only exists in Indonesia was fitted indonesia so you have questions now remember I looked into it when I found out that guy converted to this peculiar form Islam I did some google searching and actually it it seems really harmless it's not a scary or militant group but still the question has to be asked your concerns have to be there friend of yours and so on gets involved these things now Bao means if if your friend converts the mainstream Catholicism you should ask questions also she asked what their motives are should I you should take a human interest in their well-being and and how that religion may well change their lives but if we're being fair and equal here why do we not apply the same standards of scrutiny in Buddhism even if you are Pro Buddhists if you are watching this video and you're a devout believer in what you consider Orthodox Buddhism you should want these same standards to be applied or even higher standards why is it paradoxically that in Buddhism we seem to have a much lower standard of scrutiny a lower standard of skepticism we regarded as less problematic if you're talking about a small splinter group in California that is run by white Western people that doesn't recognize the legitimacy of the equivalent of the Pope in their form of the religion so you know we have splinter groups here in the West within Tibetan Buddhism that do not recognize the Dalai Lama that have their own separate claims to authority that should be worrying for the same reasons I've just explained and we have these terrified of Buddhist groups that don't recognize the authorities in Thailand don't recognize the authorities in Sri Lanka well why is that why are you a small separate splinter group when you look down the list of the so-called meditation masters at the bar Center which is the center that Sam Harris endorses I think uncritically I think stupidly I think shamefully given the guy's whole stance on religion cults etc the main thing you see is that the claims to legitimacy by these would-be religious leaders who are almost entirely white and Western I think they had one african-american woman but there were no Asians there a list of pastors this Buddhism is an Asian dominated religion I mean if so many suppose enlightened masters teaching meditation none of them are Chinese none of them are Sri Lankan none of them are from India you know raises questions again even even with Islam if you had a Muslim group that only exists in Indonesia - well why is that why doesn't exist in Saudi Arabia or Palestine or all over the world there must be some peculiar reason why this group rejects the authority of other mainstream aspects of the religion there are questions to ask I think it ultimately is just a kind of racism whereby white Western people do not want to question the authority and legitimacy of other white Western people who become leaders in Buddhism and they should they should question it more if I were to represent myself to you if I just said you look I am a member of the sium nakiya from Sri Lanka cm nakai in Sri Lanka is one of the two mainstream the equivalent of mainstream Catholicism in Tara by the Buddhism it's a mainstream slow moving slightly authoritarian organization you know same way as in Catholicism there's a hierarchy there are people in charge there are always questions about you know financial corruption and this sort of thing just like a thoughtless ism it's a big enough religion that it has those features of a hierarchical slow-moving movement and if anyone wants to change something in that version of the religion it's going to take a very long time to get anywhere for and people do people do seek reform you know they say uh these things were doing at the funerals you know we should clean up what's been going on with funeral ceremonies or whatever the issue of the day is including you know in Sri Lanka they're open debates about things like eating beef whether or not they should try to ban the production of cow meat and so on but anyway all those all those debates are ongoing but it's within the framework of old fashioned conventional hierarchical religion if I present myself to you as just a member of that religion okay you've got the same reasons to be skeptical of me as you would be skeptical of a mainstream Catholic but if you look down the list of the the white faces who are supposedly the gurus and meditation masters at a place like the bar Center a place that Sam Harris so uncritically and stupidly respects and supports what are their claims to legitimacy and what are their reasons for rejecting the central authorities that normally would define legitimacy in Buddhism well the number one pattern I see is simply so and so it gives the person's name so-and-so has been meditating since 1973 and has been teaching meditation since 1976 and opened his own Meditation Center in 1986 of course the years are different for each person and so these are not credentials this should make you more suspicious of the person not less I'll tell you why if I work for someone else as a cook if I work as a cook in the kitchen in a real hierarchy let's say at a hotel chain I'm a cook in the Hilton Hotel then you know I have to be able to cook good food by that hotel chain standard I'm I'm not saying it's an objectives it's a subjective standard but it's a hierarchical slow-moving standard the Hilton Hotel chain any big hotel company it's a bit like the Catholic Church there's a talk there in relationship and I don't get to just decide what's gonna taste good what kind of food I want to cocaine but if I inherit money from my parents if I win the lottery if I somehow get money and then I open my own restaurant I'm the boss I'm the one person in charge then I can cook anything I want and nobody can really tell me that my food tastes like crap or I'm not a very good cook and I can hire anyone I want to be to cook with me there's actually no accountability and no kind of subjective standard applied to me much less an objective standard the levels of scrutiny and skepticism we apply to Buddhism should at least be as high if not higher than what we apply to scholars of ancient Greek and I'll tell you why scholars of ancient Greek will very rarely make claims this philosophy this psychological concept from the ancient Greek text still gets effects today I do once in a while but with Buddhism so with ancient Greek sorry I'll stick with aged Greek for a second so with ancient Greek most of the claims you're gonna get are to authenticity or to the quality of interpretation or to some sort of cultural and literary significance of what your claims are if you're the expert if you're the interpreter of ancient Greek but yeah once in a while there might be claims meant for there might be claims made about what this means today why this matters today how this can help you live a more meaningful life etc with Buddhism you have it both ways people are making claims about meditation down on the one hand are supposed to be demonstrably authentic authoritative etc and on the other hand are supposed to have pseudo medical benefits for you today they're supposed to make you ten percent happier they're supposed to make you more focused more intelligent more productive hope you earn more money help you get over to your dough force help you attract members of the opposite sex help you lead a better sex life or help you live in celibacy every possible crackpot promise of the pseudo-scientific scene has been hung on to Buddhist meditation including by the type of white Western people you see teaching at the bar Center so we have both of the problems of the note lining here when we're looking at white Western gurus self-appointed experts we have the problem of the cook who owns the kitchen we have the problem of who says you're an expert you do you started meditating in 73 you decided to start teaching meditation in 76 didn't get a diploma didn't pass a test didn't get a driver's license didn't get any kind of licensing or 800k you decided you were teacher and a couple years later you got the money somehow and you opened a center and you know now you're an expert and nobody can question you for one thing nobody will really be motivated to question you anyone who thinks you're a crackpot they just walk out the door they don't show up in the first place or they show up they listen for five minutes and walk of the door nobody gets rewarded for a critical engagement with this kind of self-appointed expert and the other hand because you're the head of your own little hierarchy you don't you don't recognize any Popol it's right any Popish or people we have both words English language polish and people you don't recognize any Pope ish authority shall we say over you to scrutinize you and so on well you're making up your own nonsense and why not recognize those authorities why is it that these self-appointed white Western leaders of contemporary Buddhism and meditation starters why don't they deeply respect the people who are the equivalent of the Pope in their religion why aren't they trying to become part of a formal hierarchy such as the CM nakiya in sri lanka or any of the mainstream organizations in Thailand now I'll give you a best-case scenario in a worst-case scenario answer that question it's not just hypothetical question real quick best case scenario would be that these white Western leaders are actually real experts in those Asian versions of the religion that they have spent years becoming fluent in a language such as Thai Sinhalese Cambodian that they're fluent in one of the contemporary living languages of tera vaada Buddhism and that through their deep study their profound socio-political understanding of what's wrong with the religion they have an analysis of the ways in which that Southeast Asian religion is corrupt and they tried to reform it from the inside but despairing after some period time they decided to instead set up their own Foundation and try to reform from the outside that is the best case scenario good luck finding one example of a person who is in that position sadly what you are much more likely to find is that these