Strong Roots by Jake H. Davis, offers vision and value in how an ancient wisdom can be transmitted into contemporary culture without losing its authenticity and power. With clarity and reverence, Davis inspires gratitude and gives sound guidance for the transmission of a timeless wisdom teaching – from one culture into another, from classical style to contemporary relevance, and from one era to another. He draws on experiences from his personal life in establishing the Burmese lineage of the Mahāsi Sayadaw in North America.
From the book:
We do not have to wait for the current scientific paradigm to shift unless Western Science has some monopoly on truth. The disciplines of Physics, Chemistry, and Biology are limited by their approach and their instruments to examining physical aspects of existence. The Theravāda offers an approach to understanding the interplay of mental and physical factors that has proven logically justifiable and effective at aiding mindfulness practitioners for thousands of years. In philosophy, as in photography, different projects call for different methods. Black and white film is brilliant at capturing the play of shadows and for many other uses, but it is not an effective tool for capturing the signals at a stoplight, because it does not register a crucial variable. Likewise, the experimental results and explanatory theories of modern Science are tremendously powerful when applied to physical aspects of reality, but attempts to provide complete accounts of conscious experience are outside of their domain. Recall that from the perspective of the Buddha’s teachings in the Pāḷi, the ‘All’ is composed entirely of phassa, contact between sense base and sense object. We can only directly know phenomena within this ‘world of experience’, so from the Theravādin perspective, we cannot know whether there really exists a ‘brain’ or a ‘body’ apart from moments of intellectual consciousness, of seeing (the image of a brain), and so on.
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