Buddhism and Science

Science and Buddhism VIII: Conclusion

Science and Buddhism are distinct. They have their own projects, they have their own attitudes. I’d love to see them influencing each other in the future. They agree in many ways — they are both trying to see clearly the way things connect together, what patterns there are in life and the world. Scientists notice, like Buddhists, that nothing is fixed or isolated — everything is involved in a dance of mutual interaction. They agree with Buddhists that the so-called Self is a convenient fiction — there are just mental processes. Scientists are very aware that perception is vulnerable to illusion and delusion, and that we need other ways to find out what’s going on, because our senses are not reliable. And as for God, 200 years ago, the French astronomer Pierre Laplace said: ‘I have no need of that hypothesis’.

Both Buddhism and science are aware of an enormous, vast universe, probably with many inhabited places at inconceivable distances from each other, but with the same laws applying everywhere. Science also agrees with Buddhism that animals are basically like us, and that we can find animal drives pushing us along from deep within. There are even some very mysterious parallels between Buddhist understandings and the way that science understands the whole of the cosmos, and quantum mechanics.

At its best, science is very cautious, taking nothing on trust, wanting everything to be checked in experience, and double checked by others as well. I feel that Buddhism adopts the same approach.

I would love to see Buddhism having more influence here in the West, and to do so, I think it needs to take the West’s greatest achievement — science — very seriously. It can ask Science for help: science can help the Buddhist project in its specialities — the first two niyaamas, the inorganic and the organic. In the third order, the citta niyaama, the techniques of science can greatly contribute to the understanding of the mind. Buddhism has the project of alleviating suffering — science can help greatly with this, through medical and technological advances.

But I think that Buddhism can return the favour — it can help science in many ways. Its global vision of reality can help provide a more effective philosophical standpoint for science; it has an experimental technique, as it were, for intuitively grasping the way that phenomena fit together. Thus through Buddhist wisdom the meaning and the significance of our experience can become more apparent. We need that technique — contemplation of one’s experience within a quite space of meditation — to simplify the tangle of conditions, and to make them less misted over by our own hopes and fears and needs. So I sense that Buddhism, neuroscience and psychology can work cooperatively together to gain a deeper sense of the way that the mind works. Finally, Buddhism can help science through its realisation that the way that one lives — ethics — affects one’s ability to be realistic about one’s experience. Science does not at present have a trustworthy source of ethics, and if scientists do not know how to be ethical, we cannot trust them to be basically benevolent. I think that Buddhism can help with this.

Imagine how the Buddha might have responded if he had encountered modern science. He might have said: “these scientists are suffering — they need the Dharma. Their work is often undirected and clumsy, and gives rise to unforeseen sufferings, sometimes even deliberate sufferings. Help them encounter the Dharma, help them see its relevance first to them, and then to their work”.

I think that the universes of science and Buddhism can merge — perhaps they will merge — in a more comprehensive worldview for the centuries to come — a worldview that draws on the creative geniuses of millions of men and women who have contributed to the cultures of the East and the West — but also a worldview that tackles conflict and poverty far more effectively than we seem to be doing at the moment.

Image is Vairocana, from the Walters Art Museum

Science and Buddhism VII: Science and Rebirth

Buddhism at present diverges from science, in incorporating in its worldview various apparently out-of-body experiences, including the possibility of mental processes unlinking from a dying body, and relinking with a growing embryo — i.e. rebirth. See the formidable investigations of Ian Stevenson.[1] Most schools discuss a period between death and rebirth known in Tibetan as the Bardo. Are these notions accessible to objective study? There is no need to debar science from the phenomena of the psyche, and even the suggestion of karmic links between one’s willed actions and later events should be, to some extent, testable scientifically.

Rebirth is coherent if the mind is not just physical events. The mind is certainly very conditioned by the brain and the body. Consciousness always finds itself in a body, but traditional Buddhism says it might not be a physical body. What would your mind without the vehicle of a physical body be like? It may be unencumbered by the burden of flesh, but it would also be, I guess, lacking in many abilities. For example, the influence of the senses is quite mysterious. In the Bardo, one probably can’t do anything to physical things — the body is the interface with a physical world. One probably can’t think in a linear fashion — no plans, no thinking things out, no deliberate recall etc. If you are unused to it, you are just swept along in a dreamlike condition — ‘why is all this happening to me?’ Or you are blissed out and thoughtless like the devas.

There isn’t even a persistent entity, a Self, during life, so there is definitely no soul that persists from one life to another. But yet the Buddhist view is that the karmic processes that you have set in motion during your life don’t simply vanish at the moment when the body becomes a corpse. Somehow they are still viable; they can germinate and have an influence over another person, newly conceived. More than an influence — the view is that a foetus growing in its mother’s womb can’t survive without some non-physical contributions from a previous life. So it’s not you that survives death, yet processes that have built up during your life do go on to have their own consequences in another future life.

This is the Dalai Lama on rebirth. “The various instances of consciousness… come into being because of the presence of preceding instances of consciousness, and since matter and consciousness have totally different natures, the first moment of consciousness of the new being must be preceded by its substantial cause, which must be a moment of consciousness. In this way, the existence of the previous life is affirmed.”[2] Traditionally, rebirth is not seen as an issue of faith, but is something that can be verified through rational inference, according to the Dalai Lama, and I would add the testimony of others, and perhaps personal memory.