people these white Western gurus absolutely avoid any critique of those Asian Buddhist authorities one of the reasons for that being as soon as they engage in the critique then there are other people who can challenge them so if I say conventional Asia and authority on Buddhism is wrong about something because I'm a poly scholar I have read the original text I know what it means now we've got a contestable claim right that's like having a specific rity cat the Catholic Chur say look the Catholic Church teaches you about the virgin birth but let's look at what the Scriptures actually say actually historically that one's very easy to prove you can go into the history of the text and pretty rapidly show look the original text did not even contain this legend it didn't contain a myth that the mother of Jesus was a virgin so this is a spurious and false notion okay yes theoretically in the best case scenario it is possible that you would have a white Western Buddhist movement that has splintered off and formed its own faction for these reasons tragically this is almost never the case and among the reasons for that is exactly the level of legitimacy and simply hard work that would be required for any group of Westerners to engage in that right some have tried and some have dropped out you know this guy jack Kornfield he's now a total snake oil salesman but in terms of the history of his movement he started by proclaiming some of these things those guys were reacted to forms of corruption that were endemic especially in Tibetan Buddhism both Asian Tibetan Buddhism Tibetans who had come to America and white Western people who had appropriated and reinvented Tibet most they saw the corruption that said okay let's have some kind of critical tera vaada based response to this the results are not good and look jack Kornfield any of these guys jack Kornfield has a PhD have you read his thesis have you even looked at the Wikipedia article on the university that gave him that PhD would you call that a real university would you trust a medical doctor who had their diploma from a university that doesn't really exist and that at that time wasn't even licensed to give up a cheese and so on who do you think his supervisor was that University what treated what tradition is he represented what's his source of authority as I say in a best-case scenario yes your religious authority could be based on brilliant original research new translations new examinations of ancient texts newer it's possible but sadly in the 21st century just ain't so instead in the same way that we have to look skeptically at a splinter group that has formed a separate faction from Catholicism and doesn't recognize the Pope and so on even though there may be real causes you know there's obviously corruption in the Catholic Church there are obviously problems in that religion there although there may be causes we sympathize with for why that splinter group arose we have to be incredibly skeptical incredibly rigorous and examining why the group exists and what its aims really are because nine times out of ten at least nine times out of ten the reality is that people broke off and formed this separate faction simply for the ego and authority of the people in charge why are there so many tiny white Western Buddhist groups and so few that resemble the Catholic Church in any way why are there so few that have a hierarchy or just just simply have respect for a leader based in Asia for a conventional monastic system s-so Buddhism is all about that's the core of the religion if I were recording this video six months ago I could have said if you think sam harris is a genius just look at his excuses for why he eats meat for why he is not VIII okay today the guy is vegan maybe a few months from now he's going to give up being vegan and go back to eat meat I don't know but what I'm here to say to you today is if you think sam harris is brilliant sadly just take a look at what he has to say about buddhism read a little bit of what I wrote soon here I wrote him just an email it is very sad for me to see your uncritical reception of a complete charlatan and the person of Joseph Goldstein and that you are willing to treat him as an objective and detached authority on texts he has never studied as primary sources already we have such a profound problem here if you want to record a podcast you're a major public intellectual like Sam Harris if you want to record a podcast and tear about Buddhism why would your expert be Joseph Goldstein why Joseph Colson yes his resume his CV listed on the the bar center VAR re is the center that Sam Harris endorses if if you can interview anyone in the world I would understand why you would enter interview someone with a PhD from Cambridge University who represents the hidebound British tradition of Buddhist studies I can understand why you would choose that interview there's a very different tradition incidentally in Germany it's not very robust right now but the Germans who last 200 years they had a very strong academic tradition of the study of Buddhism you could get one of those guys on the radio you could invite one of those guys to do an interview in a podcast I understand that on the other hand I completely understand and I myself was Patra I completely understand why you would want to interview a a village monk a monk from a small town in Sri Lanka a monk from a small town in northeastern Thailand who really represents something authentic about tera vaada Buddhism a guy who actually gets his hands dirty performing funeral rituals and going to the charnel grounds and actually you know ripping up rags and sewing the rags together to make a Buddhist you know gown a Buddhist robe we used the word robe in English a Buddhist robe out of old cloth I completely respect that that's that's closer to anthropology of course and then again if it's about someone who's authoritative someone who's an authority figure then you want to instead of the village monk maybe a monk who is up near the the top of the hierarchy you could be interviewing anyone but instead you're interviewing Joseph Goldstein and what credentials does he have he he got interested in Buddhism back when he was working in the Peace Corps the United States Peace Corps in Thailand didn't learn how to speak Thai didn't learn how to read Pali he's at decades and decades didn't learn any of these languages to me that's a failure all right if if you got really passionate about Judaism and you never learn Hebrew I you became a some kind of Jewish rabbi a self-made rabbi who doesn't recognize any of the established churches he doesn't even recognize Reform Judaism you became an independent rabbi with your own little faction and opened your own Meditation Center because believe me Judaism has its own form of meditation it's nothing unique to Buddhism about the concept of meditation Norman Asus's amore o OG and where did you learn Hebrew what if you don't know Hebrew you don't know Greek you don't know Yiddish what what kind of a rabbi are you an English language only rabbi and the sister decades decades of preaching a religion you're not an expert in or you don't you've never never encountered the primary source texts or any of the problems in the history of the religion I've complete content for this coming life and he is a self-made religious authority on exactly this pattern he went to Thailand he started meditating at some point he declared himself a teacher at some point he opened his own meditation studio who knows where the money for that came from it's not like there are too many cooks in the kitchen when you're the boss of that meditation studio nobody else is in charge of you nobody else was scrutinizing you not morally not ethically not in terms of textual authenticity not in terms of outcomes there's no scientific team measuring whether or not you're pseudo medical claims oh the psychological and health benefits of meditation actually get results and good look if you if you want to look up the peer-reviewed research on that stuff it's really depressing it's all a game of using the most vaguely you know vaguely defined terms possible I had a friend someone I met online here hi Rama and she was briefly convinced by some of these articles if not connected to jack Kornfield I don't think he wrote them but I think she found out about them through his his circle you know they were making the same claims that Christians make about the efficacy of prayer you know like prayer and singing can reduce your subjectively perceived stress levels of course they can of course they can the social experience of going to a church and praying and singing gee it reduces stress it makes people feel better it makes cancer patients feel better about the fact that they're dying of cancer or that they're suffering through cancer therapy so what did absolutely nothing supernatural within these same claims are made for Buddhist meditation and they you know they try to define you know subjective stress levels as as vaguely and in as confusing way as possible so you think this is telling you there's a real measurable medical benefit but guess what these claims made of a prayer and meditation it's not just the placebo effect but if you compare them to the same effects of going to the gym of physical exercise because we do the same types of research how does going to the gym help cancer patients how does going to the gym help elderly retired people who are suffering social isolation guess what physical exercise is more effective than meditation and so there's a whole pseudo science pseudo medical literature backing up the type of [ __ ] claims that guys like Jace of Kotori Joseph Goldstein and the bar Center trying to make money from okay you can investigate it for yourself I'm not getting any deeper into it here but I'm starting off by asking the question of anyone in the world about tera vaada Buddhism why would this be the guy sam harris interviews and the answer is that sam harris himself is not objective he has a subjective personal connection - this Meditation Center the bar meditations that are and - Joseph Goldstein he's