I hold doctorate degrees in Science and Medicine and am one of the Western Dharma heirs of Chan Master Sheng Yen. I love science, I respect the way it teaches about laws of nature which we all, from individuals to mankind alike, ignore at our own peril. I became an engineering geologist. I was reasonably good at discovering things and finding solutions. But all my contributions had one underlying direction: Fostering material consumption and waste on earth to such a level, I suspected, that it will become uninhabitable. A mad plan of great harm to all beings, I was certain.
Working 1968 in Axel Heiberg in the Canadian High Arctic, the expedition leader, Fritz Müller, and I discussed the thinning of the Arctic Ocean. “Fritz, it is the CO2” (an idea that goes back to 1859, to the physicist John Tyndall [1820-1893]). Fritz “Interesting hypothesis, you might be right”. I told to whoever was unlucky enough to be near, also at four universities, earning sympathetic smiles “why don’t you study something else”. My late wife “you could have done a less drastic change, you could have done differently”. But I could not figure out another path and I became a physician. In medicine I hoped to do less harm.
My life is an attempt to bring science, medicine and Buddhadharma into focus. This website is the attempt to present this focus as a worldview in a manner as simple as possible. However, from the viewpoint of Buddhadharma focus is an illusion, there is neither focus nor no-focus. The concept of focus is an expedient means to communicate in the either/or world of duality.
Sources, if known, are always identified and quoted.