In any case, there is no doubt that mental processes influence the physical through karma — and eventually the whole universe will probably be radically affected by the presence in it of self-aware beings.[3]

[1] E.g. Ian Stevenson, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (University press of Virginia, 1974).

[2] The Universe in a Single Atom, 141.

[3] See David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality (Penguin, 1997).

Science and Buddhism VI: Buddhist Ethics for Scientists

The karmic order

The Buddhist view of karma is that there are universal and discoverable principles that distinguish good behaviour from bad. This is a radical alternative to theistic sources of ethics:

Don’t do what you want, and do what you don’t want to do, because a priest insists that someone you can’t believe in tells you to…

It is also a radical alternative to the purely rational sources of ethics:

Trying to calculate what would bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number. (But why do this?)
Cause as little interference to others as possible, and let them do whatever doesn’t interfere with others. (This leads to the ethics of public opinion, which is all many scientists have.)
Evolutionary ethics — behave in ways you decide must be programmed in genetically, because you will tend to leave more breeding offspring if you do (a very depressing source of noble human acts).

Applying the precepts to science

1. Not harming and acting from love.

2. Not appropriating resources and possessions, and freely sharing.

3. Not going for selfish gratifications, and not inducing neediness and dissatisfaction.

4. Communicating with integrity and kindness.

5. Protecting your consciousness as something precious and vulnerable — what affects it? Look out for pride, status seeking, professional jealousy, fear of the vastness of truth, and taking refuge in petty egotistical projects, pursuits and obsessions.

You can apply these to science, overriding unconsidered pursuit of dazzling results, and the demands of paymasters. Look out for military and profit motives corrupting scientists.

Thus consider unethical type of science, perhaps fulfilling these criteria corresponding to the five precepts.

1. It is for benefit, expressing love.

2. It is exuberant and abundant, freely shared.

3. It is tranquil and peaceful, not craving-driven.

4. It is guided by truth, with a strong emphasis on finding effective ways to communicate it.

5. It is meditative, expanding the scope of awareness, always in an atmosphere of wonder at the beauty of the mind and universe, and knowing there is always more there that is unknown, and with a sense that it can’t all come together within a discursive and divided intellect.

Science and Buddhism V: The Niyamas

*The primal drives at the centre of the Wheel of Life (Tom Knudsen)*

Instead of a definite personality, and instead of intrinsically existing things interacting with each other, we have the notion of conditional arising (see post Science and Buddhism III).

To clarify it further, Pali Buddhism says there are a number of orders or categories of conditionality (niyamas) (using a modern re-framing of the terms, as developed by Caroline Rhys Davids[1]):

Inorganic — traditionally seen as heat and cold, and the behaviour of the atmosphere.
Organic –specifically the growth of plants from their seeds.
Mental — basic psychology, covering anything with a mind, including animals.
Karmic — one’s choice comes in, one can make ‘skilful’ or unskilful choices; the former are realistic, the latter try to fight reality for egoistic purposes, and thus cause huge problems, for self and others.
Dharma — can be seen as the substrate of ineffable reality itself, never completely summed up in the ‘laws’ of the four other spheres.[2]

Inorganic and organic orders

Science rules in the inorganic order.

The organic or biological order has been greatly illuminated by science, which has established the fact of evolution, with all life interrelated through historic lineages. Science has investigated genetics and developmental biology; physiological processes and the maintenance and reproduction of life.

In Buddhism, three of the undetermined questions illuminate the first two niyamas:

What is the duration and size of the universe?
Is the life force the same as the body or not?

Traditional Buddhism asserts that the universe has no beginning. If the big bang is an absolute beginning, then you need a transcendent principle as the cause of universe, some kind of godhead. Like science, Buddhists do not postulate a transcendent being as the origin of all things.

But it’s interesting that the Buddhist origin myths include conscious beings from the very ‘beginning’. It said that consciousnesses are left over from a previous world cycle, and they become attracted by the gradually condensing material universe, longing for some kind of embodiment, and their involvement influences the evolution of the new universe until eventually physically embodied self-aware beings appear.[3] This is a long way from any scientific view!

However in one Buddhist scripture, there is a teaching about particles of pure energy subsisting in the empty period between the destruction of one universe and the beginning of another, from which all the matter in the new universe is formed, which the Dalai Lama thinks could be rather like the origins of the universe in the fluctuations of the quantum vacuum.[4]

It is certainly true that some ancient Buddhist descriptions of the Cosmos are surprisingly close to modern scientific discoveries. But so what? Is this just a coincidence? If not, does it imply that an advanced and trained introspective mind can have insights into structures far beyond the possibility of its sensory perceiving?

Mental order

It is very fruitful to compare Buddhist and scientific psychologies, and allow a synthesised new psychology to emerge. For example, Daniel Goleman has attempted to do this in his study of the emotions.[5]

Note the Wheel of Life — the three central animals as the primordial drives (craving, aversion and active ignoring); and consider the six realms.