known Joseph Goldstein for 20 years or so etc okay Sam Harris would never report on the philosophy of ancient Greek in as biased and unfair away as he's here reporting on Buddhism he would never report on critique or discuss Islam in the sloppy subjective non rigorous way that he's here reported on Buddhism and he would never talk about the health benefits or the psychological benefits of prayer in the sloppy self-indulgent way that he's here talking about meditation okay now if you're watching this video and you are a Buddhist or you are Pro Buddhists you should care about this stuff even more than I do I'm a former poly scholar I'm a former scholar of Buddhism but I'm not a member of the Buddhist religion today I'm I'm detached to a fault about this issue but still if this is your religion if this is the future of your religion you got to hear about it joke Joseph Goldstein even worse Joseph Goldstein is someone who has an active interest in bamboozling you although you do not have the expertise to laugh out loud and how Aegis Lee he's misrepresenting his sources etc rather than someone who was interested in informing you or debunking misconceptions about the religion the ancient or the modern religion look man my heart's not in it to read this I'll try to keep going for one more second so this is me addressing sam harris directly please pause to reflect on how absurdly uncritical your response is to his discussing mara in contrast to the way you'd respond to a christian discussing satan or perhaps some other religion describing a trickster demon etcetera this came up in sam Harris's debate with well not even debate his interview with his uncritical promotion of this guy goldstein you're talking about having visions of Marah how would you react if you were talking to someone who was a Muslim talking about having visions of Satan how would you react if you were talking to someone who was supposed to be a professor of ancient Greek philosophy talking about having visions of Plato or Socrates let alone Zeus and Athena I think you'd respond in a more intellectually rigorous way especially if you were sam harris professional atheist professional self defined skeptic but instead he acts like any soft-hearted [ __ ] flower child in broadcasting this [ __ ] from the most corrupt the most self-indulgent the most self-centered the the most despicable form of Buddhism that has ever existed anywhere in the world and why do I say that about the seemingly antiseptic white western version of Buddhism that exists at the bar centre and at other similar centers that accept money in exchange for meditation to white people doesn't that seem very hygienic and clean it's more despicable precisely because they're not getting out and dealing with the social and political reality that real Buddhism plunges you into gee you know this guy Goldstein I forget how my decades and decades ago I think in the 1960s he did he worked in Thailand with the Peace Corps she was he interested in the fact that the United States at that time was dropping more bombs on the tiny country of Laos right next to Thailand they're dropping more bombs on Laos than they ever dropped on Germany in World War two you know that that Indochina theater Laos Cambodia Vietnam at just that time they're dropping more bombs they did on all of Germany and Japan combined during World War two you know if instead of taking the path he had taken of opening his own meditation studio and teaching Westview if he had just stayed there and trained to perform funeral rituals for local peasants in that area and he had learned he'd had the humility to learn the local language Goldstein I just heard his voice he can't pronounce the word Buddha correctly he can't pronounce Buddhism correctly the U vowel in that word in both Pali and Sanskrit difference between uh and ooh is that there are two different spellings there are two different words okay like you've gotten this level you're supposedly a great expert a great Swami a great guru and you can't pronounce Buddha is very common for me to hear the voice of these people they're supposedly tera vaada Buddhist leaders and they can't pronounce tera bada they'd say there've a de I've faced a face I've had encounters people with that whether they're people with PhDs or not whether they're self-made gurus or not yeah it's bad I was saying a minute ago that I'm completely detached with this stuff the sense in which I'm not detached is exactly that I care about the suffering of these people I care about this history I care about political reality I mean the meditation doesn't work the in that sense I don't have to care about it because it disproves itself it's like phony cures for cancer it's like praying to get rich it doesn't work so I don't have to debunk it it debunks itself you can kid yourself for a while if you're watching this video go ahead you could listen to the same interview between sam harris professional skeptic and an goldstein professional steak whole new l salesman you can sit there nodding your head in agreement when he's talking about having visions of maura his MA ARA the long a mara okay mmm yeah this is completely respectable intellectual discourse I see no reason to be critical or scheduling oh yeah oh gee mindfulness meditation ology mmm the passing and meditation that all sounds perfectly scientific I don't have to either question um you know measurable outcomes nor do I have to question how this connects to the the ancient textual sources written in Pali there's language that almost nobody home yeah sure hmm yeah I can totally you know accept that some guy who just moved to California and rented a room and called himself a meditation instructor I can totally accept how that guy would know what he's talking about man village blood ism gets a bad reputation and it gets a bad reputation for good reasons okay lived in Cambodia Thailand Laos I spent a little bit of time in Sri Lanka but it was very memorable I lived in the same Buddhist monastery that bhikkhu bodhi used to live in and I had the same bookshelf I was reading books that he had signed that he had owned that he had written I've had a lot of real interesting experiences in Buddhist Asia but yeah guess what if he had stayed in Asia for any length of time at that level I think he would come back with a very different set of anti sights a very different set of insights into human condition because you go through that suffering learning a foreign language a horror foreign language like Cambodia is suffering you suffer doing it it requires humility to struggle to really communicate with people in Cambodia especially when you're not the one paying the bills if you're not the boss if you're not the one in charge Cambodians will really sneer at you and really be short-tempered with you and really will not like the fact that you're mispronouncing words if you're wealthy or if you're in a position of authority that's different then Cambodians don't treat you that way this is a generalisation beast experience Thailand and Laos different stories feel like you different story but I mean we're not talking about learning French or Spanish or German many people say that learning Italian is quite relaxing and enjoyable I'm willing to believe that if your first language is English learning Italian maybe a vacation no learning these languages is a ton of hard work and sorrow learning a language like Pali incredibly difficult much more difficult than learning ancient Greek because the books and other resources are garbage you have to do so much to work yourself these people go through none of that and they become self-appointed Dharma masters and if anyone on earth should be skeptical in receiving those claims to Authority both there were claims to authenticity religious authority and their claims to having real-world outcomes and semi scientific benefits the meditation to G if anyone should be critical of that it should be Sam Harris he should be the most critical person in the world and he's not he's the least continue with my met letter here I would go further to say that you ie not an abstract you but Sam Harris specifically would never give this type of uncritical reception to a scholar of ancient Greek nor even to a scholar of Shakespeare you would demand much more critically that even a professed expert in these non-religious fields much more carefully demonstrate the validity of his or her opinions yet here you are as uncritical as any cult flunky in broadcasting a bunch of baffle gab but a religion that you know almost nothing about as a concession I must add in the context of discussing Islam etc it is genuinely true that Buddhism presents an appealing alternative even if it is just the lesser of two evils and so you may be inclined to turn off the skeptical side of your brain in receiving such as snake oil salesman as goldstein as a further concession I would also say that tera vaada Buddhism is the lesser of two evils compared to many other forms of Buddhism devoured by contrast some horrendous varieties of Buddhism in both Tibet and Japan can applause here it's also very good sincere I understand I sympathize the sam harris is accustomed to the critique of islam to some extent the critique of Christianity and the critique of extreme cold groups cult groups that kill people I understand that Buddhism is not menacing in the same way it's not scary it's not threatening but that is not a valid excuse to have this uncritical idiotic attitude towards religion it's not and it wouldn't be an excuse for ancient Greek philosophy either even though ancient Greek philosophy isn't killing anybody it's not a threat and you know look let's put pause for one second think about what the word respect means in this concept let's say to you that I have tremendous respect for the Department of ancient Greek at my own University here in Canada hypothetical there is a department of ancient Greek here let's suppose I say to you we have a great team of professors here I have so much respect for this department of ancient Greek I have faith in them I believe in them this is a great university department