Roger Walsh: An Honorary Buddhist Geek

I was both surprised and delighted, at the end of a recent interview with Roger Walsh, to hear him give this answer to my question about what he would say to a group of listeners who may identify as Buddhist Geeks.

Roger: [Laughs] Well, Buddhist Geeks, I love that phrase by the way, and I’m just delighted to know of what you’re doing and that you’re putting this information out on the Web and making it available to people.

Yes, something does come to mind and that is that we’re in a unique time in history and we have a unique opportunity as well as unique challenges. This is the first time that Buddhism has not only crossed cultures, but has crossed eras. As Buddhism moved, for example, from India to Tibet to China to Japan across cultures in the past, but in coming to the West, it’s also transitioning across eras. It’s moving from an agricultural era to a post-modern era. And as such, there’s enormous sensitivity that’s needed to the different worldviews and understandings and assumptions that Westerners have as opposed to people from Oriental cultures, for example.

So, we are being called to look at the Buddhist tradition and to assess it in the light of contemporary knowledge and science and technology, and to differentiate between, for example, the wonderful trends, rational practices that Buddhism contains, the exquisite rational philosophy, and the pre-rational magic and myth, also sometimes associated with it. That’s a distinction that hasn’t necessarily been made before. So, that’s one thing. And it’s an example of the fact that when Buddhism was migrated into a new culture, in each and every case, it has transformed the culture, Buddhism itself is also being transformed. So, we’re called as contemporary Buddhist practitioners, as Buddhist Geeks, to both do the practices and absorb the wisdom, but also to bring a discerning, contemporary, post-modern eye and discernment to the tradition so that we can take what is most valuable and appropriate for our culture and time, and leave what isn’t so helpful. So, that’s the one thing.

The second thing that we’re called to do is to communicate these practices and teachings through contemporary means, and this is exactly what you’re doing with Buddhist Geeks. That is, to make use of contemporary media as a way of making these practices and ideas available to the largest possible community, and one of the main reasons I’m so delighted about what you’re doing.

Then there’s the third challenge that we face and the third opportunity, and that is, we not only have all the world’s spiritual traditions available as a unique feature of our time but, in addition, we face a unique challenge to our planet. We, really, for the first time in history, are at a time when we’re not only facing enormous social and global challenges but almost all of them in human cost. Which means that, what we call our global problems are actually global symptoms. They’re symptoms and expressions of our own individual and collective pathologies and immaturities.

And, yet, most of the remedial actions that are being taken to work with things like pollution or over-population or global warming or nuclear weapons, are military, economic, and political. So, they don’t really get at the psychological and spiritual roots from which our global crises have emerged. Yet, if we’re going to survive or if we’re going to handle these problems, if we’re going to keep the world as a livable eco-system, we’re going to have not only solve the external problems. We’re going to have to heal the internal forces and neuroses within us, between us, which created it in the first place, and that’s where Buddhism comes in. It has the potential for giving us practices to cultivate qualities like love and compassion and sensitivity and clarity that we, as individuals and as a society and a species, desperately need.

So, we are at this enormously pivotal time in human history where we desperately need what Buddhism and other contemplative practices have to offer us. And we are called as individuals and as a spiritual community to develop the skillful means that makes optimal use of contemporary technology and information to respond as well as we can both individually and collectively to these crises.

I felt his short answer, in many ways, summed up the driving force behind Buddhist Geeks (though he said it much better than I ever have). Every time we interview people like Roger, who are so clearly at the cutting edge of Buddhism and culture, I feel inspired to continue this strange exploration into what it means to be a Buddhist contemplative in the modern and, as Roger points out, the post-modern era that we now live in.