Buddhism and Science:
Probing the Boundaries of Faith and Reason
Dr. Martin J.
Verhoeven
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Abstract
Western interest in Eastern religions, especially Buddhism, historically
coincided with the rise of modern science and the corresponding perceived
decline of religious orthodoxy in the West. Put simply: Modern science
initiated a deep spiritual crisis that led to an unfortunate split between
faith and reason—a split yet to be reconciled. Buddhism was seen as an
"alternative altar," a bridge that could reunite the estranged worlds of
matter and spirit. Thus, to a large extent Buddhism's flowering in the
West during the last century came about to satisfy post-Darwinian needs to
have religious beliefs grounded in new scientific truth.
As science still constitutes something of a "religion" in the West, the
near-absolute arbiter of truth, considerable cachet still attends the
linking of Buddhism to science. Such comparison and assimilation is
inevitable and in some ways, healthy. At the same time, we need to examine
more closely to what extent the scientific paradigm actually conveys the
meaning of Dharma. Perhaps the resonance between Buddhism and Western
science is not as significant as we think. Ironically, adapting new and
unfamiliar Buddhist conceptions to more ingrained Western thought-ways,
like science, renders Buddhism more popular and less exotic; it also
threatens to dilute its impact and distort its content.
Historians since the end of World War II, have suggested that the
encounter between East and West represents the most significant event of
the modern era. Bertrand Russell pointed to this shift at the end of World
War II when he wrote, “If we are to feel at home in the world, we will
have to admit Asia to equality in our thoughts, not only politically, but
culturally. What changes this will bring, I do not know. But I am
convinced they will be profound and of the greatest importance.”
More recently, the
historian Arthur Versluis, in a new book, American Transcendentalism
and Asian Religions (1993), pieced together five or six major
historical views on this subject, and presented this by way of conclusion:
However much
people today realize it, the encounter of Oriental and Occidental
religious and philosophical traditions, of Buddhist and Christian and
Hindu and Islamic perspectives, must be regarded as one of the most
extraordinary meetings of our age. . . . Arnold Toynbee once wrote that of
all the historical changes in the West, the most important—and the one
whose effects have been least understood—is the meeting of Buddhism in the
Occident. . . . And when and if our era is considered in light of larger
societal patterns and movements, there can be no doubt that the meeting of
East and West, the mingling of the most ancient traditions in the modern
world, will form a much larger part of history than we today with our
political-economic emphases, may think.
These
are not isolated opinions. Many writers, scholars, intellectuals,
scientists, and theologians have proclaimed the importance of the meeting
of East and West. Occidental interest in the Orient predates the modern
era. There is evidence of significant contact between East and West well
before the Christian era. Even in the New World, curiosity and interchange
existed right from the beginning, as early as the 1700s. One can find
allusions to Asian religions in Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin, Walt
Whitman, and of course, more developed expressions in Henry David Thoreau,
and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
By the
mid-twentieth century this growing fascination with Asian thought led
Arnold
Toynbee to envision a new world civilization emerging from a convergence
of East and West. He anticipated that the spiritual philosophies of Asia
would touch profoundly on the three basic dimensions of human existence:
Our relationships with each other (social); with ourselves
(psychological); and, with the physical world (natural). What is the shape
and significance of this encounter? What does Buddhism contribute to the
deeper currents of Western thought; and more specifically, to our struggle
to reconcile faith with reason, religion with science?
Science was already the ascendant intellectual sovereign when Buddhism
made its first serious entry on the American scene in the latter decades
of the 19th century. A World's Parliament of Religions, held in
conjunction with the 1893 Colombian Exposition in Chicago, brought to
America for the first time a large number of Asian representatives of the
Buddhist faith. These missionaries actively and impressively participated
in an open forum with Western theologians, scientists, ministers,
scholars, educators, and reformers. This unprecedented ecumenical event in
the American heartland came at a most opportune time. America was ready
and eager for a new source of inspiration, ex orient lux, the
'light of Asia.'
By the
1890s America was caught in the throes of a spiritual crisis affecting
Christendom worldwide. Modern scientific discoveries had so undermined a
literal interpretation of sacred scripture, that for many educated and
thoughtful people, it was no longer certain that God was in his heaven and
that all was right with the world. These rapid changes and transformations
in almost every aspect of traditional faith, had such irreversible
corrosive effects on religious orthodoxy, that they were dubbed, "acids of
modernity." They ate away at received convictions, and ushered in an
unprecedented erosion of belief. People like my grandparents, brought up
with rock-solid belief in the infallible word of God, found their faith
shaken to its very foundations. It was as if overnight they suddenly awoke
to a new world governed not by theological authority but by scientists.
New disclosures from the respected disciplines of geology, biology, and
astronomy challenged and shattered Biblical accounts of the origins of the
natural world and our place and purpose in it. Sigmund Freud
captured the spirit of the age well when he said “the self-love of mankind
has been three times wounded by science.” The Copernican Revolution,
continued by Galileo, took our little planet out of the center position in
the universe. The Earth, held to be the physical and metaphysical center
of the Universe, was reduced to a tiny speck revolving around a sun. Then
Darwin all but eliminated the divide between animal and man, and with it
the "special creation" status enjoyed by humans. Darwin, moreover,
diminished God. The impersonal forces of natural selection kept things
going; no divine power was necessary. Nor, from what any competent
scientist could demonstrate with any factual certainty, was any Divinity
even evident—either at the elusive "creation," or in the empirical
present. Karl Marx people portrayed people as economic animals grouped
into competing classes driven by material self-interest. Finally, Freud
himself characterized religious faith as an evasion of truth, a comforting
illusion sustained by impulses and desires beyond the reach of the
rational intellect. Nietzsche's famous declaration that “God is Dead” may
have seemed extreme, but few would have denied that God was ailing. And
certainly the childhood version of a personal, all-powerful God that
created the world and ruled over it with justice and omniscience was for
many a comforting vision lost forever.