these are great scholars still every single thing they say I'm gonna scrutinize for myself and on myriad issues I may disagree with the professors and I may disagree with the department as an authority and people have conversation of this oh you know professor so-and-so oh yeah he's a great professor I have a lot of respect for him he's a real authority's a real Ange he's a real expert on ancient Greek he's a real authority oh yeah yeah but you know did you hear this stuff he said about Aristotle and slavery it's it's nuts it's completely crazy oh yeah boy he's out to lunch on that you know Wow you know I mean he's he's so enthusiastic about trying to glorify the status of slaves in ancient Athens that you know I mean he just departs from the texts and he really misrepresents whatever stall is said was Limerick this doesn't mean I don't respect his authority it doesn't mean he's a fraud it doesn't mean he's not a real scholar of ancient Greek it doesn't mean he can't read ancient Greek it just means I disagree with him in a sense it means I respect him enough to bother to disagree with him I'm still reading his work or I'm still listening to his lectures I may still be paying thousands of dollars in tuition but yeah my critical faculties are turned on even though there is no threat of violence there's no threat of world war 3 etc that's spurious again if you are a Buddhist if you are Pro Buddhist you should be demanding that Buddhist philosophy be taken as seriously as ancient Greek philosophy and you should be demanding that the religion be scrutinized in all of these ways I don't know how much more this letter I'm gonna read look the lesser of two evils is still evil okay the fact that some terabyte of Buddhism may be much less threatening than Islam doesn't mean it's good the fact that Christian claims about prayer having medical benefits are ridiculous doesn't mean that Buddhist claims about meditation having medical benefits and psychological benefit doesn't mean they're any less ridiculous i say to sam harris however in your interview with goldstein you have conducted yourself as shamefully as any flower child ignoramus who signs up for a 10-day vie pass in the course you of all people should know how to question someone in a rigorous way about the extraordinary claims they're making both in the realm of pseudo medical claims of meditation and also in the claims to canonical authority / authenticity made by someone like goldstein who never even became an expert in modern tile ism via that modern tile language much less in the ancient Pali Canon or an understanding the differences between the two skipping to the end here thank you for your time I understand that you are trying to engage with these issues sincerely but you were engaging with Buddhism guilelessly and from a position of ignorance and gullibility that is painful to behold really please ask yourself how you would receive a scholar of ancient Greek philosophy who made any of the same claims you would I think be much more shrewd both in questioning the connection of the ancient sources and also you'd be very rigorous in questioning any claim to pseudo medical benefits being provable in the modern world today on the basis of the advice of an ancient Greek source no matter how nebulous were psychologically suggestive the translation into modern English may be sam harris is famous for a good reason i just i started this video an hour ago reflecting on a professor i had back in the year 2001 and he became famous because what he was talking about became more important to the world became more important politically after 2001 ok sam harris chose to discuss a bunch of issues he really chose to base his career around a bunch of issues that became more and more important over time within his life if he had chosen 20 years ago back when he apparently converted to a form of [ __ ] self-indulgent pay-to-play meditation based buddhism if he had chosen back then to base his academic career on buddhist philosophy he would not be famous he could have become an expert in buddhism he had every opportunity and he says what over 20 years ago he first started meditating he first signed up for these incredibly depraved and corrupt from my perspective depraved and corrupt forms of westernized Buddhism and he's still a fan of them he still supports them why why did he become an expert in Islam and this critique of Islam he's devoted someone why did he do that instead of becoming a an expert in Buddhism and a critic of Buddhism well I'll tell you Sam Harris is famous for a reason he talks about issues that millions of people really care about and that are really politically loaded today Islam gun control war violence if he had spent his time talking about the Cambodian Civil War the Cambodian border conflicts this is stuff I have written articles about if he had spent his time writing about the Sri Lankan Civil War if he'd gotten passionate about Buddhism in Sri Lanka and this conflict between Buddhism and Hinduism in Sri Lanka if you had gotten passionate about the new Buddhist movement in India the caste system Hinduism Jainism Buddhism and what's going on in India today he would not be famous but his opinions about Buddhism would have the respect of a small number of people like me and instead while he's legitimately his expertise on Islam Christianity and a number of issues that he's spent decades talking about written books about cetera he does not have my respect when he's talking about Buddhism he has my complete contempt and whether you are Buddhist atheist anti Buddhist whatever your position is on this issue even view the biggest fan of Sam Harris in the world Sam Harris should have your contempt to
of the Muslim world at the University of Toronto before September 11th 2001 and at that time I had a very memorable University professor dr. ramin Jahan Begley and he's actually now a little bit famous I guess he was a little bit famous back then too um he's one of these guys who tries to kind of reinvent Gandhi's philosophy of non-violence to have a salient message for the Muslim world in our times his hearts in the right place that Professor John beg Lew I got to see how his whole life changed after September 11th 2001 because at that time the University of Toronto had a completely dismissive and contemptuous attitude towards politics in the Muslim world they didn't really have any interest in politics anywhere outside of the United States and Canada and then suddenly after September 11th 2001 they wanted to make it into a big deal to have some kind of expanding Department or some kind of research interest in that area so I got to see those struggles I got to see as that professor struggled to get even half 1/2 credit course taught on the politics in the Muslim world and the department the other professors had this sneering attitude towards it like this was the most marginal and trivial thing imaginable to have a course discussing the politics of places like Egypt and Libya and Syria and Iraq and Iran to have just one course one half credit course on University calendar that seemed to be too much to ask in the year 2000 and then you're by the end of the year 2001 2002 suddenly all their attitudes have changed one of the guys who has come up and become a major or public intellectual on the wings of the world's concern over Islam is this guy Sam Harris I've heard him complained that really he wants to be a public intellectual engaged variety of ethical issues and questions and that he resents the fact that he's been painted into a corner in dealing so heavily with his LOM and I've heard him complained that he finds his own voice rather boring on the subject of his LOM that he's tired of talking about it and so on I disagree I think that that is his area of greatest strength and yes he has the most practice in talking about it over the last 15 years shall we say he has obviously refined his ability to engage with those issues and to discuss them both with hostile audiences and with people who are more sympathetic and willing to engage in debate and discussion with him simply put you know Sam Harris is sincere but he's not too bright those of us who are vegan and who are familiar with his excuses for not being vegan in the recent past were not too impressed when he finally grudgingly decided to try to become vegan again quite recently so this exposed us to a side of Sam Harris's act and Sam Harris's intellect that is just not too impressive if you search within my own channel you'll see I did make one earlier video poking some fun at Sam Harris for his intellectually unimpressive excuses for why he continued to eat meat even when he himself said he believed it was morally wrong I wrote a letter to Sam Harris today and I'm gonna read out a little piece of it in just a minute here um the real test of someone's intelligence I think is their adaptability to applying the skills they already have outside of their own area of greatest strength I think Sam Harris is very familiar with the critique of Islam he's obviously familiar to a great extent also with the critique of Christianity and yet when he turns his attention to Buddhism he is a complete [ __ ] he seems to have no critical faculties whatsoever now for those of you don't know Sam Harris is a vocal atheist and he's also a very harsh critic of just New Age philosophy cult groups but not just cult groups um poorly supported mystical beliefs in general he's supposed to be a skeptic the word skeptic has been so badly degraded in its meaning and significance in my lifetime boy but anyway he aspires to skepticism and yet you find on the subject of Buddhist meditation he is a soft-hearted true believer who talks about his 20-year friendship with a guy who's associated with the bar Center and other frankly disreputable white Western meditation guru organizations that sell a badly bastardized version of Buddhism to affluent white Western folks now why am i using words like white and Western here why are they significant in talking with Buddhism well whether you are Pro Buddhist anti Buddhist agnostic or neutral there are certain warning