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).
Ratnaprabha = Robin Cooper 