Is Buddhist psychology scientific? It has never used the techniques of performing carefully recorded and repeatable experiments, observing only countable variables and measurable quantities. Traditional Buddhist writers based their conclusions upon reported experiences (so can be accused of relying on anecdotal evidence). They tended to give weight to experiences reported a) by practitioners regarded as spiritually advanced, and b) in older, authoritative texts. Nevertheless, early versions of Buddhist psychology were subjected to criticism by later thinkers, and the discipline (not that it was ever regarded as a field separate from the religion as a whole) progressed.

We’ll look at the Karmic order in the next post.

[1] C A F Rhys Davids, Buddhism (1912).

[2] See Subhuti’s 2010 paper. http://www.sangharakshita.org/pdfs/revering-and-relying-upon-the-dharma.pdf The dharma-niyama can also be seen as spiral conditionality. The names for 1-3 are based on Caroline Rhys David’s alignment of the niyamas with a western classification of scientific knowledge, and don’t directly translate the Pali terms, utu- bija- and chitta-niyama; and dhamma-niyama is traditionally described quite differently.

[3] Agañña Sutta, Digha Nikaya 27.

[4] Dalai Lama, The Universe in a Single Atom, 90.

[5] Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama, by Daniel Goleman (Bantam, 2002).

Science and Buddhism IV: Is the scientific description true?

The realist view: science is revealing to us all the components of an ultimately real objective universe completely separate from us.

The instrumentalist view: we can say nothing about reality, but we use science for its practical convenience.

A traditional Buddhist perspective would agree with neither of these. Our experience is indeed experience of reality — it is not a product of our minds — but the categories that we use to make sense of that reality are provisional — they are not ultimate components of reality.

This labelling and categorisation is a function of human minds, it is influenced by volitional processes of the past and present — human urges, tendencies, weaknesses and so on. It is our minds that pick out the entities that we experience from the bewildering background of that tangled flow of phenomena.

We make decisions to draw boundaries around things in a particular way, or we regard particular ‘shapes’ as being in the foreground. Once we have done that, then the laws of the interactions between these entities we have picked out are now decided, and science can discover what the laws are.

The entities will behave as they do whatever we think about them, once we have picked them out. They are not all in the mind. But the choice of what to look at is very significant indeed. It produces whole sciences — geology, oceanography, animal behaviour — and the entities multiply, and some of them last a long time through the history of science, and some of them are briefly popular and then die away. Not long ago, most astronomers were convinced that they could see a network of lines on Mars, and a lot of them agreed that they were canals. But better telescopes showed that there is nothing at all there resembling the maps that people were drawing up until the 1930s.

The new sciences give rise to their own technologies, and a hint at plans to look for yet more new entities. For example, once people started thinking of light as being rather like waves on the ocean, they wondered what a much choppier ocean would be like, and X-rays were discovered. They wondered what a much slower swell would be like, and radio waves were discovered. But it is no less true to think of light as zooming along like thousands of little pellets, not like waves on the ocean at all.

Is everything pre-determined?

Quantum mechanics suffers from the problem of indeterminism — the unpredictability of quantum events. Is it that chance is ultimate, and any deterministic laws that we find come from the law of large numbers? Or is it that determinism is ultimate, and apparent randomness comes from the complexity of huge numbers of interacting events, as studied in chaos theory? A French Buddhist philosopher of science, Michel Bitbol, takes a dependent co-arising-type approach, showing that the causes of any event are not defined in the absolute, but are “relative to the very circumstances of the production of the phenomena”.[1] Since phenomena arise in dependence upon an enormously complex context, a context which includes the person or instrumentation detecting the phenomena, they are immune to any certain determination. Relations between things should be seen as being prior to the things that are relating; however, “neither connection, nor connected nor connector exist”, says Nagarjuna. Buddhism’s radical analysis is needed to cap philosophy of science, since it comes from “direct stabilised experience of a disabused outlook” — i.e., non-conceptual Insight into reality — while the insights of Western philosophy, impressive though they are, are the products of the free play of ideas.

Is there a self?

Conditioned arising applied to oneself leads to the realisation that there is no core-self, something which current psychologists, as well as neuroscientists, are insisting on with increasing unanimity. There are just mental processes. Already 100 years ago, the founder of scientific psychology, William James, said ‘the thoughts themselves are the thinkers’ — there is no mysterious inner core of selfhood doing the thinking.

[1] In Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground, B. Alan Wallace (editor), Columbia University Press, New York, 2003, 349.

Science and Buddhism III: Investigating Reality

How do you find out what is the case? Consider the criteria of the Kalama Sutta in which the Buddha provides a list of what he regards as unreliable sources of knowledge or advice:

something asserted repeatedly
tradition
hearsay
scriptural texts
sophistical reasoning
logical inference
prolonged consideration
getting carried away by a view that you identify with
indulgence in the pleasure of speculation
a person who makes a plausible impression
your respect for a spiritual teacher

None of these are reliable sources of knowledge. Instead, he says, ‘when you know of yourselves that these teachings are skilful, blameless, recommended by sensible people [viññugarahitā], and that followed through and practised they lead to welfare and happiness, then practise them and stick to them.’[1]

We can investigate:

Our surroundings — the material world. Here, science is paramount, and manipulating things using what is learnt leads to technology.
Ourselves — our ‘inner’ experience, character, drives, aspirations, abilities, pathologies; how this state of mind has come about. What to do about it. There are some Western insights, but Buddhism is way ahead.
Other ‘selves’. But also,
we can investigate how all these three fit together.

