Arri Eisen

(note: this was among my to-be-reviewed books that ended up in the hands of the wrong people when moving 4/1/18 - see https://btripp-books.livejournal.com/206862.html for details - I did brief reviews of these lost books on recall)
(finished 12/15/17)
This was a LibraryThing.com “Early Reviewer” program book, so I really regret losing it and my notes on it. This grew out of the Emory Tibet Science Initiative, with half of it being the science side trying to engage the Tibetan traditions, and half of it being a Tibetan monk learning the Western scientific model. It was a fascinating read, and I was sharing bits from it with friends while I was working my way through it, so I know I had a lot of bookmarks in there highlighting “the good stuff”, which I wish I could be bringing to you at this point.… (meer)

This thoughtful and meditative book examines the intersection of the Western scientific and Tibetan Buddhist traditions, often with illuminating results. For instance, the passage explaining cell differentiation through comparison to a group of monks divvying up tasks to build a new monastery took this complex phenomenon and made it immediately understandable.

Eisen and Konchok cover a broad range of topics--everything from evolution to morality to mental health--and it's fascinating to see how each tradition's standard understanding of these issues, and reaction to the other's understanding, brings new ways of thinking about or approaches to them. It's an ambitious breadth of topics, and I was often frustrated that the authors didn't devote more time to each, even as I was excited to move on to the next intriguing chapter and topics. I very much hope Eisen, Konchok, and the other participants in this science-Buddhism exchange collaborate on future volumes, and will eagerly read them if they do.… (meer)

Teaching science to Tibetan Buddhist monastics in exile is an interesting project. The heart of this book is about how faith and belief can help people of science, and how science and medicine can help people of faith. It moves back and forth between a modern scientist, Arri Eisen, and a Tibetan monk scholar, Yungdrung Konchok. For the most part, the questions asked are interesting, but the presentation is rather dry. (It took me a while to get through.) There is some repetition and unnecessary skipping around. At times, it felt like they weren’t entirely sure what book they were writing.… (meer)