Professor Bhagwan Chowdhry has been featured a few times on this blog, primarily focused on his work with Financial Access at Birth (FAB), the organization he co-founded. FAB is dedicated to social and economic innovation that seeks financial inclusion for all. We recently wrote about his appearance at the PopTech Conference and we also covered his appearance on HBO's Entourage here and here.
Chowdry, a professor of finance and faculty director of UCLA Anderson's Master of Financial Engineering program, is a man of diverse interests. In his most recent post on The Huffington Post, Chowdhry writes about his becoming a secular Buddhist seven years ago and how he first became interested in Buddhism due to the curiosity and openness with which the Dalai Lama was engaged with science.
In the post, Chowdhry writes of the Buddist concepts of emptiness and dependent arising. He writes:
Robina explained that emptiness, which is derived from the Sanskrit word sunyata where sunyaliterally means zero or nothing, does not imply Nihilism -- that nothing matters -- but in fact, quite the opposite. Emptiness implies that nothing exists independently, but is dependent on many other causes. I found it difficult to understand these ideas. I even tried to access the writings of Nagarjuna, the renowned Buddhist scholar who first wrote about emptiness in 150-250 CE. I remained confused.
...
I think the reason these ideas sometimes appear impenetrable, sometimes vacuous, and sometimes contradictory, is because most Buddhist writers use the same words, the same jargon, and the same explanations over and over again. I will attempt to explain these ideas using a different language, a different vocabulary, a different methodology, that should be familiar to those who work with mathematical and statistical models.
W = T plus F
where,
T represents what you Think exists or is the truth,
F represents other Factors that are inevitably present, and
W represents What finally arises.The Buddhist idea of Dependent Arising simply says that F is unpredictable and has a significant presence -- always. So you can never be sure that what finally will arise will be T -- what you think will happen. Tand F always occur together. It may be helpful to think of W, T and F as variables that take on real values and F is a continuous random variable with significant variability.
The probability that W will take on a particular value, say equal to some particular value of T, will be zero -- hence the connotation of being empty. However that does not mean that nothing exists. In fact, many values, perhaps infinitely many values, of W are possible. It is precisely because many values are possible, the chances that a particular value will be realized are close to zero.
Chowdry writes that this "WTF model" helps us understand the Buddhist concept of "no-self":
... this amounts to asserting that there is a true T that can be attained by clearing out the Maya or the confusion -- that is we can drive F to zero. Budhhists argue that F is always there so no fixed W exists (No-self) but in fact many Ws arise because T and F are always together. In fact, it is precisely our strong belief in a particular T, our attachment, that leads to dissatisfaction or unnecessary suffering.
Then:
Once we cease our belief in a particular T, we open ourselves to the multitude of possibilities of W.
It's complex stuff, Buddhism through the prism of an equation. What I think Prof. Chowdhry is saying is that we must be open to all possibilities and therefore open and accepting of any outcomes.
What are your thoughts? What do you think or feel about what Prof. Chowdhry has written?
Let us know in the comments below.
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