Science supremely respects objective investigation, so that only ‘objects’ can be investigated — separable, isolatable things, or at best processes. So its natural tendency is to reduce 3 and 2 to 1.

Buddhism makes 2 paramount, but doesn’t reduce 3 and 1 to 2. Instead, it offers two ways of apprehending the totality of 1-3 — how they fit together in a single nondual universe.

Direct apprehension

The first way is said to be direct apprehension, with no mediation of descriptions, or models or framework etc. You can’t prove this is possible, though you can intuit whether a holistic grasp of the situation (being completely present, with no need for divisions or discriminations — jñana, not vijñana) is in a sense already available, but overlain by rather nervous and insecure habitual colourings, enhancings, ignorings, and mental concepts.

It seems unlikely that this kind of insight could directly answer questions relevant to the physical sciences. But when it comes to the mind and human life, Buddhists would tend to privilege their personal insights over the findings of science. However, as soon as an insight (assuming such a thing to be possible) is reduced to a conceptual explanation, which it presumably has to be to be conveyed to another person, it has switched to the same objective level that science operates on. This is the reason that the Dalai Lama is prepared to expose the teachings of Buddhism to scientific scrutiny, and to alter them if they are falsified.[2]

An intimation of the outcome of insight in is valuable to science. Buddhism tries to gradually accustom one to the fact that there are no things, no essences, nothing ultimately exists, but neither are things nonexistent, and one has no core-self, and so on. At first, this attitude is rather disturbing — it feeds in to one’s sense of insecurity. But if a scientist can become accustomed to it, I think that it will help them to ponder the significance of their results more effectively, not distracted by essentialist or dualist assumptions. Our intellect gives a certain form to the phenomena that we are trying to make sense of; but this is not the form of the things in themselves.

Conditioned arising

The second way of apprehending the totality of inner and outer experience is to find what might be the most simple and austere framework for accounting for reality, when conceptual structures first come in — very aesthetic, calm, vivid, elegant.

This is the way or ways that someone with considerable insight will use to try to give an account of their perspective — attempting to be as helpful as possible for others to achieve insight. The account is known as pratitya samutpada.

It starts from the insistence that:

Nothing is fixed.
There are no independent entities (including oneself).

So all phenomena are an interconnected flow. The Buddha put it like this:

‘This being, that becomes. From the arising of this, that arises. This not being, that does not become. From the ceasing of this, that ceases.’

Whatever we think of as a thing or event wells up from the past on a wave of supporting conditions, and only remains so long as the conditions remain. And that thing itself is a factor in other things or events arising.

The Buddha’s image is of a fast-moving river, with froth and eddies: structures in the water which form and vanish, merge, stay or move swiftly on…. But their formation and evolution and movement and interaction are all completely law-governed.

The number of factors is too great for exact predictions, in most cases. And you can’t reduce the number of influences on one entity to a manageable number — other small influences might become appreciable (as in the butterfly effect). But according to this view, nothing is completely fortuitous. And there is no need to invoke a supernatural personality who runs the universe, or who decides to bring it into existence.

The natural laws of conditioned arising apply to the objective world, to one’s own mind, and to other people.

Is the world made up of things?

Buddhism has very fully investigated the laws of conditioned arising in human mind and life. Science has done so in the material world. Science does take this process approach, but often forgets it, in ‘discovering’ some fixed entity.

There is a strange contradiction in science. It is supposed to be about the hard and objective material world. But nearly everything it talks about is actually invisible — atoms, subatomic particles, pressure and electric current, distant galaxies, black holes and the Big Bang, continental drift, evolution over millions of years, genes and instincts in animals. These all have to be inferred using very sophisticated theories working on the data from very sophisticated equipment.

We tend to believe it all a bit too easily! We are very respectful and credulous when we hear about genes or atoms, even though we’ve never seen one. The theories are wonderful, and are very fertile ways of understanding the universe, but we should not think that they are true. We shouldn’t take them too seriously. They are just very effective models, ways of coming to an understanding of the world for minds that work like ours do. A different being would have a very different science, and we will have, I suspect, a very different science in 100-200 years. It’s all a wonderful story, with vividly imagined and extremely weird characters in it. But don’t be too solemn about it all as if it is some sort of absolute reality.

To put this in Buddhist terms, there is a radical consequence of everything being interrelated, mutually conditioned. Complete mutual conditioning means that there are actually no things being conditioned. We can provisionally label parts of the tangled flow with names, thinking of them as real entities, but soon they have vanished and turned into something else. So none of the names we use refer to anything which has the properties that one assumes that things must have. There is no entity that exists in isolation, and no entity can give rise to or sustain itself, no entity can remain the same. Conditioned coproduction shows that everything is shunyata, and therefore that every situation is open — it can evolve into something quite different. You can’t say that all these categories that science talks about are somehow protected from shunyata. Atoms and genes have no existence of their own; neither does gravity or natural selection. They are just helpful descriptions that pick out parts of that flowing tangle, so that we can make some kind of sense of it while we wait until we can have insight into the whole thing.

