Buddhism
and Science:
Probing the Boundaries of Faith and Reason
Dr. Martin J. Verhoeven
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.