Buddhism
and Science:
Probing the Boundaries of Faith and Reason
Probing the Boundaries of Faith and Reason
Dr. Martin J. Verhoeven
Religion
East and West, Issue 1, June 2001, pp.
77-97
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. 1
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." 2
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. 3
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.
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