Why did Bodhidharma go to the east? Buddhism’s struggle with the mind in the world

This question—why did Bodhidharma come from the West?— is ubiquitous in Chinese Ch’an Buddhist literature. Though some see it as an arbitrary question intended merely as an opener to obscure puzzles, I think it represents a genuine intellectual puzzle: Why did Bodhidharma come from theWest—that is, fromIndia? Why couldn’tChina with its rich literary and philosophical tradition have given rise to Buddhism? We will approach that question, but I prefer to do so backwards. I want to ask instead, “why was it so fortuitous for the development of Buddhist philosophy that Bodhidharma wentEast? I will argue that by doing so he gave a trajectory to Buddhist thought about the mind and knowledge that allows certain issues that are obscure in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, despite their centrality to the Buddhist critique of Indian orthodoxy, to come into sharper relief, and hence to complete a project begun, but not completable, in that Indo-European context.     

Problems With the Argument From Fine Tuning

The argument from fine tuning is supposed to establish the existence of God from the fact that the evolution of carbon-based life requires the laws of physics and the boundary conditions of the universe to be more or less as they are. We demonstrate that this argument fails. In particular, we focus on problems associated with the role probabilities play in the argument. We show that, even granting the fine tuning of the universe, it does not follow that the universe is improbable, thus no explanation of the fine tuning, theistic or otherwise, is required.     

Children''s self-initiated approach to spiders

Seventeen school children were invited to stay in the presence of a harmless spider for 4 minutes under instructions which were designed mildly to encourage touching the spider but which left open a clear alternative of not touching. Subjects confronted the spider in dyads which differed in composition in terms of fear-level and sex of subjects. The main finding was that boys did not show any more approach when paired with girls, thus confirming previous negative findings in this regard. Other findings were that boys showed more approach than girls, level of fear interacted with sex of subject, and ‘fearless’ but not ‘fearful’ subjects showed more approach with repeated experience.