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
Ratnaprabha = Robin Cooper 