signs when you're looking at a religious group there are certain warnings that make you evaluate the evidence in front of you in a different way with a different set of concerns in many ways the Catholic religion we could say is a worrying religion they have a history of unbelievable violence persecution Wars etc but if your own teenage son your own teenage daughter told you that they were going to join the mainstream Catholic faith you would probably not be that worried despite that history in many ways Catholicism although there are a lot of things I dislike about Catholicism as a religion in many ways it is shall we say a destabilizing force in the world in that it is very conservative and slow-moving they very gradually shifted from denying the existence of evolution to accepting the existence of evolution you might not have noticed that when the Catholic Church instructed its priests to no longer claim that evolution is only a theory nothing much changed in the world but you know very slowly they admitted that you know the earth orbits around the Sun and theory of evolution is OK and not an offense to God and man but these same characteristics make it sort of non-threatening however if your teenage son or daughter told you that they were joining a splinter faction of Catholicism a small separate group that does not recognize the legitimacy of the Pope and does not recognize Italy as the center of Catholicism but has some totally different set of doctrines then you might be concerned not necessarily because the group is a cult it would simply be a warning it would simply be something that raises concerns now even within Islam likewise if you had a friend let's say your brother your sister decides to convert to Islam if they're converting to one of the big mainstream forms of Islam you probably would not be that worried any of the big major boring institutional slow moving forms of Islam even though you may personally disagree with Islam I myself I don't like the contents of the Quran I don't believe in the existence of this God and so on but that is not to worrying whereas if they told you they were converting to a small splinter group that doesn't recognize the legitimacy of any of the conventional authorities in Islam maybe even a group that doesn't recognize the authority of the Quran itself now you've got questions now you've got concerns right there were red flags here even if it turns out this particular splinter group is completely harmless you've got to ask questions about its legitimacy its assumptions its religious practices that would not arise for mainstream Catholicism mainstream Islam now why is that for one thing it's because the large mainstream groups also have mainstream sources of scrutiny of skepticism being applied to them as terrible as the sexual abuses by the Catholic Church have been to use a more specific example the Catholic Church within Ireland the Catholic Church within Spain an amazing recent history within my lifetime of sexual abuse still that abuse was examined by the mainstream newspapers by the police ultimately it was a focus of investigation etc and small splinter groups whether they're cult groups or new religions factions that have broken off their secrecy and their lack of accountability to a higher authority their lack of accountability to the newspapers is because nobody's interested in them and their lack of authority to the Pope and the you know institutional structures the Pope has to try to enforce orthodoxy all of those things make a small splinter group more worrying if your friend if your brother if your sister converted now these things do exist for Catholicism they do exist for as long they do exist for Buddhism these types of splinter groups are lack of a better term the deny the legitimacy of the mainstream religion a a long time ago when I was a kid there was a famous singer called Sinead O'Connor I don't think many people remember her today but she was a very famous very successful singer recording artist we now say um she was Irish and she broke off from Catholicism to join a small group that many people consider a cult and famously she went on television and she tore up the photograph of the Pope and so on okay whirring one of my university professors not the one I mentioned earlier actually one of my white Western University professors converted to Islam and he converted to a peculiar small splinter group of Islam that only exists in Indonesia was fitted indonesia so you have questions now remember I looked into it when I found out that guy converted to this peculiar form Islam I did some google searching and actually it it seems really harmless it's not a scary or militant group but still the question has to be asked your concerns have to be there friend of yours and so on gets involved these things now Bao means if if your friend converts the mainstream Catholicism you should ask questions also she asked what their motives are should I you should take a human interest in their well-being and and how that religion may well change their lives but if we're being fair and equal here why do we not apply the same standards of scrutiny in Buddhism even if you are Pro Buddhists if you are watching this video and you're a devout believer in what you consider Orthodox Buddhism you should want these same standards to be applied or even higher standards why is it paradoxically that in Buddhism we seem to have a much lower standard of scrutiny a lower standard of skepticism we regarded as less problematic if you're talking about a small splinter group in California that is run by white Western people that doesn't recognize the legitimacy of the equivalent of the Pope in their form of the religion so you know we have splinter groups here in the West within Tibetan Buddhism that do not recognize the Dalai Lama that have their own separate claims to authority that should be worrying for the same reasons I've just explained and we have these terrified of Buddhist groups that don't recognize the authorities in Thailand don't recognize the authorities in Sri Lanka well why is that why are you a small separate splinter group when you look down the list of the so-called meditation masters at the bar Center which is the center that Sam Harris endorses I think uncritically I think stupidly I think shamefully given the guy's whole stance on religion cults etc the main thing you see is that the claims to legitimacy by these would-be religious leaders who are almost entirely white and Western I think they had one african-american woman but there were no Asians there a list of pastors this Buddhism is an Asian dominated religion I mean if so many suppose enlightened masters teaching meditation none of them are Chinese none of them are Sri Lankan none of them are from India you know raises questions again even even with Islam if you had a Muslim group that only exists in Indonesia - well why is that why doesn't exist in Saudi Arabia or Palestine or all over the world there must be some peculiar reason why this group rejects the authority of other mainstream aspects of the religion there are questions to ask I think it ultimately is just a kind of racism whereby white Western people do not want to question the authority and legitimacy of other white Western people who become leaders in Buddhism and they should they should question it more if I were to represent myself to you if I just said you look I am a member of the sium nakiya from Sri Lanka cm nakai in Sri Lanka is one of the two mainstream the equivalent of mainstream Catholicism in Tara by the Buddhism it's a mainstream slow moving slightly authoritarian organization you know same way as in Catholicism there's a hierarchy there are people in charge there are always questions about you know financial corruption and this sort of thing just like a thoughtless ism it's a big enough religion that it has those features of a hierarchical slow-moving movement and if anyone wants to change something in that version of the religion it's going to take a very long time to get anywhere for and people do people do seek reform you know they say uh these things were doing at the funerals you know we should clean up what's been going on with funeral ceremonies or whatever the issue of the day is including you know in Sri Lanka they're open debates about things like eating beef whether or not they should try to ban the production of cow meat and so on but anyway all those all those debates are ongoing but it's within the framework of old fashioned conventional hierarchical religion if I present myself to you as just a member of that religion okay you've got the same reasons to be skeptical of me as you would be skeptical of a mainstream Catholic but if you look down the list of the the white faces who are supposedly the gurus and meditation masters at a place like the bar Center a place that Sam Harris so uncritically and stupidly respects and supports what are their claims to legitimacy and what are their reasons for rejecting the central authorities that normally would define legitimacy in Buddhism well the number one pattern I see is simply so and so it gives the person's name so-and-so has been meditating since 1973 and has been teaching meditation since 1976 and opened his own Meditation Center in 1986 of course the years are different for each person and so these are not credentials this should make you more suspicious of the person not less I'll tell you why if I work for someone else as a cook if I work as a cook in the kitchen in a real hierarchy let's say at a hotel chain I'm a cook in the Hilton Hotel then you know I have to be able to cook good food by that hotel chain standard I'm I'm not saying it's an objectives it's a subjective standard but it's a hierarchical slow-moving standard the Hilton Hotel chain any big hotel company it's a bit like the Catholic Church there's a talk there in relationship and I don't get to just decide what's gonna taste good what kind of food I want to cocaine but if I inherit money from my parents if I win the lottery if I somehow get money and then I open my own restaurant I'm the boss I'm the one person