One of
the lingering side effects of this loss has been the unfortunate
disjunction of matter and spirit that afflicts the modern age. It can
assume many forms: a split between matter and spirit, a divorce between
faith and reason, a dichotomy between facts and values. At a more personal
level, it manifests as a mind-body dualism. An unwelcome spiritual and
psychological legacy from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it is
still very much with us today, something that haunts our psyches.
Much
of today’s near-obsession with therapy in the West, and even the shift
toward psychologizing religion (including the “New Age” phenomenon) could
be seen as attempts to heal this deep sense of alienation. The pragmatic
philosopher, John Dewey, wrote: “The pathological segregation of facts and
value, matter and spirit, or the bifurcation of nature, this integration
[i. e. the problem of integrating this] poses the deepest problem of
modern life.” This problem both inspires and confounds contemporary
philosophy and religion. Wholeness eludes us while the split endures; and
yet, almost tragically, the very means we have available to heal it insure
its continuation. For, all of our philosophies, academic disciplines,
therapies, and even religious traditions are informed by and rooted in
aspects of this dualism. Perhaps the most visible expression of this
pathological segregation is the gap between science and religion.
Thus,
when the eminent philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead
scanned the broad outlines of our time, he wrote: “The future course of
history would center on this generation’s resolving the issue of the
proper relationship between science and religion, so fundamental are the
religious symbols through which people give meaning to their lives and so
powerful the scientific knowledge through which we shape and control our
lives.” And it is in regard to this troubling issue, I think, that Eastern
religions, particularly Buddhism, are seen to hold out the promise of
achieving some resolution. The idea dates back over a hundred years.
After
the 1893 Chicago Parliament of World Religions, one Paul Carus, a
Chicago-based editor of the Open Court Press, invited some of the
influential Japanese Buddhist delegates to a week-long discussion at the
home of Carus's father-in-law, Edward Hegeler. Both deeply felt the
spiritual crisis of the times. Both were trying to reform Christianity to
bring it in line with current thought; in short, to make religion
scientific. It occurred to them that Buddhism was already compatible with
science, and could be used to nudge Christianity in the same direction.
Toward this end, Carus wanted to support a Buddhist missionary movement to
the United States from Asia. His thinking was to create something of a
level playing field. Carus had witnessed the most ambitious missionary
undertaking in modern history that send thousands of Protestant
missionaries abroad to convert the people ‘sitting in darkness.' He wished
to conduct a Darwinian experiment of 'survival of the fittest." His goal:
to bring Buddhist missionaries to America where they could engage in
healthy competition with their Christian counterparts in the East, and
thus determine the "fittest" to survive.
With
the aid of his wealthy father-in-law who put up money, they sponsored a
number of Eastern missionaries to the United States: Anagarika Dharmapala,
from what was then Ceylon, now Sri Lanka; Swami Vivekananda, from India
representing the Ramakrishna Vedanta movement; and Soyen Shaku, a Japanese
Buddhist monk, and Shaku's young disciple D.T. Suzuki. During his stay in
the United States in the late 1890s and early 1900s, Suzuki lived in the
small town of LaSalle/Peru, Illinois. He was in his twenties then, and for
about eleven years he worked closely with Paul Carus translating Buddhist
texts into English and putting out inexpensive paperback editions of the
Asian classics. Suzuki later became the leading exponent of Zen in the
West, when he returned in the 1950s on a Rockefeller grant to lecture
extensively at East Coast colleges. He influenced writers and thinkers
like Carl Jung, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, Martin Heidegger, Thomas
Merton, Alan Watts, and the "beat Buddhists"—Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg,
and Gary Snyder. Suzuki died in 1966 in Tokyo. His influence in the West
was profound—making Zen an English word, translating Asian texts into
English, stimulating a scholarly interest in the Orient among American
intellectuals, and deepening American respect and enthusiasm for Buddhism.
The historian Lynn White Jr. praised Suzuki as someone who broke through
the "shell of the Occident" and made the West's thinking global. His
introduction to the West came about through the hands of Paul Carus.
These
early missionaries of Buddhism to the West, including Carus himself, all
shared the same modern, reformist outlook. They translated Buddhism into a
medium and a message compatible and resonant with the scientific and
progressive spirit of the Age. They selectived passages of text to favor
that slant, and carefully presented the Buddhist teachings in such a way
as to appeal to modern sensibilities—empirical, rational, and liberal.
Americans wanted religion to "make sense," to accord with conventional
wisdom. Then, as now, our primary mode of making sense of things was
positivist—reliable knowledge based on natural phenomena as verified by
empirical sciences. So firmly entrenched is the scientific outlook that it
has for all practical purposes taken on a near-religious authority. Few,
then or now, critically question our faith in science; we presume its
validity and give it an almost unquestioned place as the arbiter of truth.