[1] Ratnaprabha’s translation.

[2] In Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground, B. Alan Wallace (editor), Columbia University Press, New York, 2003, 77.

Science and Buddhism II: Understanding One’s Mind

Scientists themselves have increasingly seen the importance of ‘the observer’. Science is for human beings, so it needs to understand what it is to be human, what self-awareness is, and what the range of human needs are (scientists tend to stop at the survival (medicine), and material (technology) needs.) But above all because immediate experience is all we have! All else is inferred, models, theories, assumptions, attempts at communication etc.

So take mental processes seriously. And take seriously the mental processes of others — there is a real possibility of empathy. (Note how primitive Western philosophy and psychology can be here, without ‘contemplative’ disciplines.)

Can consciousness be studied scientifically (i.e. objectively)? Of course it can. But one can miss what it actually is — and think that consciousness is a thing, rather than it being ‘actual awareness’ – a ‘light’ you and I are immersed in now, in a rolling present. The structures that I use to make sense of the ‘contents’ of this illumination (which ‘I’ think of as partly inner, partly outer) can be studied.

Real empathetic communication implies different people’s described worlds can be compared. One can even construct highly simplified circumstances amenable to careful measurement (experimentation) as in brain imaging, and correlate measured variations with reported mental states, and with observable body responses or actions.

Actual experience and the states of the brain act reciprocally upon one another, so that it is incoherent to say that brain states simply cause mental events. Perception (says the Buddhist neuroscientist Francisco Varela) can be regarded as subsidiary to the mental function of imagination. Perception refers to what is present, imagination to what is not present, and the two mix so that in every moment they are emerging into awareness from an unconscious background, as a living present.

It is still the case that the dominant view among neuroscientists is, in effect, that processes in the body cause the mind. But neuroscientists such as Varela have shown that one’s state of mind can access local neural processes, so that neither can be reduced to the other. The mental state corresponds to a particular neural state, and actively incorporates or discards any contemporary neural activity in the relevant brain region, evaluating many potential neural states, “until a single one is transiently stabilised and expressed behaviourally”[1]. Mental states (says Varela) require both a phenomenological and a biological account. The neural elements and the global cognitive subject are co-determined; the subject is emergent, not just from the brain, but also from preceding mental states. Buddhism extends this account by offering its pragmatic consequences, showing how the living present, with imagination active, is a means for human transformation.

[1] Varela and Depraz, in Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground, B. Alan Wallace (editor), Columbia University Press, New York, 2003. 213. See also Varela, Thomson, and Rosch, The Embodied Mind (MIT press, 1993), 22.

Science and Buddhism I: Universes Colliding

Antennae galaxies colliding. NASA, ESA, SAO, CXC, JPL-Caltech, and STScI, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In a direct encounter between two massive spiral galaxies…, huge cold clouds of molecules will be compressed, and millions of new stars will burst into life like a string of Christmas lights. As the galaxies first swing by each other, their once orderly skies will become jumbled with dust, gas, and brilliant blue star clusters. Then the galaxies may do a slow, graceful U-turn and plunge into each other. This second encounter will trigger another burst of star formation, which will drive the remaining gas and dust from the combined system.[1]

Science and Buddhism can be seen as self-contained universes, apparently complete in themselves. Each is a very extensive, coherent worldview, worked out over many centuries. They are the greatest collective cultural achievements of the West and of Asia respectively. Now they are undergoing a historic encounter, and we are still in the early days of it.

In the 19th century, Westerners encountering Buddhism were very keen to present it as a rationalistic, even scientific approach[2]. But a genuine dialogue between Buddhism and science didn’t really start until the Dalai Lama’s Mind and Life conferences and dialogues began. Their first topic in 1987 was Buddhism & the Cognitive Sciences[3].

From boyhood, the Dalai Lama has had a very open, inquiring and fascinated response to science. For example, he says that, if any Buddhist assertion is convincingly refuted by science, it should be abandoned, because freedom comes from knowing reality as it is. (However, though he’d be relaxed about the non-existence of Mt Meru, he might be less quick to abandon ‘suffering arises in dependence on craving’, say, if a study appeared to contradict it.) And generally, scientists rather like Buddhism.

Buddhists are fascinated by the torrent of human experience, and what it all means. Their main priority is to expand the scope of awareness. They are not encumbered by the rather strange doctrines one encounters in ‘Religion’. (The only exception to this is perhaps rebirth. ) Both are concerned with the truth, and are prepared to take it on board, even if it threatens one’s cherished preconceptions. This is the ideal, and of course practising scientists and practising Buddhists both vary a lot.

The project and attitude of science.

The project: making systematic records of what is going on, accumulating factual knowledge, but also finding out what the connections are between all the things going on, and between what came before and what comes after — in other words, looking for laws of nature. Once science has found out how things connect with each other and affect each other, it tries putting them together in new ways. Sometimes this is just to see what happens — scientific experiments. Sometimes it is to make things happen in new ways, things that people want to happen — that is technology.

