Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground

It is the purpose of this essay to consider some of the ways in which Buddhism and science have engaged each other: to take stock of the historical interaction of these two spheres, and to suggest, by way of conclusion, some directions for future engagement. Some caveats are in order at the outset, however. Although I use the terms Buddhism and science throughout, I am not unaware of the problems involved with the use of such generalities. Both Buddhism and science are of course highly internally differentiated categories. At times I will resort to evoking some of that internal structure (e.g., when I discuss the biological theory of evolution or Indian Buddhist views of matter). But I do not apologize for the fact that on other occasions I am painting a picture in broad strokes.

First of all, part of my goal in this essay is to consider the ways in which scientists and scholars of Buddhism have themselves depicted their mutual interaction. It is clear that, especially in their earliest encounters, that engagement was rhetorically constructed as one between Buddhism and science generally. To the extent that my remarks are a historical characterization of that encounter, then, it is fitting that I resort to the categories the participants in that encounter themselves utilize. Second, even more distinct categories, like evolution and Tibetan Buddhism, are themselves generalities. The point of course is that there is no escaping generality. A brush stroke is always broad by comparison to one that is finer. Finally, and more pragmatically, there is always a place for generalities as long as one remains mindful of the fact that in the process of resorting to them one is sacrificing detail.

Although I will be dealing here with many different time periods, this essay does not purport to be anything even remotely close to a complete historical overview of the interaction of Buddhism and science. If anything, I am more interested in characterizing this interaction in structural and typological, rather than in historical, terms, although even here the reader will find, as I have, the complexity of the real historical engagement of these two spheres evades even this form of categorization. This being said, it is my hope that this essay will be provocative, if only as a starting point for others who, like me, would seek to make some explanatory sense of the complex interactions of Buddhism and science and some normative suggestions for their future intercourse.

The earliest encounters between Buddhism and science cast Buddhism not as the partner of science in a dialogue, but as the object of scientific inquiry. It was the Enlightenment penchant for modeling the humanities after the natural sciences that led to the rise of the “science of religion.” As Buddhism came within the purview of this new “science,” there emerged, on the one hand, the rise of Buddhist philology, perceived as the application of systematic scientific principles to the study of Buddhist texts, and, on the other, the rise of the social scientific study of Buddhist cultures. In this way Buddhist texts and societies became fodder for the “scientific inquiries” of figures like Max Mueller and Max Weber. That today we find Religionwissenschaft as a movement much less neutral, much less the disinterested and objective analysis of pure fact, and much more theory and theologically laden than did the founding fathers of the discipline does not belie the fact that for these late nineteenth-century scholars Buddhism was to be approached as the object of such a science.

More important, this early rhetoric, a rhetoric that cast Buddhism as the subject matter of scientific inquiry, has in many ways set the tone for one important strand in the encounter between Buddhism and science, even to the present day. Such a mode of interaction is presumed in a good deal of current sociological and anthropological work being done in regard to Buddhist cultures and societies. And it is of course the dominant model in much of the psychological and neuroscientific work currently being undertaken in regard to Buddhist meditation.

At the risk of digression, I consider this form of encounter—the objectification of Buddhism, and especially Buddhists, by science as part of a scientific research program—to be sufficiently important to warrant some further remarks at this point. There is, of course, an inherent danger in the scientific objectification of subjects in an experimental setting. The peril lies in the possibility that those being tested come to be considered mere objects and thus dehumanized. Such a problem becomes especially acute when subjects are separated from researcher not only by professional but also by cultural distance. One way to lessen the negative effects of scientific experimental objectification—a tack taken by a group of researchers, to which I myself belong, studying the effects of meditation in a group of Tibetan monks¹—is to involve the subjects, to whatever extent possible, in the actual planning and execution of experiments, that is, to acknowledge them as intellectual equals and thus to give them a voice as colleagues. But even when this is done, casting Buddhists’ collective or individual behaviors, or their bodies, in the role of examined object is an enterprise fraught with ethical perils. My purpose in bringing this up is not to suggest that this form of encounter is to be avoided but only that it requires a great deal of forethought.