Thus,
the early missionaries of Buddhism to America purposely stripped Buddhism
of any elements that might appear superstitious, mythological, even
mystical. Dharmapala, Suzuki, and Vivekananda clearly ascertained that
Americans measured truth in science, and science posed little theological
threat to a Buddhist and Hindu worldview. After all, Buddhism had unique
advantages for someone who rejected their faith (Christian) due to its
authoritarianism and unscientific outlook:
1) Buddhism did
not assert or depend upon the existence of a God
2) Buddhism was a
superstition-free moral ideal; it conformed to the scientific view of an
ordered universe ruled by law (Dharma)—a system both moral and physical
where everything seemed to work itself out inexorably over vast periods of
time without divine intervention (karma)
3) Buddhism
posited no belief in gods who could alter the workings of this natural law
4) Buddhism was a
religion of self-help with all depending on the individual working out
his/her own salvation
5) "Original"
Buddhism was seen as the "Protestantism of Asia," and Buddha as another
Luther who swept away the superstitions and rituals of an older, corrupted
form and took religion back to its pure and simple origins
6) Buddhism
presented an attractive personal founder who led life of great
self-sacrifice; parallels were drawn between Jesus and Buddha as the
inspiration of a personal figure exerted strong appeal to seekers who had
given up on theology and metaphysics.
Thus,
Buddhism was packaged and presented in its most favorable light viz a viz
the current spiritual crisis in the West; and, not surprisingly, Buddhism
seemed immensely reasonable and appealing to Americans. Darwinism might be
undermining Biblical Christianity, but it only enhanced Buddhism's
standing.
In
fact, Darwin's theory of evolution, which struck the most severe blow to
the Judaeo-Christian edifice, was taken up as the leading banner for
Buddhist propagation. With Darwin the concept of evolution became
enshrined in the popular mind. Everything was evolutionary—species, races,
nations, economies, religions, the universe—from the micro to the macro.
Social Darwinists even saw evolution operating behind the vicissitudes of
free-market capitalism. As the constant interaction of stimulus and
response in nature, evolution seemed to match nicely with the notion of
karma—the cyclical unfolding of events governed by the law of cause and
effect. So Anagarika Dharmapala could announce in Chicago to his largely
Judaeo-Christian audience that "the theory of evolution was one of the
ancient teachings of the Buddha." As it was in nature (at least in the new
natural world of Darwin), so it was in the Buddhist universe.
Most
people drawn to Eastern religions did not examine very closely the
supposed identity of Darwin's evolution and the Buddhist concept of karma.
They were content, even predisposed, to imagine them the same. Buddhists
ardent to convert Americans to Buddhism, as well as Christians eager to
find some correspondence between modern science and their beleaguered
faith, were happy to say, “Yes, the similarities are close enough; look,
how the ancient Eastern religions anticipated our modern science!"
Vivekananda, the charismatic and eloquent Ramakrishna delegate from India,
met only hurrahs of affirmation when he proclaimed to a Chicago audience
that the latest discoveries of science seemed "like the echoes from the
high spiritual flights of Vedantic philosophy."
This
facile view that Buddhism and science were cut of the same cloth accorded
nicely with the longing to reconnect the sacred and the secular. It held
out hope that religion could once again assume its rightful place
alongside (if no longer in the lead of) the emerging disciplines of
biology, geology, and physics. It also fit neatly with the presumed "unity
of truth" that Victorians held to so dearly—there could only be one truth,
not two. The very nature of reality demanded that the truths of science
and religion be one and the same. Carus called his new system of thought
"the Religion of Science," and Max Muller called his new theology "the
Science of Religion."
This
trend linking Buddhism to science continued, even accelerated, into the
20th century. Einstein's work and further developments in the new
cutting-edge physics seemed to provide even further evidence that science
and Buddhism were merely different rivers leading to the same sea. Where
the old theologies crumbled under the juggernaut of science, Buddhism
seemed to hold its own, even thrive. The early (and even contemporary)
exponents of Buddhism pushed this idea. It remains an area of great
promise and interest; but it is not one without difficulties.
One of
the first to question this marriage, interestingly, was also one of its
earliest proponents, D.T. Suzuki. When Suzuki came to the United States
to collaborate with Paul Carus, both were outspoken advocates of the link
between Buddhism and science. Suzuki’s early writings make virtually no
distinction between Buddhism and science. For Suzuki, Buddhism was
eminently modern and progressive, compatible with the latest discoveries
in Western psychology and philosophy. It was, in a word, scientifically
sound.
By the
time Suzuki returned to the United States in the 1950s, however, he had
experienced a change of heart. He then wrote that his initial
thinking—that religion must be based on scientific grounds and that
Christianity was based on too much mythology—was a little ill-founded. An
older, perhaps wiser Suzuki, came to doubt the sufficiency of a religion
based on science, and even saw the need for religion to critique science.
In 1959, Suzuki wrote that his early modernist agreement with Hegeler and
Carus that "religion must stand on scientific grounds...Christianity was
based too much on mythology," was ill-founded. "If it were possible for me
to talk with them now," he reflected, "I would tell them that my ideas
have changed from theirs somewhat. I now think that a religion based
solely on science is not enough. There are certain 'mythological' elements
in every one of us, which cannot be altogether lost in favor of science.
This is a conviction I have come to."
What
had changed? First of all, two world wars. As the contemporary writer Kurt
Vonnegut has wryly observed, “We took scientific truth and dropped it on
the people of Hiroshima.” Suzuki was, of course, Japanese; he felt
directly the negative weight of modern science. Having survived the brutal
experience of a war initiated, carried out, and ended with weapons of mass
destruction born of modern science, he was left less sanguine about the
idyllic marriage with religion and science that he had heralded at the
turn of the century. Suzuki was enjoying the wisdom of hindsight; but in
fairness to Suzuki, so were many other people.
Since
Suzuki's turnabout in 1959, there have been even further, more
fundamental challenges to the presumed closeness of Buddhism and science.