in charge then I can cook anything I want and nobody can really tell me that my food tastes like crap or I'm not a very good cook and I can hire anyone I want to be to cook with me there's actually no accountability and no kind of subjective standard applied to me much less an objective standard the levels of scrutiny and skepticism we apply to Buddhism should at least be as high if not higher than what we apply to scholars of ancient Greek and I'll tell you why scholars of ancient Greek will very rarely make claims this philosophy this psychological concept from the ancient Greek text still gets effects today I do once in a while but with Buddhism so with ancient Greek sorry I'll stick with aged Greek for a second so with ancient Greek most of the claims you're gonna get are to authenticity or to the quality of interpretation or to some sort of cultural and literary significance of what your claims are if you're the expert if you're the interpreter of ancient Greek but yeah once in a while there might be claims meant for there might be claims made about what this means today why this matters today how this can help you live a more meaningful life etc with Buddhism you have it both ways people are making claims about meditation down on the one hand are supposed to be demonstrably authentic authoritative etc and on the other hand are supposed to have pseudo medical benefits for you today they're supposed to make you ten percent happier they're supposed to make you more focused more intelligent more productive hope you earn more money help you get over to your dough force help you attract members of the opposite sex help you lead a better sex life or help you live in celibacy every possible crackpot promise of the pseudo-scientific scene has been hung on to Buddhist meditation including by the type of white Western people you see teaching at the bar Center so we have both of the problems of the note lining here when we're looking at white Western gurus self-appointed experts we have the problem of the cook who owns the kitchen we have the problem of who says you're an expert you do you started meditating in 73 you decided to start teaching meditation in 76 didn't get a diploma didn't pass a test didn't get a driver's license didn't get any kind of licensing or 800k you decided you were teacher and a couple years later you got the money somehow and you opened a center and you know now you're an expert and nobody can question you for one thing nobody will really be motivated to question you anyone who thinks you're a crackpot they just walk out the door they don't show up in the first place or they show up they listen for five minutes and walk of the door nobody gets rewarded for a critical engagement with this kind of self-appointed expert and the other hand because you're the head of your own little hierarchy you don't you don't recognize any Popol it's right any Popish or people we have both words English language polish and people you don't recognize any Pope ish authority shall we say over you to scrutinize you and so on well you're making up your own nonsense and why not recognize those authorities why is it that these self-appointed white Western leaders of contemporary Buddhism and meditation starters why don't they deeply respect the people who are the equivalent of the Pope in their religion why aren't they trying to become part of a formal hierarchy such as the CM nakiya in sri lanka or any of the mainstream organizations in Thailand now I'll give you a best-case scenario in a worst-case scenario answer that question it's not just hypothetical question real quick best case scenario would be that these white Western leaders are actually real experts in those Asian versions of the religion that they have spent years becoming fluent in a language such as Thai Sinhalese Cambodian that they're fluent in one of the contemporary living languages of tera vaada Buddhism and that through their deep study their profound socio-political understanding of what's wrong with the religion they have an analysis of the ways in which that Southeast Asian religion is corrupt and they tried to reform it from the inside but despairing after some period time they decided to instead set up their own Foundation and try to reform from the outside that is the best case scenario good luck finding one example of a person who is in that position sadly what you are much more likely to find is that these people these white Western gurus absolutely avoid any critique of those Asian Buddhist authorities one of the reasons for that being as soon as they engage in the critique then there are other people who can challenge them so if I say conventional Asia and authority on Buddhism is wrong about something because I'm a poly scholar I have read the original text I know what it means now we've got a contestable claim right that's like having a specific rity cat the Catholic Chur say look the Catholic Church teaches you about the virgin birth but let's look at what the Scriptures actually say actually historically that one's very easy to prove you can go into the history of the text and pretty rapidly show look the original text did not even contain this legend it didn't contain a myth that the mother of Jesus was a virgin so this is a spurious and false notion okay yes theoretically in the best case scenario it is possible that you would have a white Western Buddhist movement that has splintered off and formed its own faction for these reasons tragically this is almost never the case and among the reasons for that is exactly the level of legitimacy and simply hard work that would be required for any group of Westerners to engage in that right some have tried and some have dropped out you know this guy jack Kornfield he's now a total snake oil salesman but in terms of the history of his movement he started by proclaiming some of these things those guys were reacted to forms of corruption that were endemic especially in Tibetan Buddhism both Asian Tibetan Buddhism Tibetans who had come to America and white Western people who had appropriated and reinvented Tibet most they saw the corruption that said okay let's have some kind of critical tera vaada based response to this the results are not good and look jack Kornfield any of these guys jack Kornfield has a PhD have you read his thesis have you even looked at the Wikipedia article on the university that gave him that PhD would you call that a real university would you trust a medical doctor who had their diploma from a university that doesn't really exist and that at that time wasn't even licensed to give up a cheese and so on who do you think his supervisor was that University what treated what tradition is he represented what's his source of authority as I say in a best-case scenario yes your religious authority could be based on brilliant original research new translations new examinations of ancient texts newer it's possible but sadly in the 21st century just ain't so instead in the same way that we have to look skeptically at a splinter group that has formed a separate faction from Catholicism and doesn't recognize the Pope and so on even though there may be real causes you know there's obviously corruption in the Catholic Church there are obviously problems in that religion there although there may be causes we sympathize with for why that splinter group arose we have to be incredibly skeptical incredibly rigorous and examining why the group exists and what its aims really are because nine times out of ten at least nine times out of ten the reality is that people broke off and formed this separate faction simply for the ego and authority of the people in charge why are there so many tiny white Western Buddhist groups and so few that resemble the Catholic Church in any way why are there so few that have a hierarchy or just just simply have respect for a leader based in Asia for a conventional monastic system s-so Buddhism is all about that's the core of the religion if I were recording this video six months ago I could have said if you think sam harris is a genius just look at his excuses for why he eats meat for why he is not VIII okay today the guy is vegan maybe a few months from now he's going to give up being vegan and go back to eat meat I don't know but what I'm here to say to you today is if you think sam harris is brilliant sadly just take a look at what he has to say about buddhism read a little bit of what I wrote soon here I wrote him just an email it is very sad for me to see your uncritical reception of a complete charlatan and the person of Joseph Goldstein and that you are willing to treat him as an objective and detached authority on texts he has never studied as primary sources already we have such a profound problem here if you want to record a podcast you're a major public intellectual like Sam Harris if you want to record a podcast and tear about Buddhism why would your expert be Joseph Goldstein why Joseph Colson yes his resume his CV listed on the the bar center VAR re is the center that Sam Harris endorses if if you can interview anyone in the world I would understand why you would enter interview someone with a PhD from Cambridge University who represents the hidebound British tradition of Buddhist studies I can understand why you would choose that interview there's a very different tradition incidentally in Germany it's not very robust right now but the Germans who last 200 years they had a very strong academic tradition of the study of Buddhism you could get one of those guys on the radio you could invite one of those guys to do an interview in a podcast I understand that on the other hand I completely understand and I myself was Patra I completely understand why you would want to interview a a village monk a monk from a small town in Sri Lanka a monk from a small town in northeastern Thailand who really represents something authentic about tera vaada Buddhism a guy who actually gets his hands dirty performing funeral rituals and going to the charnel grounds and actually you know ripping up rags and sewing the rags together to make a Buddhist you know gown a Buddhist robe