B. Alan Wallace – Former Buddhist Monk and Philosopher

For me Buddhism remains a central focus.  In my mid-50s I joined the Beaumaris Buddhist Meditation Centre and discovered the Tara Institute in Brighton.  I found a living treasurer, Geshe Doga Lam dwelling in that sacred place.  This led to another intense period of exploration of Buddhist Philosophy.  Somewhere along the path I discovered the work of B. Allan Wallace.  It profoundly resonated.

 Alan initially trained as a physicist but found the spiritual path early in life.  He studied to become a Buddhist Monk and was ordained by the Dalai Lama himself.  He found inspiration in the great Mahayana teachers and went on to write and speak extensively on the convergence of science and spirituality.  His classic essay “Buddhist Radical Empiricism” was inspirational and reminded me so much of Gareth Morgan and Gibson Burrell’s, Sociologist Paradigms and Organisational Analysis (1979), which has influenced my view of organisational life for 30 years.  Alan takes us from the functionalist view, that appearances to the mind have a real and substantial ontological existence; Vaihabisika – Dualistic Reductionism to Madhayamaka – Ontological Relativism, where only the mind and consciousness are real. This quote captures Alan’s brilliance:

“The preceding application of radical empiricism and logical reasoning leads to the conclusion that only the mind, together with its appearances, is real.  Within the field of experience, we continue to identify a class of phenomena as physical – from subatomic particles up to galactic clusters – but they have no external existence independent of the mind.  Such physical entities have only conventional existence.”

Wallace B.A.  Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic, Buddhist Radical Empiricism.  Columbia, 2012, p 139.