Questions have arisen in two areas. One, as a society we have come to
reassess the blessings and the promise of modern science in terms of the
socio-psychological impact. While people are mesmerized by science and
dream about what science can do for them, they also have nightmares about
what science can do to them. This bittersweet realization lingers in the
contemporary psyche: we dream about all the wonderful things science is
going to do for us; at the same time we are haunted by unsettling specters
of the dreadful things science could do to us. This concern and troubling
ambivalence seems to grow, not diminish, with each scientific advance.
At the
popular level, movies and television play on variations of the
Frankenstein, Godzilla, the X-Files motif, reflecting anxieties over
science-gone-wrong. These "monsters" give form (albeit imaginary) to some
of humanity's deepest fears. They reflect not only the apprehension of
Pandora's box unearthed, but more significantly, the hubris of human pride
and lust for power unrestrained. Nowhere is this more evident than in the
new field of biotechnology—the actual manipulation of life at the subtle
genetic source. Scientists now talk of the end of evolution, the end of
nature, in the sense that humans will soon replace nature to direct the
course of creation themselves. Doctor Panayiotis Zavos, who is now
actively engaged in producing the first human clone, announced proudly,
``Now that we have crossed into the third millennium, we have the
technology to break the rules of nature.''
Thus,
the development and unleashing of "advanced" weapons of mass destruction
through two World Wars, the Cold War, and now almost daily in "hot spots"
throughout the world; the unenlightened tampering with nature that has
brought about widespread environmental pollution; the almost cavalier
experiments with human reproduction, cloning, genetically engineered life,
chemical-biological warfare—all threaten to make reality more frightening
than fiction.
The
second area of doubt regarding modern science arises from within the
scientific community itself. The last decades of the 20th century have
seen an internal reexamination take place within almost every scientific
discipline, as each has been forced to question its own foundations and
exclusive claims to truth. We are in the midst of a major paradigm shift,
the outcome of which still remains unclear. It revolves around a loss of
the positivistic certainty that science once enjoyed and now finds
slipping away. Ironically, the scientific "establishment" finds itself
confronting a challenge to its exclusive authority that in many ways
mirrors the spiritual crisis that religious orthodoxy faced with the
triumph of modern science.
Sigmund Freud exemplifies this ironic shift. Perhaps more than any modern
thinker, he contributed to the undermining of religious certainty. He
stated quite unequivocally that “an illusion would be to suppose that what
science would not give us, we can get elsewhere.” Elsewhere, of course,
refers to religion, as he made clear in his pessimistic indictment of
religion in The Future of an Illusion. And yet his own
psychoanalytic theory has become a matter of intense debate, and has come
under the critical scrutiny of the very scientific system he felt would
validate his ideas. But it is in areas other than psychology, most notably
in physics, and increasingly in the life sciences, that a growing body of
new knowledge is beginning to strain existing models of explanation and
understanding.
With
the ground-breaking work of Niels Bohr, Heisenberg, and Sir Arthur
Eddington, the rock-solid presupposition central to that classical
scientific thought began to crumble. With the "new science" that started
to emerge in the post-World War II era, the observer and the observed
could not be presumed separate and distinct. Gone too was the neat
subject/object distinction that had come to define classical science. This
shift away from the study of the "outside" objective world of nature to
the "inner" subjective world of the observer is a hallmark of the new
science. As Heisenberg observed, “Even in science, the object of research
is no longer nature itself, but man’s investigation of nature.”
For
example, Heisenberg pointed out that the very act of measurement
interfered with what one was attempting to measure. You cannot separate
the subject from the object of the experiment. So, if the scientist
changes the very nature of the "reality" he or she investigates, then what
is truth? What is purely objective fact? Where does the boundary lie
(indeed, if there is one) between the mind and the external world?
Consequently, the quantum theory of the new physics no longer claims to be
describing "reality." It describes probable realities. The new
physics looks for possible realities and finds them so elusive that no one
model can exhaustively account for everything. The indeterminacy of models
has replaced earlier certainties.
Some,
like Thomas Kuhn, even questioned the notion of science as an objective
progression towards truth. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
(1962), Kuhn observed that science, like religion, becomes heavily
encumbered with its own baggage of non-rational procedures. Science
accumulates its peculiar set of presuppositions, doctrines, and even
heresies. Kuhn essentially demolished the logical empiricist and purist
view that science personified the impartial progression towards a
universal truth. Instead, he saw it as a series of shifting "paradigms"—a
global way of seeing things which is relatively immune from
disconfirmation by experience. One paradigm would hold sway for awhile,
only to be displaced in a "revolution" by another conceptual worldview.
These paradigms, both self-contained and self-perpetuating, tended to
conserve and perpetuate their own ideas, just as religion tends to
conserve and perpetuate its own beliefs.
For
example, Galileo declared in the early 1600s that Copernicus was correct:
The earth moves, and the sun is the center of our galaxy. The Church
denounced these views as heresies and dangerous to the Faith. They forced
Galileo to recant during a trial under the Inquisition. Although he was
publicly compelled to affirm the existing "scientific" paradigm, Galileo
still defied the authorities. After getting up from his knees, he is said
to have mumbled "E pur si muove" (nevertheless it still moves). Placed
under house arrest, Galileo lived out the rest of his life in seclusion.
The
world, of course, shifted paradigms to accept the Copernican worldview.
The Church, however, lagged behind, and only in 1992 did the Vatican lift
the 1616 ban on the Copernican teaching. Einstein, whose theory of
relativity was at first met with skepticism and doubt, later became an
icon of scientific genius. And yet, even Einstein found himself resisting
the new theories of the quantum physicists towards the end of his
life—once again adding credibility to Kuhn's thesis.