My own work as part of the research group mentioned above has made it clear to me that there are ethical issues involved in the cognitive scientific testing of Tibetan meditators that go beyond those traditionally covered and disposed of as part of traditional human subjects research screening.² Some of these are the result of cultural/religious factors that are unique to a Buddhist (and especially a Tibetan Buddhist) setting. For example, in a tradition where the wishes of the spiritual master are considered almost sacrosanct, how much freedom of choice do potential subjects really have if they know, or even believe, that their teacher or mentor is in favor of the program of testing? Other issues concern the procedures and effects of testing. Does mere participation in such experiments have a negative impact on a retreatant’s meditative life? What responsibility does a researcher have to share the results of experiments with subjects? How might such results—both positive and negative—be interpreted by subjects, and what effects might such interpretations have on their personal practice? Even apart from the obvious interruption to a retreatant’s isolation, can we say with certainty that, as regards the actual testing, apparently noninvasive procedures like EEGs will have no negative effects on the subtle physiology that a monk relies upon and manipulates in the more advanced forms of meditation, to take just one example of a real-life concern that emerged from our conversation with monks? And even assuming that one could be certain of this, which I think arrogant, is it not possible that a mediator’s subsequent practice might be negatively affected by the mere belief that such testing might have negative consequences? How do we weigh the value of the knowledge gained from testing against the possible negative effects it might have on the subject being tested?

In addition, there are a host of ethical questions that have to do with the effects of research, not on the individual but on the society at large. When research is conducted on a specific sample of adepts from a particular religious tradition or from a particular subschool within a religious tradition—say, monks from a particular school of Buddhism—might “positive” results be socially interpreted as validating the meditative techniques or expertise of adepts of that school over others? Might this exacerbate already existing forms of interreligious rivalry or intrareligious sectarianism? Given that science is such an extremely powerful legitimizing force, how can such research avoid serving as a scientific imprimatur to social tensions that already exist between cultures or within a single society, or, worse, create new tensions? Can anonymity and confidentiality prevent this? What degree of anonymity, if any, should be required to assure that this does not occur?

Still other issues arise from the different presuppositions of Western science and Buddhism as worldviews. How can an intellectual rapprochement be achieved between the prevailing philosophical view of cognitive scientists, most of whom hold to strict mind-brain identity, and Buddhists, who, believing that the mind is nonmaterial, are dualists? It is true that one could envision such a rapprochement taking place on a ground where each side took a more nuanced position—the scientist eschewing materialist reductionism and the Buddhist granting the possibility that mental states could have physical, and therefore measurable, correlates. However, such conversations, and reconciliation of views, have rarely taken place prior to actual experimentation, and this once again raises ethical issues. Where a subject’s ignorance of the nature and presuppositions of an experimental design can lead to fear, how much agreement must exist as a prerequisite for conducting research? What responsibility does a scientific researcher have to establish such consensus prior to testing?

Again, I will reiterate that my purpose here is not to argue against the objectification of Buddhism, or of Buddhists, by science, but simply to note that when this becomes a dominant mode of interaction between the two spheres there arise ethical issues to be sorted out, ethical issues that are in many ways more weighty than those arising when the mode of interaction is one of conversation.³

Not surprisingly, historians of science have long been concerned with etiological questions. In particular, they have sought to identify those factors which, by their presence in European culture, and their absence elsewhere, have brought about the rise of science. In this regard, Asian cultures have served for them as a kind of control. Concerned to establish the historical circumstances that led to the emergence of science in Euro-Christian society, it becomes natural to construct the rest of the world, including Buddhist Asia, as the barren and infertile site out of which science failed to arise.⁴ It goes without saying that this kind of historiography begs to be subjected to the kind of literary critical analysis that weaves out the rhetorical construction of the other and its relationship to questions of race, gender, power, empire and its demise, but this of course is impossible here.⁵ Suffice it to say that in much of this writing, and despite the subsequent antagonism between science and Christianity, it is precisely the Christian worldview that comes to be characterized as the causal sine qua non to the rise of science. Hence, Jaki (1974, 1985) believes that he explains Western Europe as the unique historical locus of the rise of science by identifying those factors within its Christian worldview that permitted its emergence: a monotheism that, in contradistinction to pantheism, led to a deanimized view of nature, a notion of the will of God as ascertainable and compatible with the existence of physical laws, and a noncyclical view of time, epitomized by the event of the Incarnation. Jaki contrasts the Indian notion of cyclical time, as instantiated, for example, in the doctrine of world-cycles, or yugas, to the notion of linear time, which, because of its focus on the “uniqueness of events,” serves as a foundation for the kind of empirical observation that is necessary to the emergence of science.

