Compositional anaylsis of the Gospel of Mark

[Angrboda]

At the [First] Council, the Dhamma [the Buddha's teachings] was divided into various parts and each part was assigned to an Elder and his pupils to commit to memory. The Dhamma was then passed on from teacher to pupil orally. The Dhamma was recited daily by groups of people who often cross check with each other to ensure that no omissions or additions were made. Historians agree that the oral tradition is more reliable than a report written by one person from his memory several years after the event.

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"Same shit, different savior...."

[According to the Dalai Lama] there are limits to the power of science to critique Buddhist dharma. For the Dalai Lama, modern science can critique Buddhist claims about the material realm, the realm of matter and energy, but not the non-material realm – the realm of the inner, subjective experiences of images, feelings, and awareness. If one were to claim scientific reasons for rejecting the possibility of the Buddhist idea of rebirth (or reincarnation), by pointing to the fact that most people do not claim memories of a past-life, or to psychological evidence of the mind's dependence upon the physical organ called the brain, then, the Dalai Lama argues, one has entered into an realm that scientific method and instruments cannot competently study. If Buddhist scriptures describe material realities that are not literally true, then that fact should be acknowledged. Thus, when it comes to non-material realities (like ideas, thoughts, and consciousness), scientific claims about such realities, though accurate in some ways, do not and cannot fully describe what those realities are.

The Dalai Lama argues that the particular forms of reason and experience that modern science values places a limit on the domain of scientific authority:
“Science deals with that aspect of reality and human experience that lends itself to a particular method of inquiry susceptible to empirical observation, quantification and measurement, repeatability, and intersubjective verification — more than one person has to be able to say, ‘Yes, I saw the same thing. I got the same results.' So legitimate scientific study is limited to the physical world, including the human body, astronomical bodies, measurable energy, and how structures work.”

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