The attitude: reality as objective, implying the use of experimental method. Thus science takes that part of human experience which seems to be outside oneself very seriously, and takes it as primary.

The project and attitude of Buddhism.

The project: a path of growing insight and compassion — ethics, meditation, wisdom — each with insight and compassion aspects. Eradicating human suffering.

The attitude: the possibility and the desirability of complete awareness — being fully present in awareness of reality (insight) and of people (compassion). This attitude means that it takes consciousness very seriously, and as primary.

Where Buddhists and scientists agree

Curiosity-driven.
Interest in knowledge/truth/reality.
Discovering universal laws.
Problem-solving.
Reality as process.
The recalcitrance of the external world, which challenges ego clinging.
To change the results, you need to change the conditions.
Vast space and time. There are probably many inhabited places at inconceivable distances from each other, yet the same patterns can be discovered everywhere in the universe.
No creation, and no end of the world.
Relativity.
The plenum void: seeing that the void teams with potential, and with coming into being.
Linear time not intrinsic.
No self: seeing that the ‘self’ is a convenient fiction — there are just mental processes, which require no ego.
Animals are basically like us, and their drives can be found driving us from deep within.
Recognition of the barrier of subjectivity. Seeing that perception is prey to illusion and delusion, and other methods are needed than the conditioned senses to discern what is really going on.
The creation of a cooperating community (the peer-group of scientists, or the Sangha) able to achieve more than any individual can.

One-sidedness in Buddhism and science?

Buddhists have neglected the material, and this has influenced the countries where Buddhism has been active. For example, Joseph Needham claims that Buddhism seriously inhibited the growth of science in China, though I am not convinced by his arguments[4]. Sometimes, this is for the better. If there is less expectation that ‘things’ can yield happiness, more happiness results. But two things have been lost:

potentials from technology to reduce hardships
potentials for understanding the objective pole of experience more fully — and therefore ourselves and others

Science has neglected immediate experience, which is not trusted because it is so personal, and because it is so hard to come up with standardised results. Also, the disciplines of introspection and mental cultivation take a long time, so that William James and early psychologists while initially keen, gave up on it. The current fashion is to call introspection and even meditation itself ‘contemplative science’[5].

To come: Science and Buddhism II: Understanding One’s Mind

[1] From the Hubble telescope website. See https://hubblesite.org/science/galaxies

[2] For the history of this encounter, see Buddhism and Science: a Guide for the Perplexed by Donald S Lopez Jr (University of Chicago Press: Chicago 2008), and my review in the Western Buddhist Review.

[3] https://www.mindandlife.org/events/mind-and-life-dialogues/

[4] Joseph Needham, The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China, Volume I (Cambridge University Press, 1978), pages 264, 265, 272. But an essay by Jose Ignacio Cabezon indicates that the conditioning factors were far more complex, and that when Western science did arrive in Asia, it was treated by Buddhists in an open and welcoming way, in contrast to the responses to science of many European churchmen. (In Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground, B. Alan Wallace (editor), Columbia University Press, New York, 2003.)

[5] See the works of B Alan Wallace.

Are scientific laws permanent?

‘All things are impermanent’: what about scientific laws?

Saturn

Impermanence is fundamental to Buddhism. It is even “Buddhism in One Word” (Sangharakshita). The locus classicus for this particular doctrine could be seen as being a verse of the Dhammapada (a collection of sayings ascribed to the Buddha, which are very likely to be very close to his original teachings), which runs:

277 sabbe sankhaaraa anichchaa ti yadaa paññaaya passati
atha nibbindati dukkhe esa maggo visuddhiyaa.

All processes are impermanent. When one sees this with understanding, then one is disillusioned with the things of suffering. This is the Path of Purification. (John Richards translation)

So what is being stated as being impermanent is all processes — the Pali word being sankhara (the transliteration doubles the a’s to show they are the long form), or Sanskrit samskara. It pointedly does not say, “all dharmas are impermanent”, but two verses later, it does say, “all dharmas are insubstantial (anatta)”. Dharmas here probably means anything that can be an object of cognition, whether it is what we see as a physical thing, or an idea, or an attribute etc. I think it would be best to see a physical law as a dharma, but not a samskara (though a philologist friend who read an earlier draft disputes this).

Verse 5 of the Dhammapada says:

Occasions of hatred are certainly never settled by hatred. They are settled by freedom from hatred. This is the eternal law

So here a psychological law is being stated as not being impermanent. (Eternal law translates dhammo sanantano – ‘an eternal or age-old dharma’.) Why should the same not be the case with the physical laws of the universe? However, it is possible that they are contingent in some way: the cosmologist Lee Smolin speculates that new universes are constantly being spawned within black holes, each new universe having slightly different physical laws from its parent universe. (The Life of the Cosmos.)

But Buddhists might differ from many scientists, in particular those who think that there will eventually be a final theory of everything, in that they would count physical laws as dharmas, and so would assert that they are insubstantial. In other words, a law has no independent existence of its own. It is simply an ordered description of the way phenomena behave — how they influence each other, how they arise and pass away etc. and another type of intelligence might use a different set of laws to describe the same phenomena, though it would in principle be possible to cross-reference the two sets, and show how they are consistent with each other. It is an object of the conscious mind.

