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 Buddhism and the Natural Sciences
Posted: Saturday July 10, 2004 7:33 PM EST
II. The Buddhist History with Science Buddhism has a very different relation to natural science. There is little in Buddhism to encourage people to devote their lives to scientific experiment or to seeking the laws of nature. Buddhists are more likely to attend to nature in its concrete particularity than to seek abstract universal principles. The knowledge to be gained by scientific study would not be expected to advance the movement toward enlightenment. On the other hand, Buddhism is free from those attachments that have led Christians to resist the acceptance of scientific findings. There is no attachment to a traditional cosmology that is threatened by scientific advance, or at least, any such attachment would fall immediately under Buddhist critique. There is no doctrine of creation that is undercut by new ways of understanding how the world came into being. There is no claim to a special status of human beings that is weakened by evolutionary theory. Seeing this, Buddhists have sometimes asserted superiority over Christianity. The enlightenment to which they point is not vulnerable to new empirical findings or scientific theories. It is a matter of experience that is self-verifying. In one sense this is true. Buddhism is not bound up with doctrines of the sort that have led Christians into conflict with science. It does not affirm a God whose existence is problematic, so that belief requires the support of arguments whose foundations are vulnerable to scientific advance. The belief in human freedom, so central to Christianity, is not thematically developed in Buddhism. One attraction of Buddhism to Christians since the latter part of the nineteenth century has been this freedom from controversial doctrines. However, as I see it, Buddhist discourse is not, in fact, consistent with every possible worldview. Quite the contrary. Buddhism would make no sense if the world were in fact nothing but matter in motion. A science formulated in those terms may not threaten Buddhism in its specifics, but it contradicts Buddhism fundamentally and generally. Sociologically and psychologically, one who is convinced of the truth of the modern scientific worldview will have no interest in listening to Buddhist discourse or in pursuing Buddhist enlightenment. Buddhists have as much reason as Christians to oppose this worldview. Indeed, they have an additional basis for opposition. They can appeal to newer developments in physics as supporting a worldview to which they came independently. Especially the phenomena of quanta can be more intelligibly understood if we adopt the view of pratitya samutpada. This advantage of Buddhism in the interpretation of contemporary scientific findings has been widely noticed. It has certainly increased interest in Buddhism in the West. But on the whole the scientists who note this connection are not sophisticated in their understanding of Buddhism and in fact make little use of this new way of thinking in their continuing work. I hope for more. I am also very open to learning from you of contemporary physicists in Japan who are engaged in reconstructing physics on the lines suggested by Buddhism. I have heard occasionally of such work, but this program seems not to have gone very far. III. Obstacles to Buddhist Involvement It is my suspicion that another Buddhist teaching inhibits such a program. Buddhists are often quite suspicious of the ability of language to avoid misleading us. They are willing to employ language as “skillful means”, but the truth to which they point still eludes language. To develop science we must formulate concepts and theories. One may, in fact should, recognize that concepts and theories are subject to correction, but the goal is better concepts and theories. Buddhists rightly emphasize that we should not attach ourselves to concepts and theories. But too strong an emphasis here on nonattachment can reduce the interest in generating new concepts and new theories. Without these, there will be no progress in science and specifically now, no breaking of the power of the deeply entrenched mechanistic worldview. This will give way only as it is shown that there is another way to think about nature that explains all that has been previously explained mechanistically and more besides. If Buddhism could give a greater spiritual value to the understanding of the world, its potential contribution to the progress of science and of a scientifically-informed worldview might be realized. What would it take to persuade Buddhists that this kind of involvement in an intellectual enterprise is truly important? I don’t know. As far as I can tell, understanding alone is not sufficiently important in Buddhist tradition to call forth such efforts. The chances may be better with compassion. But why would compassion call one to devote one’s life to transforming science and the scientific worldview? The answer, I believe, is that the inherited Western worldview has done, and is doing, great harm to human beings and the other creatures with which we share the planet. Viewing nature as a machine has led human beings to treat it that way. We are moving toward a crisis of global proportions, and our mechanistic vision deters us from taking the drastic steps needed to change direction. When human beings, or some human beings, are treated as part of this mechanistic world, they are terribly exploited. This has been true in my own country of much of the treatment of people of other races, especially Native Americans and Africans. It still leads to lack of sensitivity to the underclass and to peoples in other parts of the world, especially the poor. We too often view them as “others” rather than in terms of our kinship and interconnectedness. To change our basic way of perceiving the natural world and all its human inhabitants is an urgent expression of compassion. Just after writing this I received a message from the Institute of Science in Society, with its headquarters in England. I was pleased to find that a similar analysis of the harm done by this worldview is gaining more institutional expression. Listen to a few paragraphs of the ISIS communication. The new trade-related intellectual properties regime in industrialised nations is an unprecedented privatisation of knowledge, which has also encouraged the biopiracy of indigenous knowledge and resources on a global scale. This regime is being imposed on the rest of the world through the World Trade Organisation, as part of a relentless drive towards economic globalisation. Economic globalisation is widely acknowledged to be the major cause of poverty, social disintegration and environmental degradation over the past decades. At the same time, it is obstructing any attempt to reverse the trends and to implement a global agenda for sustainability. Fifty thousand gathered in Porto Alegre in February at the Second World Social Forum to voice unanimous opposition to economic globalisation and to call for alternative models of world governance and finance. Almost no one is targeting the