Jaki’s work is by no means ill-informed about the views of the various religions he examines, nor does it lack nuance. Ultimately, however, it remains unconvincing as an explanation, not because of errors in details but for various other reasons. For one, it can be pointed out that India and China did give rise to forms of empirically derived sciences that can be recognized as such even in Western terms, that is, that can be recognized as science without altering the semantic range of the word to take into account its understanding in these different cultures.⁶ Moreover, neither cyclicality, nor pan- and polytheisms seem to have acted as deterrents to the acceptance of science in these various cultures since its movement east, something that would be expected were Jaki’s thesis true.⁷ On the contrary, there is an ever increasing, albeit mostly naive and misguided, literature in these various cultures that suggests that science is completely compatible with, and at times that its findings are even prefigured in, their respective religious traditions. The point I am making is not, of course, that this literature is true, but that its existence is difficult to explain given Jaki’s thesis.

My chief objection to the work of Jaki and others like him, however, lies less in the realm of contingency than it does in the very logic of the form of historiography that it represents. For one, it places too much emphasis on ideology as the factor that determines or impedes the rise of science in a given culture. In so doing, it pays too little attention to material, sociological, and political forces that are at the very least as important as explanatory tools. Moreover, even if the importance of ideology were to be granted, there are questions as regards Jaki’s categories. Notions like cyclical time, and even polytheism, are in large part vague and can be read out of or into a wide variety of traditions.⁸ But, in addition to employing nebulous categories, studies like Jaki’s ultimately fail because in the end they are speculative, for, to be convincing, they require controls, and the irreversibility of history makes controls impossible. Ultimately, all that we may be able to say of the rise of science in the West is that it is in some very complex way the result of many different and unique causes that resist generalization,⁹ not the least of which is the bittersweet genius of individuals like Bacon, Descartes, Galileo, and Newton, something to which Jaki seems to pay little attention.

Apart from the historiographical literature that takes Buddhist and other Asian religious ideologies as contrasting vehicles for explaining the rise of science in the West, there is of course a literature that represents a more direct encounter between Buddhism and science. In his Gifford Lectures, Ian Barbour (1990:3–30) suggests a fourfold typology for considering the interactions of religion and science: conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration. While illuminating, especially because of its explanatory power in regard to the interaction between science and Christianity, I opt here for a slightly modified schema that I consider more useful in characterizing the interaction of science and Buddhism: conflict/ambivalence, identity/similarity, and complementarity.

I first consider conflict as a mode of engagement not, as is the case with the other modes, because of its prevalence, but because of its relative absence. That conflict has existed between Buddhism and science can hardly be denied. But conflict, where it has existed, is often attenuated. What is perhaps more common than out-and-out antagonism is either mutual disregard, or, when the two spheres have interacted, a kind of ambivalence.

Of course, to come to conclusions about the presence or lack of conflict between Buddhism and science from the Buddhist side requires not only a complete historical survey but demands that we treat different geographical regions of the Buddhist world individually as well. In Asia, where a rhetoric of conflict exists, this will undoubtedly be enmeshed with (though in my view not reducible to) Asian Buddhist opposition to European colonialism, which was, at least in the early phase of contact, the vehicle for the introduction of science into most Asian cultures.

