Towards a Zen-Informed Spiritual Research Paradigm: Philosophy, Methodology, and Evaluation Criteria
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explicates a Zen-informed spiritual research paradigm based on an Eastern Buddhist worldview that fundamentally transcends the Western mainstream assumptions. Beginning with a proposed definition of “spiritual research”, this article systematically discusses the features of a Zen-informed spiritual research paradigm in terms of ontology, epistemology, axiology, and methodology. The author uses a field study (Yu, 2021; Yu & Mills, 2023; Yu, 2024) to showcase the application of Zen methodologies with respect to research design, data sampling, data collection, data analysis, theorizing, and report writing. The author also proposes a list of criteria for evaluating spiritual research along with applicable methodological strategies. This research potentially opens a new field in the MSR domain, namely, Zen-informed spiritual research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.382 | 0.280 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.012 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".