Whether Kuhn is correct or not is beside the point. His critique
illustrates a larger trend: the suspicion that science does not have
absolute answers, nor even ultimate authority. Thus, modern science
presents less of a unified front, less of a final bastion of truth.
Certainly many people still see themselves as living in a black and white
world. But, in general, many scientists are coming to define their
discipline in a more humble and tentative way. Science, for people at the
turn of the century, stood for absolute, fixed truths and principles that
held good forever; it embraced and explained an unchanging reality, or at
least a reality that was changing according to constant and predictable
laws. Today we are more modest, less presumptuous. A better working
definition of science now might be “a form of inquiry into natural
phenomena; a consensus of information held at any one time and all of
which may be modified by new discoveries and new interpretations at any
moment.” In contemporary science, uncertainty seems to be the rule.
Thus,
it grows increasingly difficult to believe in an external world governed
by mechanisms that science discloses once and for all. Thoughtful people
find themselves hesitant, unmoored, with an up-in-the-air kind of feeling
regarding the most basic facts of life. It is said that "we live in an age
when anything is possible and nothing is certain." This post-modern
dilemma highlights the felt need to reconcile facts and values, morals and
machines, science with spirituality. And while traditional
Judaeo-Christian theologies struggle to address this particularly
contemporary malaise, Buddhism maneuvers this tricky terrain with apparent
ease and finds itself sought after with renewed interest and popularity.
Moreover, some observers have puzzled over this anomaly: Asia accelerates
in its secular and material modernization (read "Westernization"), while
the West shows signs of a spiritual revitalization drawing on largely
Asian sources—especially Buddhism. Buddhism is being 'Westernized' to be
seen as a teaching that can mesh with both the good life and mitigate the
stress of the faith/reason divide. Part of Buddhism's immense appeal lies
in its analysis of the mind, the subject/self—exactly the area where
modern science now senses the next breakthroughs are to be made.
The
Buddha, well before Aquinas or Heisenberg, stressed the primacy of the
mind in the perception and even "creation" of reality. A central concept
of Buddhism is the idea that "everything is made from the mind." Any
distinction between subject and object is false, imagined, at best an
expedient nod to demands of conventional language. In the Avatamsaka
Sutra, the Buddha uses metaphor to elucidate: "The mind is like an
artist/It can paint an entire world. . . If a person knows the workings of
the mind/As it universally creates the world/This person then sees the
Buddha/And understands the Buddha's true and actual nature." (Chap. 20) We
think we are observing nature, but what we are observing is our own mind
at work. We are the subject and object of our own methodology. Moreover,
this mind encompasses the entirety of the universe; there is nothing
outside of it, nothing it does not contain, according to the Buddha.
Such insights
early on intrigued Western thinkers, as Buddhism hinted of a new avenues
of travel through the mind/matter maze. It led scientists like Albert
Einstein to declare:
The religion of
the future will be cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal God and
avoid dogmas and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it
should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all
things, natural and spiritual and a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers
this description. . . If there is any religion that would cope with modern
scientific needs, it would be Buddhism.
The Nobel Prize
winner was not alone in his positive assessment of the Buddhism's
potential for going beyond the boundaries of Western thought. The British
mathematician, philosopher Alfred North Whitehead declared, "Buddhism is
the most colossal example in the history of applied metaphysics." His
contemporary Bertrand Russell, another Nobel Prize winner, found in
Buddhism the greatest religion in history because "it has had the smallest
element of persecution." But beyond the freedom of inquiry he attributed
to the Buddha's teaching, Russell discovered a superior scientific
method—one that reconciled the speculative and the rational while
investigating the ultimate questions of life:
Buddhism is a
combination of both speculative and scientific philosophy. It advocates
the scientific method and pursues that to a finality that may be called
Rationalistic. In it are to be found answers to such questions of interest
as: 'What is mind and matter? Of them, which is of greater importance? Is
the universe moving towards a goal? What is man's position? Is there
living that is noble?' It takes up where science cannot lead because of
the limitations of the latter's instruments. Its conquests are those of
the mind.
As
early as the 1940’s, the pioneering physicist Niels Bohr sensed this
congruence between modern science and what he called “Eastern mysticism.”
As he investigated atomic physics and searched for a unified field of
reality, he often used the Buddha and Lao Tzu in his discussions on
physics in his classes. He made up his own coat of arms with the yin/yang
symbol on it. The American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer also saw in
Buddhism a scientific parallel to the puzzling riddles of modern physics;
his cutting-edge discoveries seemed to echo the enigmatic wisdom of the
ancient sage. Wrote Oppeheimer:
If we ask, for
instance, whether the position of the electron remains the same, we must
say 'no;' if we ask whether the electron's position changes with time, we
must say 'no;' if we ask whether the electron is at rest, we must say
'no;' if we ask whether it is in motion, we must say 'no.' The Buddha has
given such answers when interrogated as to the conditions of man's self
after his death; but they are not familiar answers for the tradition of
seventeenth and eighteenth-century science.
In the
1970s, in The Tao Of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between
Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism, Fritjof Capra expanded on some
of Bohr’s and Oppenheimer's tentative impressions. He argued that modern
science and Eastern mysticism offer parallel insights into the ultimate
nature of reality. But, beyond this, Capra suggested that the profound
harmony between these concepts as expressed in systems language and the
corresponding ideas of Eastern mysticism was impressive evidence for a
remarkable claim: That mystical philosophy offers the most consistent
background to our modern scientific theories.