That Asian Buddhist views concerning science will be found to be ambivalent can, I think, be gleaned, at least anecdotally, from the case of Tibet. We find that before the 1959 takeover of the country by Chinese forces, there existed widespread skepticism on the part of the politically powerful Buddhist monastic elite about Western influence generally. Science and technology, if not viewed as coextensive with, were nonetheless perceived by many conservative monastic officials as an essential part of, the Western ideology that threatened to undermine the Buddhist worldview of the country.¹⁰ In spite of this, there were individuals, like the thirteenth Dalai Lama and the regent sTag brag, who made valiant, though ultimately unsuccessful, attempts at modernizing the country by, among other things, educating young Tibetans in the theoretical and applied sciences and in mathematics. There were also prominent intellectuals who, through their exposure to Western culture, themselves developed a considerable personal interest in science, among the most famous of these, the present, fourteenth Dalai Lama, and the well-traveled and controversial monk-scholar Gendün Chöphel, who lived in the first half of this century.¹¹

More recently, there has been widespread skepticism among meditator monks as regards the exploding interest in the neuroscientific study of meditative states and the long-term effects of meditative practice. This skepticism, already alluded to above, is both theoretical and practical. The theoretical suspicion stems from the fundamental doubt (a) that nonphysical states of mind, like compassion and single-pointed concentration, can be measured using physical means and (b) that even if this were possible it would be a valuable thing to do. The practical skepticism expresses itself in these monks’ suspicion that such tests could have deleterious effects on their health and practice.¹²

From these brief remarks it can be gleaned that from the time of Tibet’s first major contacts with the industrialized West there has existed an ambivalence toward Western science, being seen by some as a threat to Buddhism and by others as an essential and positive part of the program to modernize the country. To my knowledge, however, there was never an elaborated and sustained critique that focused on Western science to the exclusion of other aspects of the Western intellectual tradition, even by those who viewed science and technological advancement in a negative light. It is of course the case that no one Asian Buddhist culture can be taken as paradigmatic of Buddhist Asia as a whole, but it would be surprising to me if the pattern of ambivalence toward science that we find in pre-1959 Tibet were not repeated in many other Asian settings.

If Buddhist attitudes toward science can be tentatively characterized as ambivalent, scientists’ interest in Buddhism, at least up to the last few decades, can be viewed as practically nonexistent. Some Buddhists, writing from the late 1950s to the present day, see the relative lack of conflict between Buddhism and science in history as an indication of the fundamental harmony between these two spheres. But if Buddhism has not been singled out for attack by Western scientists and their philosophical backers, if the interaction between Buddhism and science has not been as polemical and antagonistic as that between Christianity and science, it is most likely and simply because Buddhism was not seen as a competitor in the arena where, from the seventeenth through the early twentieth centuries, the war for the intellectual hegemony of the West was being waged. Buddhism was not targeted for attack simply because it was, for all intents and purposes, absent as a serious intellectual option, and not because, as implied by some erstwhile scholars, it is, either in content or method, more in tune with science. It is then history, or, perhaps more accurately, the colonialist devaluing of the culturally other, that spares Buddhism the pains of having to pass through modernity kicking and screaming, for while Buddhism, in the not-so-subtle logic of colonialist superiority, was a curiosity, until very recently it could by no stretch of the imagination be considered an intellectual equal worthy of being engaged as a partner in conversation.

Today there is certainly to be found in the literature what might be considered anti-Buddhist sentiments on the part of scientists, but this is usually not directed specifically at Buddhism, being instead a part of more general antireligious sentiments that are founded on naive mechanistic materialism.¹³ Likewise, there is a good deal of skepticism on the part of Buddhists as regards, for example, some of the technological fruits of science, but this critique falls short of a full-blown repudiation of science.¹⁴ Although most contemporary Buddhists and scientists continue simply to disregard each other, in the last few decades there has begun to emerge a real conversation between the two, and this is best characterized not in terms of either conflict or ambivalence but in terms of the modes of interaction to be discussed next.

In his study of the spread of Buddhism in the United States, Thomas Tweed (1992) argues that the first phase of the dissemination of Buddhism in North America (1844–1857) was characterized by a deemphasizing of Buddhism’s distinctiveness, and by a concomitant accentuation of the similarities between Buddhism and Christianity, especially Catholicism. This is followed, says Tweed, when more of the details about Buddhism are known, by a period in which Buddhism’s otherness is emphasized, especially its otherness vis-à-vis Christianity. Tweed’s work is of interest to me here because it suggests that when two very different cultures or traditions meet the first reaction is to treat the culturally other in terms of the culturally familiar. This, I will claim, is what happens when Buddhism and science first make contact.