predominant, reductionist knowledge system of the west, that has provided the intellectual impetus for globalisation as well as the instruments of destruction and oppression. It has also marginalised indigenous knowledge systems and driven countless to extinction. But western science itself is undergoing a profound paradigm change towards an organic perspective that has deep affinities with indigenous knowledge systems around the world. We have all the means to bring a truly sustainable and equitable world into being, only the political will, and the appropriate vision, is missing. We need some means to help focus attention on how that could be done, and to underpin a new model of world governance and finance. Perhaps, however, there may be a barrier in Buddhist teaching to applying compassion to this kind of task. In talking with Buddhists, I find a certain ambivalence as to the expression of compassion. Some say that compassion always expresses itself in seeking the enlightenment of others. If so, improving social and cultural conditions is not an appropriate expression of compassion. Others believe that relief of suffering of any kind, even if it does not lead toward enlightenment, is a proper expression of compassion. But even for these, it often seems that the models of compassionate action are typically spontaneous responses to immediately apparent suffering. For those who think in this way, changing the structures of thought and perception built into so much of our science would be too indirect a contribution to the relief of suffering to be a true expression of Buddhist compassion. Nevertheless, I believe many Buddhists recognize that social systems cause much of the suffering in the world and that these social systems are grounded in conceptual systems. Changing these conceptual systems may be a particularly important contribution, in the long run, to the relief of suffering. If Buddhists can think in this way, their compassion can draw them into the work of critique and reconstruction of the worldview that still underlies most of Western thinking. Since Western social and natural sciences shape the thinking of many Easterners today as well, the problem is not limited to the West. IV. Potential Buddhist Contributions If Buddhists were motivated to enter vigorously into the discussion, they could contribute a great deal. The ISIS refers to the emergence of more organic thinking in Western science. This is certainly progress. Organisms are interactive and are centers of creative activity. To understand the world as composed of organisms rather than mechanisms could affect public policy for the better, as well as the formulation of scientific theory. But the organismic thinking that dominated Medieval understanding in the West also had its limits. It supported a hierarchical vision of society that offered little freedom to individuals. In any case, there were good reasons to turn from it in the pursuit of a more adequate scientific account. What Buddhism offers goes beyond a model of organisms. It accents nonduality and the absence of substance. This allows for the reality of the individual, but not for individuals apart from others. The individuals involved have no permanence; they are continuously passing away. They are what they are by virtue of what all other individuals are. All things interpenetrate. There is much in quantum theory today that points in the direction of this vision of reality. It is far more appropriate to the evidence than the substantialist, materialist models that still influence the formulations. As noted above, this has been widely recognized. Yet the needed change has not occurred. The Western mind has not succeeded in finding the formulations it needs. Consider the way in which quantum theory is still talked about and developed. In the first place, it is commonly called “quantum mechanics,” despite the nonmechanical character of the events with which it deals. It still speaks frequently of “particles”, although that to which it refers cannot have the characteristics that term connotes. Alternately it speaks of “waves”, although the idea of a wave implies a substantial medium, such as water or air, and it has long been established that no such substantial medium underlies quantum phenomena. In other words, there is now considerable evidence from science that Buddhists are correct, but scientists do not know how to think about the kind of world that Buddhists have been affirming for more than two millennia. Buddhists should be able to interpret the data in terms of a vision of pratitya samutpada. This should provide a far more coherent vision. Until recently scientists were in quest of such a vision. It was their inability to attain it in the twentieth century that drove them to the kind of irrationalism that now characterizes much of science. Scientists often say that they are no longer trying to understand nature; they seek only to make predictions that they can experimentally check. This provides the knowledge needed for technology to develop. What the real world is like, or even whether there is any such world apart from our ideas or language about it are, for some scientists, now irrelevant questions. The theoretical result of this indifference to what is real is sometimes an extreme dualism. It is supposed that there is the world of thought or language, and there is the world of nature. In this dualistic view, how they are related, or whether they are related at all does not matter. At other times, the result is an extreme idealism. It is supposed that the world of language is the only world there is. We are told that there can be no experience of reality other than of language. I am not sure that anyone ever believes these theoretical results. But because sophisticated people accept these theories as the best available, they influence the direction of inquiry and thereby of policy. They do great harm. If taken with full seriousness they would direct those who believe them away from any effort to attain Buddhist enlightenment. This abandonment of the intellectual task of understanding the world is as detrimental to society as was the mechanistic view that it partly replaced. Buddhists could help greatly to restore intelligibility to science. It is my conviction that science, as well as society as a whole, would gain by this change. It may seem strange to appeal to Buddhism to provide intelligibility. Buddhism has long taught us not to put trust in concepts and conceptual understanding. It recognized that the vision it offered worked against the tendency of concepts to objectify, to reify, to rigidify, and to separate. Concepts typically encourage the dualism of subject and object rather than the nondual vision that comes closer to the truth. But in fact in the process of criticizing concepts and attachment to them, Buddhists have developed new concepts that would be far more helpful than the old ones in formulating scientific theories. There is a tremendous opportunity here. Source: http://www.religion-online.org/
Reproduced with permission from Religion Online.
©2004 Religion Online. All Rights Reserved. |
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