In the
1970s this notion came as something of a bombshell. Suddenly religion and
science reunited—though in a rather unexpected way—Eastern religion and
Western science. This echoed the excitement of a hundred years previous
that Carus and other late Victorians sensed in Buddhism's potential. Then,
however, the emphasis was on how Buddhism could help establish religion on
a more scientific basis; now, it seems the other way around—that science
is seeking Buddhism to stake out its spiritual or metaphysical claims.
Regardless, those familiar with Buddhist texts immediately saw (or thought
they saw) the correctness of Capra's revelation. Certain Buddhist
scriptures in fact seemed most solidly to confirm the linking of science
and Dharma. The most oft-quoted is the famous teaching called the
Kalama Sutta.
In
this short discourse, we find the Buddha in his wanderings coming upon the
village of the Kalamas. Religious seekers themselves, the Kalamas were
bewildered by the plethora of divergent philosophies and teachers vying
for their attention. They proceeded to ask the Buddha a series of
questions. Here is the relevant portion of the text:
The Buddha once
visited a small town called Kesaputta in the kingdom of Kosala. The
inhabitants of this town were known by the common name Kalama. When they
heard that the Buddha was in their town, the Kalamas paid him a visit, and
told him:
"Sir,
there are some recluses and brahmanas who visit Kesaputta. They explain
and illumine only their own doctrines, and despise, condemn and spurn
others' doctrines. Then come other recluses and brahmanas, and they, too,
in their turn, explain and illumine only their own doctrines, and despise,
condemn and spurn others' doctrines. But, for us, Sir, we have always
doubt and perplexity as to who among these venerable recluses and
brahmanas spoke the truth, and who spoke falsehood."
"Yes,
Kalamas, it is proper that you have doubt, that you have perplexity, for a
doubt has arisen in a matter which is doubtful. Now, look you Kalamas, do
not be led by reports, or tradition, or hearsay. Be not led by the
authority of religious texts, not by mere logic or inference, nor by
considering appearances, nor by the delight in speculative opinions, nor
by seeming possibilities, nor by the idea: 'this is our teacher'. But O
Kalamas, when you know for yourselves that certain things are unwholesome
(akusala), and wrong, and bad, then give them up...And when you know for
yourselves that certain things are wholesome (kusala) and good, then
accept them and follow them."
The
Kalamas voiced their doubts, their perplexity in determining truth or
falsehood, as a result of having been exposed to all the competing
teachers and doctrines of India at the time: not unlike our modern world
today. Each teacher, each school, expounded different and often
conflicting notions of the truth. The Buddha's response was to set down a
methodology that was in many ways ahead of its time in anticipating the
skeptical empiricism of the modern scientific method.
He
said, “Do not be led by reports, or tradition, or hearsay. Don’t be led by
the authority even of religious texts, nor by mere logic or inference, nor
by considering appearances”—all of which eliminate exclusive reliance on
cultural convention, received tradition, and deductive speculation, as
well as mere sense impressions. Also rejected were opinions and "seeming
possibilities"—the stuff of preconceived bias and subjective imagination
and fancy. (Some might argue that being "led by appearances" would include
a narrow scientific method, at least as it has come to be popularly
understood—i.e. an exaggerated reliance on natural phenomena as the only
basis of what is true or real. It would also dismiss the equally
exaggerated claim that scientific knowledge is the only valid kind of
knowledge.The Buddha even discounts blind faith in one's teacher.
So
what's left? Here the Buddha lays out a subtle and quite unique
epistemology: “Oh Kalamas, when you know for yourselves that certain
things are unwholesome and wrong and bad, then give them up. And when you
know that certain things are wholesome and good, then accept them and
follow them.” But how to interpret this key passage?
Many
scholars and believers, both recently and at the turn of the century,
jumped at this passage as confirmation that ancient Buddhist wisdom
validates modern science. Early popularizers of Eastern religions in
America like Anagarika Dharmapala, D. T. Suzuki, Paul Carus, and even
Vedantists like Vivekananda, generally waxed enthusiastic about the
compatibility of Eastern spirituality and Western science. They saw in
passages like the Kalama Sutta proof positive that the Buddha
prefigured the modern scientific outlook. Buddhism seemed eminently
scientific: detached skeptical investigation of empirically testable
phenomena; no faith, no dogma, no revelation. Experiments carried out by
and confirmed by individuals regardless of time or place suggested
"intersubjective testability"—one of the hallmarks of the scientific
method. I do it, you do it; anyone can do it and obtain the same results.
That Buddhism and science should be so nearly identical was understandably
immensely appealing; it is also misleading.
While
American thinkers and newly converted Western Buddhists thought they saw a
natural fit between Buddhism and science, Buddhist teachers more steeped
in the traditional discipline were less apologetic and often more critical
of such facile comparisons. Two notable contemporary examples come to
mind: Master Hsuan Hua, from the Mahayana tradition, and Wapola Rahula, a
Theravada scholar-monk, both threw cold water on this notion.
The
Venerable Hsuan Hua, a Ch'an and Tripitika master from China, arrived in
America in the early 1960s to propagate the Dharma in the West. As he
observed and studied the trends and currents of contemporary thought, he
showed little enthusiasm for what seemed to him the exaggerated claims of
modern science—theoretical or applied. He said, “Within the limited world
of the relative, that is where science is. It’s not an absolute Dharma.
Science absolutely cannot bring true and ultimate happiness to people,
neither spiritually nor materially.” This is strong criticism that
portrays science as a discipline limited to relative truths, and as an
unsatisfactory way of life. In another essay, he wrote:
Look at modern
science. Military weapons are modernized every day and are more and more
novel every month. Although we call this progress, it’s nothing more than
progressive cruelty. Science takes human life as an experiment, as child’s
play, as it fulfills its desires through force and oppression.
