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Professor-emeritus Lewis Lancaster is a distinguished scholar of Buddhism, founder of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative to use the latest computer technology to map the spread of various strands of Buddhism from the past to the present. Here is a video of a lecture he gave at the University of California, “Buddhism in a Global Age of Technology.”

He talks about four factors that made Buddhism “portable”, helping it spread far and wide and become the first “world religion:”

• bodily relics (Buddhism was not afraid of the pollution of death, on the contrary, crystalline pieces of bone left over after cremation became holy relics - those relics could easily be carried far and wide),
• statues (based on Greek portrait imagery plus as a robe for the Buddha, the Roman toga; the first Buddha statues were made in the image of Apollo),
• monks (the ascetic and scholarly life; in addition, Buddhism was carried across the deserts by merchants who helped the monks set up monasteries - monasteries in their turn served as caravanserai’s),
• texts (the Buddhist sutras - texts become portable when translation is legitimate - the teaching (dharma) was important and not the literal text).

He also lectures about the unique features in Buddhist teaching for our time:

• Perception - how we see the word physically - the eye sending an impulse to the brain and the brain processing this - understanding how your senses work physically is the beginning of enlightenment. Buddhists never deny the existence of the external world, but say that we will never see it directly, all we can experience are the brain reactions to the data coming via the senses. We cannot go beyond that. The true illusion is the virtual reality our brain constructs for us - we even believe we exist! And with meditation and mindfulness the brain can even turn off pain.
• Causality - everything has a cause. So there is no creator, as there will always be a cause of a cause of a cause… You just can’t get there. Causality is like a chain, with links. Relation does not mean causality - we in fact do not understand causality… Karma is like cellular automata - you can make rules but you cannot predict what it will produce for you.
• We live in a multiverse of cosmoses. Causality is interactive and is an endless chain. We therefore can never know the pattern, as we cannot know the end. It is a holographic world. Our universe is contained in another one, and so on and so on.
• In the end, it is the present moment that counts, as it is perfect in itself.