Anyway, there are scientists with a Buddhist view of life, who are more than willing to cover this blurred area of research and conclude on experiments in a manner that almost validates the “metaphysical assumptions” (or dogmatic conclusions) of Buddhism. In the New York Times, September 14, 2003, we learn about one of them: “In the spring of 1992, out of the blue, the fax machine in Richard Davidson’s office at the department of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison spat out a letter from Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama. Davidson, a Harvard-trained neuroscientist, was making a name for himself studying the nature of positive emotions, and word of his accomplishments had made it to northern India. The exiled spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists was writing to offer the minds of his monks – in particular, their meditative prowess – for scientific research. Most self-respecting American neuroscientists would shrink from, if not flee from, an invitation to study Buddhist meditation, viewing the topic as impossibly fuzzy and, as Davidson recently conceded, very flaky. But the Wisconsin professor, a longtime meditator himself – he took leave from graduate school to travel through India and Sri Lanka to learn eastern meditation practices – leapt at the opportunity.” Now, from this description, what are the chances that Richard Davidson will eventually find sustained Buddhist meditation to be equivalent to many neuroscience markers indicative of positive brain states and their effects (emotional control and flexibility, heightened awareness, well-being, health, empathy and so on)?

Of course this line of experimental verification rests on the supposition that brain states and states of consciousness are correlated or even somehow “identical”, the basic idea being, that the brain is the seat of consciousness and as such highly plastic and wireable – characteristics, that to the enthusiastic neuroscience-neo-Buddhists seem to perfectly fit the traditional Buddhist philosophy of consciousness and understanding of reality. But there are obvious fallacies involved in this research. It is worth noting that apart from the underlying “metaphysical assumptions” there is really nothing sensational in the experimental proof that trained meditators tend to produce stable and specific neurological patterns in their brain activity during practice. That is only a question of systematic conditioning and training. The research problems arise with the understanding and interpretation of this correlation partly based on introspection, since you need the subject to identify his own state of mind. Due to his simplistic identification, the somewhat biased neuroscientist looks for any possible resemblance between the neurological data and the “metaphysical assumptions” and/or (spectacular) positive effects, which makes a case for his claim that Buddhist meditation “works”. Just study these excited statements by Richard Davidson, now a close friend of Dalai Lama, in the above-mentioned article: “In Buddhist tradition,” Davidson explains, “meditation is a word that is equivalent to a word like sports in the U.S. It’s a family of activity, not a single thing.” Each of these meditative practices calls on different mental skills, according to Buddhist practitioners. The Wisconsin researchers, for example, are focusing on three common forms of Buddhist meditation. ”One is focused attention, where they specifically train themselves to focus on a single object for long periods of time,” Davidson says. “The second area is where they voluntarily cultivate compassion. It's something they do every day, and they have special exercises where they envision negative events, something that causes anger or irritability, and then transform it and infuse it with an antidote, which is compassion. They say they are able to do it just like that,” he says, snapping his fingers. “The third is called ‘open presence’. It is a state of being with an acute awareness of whatever thought, emotion or sensation is present, without reacting to it. They describe it as pure awareness.” And then compare with the experimental findings in the second area, the cultivation of compassion: The “Olympic athletes, the gold medalists, of meditation” in comparison with beginners showed high amplitude gamma waves (a state generally associated with attention, conscious perception, and learning) particularly in the left prefrontal cortex (an area of the brain associated in some studies with positive emotions, anti-depressant activity and inhibition of fear and anxiety). This made Davidson speculate whether compassion could be exercised like a muscle – a jargon now popping up everywhere on the internet: “Just as aerobics sculpt the muscles, so mental training sculpts the grey matter in ways scientists are only beginning to fathom,” and: “Davidson has also shown that monks who meditate have a capacity for happiness that is 7-8 times what non-meditators have. Exercising the "compassion muscle" of the brain strengthens the feeling of the emotions associated with it - enthusiasm, alertness, interest, and happiness.”

