Mistaken Compassion: Tibetan Buddhist Perspectives on Neuroethics.

Tibetan Buddhist monastics in India hold nuanced views on neuroethical issues that align with theoretical Buddhist perspectives while also highlighting underexplored areas. Eleven semi-structured interviews revealed that monastics' perspectives on identity and authenticity, enhancement, and disorders of consciousness reinforce prior conceptual work on Buddhism and neuroethics. The interviews also identified future areas for inquiry, including the importance of community, challenges in acting from compassion, and the value of self-directed mental cultivation. Despite decades of collaboration between Buddhist monastics and neuroscientists, Buddhist perspectives remain largely absent from contemporary neuroethical analysis, a gap this empirical study begins to fill.

Study at a glance

Abstract

For more than 20 years, Western science education has been incorporated into Tibetan Buddhist monastics' training. In this time, there have been a number of fruitful collaborations between Buddhist monastics and neuroscientists, neurologists, and psychologists. These collaborations are unsurprising given the emphasis on phenomenological exploration of first-person conscious experience in Buddhist contemplative practice and the focus on the mind and consciousness in Buddhist theory. As such, Tibetan monastics may have underappreciated intuitions on the intersection of science, medicine, and ethics. Yet despite their overlapping interests, Buddhist perspectives are largely absent in contemporary neuroethical analysis, apart from conceptual arguments for their relevance. This article attempts to fill this gap by presenting the results of eleven semi-structured interviews with Tibetan Buddhist monastics in India on three issues in neuroethics: identity and authenticity, enhancement, and disorders of consciousness. The results of this empirical study reinforce the conclusions of theoretical work on Buddhism and neuroethics while also identifying future areas of inquiry, including the importance of community, the challenges in acting from compassion, and the value of self-directed mental cultivation.