In 1989,
Venerable Walpola Rahula, a Theravadin monk from Sri Lanka, also warned
that daily life is being permeated by science. He cautioned, “We have
almost become slaves of science and technology; soon we shall be
worshipping it.” His comments come well into the final decades of the
twentieth century, when many people had in effect turned science into a
religious surrogate. The Venerable monk observed, “Early symptoms are that
they tend to seek support from science to prove the validity of our
religions.” Walpola Rahula elaborated on this point:
We justify them
[i.e. religions] and make them modern, up-to-date, respectable, and
accessible. Although this is somewhat well intentioned, it is ill-advised.
While there are some similarities and parallel truths, such as the nature
of the atom, the relativity of time and space, or the quantum view of the
interdependent, interrelated whole, all these things were developed by
insight and purified by meditation.
Rahula's critique
goes to the heart of the matter: the capitulation of religion to
scientific positivism; the yielding of almost all competing schemes of
values to the scientific juggernaut. Huston Smith, the eminent scholar on
the worlds religions, recently said that the weakness of modern religions
in the West stems from their successful accommodation to culture. The
contribution that Buddhism and other religions can make to the spiritual
crisis facing modern society, therefore, may not lie in their
compatibility with science, but in their ability to offer something that
science cannot.
More
importantly, as Rahula argues, Dharma, or abiding spiritual truths, were
discovered without the help of any external instrument. Rahula concluded,
“It is fruitless, meaningless to seek support from science to prove
religious truth. It is incongruous and preposterous to depend on changing
scientific concepts to prove and support perennial religious truths.”
Moreover, he echoes the deeper moral concerns expressed by Master Hua
regarding the unexamined aims and consequences of the scientific endeavor:
Science is
interested in the precise analysis and study of the material world, and it
has no heart. It knows nothing about love or compassion or righteousness
or purity of mind. It doesn’t know the inner world of humankind. It only
knows the external, material world that surrounds us.
Rahula then
suggests that the value of Buddhism redoubles, not as it can be made to
seem more scientific, but in its reaffirming a different sensibility, an
overarching and unyielding vision of humanity's higher potential. He
concludes emphatically:
On the contrary,
religion, particularly Buddhism, aims at the discovery and the study of
humankind’s inner world: ethical, spiritual, psychological, and
intellectual. Buddhism is a spiritual and psychological discipline that
deals with humanity in total. It is a way of life. It is a path to follow
and practice. It teaches man how to develop his moral and ethical
character, which in Sanskrit is sila, and to cultivate his mind, samadhi,
and to realize the ultimate truth, prajna wisdom, Nirvana.
Both
of these eminent monks pre-date and, in many ways, stand outside the
popularization and "Westernization" of Buddhism. Unlike the
Western-leaning translators of Buddhism Carus, Suzuki, Dharmapala, et al.,
they emerged from a monastic discipline grounded in a more traditional
understanding, one less enamored of modern science and more critical of
Western philosophy. They would not so readily concur with Sir Edwin
Arnold, who wrote in his best-selling Light of Asia (1879) that
"between Buddhism and modern science there exists a close intellectual
bond."
With
this in mind, it would do well to take another look at the passage quoted
above from the Kalama Sutta:
But O Kalamas,
when you know for yourselves that certain things are unwholesome
(akusala), and wrong, and bad, then give them up...And when you know for
yourselves that certain things are wholesome (kusala) and good, then
accept them and follow them.
These
lines, I believe, hold the key to understanding the difference between
Buddhism and modern science. The passage needs to be understood not simply
as a nod to Western empiricism, but within a specific context of moral
inquiry. This "knowing for yourself" locates knowledge ('scientia') firmly
within the moral sphere, both in its aims and its outcomes. It employs a
meditative form of insight to penetrate the ultimate nature of reality. It
implies a concept quite foreign to modern science: that the knower and
what is known, the subject and object, fact and value, are not merely
non-dual, but that knowledge itself is inescapably influenced by our moral
and ethical being. Perhaps this is exactly what Suzuki intuited was
lacking in modern science when he wrote in 1959, "I now think that a
religion based solely on science is not enough. There are certain
'mythological' elements in every one of us, which cannot be altogether
lost in favor of science."
Regardless, none of this critical reassessment should come as a surprise
to thoughtful Buddhists. The Shurangama Sutra clearly notes, "when
the seed planted is crooked, the fruit will be distorted." The close link
between intention and result, cause and effect, is central to all Buddhist
philosophy. It should be obvious and expected that the very fabric of
modern science, lacking as it does a firm grounding in the moral sphere,
would result in deleterious discoveries and incomplete uses. Tragic
examples abound attesting to the ill-fated marriage of scientific
technology and human ignorance.
Nor,
from a Buddhist perspective, can these examples be seen as unintended
consequences or accidents—they are, rather, unavoidable and logical
outcomes of a partial though powerful system of thought. There is nothing
in science per se that would lead one to equate its advancement
with increased social benefits and enhanced human values. And certainly
the absence of ethical imperatives should alert any knowledgeable Buddhist
to a fundamental flaw in equating the Eightfold Way with the practice of
science. In fact, a close reading of the Buddhist sources, it seems, would
lead one to question: Is science in itself sufficient for describing
reality? Is it capable of meeting human needs?