What is wrong? Well, you might wonder, how empathy in the first place became a discipline of training and technique and a field of competition and performance. What view of the human nature lies hidden here? Is it not a contradiction per se of empathy? And you could investigate a little further and start to raise questions in the light of a more complex and total understanding of the phenomenon of man and empathy. What is empathy, what defines it, and how can empathy perhaps be made measurable? These are not simple questions, but questions, that contain great philosophical complexity and importance. The neuroscience experimenting and measuring performed by Davidson address none of these considerations in a satisfactory manner. It is based on electromagnetic devices and the body’s electromagnetic properties, but this is only a very limited phenomenology. We can, for example, not be sure what a heightened level of gamma waves actually implicates, or for that matter what any other neurological pattern of electromagnetic activity implicates. It is certainly an epiphenomenon, but of what? Many (unknown) factors on different levels except “the identified specific mental processes” could contribute here – just consider what the role of the dobbelganger might be? This is a central question, since it is perfectly conceivable that gamma waves in individual cases are consistent with a state of pure egotism on the soul level, which in many definitions would rule out empathy as a “cause”. How can you possibly measure the purity or authenticity of a motive? What is intention? It is not physical, and it is not even psychological. Intention is a subtle synthesis of will, feeling and thinking in the human I, and in the last resort it is a purely spiritual structure. To form and know an intention is essentially not an electromagnetic or neurological process. Fortunately, the clever neuroscientist has himself provided us with the adequate analogy to understand this difference, since you can train any muscle, even the compassion muscle, for any number of reasons and become an Olympic champion! It is documented that yogis can control many body functions, which are not normally to be controlled, and apparently that goes for specific brain states too. But this fact has no bearing on their moral status. On that account we can not tell, whether they are loving or selfish people, and what their intentions are. A black magician can do the same trick. Davidson’s philosophy of man is all too simplistic and mechanical, he is jumping to his Buddhist conclusions, and we only need to employ normal, intelligent thinking in order to understand that. Would you say that a monk with no parental experience in his life and a high level of “dharma waves” are 7-8 times more empathetic than the caring mother without a trace of gamma activity? We can easily understand the nonsensical character of this kind of consideration without having recourse to the more complete vision of the phenomenon of man found in anthroposophy, according to which thinking, feeling and willing are engaging the whole of man on all levels (body, soul and spirit), while none of these processes are actually seated in or originate from the material body!

Again, you have to evaluate this training of “empathy” on the background of the complete Buddhist concept of meditation, which according to Davidson also includes focusing and open monitoring. When you are assessing the actual conditioning of brain and personality, you need to understand this interplay. The latter form of meditation involves an inhibition of normal cognitive processing through being non-responsive, disengaged and suppressing ego-functions. This psycho-neurological potential influences the “empathy” training, and you have to raise a simple question: this kind of laboratory empathy without any attached existential reality and with suppressed ego-functioning, inhibited thinking and blocking of will impulses – what is the actual function and nature of that concept, when you look at the total picture? Could it lead to the opposite effect and imply a blunting of concrete empathy (empathy in moral action based on moral fantasy)? Those “gold medalists” of laboratory empathy, who spend many ours every day on training in isolation, when can they spare a moment for an act of empathy? Are they not driving out every spontaneity and genuineness from their emotional and volitional life? Is it possible at all to enjoy an emotional and volitional life amputated from the social dimension, and what about the obvious mentalization of those spheres of life – a mentalization that inhibits thinking? A prerequisite for moral action and moral fantasy is an active, free and clear thinking, converging on intuition, and the presence of an I, a person. If a seemingly empathetic act is not sustained by personal will, feeling and thought, it will not be seen and received as empathy. In fact, the complete Buddhist concept of practising meditation could very well undermine the most vital elements of real empathy through its depersonalization, introversion, passivity and mental indifference. Without any idea of the complex synthesis of real empathy, you can not critically evaluate the effect of Buddhist “empathy” training. You have to use some standard of comparison relevant to the phenomenon you are investigating, and it is a methodological error to compare beginners with skilled performers and use the Buddhist exercise as a frame of reference, because you are then begging the question. Who in the first place says that the exercise or the measured phenomenon is really empathy? It could be anything but empathy and have negative consequences for an empathetic life!  

Let us consider this possibility on a concrete historical background and try to ignore Dalai Lamas modern image management and western Shangri-La romanticism. The Dalai Lamas, in spite of their asserted infinite empathy and wisdom, have not had moral fantasy nor freedom of thought to understand that ordinary, non-monastic Tibetans, that is about 90 percent of the population in the early 1950es, needed some kind of education as a human right. When the 14^th Dalai Lama came into power, 95 percent of the population in Tibet was illiterate – a condition comparable only to the European level of general education more than 200 years earlier, when in my own country the king took the appropriate initiative to bring education to the rural population, which by the beginning of the nineteenth century was by law established as a right for all children. Why is that? It is obvious to any conscientious man or woman – and has historically been so for a majority of people in Christian cultures for hundreds of years – that children need education. But it was never obvious to the Dalai Lamas in their Potala Palace, and the same goes for all the other human freedoms and rights that he is now advocating everywhere. It was not his Buddhist wisdom or empathy training that brought these insights to him, but the meeting with other cultures, politics and historical events. It did not cross his enlightened mind that his subjects had any individual rights, before he was himself forced into refuge and had to set up a new power base in Dharamsala – then suddenly the Tibetan people was invested with human rights. Why was it not possible for a supposed Buddha to show more sympathetic insight than an apparatnik in the course of history? The present Dalai Lama has now a historically unique chance in books and speeches to ponder that question and many others, which concern his own being and karma as a “conscious reincarnation”, but he seems very keen on avoiding confrontation with his autocratic past and embraces instead all the western humanistic and Christian ideals of human worth in his ongoing media show. Let us take a simple lesson out of this: When there is no free and active thinking, there is neither moral fantasy nor moral action!