I wonder whether the regularity of scientific experimentation allows one to suspect that some physical laws would always be conceptually patterned in the same way, if different observers at perhaps very different times in very different parts of the universe set up their observations in the same way? In that sense, the law could be unchanging.

What is impermanent? In the Buddhist tradition, very little is left out of the rather loose term ‘samskara’. It is most importantly used for people’s mental states, habits, characters etc — in other words, it is encouraging you to feel that you are not stuck in any form of life, or any personal tendency.

This doctrine would assert that there can be no entity in the universe that was free from influence and thus change, similarly, no form of existence or realm, no physical object etc. ( I am taking it as read that such entities are mind objects, though in this context they are mind objects within scientific discourse, which is very careful to specify them in ways that ensures they can be investigated coherently by many people using a variety of well defined observation methods.) But how would this apply to certain subatomic particles which are regarded as being completely stable? Could one say that a proton(1) is a permanent entity?

It may be that it is illegitimate to apply Buddhist insights to the scientific sphere. I hope not, I suspect that the meeting of the two ways of looking at human life could be stimulating and fruitful. Scientific findings are very robust, and could clarify the worldview of Buddhists in many ways. Buddhists could also help scientists, for example by offering cogent alternatives to the view that it is primarily the human brain that gives rise to human awareness, and that there is an absolutely real, dead universe, lacking in awareness, which is ultimately separate from the processes of awareness. More importantly, it can suggest a non-religious ethical framework for scientists, some of whom have little in the way of ethics apart from the pressure of public opinion.

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(1) I had originally written ‘neutron’, a bit of a howler as a free neutron has a half life of less than 15 minutes. Free protons have never been seen decaying so far, so may be very long lasting, perhaps ‘permanent’, though protons within nuclei can transform to neutrons by beta decay, and a proton would lose its identity if it fell into a black hole.

Mind in Buddhism

Mind in Buddhism: Finding the Mind interview

How would you introduce Finding the Mind in just a few words?

Being aware is the most important part of our experience as human beings, so in Finding the Mind I wanted to explore what it means to be aware, and what you can do with this awareness. Buddhists have been looking into the issue for over two and a half thousand years so my book draws on the whole of the Buddhist tradition, as well as looking at some modern ideas.

I also put a few exercises in the book so that readers can do some of the things that Buddhist meditators have been doing down the ages and see what results they come up with themselves. I wanted to make the book accessible and also quite interactive because ultimately what is important is your own experience, not what somebody else says your experience ought to be. So I hope that Finding the Mind will give people a few avenues into exploring their own minds.

Why is the project of finding our minds so important?

In a way, experiences are all that we have got, so exploring the nature of experience is, I think, basic to our humanity. Also basic to our humanity are our unwelcome experiences – we suffer, we experience pain, and we wish things were different – and Buddhism has some very effective strategies for coping with these unwelcome experiences. Not just coping with them, in fact, but actually seeing through the issues that cause them in the first place.

The Buddha taught that suffering springs from our own minds, and mostly from the fact that we don’t know our own minds, so we end up making the same mistakes in life, over and over again. This is why I think that finding our minds is such an important project. We become familiar with the way our minds normally work, firstly so that we can then work out how to change our minds, and secondly so that we can also empathize with the experience of other people. Because people’s minds do work in very similar ways, and if we can understand our own minds, we can understand more about what it’s like to be a human being in general.

So finding our minds is not only important but also quite fascinating and exciting – lots of unexpected insights emerge when we start to look at our minds. Imagine that you didn’t have repeated disappointments with life and that you’d found the confidence to engage with the world and leave it a better place! This is what I think engaging with the Buddhist view of the mind can offer.

You dedicate a whole chapter to the subject of compassion. What relevance does compassion have as far as finding the mind is concerned?

Well firstly I think that it’s very important that any discussions of Buddhism include the subject of compassion because compassion is such a crucial part of Buddhism in general. Obviously meditation is also crucial – it allows us to make our experience as simple and straightforward as possible so that we can notice what’s actually going on in our minds and make subtle little adjustments. However, what is equally important is what happens during the rest of the day: how we go to sleep, how we eat, how we behave at work, how we deal with the people we live with. All of this stuff is real – it’s our mind actually responding. So finding the mind is not just about self-discovery, it’s also about connecting with our capacity to respond to life in a more compassionate way.

And as I mentioned earlier, our experience of suffering is something that we share with all human beings. More specifically, it’s a common human experience to feel embattled, for example, or needy, or that there’s something missing. One way through these experiences is through awareness of others – in other words through compassion – because compassion expands our awareness from the narrow perspective of the self, leaving us more relaxed and happier. So, even from a selfish point of view, compassion really works! But of course it is also about something much bigger than that. Other people are just as real as we are, they are just as important. So not to care about other people I think is running away from something.

Does Buddhism point to objective and universal laws that govern the workings of our minds, or does it simply encourage us to explore our own subjective experience?