we used the word robe in English a Buddhist robe out of old cloth I completely respect that that's that's closer to anthropology of course and then again if it's about someone who's authoritative someone who's an authority figure then you want to instead of the village monk maybe a monk who is up near the the top of the hierarchy you could be interviewing anyone but instead you're interviewing Joseph Goldstein and what credentials does he have he he got interested in Buddhism back when he was working in the Peace Corps the United States Peace Corps in Thailand didn't learn how to speak Thai didn't learn how to read Pali he's at decades and decades didn't learn any of these languages to me that's a failure all right if if you got really passionate about Judaism and you never learn Hebrew I you became a some kind of Jewish rabbi a self-made rabbi who doesn't recognize any of the established churches he doesn't even recognize Reform Judaism you became an independent rabbi with your own little faction and opened your own Meditation Center because believe me Judaism has its own form of meditation it's nothing unique to Buddhism about the concept of meditation Norman Asus's amore o OG and where did you learn Hebrew what if you don't know Hebrew you don't know Greek you don't know Yiddish what what kind of a rabbi are you an English language only rabbi and the sister decades decades of preaching a religion you're not an expert in or you don't you've never never encountered the primary source texts or any of the problems in the history of the religion I've complete content for this coming life and he is a self-made religious authority on exactly this pattern he went to Thailand he started meditating at some point he declared himself a teacher at some point he opened his own meditation studio who knows where the money for that came from it's not like there are too many cooks in the kitchen when you're the boss of that meditation studio nobody else is in charge of you nobody else was scrutinizing you not morally not ethically not in terms of textual authenticity not in terms of outcomes there's no scientific team measuring whether or not you're pseudo medical claims oh the psychological and health benefits of meditation actually get results and good look if you if you want to look up the peer-reviewed research on that stuff it's really depressing it's all a game of using the most vaguely you know vaguely defined terms possible I had a friend someone I met online here hi Rama and she was briefly convinced by some of these articles if not connected to jack Kornfield I don't think he wrote them but I think she found out about them through his his circle you know they were making the same claims that Christians make about the efficacy of prayer you know like prayer and singing can reduce your subjectively perceived stress levels of course they can of course they can the social experience of going to a church and praying and singing gee it reduces stress it makes people feel better it makes cancer patients feel better about the fact that they're dying of cancer or that they're suffering through cancer therapy so what did absolutely nothing supernatural within these same claims are made for Buddhist meditation and they you know they try to define you know subjective stress levels as as vaguely and in as confusing way as possible so you think this is telling you there's a real measurable medical benefit but guess what these claims made of a prayer and meditation it's not just the placebo effect but if you compare them to the same effects of going to the gym of physical exercise because we do the same types of research how does going to the gym help cancer patients how does going to the gym help elderly retired people who are suffering social isolation guess what physical exercise is more effective than meditation and so there's a whole pseudo science pseudo medical literature backing up the type of [ __ ] claims that guys like Jace of Kotori Joseph Goldstein and the bar Center trying to make money from okay you can investigate it for yourself I'm not getting any deeper into it here but I'm starting off by asking the question of anyone in the world about tera vaada Buddhism why would this be the guy sam harris interviews and the answer is that sam harris himself is not objective he has a subjective personal connection - this Meditation Center the bar meditations that are and - Joseph Goldstein he's known Joseph Goldstein for 20 years or so etc okay Sam Harris would never report on the philosophy of ancient Greek in as biased and unfair away as he's here reporting on Buddhism he would never report on critique or discuss Islam in the sloppy subjective non rigorous way that he's here reported on Buddhism and he would never talk about the health benefits or the psychological benefits of prayer in the sloppy self-indulgent way that he's here talking about meditation okay now if you're watching this video and you are a Buddhist or you are Pro Buddhists you should care about this stuff even more than I do I'm a former poly scholar I'm a former scholar of Buddhism but I'm not a member of the Buddhist religion today I'm I'm detached to a fault about this issue but still if this is your religion if this is the future of your religion you got to hear about it joke Joseph Goldstein even worse Joseph Goldstein is someone who has an active interest in bamboozling you although you do not have the expertise to laugh out loud and how Aegis Lee he's misrepresenting his sources etc rather than someone who was interested in informing you or debunking misconceptions about the religion the ancient or the modern religion look man my heart's not in it to read this I'll try to keep going for one more second so this is me addressing sam harris directly please pause to reflect on how absurdly uncritical your response is to his discussing mara in contrast to the way you'd respond to a christian discussing satan or perhaps some other religion describing a trickster demon etcetera this came up in sam Harris's debate with well not even debate his interview with his uncritical promotion of this guy goldstein you're talking about having visions of Marah how would you react if you were talking to someone who was a Muslim talking about having visions of Satan how would you react if you were talking to someone who was supposed to be a professor of ancient Greek philosophy talking about having visions of Plato or Socrates let alone Zeus and Athena I think you'd respond in a more intellectually rigorous way especially if you were sam harris professional atheist professional self defined skeptic but instead he acts like any soft-hearted [ __ ] flower child in broadcasting this [ __ ] from the most corrupt the most self-indulgent the most self-centered the the most despicable form of Buddhism that has ever existed anywhere in the world and why do I say that about the seemingly antiseptic white western version of Buddhism that exists at the bar centre and at other similar centers that accept money in exchange for meditation to white people doesn't that seem very hygienic and clean it's more despicable precisely because they're not getting out and dealing with the social and political reality that real Buddhism plunges you into gee you know this guy Goldstein I forget how my decades and decades ago I think in the 1960s he did he worked in Thailand with the Peace Corps she was he interested in the fact that the United States at that time was dropping more bombs on the tiny country of Laos right next to Thailand they're dropping more bombs on Laos than they ever dropped on Germany in World War two you know that that Indochina theater Laos Cambodia Vietnam at just that time they're dropping more bombs they did on all of Germany and Japan combined during World War two you know if instead of taking the path he had taken of opening his own meditation studio and teaching Westview if he had just stayed there and trained to perform funeral rituals for local peasants in that area and he had learned he'd had the humility to learn the local language Goldstein I just heard his voice he can't pronounce the word Buddha correctly he can't pronounce Buddhism correctly the U vowel in that word in both Pali and Sanskrit difference between uh and ooh is that there are two different spellings there are two different words okay like you've gotten this level you're supposedly a great expert a great Swami a great guru and you can't pronounce Buddha is very common for me to hear the voice of these people they're supposedly tera vaada Buddhist leaders and they can't pronounce tera bada they'd say there've a de I've faced a face I've had encounters people with that whether they're people with PhDs or not whether they're self-made gurus or not yeah it's bad I was saying a minute ago that I'm completely detached with this stuff the sense in which I'm not detached is exactly that I care about the suffering of these people I care about this history I care about political reality I mean the meditation doesn't work the in that sense I don't have to care about it because it disproves itself it's like phony cures for cancer it's like praying to get rich it doesn't work so I don't have to debunk it it debunks itself you can kid yourself for a while if you're watching this video go ahead you could listen to the same interview between sam harris professional skeptic and an goldstein professional steak whole new l salesman you can sit there nodding your head in agreement when he's talking about having visions of maura his MA ARA the long a mara okay mmm yeah this is completely respectable intellectual discourse I see no reason to be critical or scheduling oh yeah oh gee mindfulness meditation ology mmm the passing and meditation that all sounds perfectly scientific I don't have to either question um you know measurable outcomes nor do I have to question how this connects to the the ancient textual sources written in Pali there's language that almost nobody home yeah sure hmm yeah I can totally you know accept that some guy who just moved to California and rented a room and called himself a meditation instructor I can