Panel 5: Professor Will Tuladhar Douglas - Autism and Buddhism

The 8th International Symposium on Humanistic Buddhism Find out more about the Symposium here: http://hbsymposium.fgsihb.org/ Event Date: Saturday 6th – Monday 8th November 2021 The 8th International Symposium, held online at Nan Tien Institute (NTI) in Australia, is the first International Symposium on Humanistic Buddhism held outside of Taiwan, since its inception. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Speaker: Professor Will Tuladhar Douglas ------------------------------------------------------------------ Will Tuladhar-Douglas collaborates with people and ecological communities to better understand anthropogenic biodiversity. At present, he is a research fellow at Hamburg University's Numata Centre for Buddhist Studies and a director at Situgyan Consulting; he has taught in various universities and was most recently Professor of Anthropology at Asian University for Women. At the moment of writing this blurb, he is working with colleagues on sacred sites featuring vultures, turtles, and lapsi trees; traditional pharmacists in Nepal; protected areas; and translating Buddhist texts. He lives in Scotland. ------------------------------------ Autism and Buddhism ------------------------------------ At least 1% of the world’s population of humans is autistic, yet our understanding of autism as a disability and as a distinct way of being in the world has only begun to develop in the past 20 years with the emergence of autistic scholars refusing the disempowering medical model of autism. Contrary to models of autism that portray autists as cold, lonely, unable to understand others, or unable to socialise, we now know that autistic experience is deeply empathetic, but autists must devote cognitive effort in order to manage their exceptionally rich sensory inputs. This developmental difference in embodied cognition affects socialisation: autists need candor, and cannot participate in coded, indirect social interactions with hidden motives. For this panel, I will look at the double-empathy problem as framed by Damien Milton and relate it to the Mahāyāna practice of ‘exchange of self and other’. How can we build bridges of compassion across the experiential divide between autistic and non-autistic humans? #HBSymposium #InstituteOfHumanisticBuddhism #NanTienInstitute #HsingYunEducationFoundation