Thus,
the aforementioned Kalamas passage, depending on one's frame of reference,
could be seen more as a critique of than a correspondence with modern
science. The key to understanding this difference lies in a correct
Buddhist interpretation of "know for yourselves," "wholesome," and
"unwholesome." As Walpola Rahula indicates, these concepts are part of a
specific and disciplined form or methodology of self-cultivation which,
when diligently practiced, leads to true knowledge and wisdom. This method
is referred to in Buddhism as the "three non-outflow science" (san wu lou
xue), and consists of morality, concentration, and wisdom
(Sanskrit: sila, samadhi, prajna).
The
ethical component cannot be overemphasized, as "seeing things as they
really are" entails an indispensable preliminary: "purification of the
mind." This clarity of mind and concentrated awareness in turn begins with
and must be sustained by moral conduct. The Visuddhimagga (Path of
Purification), an early Buddhist manual compiled in the 4th century by
Buddhagosha, lists the Buddha's "science" of inquiry as an interrelated
three-step exercise of virtue, meditation, and insight. This is quite a
different approach to knowledge than a modern-day scientist would presume
or pursue. It is interesting that these ancient wisdom traditions
considered moral purity as the absolute prerequisite of true knowledge,
and that we today regard it as immaterial, if not downright irrelevant.
Thus, fundamental and qualitatively different views of what constitutes
knowledge and the acquisition of knowledge separate Buddhism and science.
Aspects of the above epistemological formula appear throughout the Asian
religious traditions. For example, Taoism speaks of cultivating the mind
(hsin), regarding it as the repository of perceptions and knowledge—it
rules the body, it is spiritual and like a divinity that will abide "only
where all is clean." Thus the Kuan Tzu (4 to 3rd century B.C.)
cautions that "All people desire to know, but they do not inquire into
that whereby one knows." It specifies:
What all people
desire to know is that (i.e., the external world),
But their means of
knowing is this (i.e. oneself);
How can we know
that?
Only by the
perfection of this.
Are we
studying ourselves when we think we are studying nature? Will the "new
science" eventually come to Kuan Tzu's conclusion that only “by perfecting
this," can we truly know that? These ancient writings raise
an interesting question: How accurate and objective can be the observation
if the observer is flawed and imperfect? Is the relationship between
"consciousness" and matter as distinct as we are inclined to believe?
The
"perfection" mentioned above refers to the cultivation of moral qualities
and in Buddhist terminology, the elimination of "afflictions" (klesa) such
as greed, anger, ignorance, pride, selfishness, and emotional extremes. It
seems less an alteration of consciousness than a purification and quieting
of the mind. Mencius talks of obtaining an "unmoving mind" at age forty,
again referring to the cultivation of an equanimity resulting from the
exercise of moral sense. He distinguished between knowledge acquired from
mental activity and knowledge gained from intuitive insight. This latter
knowledge he considered superior as it gives noumenal as well as
phenomenal understanding. Advaita Vedanta, the philosophical teaching of
Hinduism, as well emphasizes that jnana (knowledge) requires a solid basis
in ethics (Dharma). Chuang Tzu, spoke of acquiring knowledge of "the ten
thousand things" (i.e., of all nature) through virtuous living and
practicing stillness: "to a mind that is 'still' the whole universe
surrenders."
Even Confucius's famous passage concerning the highest
learning (da xue) connects utmost knowledge of the universe to the
cultivation of one's person and the rectification of one's mind.
The
challenge from these eminent Buddhist teachers to the nearly ex
cathedra authority generally accorded to science should give pause to
anyone attempting a facile identification of Buddhism with science. Their
aims and methods, though tantalizingly parallel, upon closer analysis
diverge. Correspondences do exist, but fundamental differences inhere as
well. To gloss over them not only encourages sloppy thinking, but
approaches hubris. So we must ask: to what extent is our conception of
science as the arbiter of knowledge culture-bound, even myopic? Could our
near total faith in science blind us to an inherent bias in such a stance:
we presume that the logic, norms, and procedures of the scientific method
are universally applicable and their findings are universally valid.
Science may not only have limited relevance for interpreting Buddhism, but
may distort our very understanding of its meaning.
Thus,
in a quest to reach an easy and elegant reconciliation of faith and
reason, we may unwittingly fall prey to "selective perception"—noticing
and embracing only those elements of Buddhism that seem consonant with our
way of thinking and giving short shrift to the rest. Overplaying the
similarities between science and Buddhism can lead into a similar trap,
where our dominant Western thought-way (science) handicaps rather than
helps us to understand another worldview. In Buddhism, this is called "the
impediment of what is known."
It may
prove more salutary to allow Buddhism to "rub us the wrong way" —
to
challenge our preconceptions and habitual ways, to remain strange and
different from anything to which we have been accustomed. To borrow a
metaphor from Henry Clarke Warren, we might enjoy a "walking in Fairyland"
in shoes that do not quite fit:
A large part of
the pleasure that I have experienced in the study of Buddhism has arisen
from what I may call the strangeness of the intellectual landscape. All
the ideas, the modes of argument, even the postulates assumed and not
argued about, have always seemed so strange, so different from anything to
which I have been accustomed, that I felt all the time as though walking
in Fairyland. Much of the charm that the Oriental thoughts and ideas have
for me appears to be because they so seldom fit into Western categories.
James Legge, Confucius: Confucian Analects, The Great Learning, and The
Doctrine of the Mean [Translated by James Legge], (New York: Dover,
1893, 1971), 4-7.
Source: Religion East and West,
Issue 1, June 2001,
pp. 77-97
http://online.sfsu.edu/~rone/Buddhism/VerhoevenBuddhismScience.htm
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Update: 01-09-2003