I think it’s definitely best if our exploration of Buddhism starts from our own experience – from basic mindfulness – but of course with mindfulness we start to notice patterns in our experience and patterns between people as well. We discover that there are universal laws that govern the lives of conscious beings – all beings with a mind – because there’s something about mind which is, in a way, universal. When we see ourselves as a distinct subject in here, for example, we are inevitably going to experience problems with the separation between ourselves and the world around us.

So all conscious beings face similar problems, and finding solutions to these common problems is exactly what Buddhism is about. It’s something that ultimately we have to do for ourselves, but Buddhism gives us maps of the patterns that we’re likely to find in our experience to help us on our way.

In fact the Buddhist tradition has come up with a number of different maps because the underlying truths of life can never be fully summed up in one single conceptual way. And I think it’s helpful to be exposed to the widest possible range of approaches, so in my book I include visual images like the Tibetan wheel of life, along with Buddhist philosophical teachings, and I also recount stories – some narratives and some more mythic stories. I think that once you’ve found an approach or a map that works for you it means that you can change your mental responses by using the understanding that’s come through from other people, as well as from your own mindfulness and self-understanding.

Are there many individual minds or is there just one universal Mind?

Well usually we have a sense of some kind of division between an outer world that we share with others and an inner world that is ours alone. However, I do know that some people have had wonderful panoramic experiences of unity where they feel a very strong connection with everything outside them as well. I think those are really valuable experiences, but I would be very hesitant to turn them into an ideology and to insist that there is only one Mind because quite a lot of the time we experience ourselves very much as individuals – I’m sure that there is truth in both views.

In the author biography on the back of the book it says that you curtailed your career in science to train for ordination into the Triratna Order. Can you talk a bit about this process and the place that Finding the Mind has in the context of your own experience?

I’ve always had a lot of curiosity about the world around me, as well as curiosity about myself. I can remember when I was very young, at that time when self-awareness starts to dawn, just looking around me and finding it incredibly weird and wonderful to think that I was in the present moment which wasn’t ever going to happen again. It was this fascination with my own awareness which led me into science, I think.

Then I got quite stressed while I was studying science at university so I started to meditate, and meditation took me to Buddhism. And Buddhism led me back to that same fascination with awareness! So in Finding the Mind I really wanted, at least for my own satisfaction, to explore what it means to be an aware human being, and to do so with fidelity to both Buddhism as a personal path and to science as an objective discipline. I find it very interesting to try and bring Buddhism and science together, and in some ways Finding the Mind is an outcome of that.

So is Buddhism a science?

Buddhism is certainly like science in some ways. Both Buddhism and science are explorations of what is going on in life, but the big difference between them is that Buddhism deals specifically with human experience rather than the outside world. Science is very interested in the outside, so even when it looks at the mind it views it as an outside phenomenon – science is not an exploration of the mind of the scientist, but the mind of the person she or he is putting into the MRI scanner. Buddhism is interested primarily in exploring the scientist’s own mind – our own minds – how they produce suffering, and how they can free us from suffering. So I would say that Buddhism is scientific, but it’s not the same as science.

You say that ‘the results of neuroscience and of Buddhist insight are being compared, and there are signs of an exciting synthesis emerging.’ Can you expand on this statement?

This is something that I discuss in the last chapter of my book – I talk a bit about the interesting insights that came out of the Mind and Life conferences where a number of top-notch scientists engaged in dialogue with Tibetan teachers including the Dalai Lama. These conferences were really productive, to the extent that a large number of American neuroscientists now also have some kind of Buddhist training or background, which is fantastic.

Since both neuroscientists and Buddhists are trying to find the mind, there is much that they can learn from each other. One of the things that science can learn from Buddhism is the value of introspection – the value of looking at your own experience with a quiet mind and not assuming that that must be completely untrustworthy because it’s subjective. Through introspection you can work from the inside, not just from the outside.

There are also many things that Buddhism can learn from science. It can learn, for example, not to be too bound by the specific teachings of particular Buddhist traditions but to look at them all together in the light of modern findings. To take a rather crude example, until recently the Tibetans still believed that the earth was flat and that there was a great mountain called mount Meru right in the middle of it. Science has enabled them to realize that although the teaching may have great symbolic value, it shouldn’t be taken literally. So I think that Buddhism and science can be friends with each other – they definitely don’t need to attack each other.

Lastly, can we really find our minds?

I feel as if I’m giving it all away here, but I think the answer is no – you can’t find your mind. Still, you’ve got to look! Buddhism is all about looking for our minds and not finding them, and then turning to the centre of our experience to realize that we can’t tie anything down when we look at it. We tend to have quite a lot of views about our subjective experience – we say ‘I’m like this’, ‘I have this identity’, ‘I associate with this’, ‘I call myself this’, and they’re all just stories that we tell ourselves which, in one way or another, cause us suffering.

So the funny thing is that the more you look for the mind and don’t find it, the happier you become – you find a sort of liberation of the mind. I mean, I don’t really know what enlightenment would be like, but I get a sense that even a liberated mind wouldn’t think that it had tied everything down. It would still carry on looking – looking really, really openly.

Buy Finding the Mind here.

Interview by Hannah Atkinson of Windhorse Publications, August 2012

Ratnaprabha = Robin Cooper

writings on buddhism