totally accept how that guy would know what he's talking about man village blood ism gets a bad reputation and it gets a bad reputation for good reasons okay lived in Cambodia Thailand Laos I spent a little bit of time in Sri Lanka but it was very memorable I lived in the same Buddhist monastery that bhikkhu bodhi used to live in and I had the same bookshelf I was reading books that he had signed that he had owned that he had written I've had a lot of real interesting experiences in Buddhist Asia but yeah guess what if he had stayed in Asia for any length of time at that level I think he would come back with a very different set of anti sights a very different set of insights into human condition because you go through that suffering learning a foreign language a horror foreign language like Cambodia is suffering you suffer doing it it requires humility to struggle to really communicate with people in Cambodia especially when you're not the one paying the bills if you're not the boss if you're not the one in charge Cambodians will really sneer at you and really be short-tempered with you and really will not like the fact that you're mispronouncing words if you're wealthy or if you're in a position of authority that's different then Cambodians don't treat you that way this is a generalisation beast experience Thailand and Laos different stories feel like you different story but I mean we're not talking about learning French or Spanish or German many people say that learning Italian is quite relaxing and enjoyable I'm willing to believe that if your first language is English learning Italian maybe a vacation no learning these languages is a ton of hard work and sorrow learning a language like Pali incredibly difficult much more difficult than learning ancient Greek because the books and other resources are garbage you have to do so much to work yourself these people go through none of that and they become self-appointed Dharma masters and if anyone on earth should be skeptical in receiving those claims to Authority both there were claims to authenticity religious authority and their claims to having real-world outcomes and semi scientific benefits the meditation to G if anyone should be critical of that it should be Sam Harris he should be the most critical person in the world and he's not he's the least continue with my met letter here I would go further to say that you ie not an abstract you but Sam Harris specifically would never give this type of uncritical reception to a scholar of ancient Greek nor even to a scholar of Shakespeare you would demand much more critically that even a professed expert in these non-religious fields much more carefully demonstrate the validity of his or her opinions yet here you are as uncritical as any cult flunky in broadcasting a bunch of baffle gab but a religion that you know almost nothing about as a concession I must add in the context of discussing Islam etc it is genuinely true that Buddhism presents an appealing alternative even if it is just the lesser of two evils and so you may be inclined to turn off the skeptical side of your brain in receiving such as snake oil salesman as goldstein as a further concession I would also say that tera vaada Buddhism is the lesser of two evils compared to many other forms of Buddhism devoured by contrast some horrendous varieties of Buddhism in both Tibet and Japan can applause here it's also very good sincere I understand I sympathize the sam harris is accustomed to the critique of islam to some extent the critique of Christianity and the critique of extreme cold groups cult groups that kill people I understand that Buddhism is not menacing in the same way it's not scary it's not threatening but that is not a valid excuse to have this uncritical idiotic attitude towards religion it's not and it wouldn't be an excuse for ancient Greek philosophy either even though ancient Greek philosophy isn't killing anybody it's not a threat and you know look let's put pause for one second think about what the word respect means in this concept let's say to you that I have tremendous respect for the Department of ancient Greek at my own University here in Canada hypothetical there is a department of ancient Greek here let's suppose I say to you we have a great team of professors here I have so much respect for this department of ancient Greek I have faith in them I believe in them this is a great university department these are great scholars still every single thing they say I'm gonna scrutinize for myself and on myriad issues I may disagree with the professors and I may disagree with the department as an authority and people have conversation of this oh you know professor so-and-so oh yeah he's a great professor I have a lot of respect for him he's a real authority's a real Ange he's a real expert on ancient Greek he's a real authority oh yeah yeah but you know did you hear this stuff he said about Aristotle and slavery it's it's nuts it's completely crazy oh yeah boy he's out to lunch on that you know Wow you know I mean he's he's so enthusiastic about trying to glorify the status of slaves in ancient Athens that you know I mean he just departs from the texts and he really misrepresents whatever stall is said was Limerick this doesn't mean I don't respect his authority it doesn't mean he's a fraud it doesn't mean he's not a real scholar of ancient Greek it doesn't mean he can't read ancient Greek it just means I disagree with him in a sense it means I respect him enough to bother to disagree with him I'm still reading his work or I'm still listening to his lectures I may still be paying thousands of dollars in tuition but yeah my critical faculties are turned on even though there is no threat of violence there's no threat of world war 3 etc that's spurious again if you are a Buddhist if you are Pro Buddhist you should be demanding that Buddhist philosophy be taken as seriously as ancient Greek philosophy and you should be demanding that the religion be scrutinized in all of these ways I don't know how much more this letter I'm gonna read look the lesser of two evils is still evil okay the fact that some terabyte of Buddhism may be much less threatening than Islam doesn't mean it's good the fact that Christian claims about prayer having medical benefits are ridiculous doesn't mean that Buddhist claims about meditation having medical benefits and psychological benefit doesn't mean they're any less ridiculous i say to sam harris however in your interview with goldstein you have conducted yourself as shamefully as any flower child ignoramus who signs up for a 10-day vie pass in the course you of all people should know how to question someone in a rigorous way about the extraordinary claims they're making both in the realm of pseudo medical claims of meditation and also in the claims to canonical authority / authenticity made by someone like goldstein who never even became an expert in modern tile ism via that modern tile language much less in the ancient Pali Canon or an understanding the differences between the two skipping to the end here thank you for your time I understand that you are trying to engage with these issues sincerely but you were engaging with Buddhism guilelessly and from a position of ignorance and gullibility that is painful to behold really please ask yourself how you would receive a scholar of ancient Greek philosophy who made any of the same claims you would I think be much more shrewd both in questioning the connection of the ancient sources and also you'd be very rigorous in questioning any claim to pseudo medical benefits being provable in the modern world today on the basis of the advice of an ancient Greek source no matter how nebulous were psychologically suggestive the translation into modern English may be sam harris is famous for a good reason i just i started this video an hour ago reflecting on a professor i had back in the year 2001 and he became famous because what he was talking about became more important to the world became more important politically after 2001 ok sam harris chose to discuss a bunch of issues he really chose to base his career around a bunch of issues that became more and more important over time within his life if he had chosen 20 years ago back when he apparently converted to a form of [ __ ] self-indulgent pay-to-play meditation based buddhism if he had chosen back then to base his academic career on buddhist philosophy he would not be famous he could have become an expert in buddhism he had every opportunity and he says what over 20 years ago he first started meditating he first signed up for these incredibly depraved and corrupt from my perspective depraved and corrupt forms of westernized Buddhism and he's still a fan of them he still supports them why why did he become an expert in Islam and this critique of Islam he's devoted someone why did he do that instead of becoming a an expert in Buddhism and a critic of Buddhism well I'll tell you Sam Harris is famous for a reason he talks about issues that millions of people really care about and that are really politically loaded today Islam gun control war violence if he had spent his time talking about the Cambodian Civil War the Cambodian border conflicts this is stuff I have written articles about if he had spent his time writing about the Sri Lankan Civil War if he'd gotten passionate about Buddhism in Sri Lanka and this conflict between Buddhism and Hinduism in Sri Lanka if you had gotten passionate about the new Buddhist movement in India the caste system Hinduism Jainism Buddhism and what's going on in India today he would not be famous but his opinions about Buddhism would have the respect of a small number of people like me and instead while he's legitimately his expertise on Islam Christianity and a number of issues that he's spent decades talking about written books about cetera he does not have my respect when he's talking about Buddhism he has my complete contempt and whether you are Buddhist atheist anti Buddhist whatever your position is on this issue even view the biggest fan of Sam Harris in the world Sam Harris should have your contempt to