m m a:
Can you think of a time where modern thought enhanced, expounded, or modified buddhist thought?
I can think of three instances:
1) Although somewhat implicit in the concept of the spectrum of experience from "gross" to "subtle", Buddhist thought does not directly address sub-conscious let alone non-conscious experience. (This is my weakest point -- I would not be surprised to stand corrected.) This is a recently introduced idea, which is usually credited to Freud.
2) Buddhist thought takes no account whatsoever of the function of the brain. The entire system predates just about everything we know today about how our bodies and the physiology of our experiential apparatus operates, especially at the functional (e.g., neurological) level. Where science falls short is, historically, in insisting on the reducibility of consciousness to organic function. Nevertheless, understanding organic function must surely be helpful
somewhere along the path.
3) Buddhist thought is utterly naive with respect to the evolution of consciousness,
as is most science even well over a century after Darwin. How could it be otherwise -- that idea had not been invented yet. This is my strongest point, and it is paradoxical because in many ways the traditional spiritual teachings have a certain superficial similarity to, and are sometimes cited as prefiguring concepts such as emergent causality, and this is deeply, deeply consistent with the concept of
anicca, but it still isn't the same as a clear explanation of the mechanism.
I have ordered Bikkhu Bodhi's book, and I am going to read it very carefully, contemplate it, and attempt to apply it to my practice; but I am pretty sure that the theoretical model advanced to account for the nuances of subjective experience presented in it (dependent origination), as good and useful as it may be, are still going to be subject to improvement along the lines of the three points enumerated above.