Of course there are degrees of similarity, from vague compatibility to selfsameness. At one end of the spectrum, the end that begins to meld into the next mode of interaction, which I call complementarity, is the claim that Buddhism and science are similar: that they share common concerns, that they reach similar conclusions, that they have similar aims or utilize analogous methods. At the other is the stronger claim that Buddhism is science: that the objects of investigation, the results, aims, and methods of the two are identical. But wherever different Buddhists or scientists come out in this spectrum of views, the mode under discussion here emphasizes similarity rather than difference. Although by no means a complete survey, let me cite some examples of this mode of interaction between the two spheres.

One of the earliest sources for exploring the relationship between Buddhism and science is Henry Steele Olcott’s Buddhist Catechism, first published in the late 1880s or early 1890s.¹⁵ Olcott states that Buddhism is “in reconciliation with science,” that there is “an agreement between Buddhism and science as to the root idea” (1889:30, 33). The reason for this is basically twofold. Olcott believes that both Buddhism and science teach evolutionism, “that man is the result of a law of development, from an imperfect lower, to a higher and perfect condition” (30). Further, “both Buddhism and science teach that all beings are alike subject to universal law” (33), which he relates both to the “law” of karma, and to the “law of motion” (51, 57) that brings the universe into existence. Thus, Olcott implies, Buddhism and science are in agreement because they subscribe to the view that there are natural laws governing the development of both persons and the world. But Olcott is also ambivalent about science. Although he states that Buddhism encourages the teaching of science (55), just two pages later he tells the reader that Buddhism is not “a chart of science” but rather “chiefly a pure moral philosophy” since Buddhism (unlike science?) believes that it is “unprofitable to waste time in speculating as to the origin of things” (57–58).

A slightly later Buddhist Catechism, written originally in German in 1888 by a German lay Buddhist under the pen name of Subhadra Bhikshu (Subhadra 1970), follows Olcott’s lead, albeit cautiously, in speaking of Buddhism’s belief that “in the universe there reigns strict conformity to law” (34, 48), which it relates to the law of cause and effect (40, 77). Subhadra is more explicit, however, and perhaps more “separatist” and triumphalist, than Olcott in his depiction of the relationship of Buddhism to science:

Buddhism does not intend to teach natural science; it does not concern itself with the outward condition of things, but with their inner being, and therefore stands neither in a hostile nor a dependent relation in regard to science. The educated Buddhist occupies a perfectly unprejudiced position concerning natural science; he examines its results and accepts, uninfluenced by religious scruples, such of its teachings as appear to him correct. . . . The Buddhist knows that science, like all earthly things, is changeable, progresses continually, and can teach many useful and great things now-a-days which were unknown at the time of the Buddha; but that on the other hand nothing can be discovered, no matter how far scientific research may progress, which could contradict the words of the Buddha. Science teaches us to find our way in . . . the material world. . . . But the eternal truth which the Buddha proclaimed leads to consummation and deliverance. He who has completely apprehended and thoroughly grasped the Four Noble Truths can do without science. While the most extensive scientific knowledge still belongs to ignorance (avijjā) from the point of view of the highest wisdom as it does not lead to deliverance. (93–94)

Subhadra evinces a real ambivalence concerning the relationship of Buddhism and science. On the one hand, there seems to be a compatibility between the two (Buddhists are free to accept the findings of science). But this is because Buddhism is neutral as regards the findings of science, since it is concerned with the metaphysics (the “inner being”) rather than the physics of things. Hence, in Subhadra, perhaps for the first time, we find the beginnings of the view that Buddhism and science are complementary. But even if they are complementary in terms of their subject matter (that is, in terms of the things they examine—Buddhism/inner world, science/outer world), the knowledge of Buddhist doctrine trumps that of science. It is Buddhism that is ultimately worth knowing, so that someone who comes to the end of the Buddhist path has no further need of science. Indeed, says Subhadra, science is in actuality a form of ignorance since it is incapable of delivering human beings from suffering. Thus, in the end, Subhadra’s is a mixed view that cuts across the three general types being discussed here, since it contains elements of conflict/ambivalence, compatibility, and complementarity.

Another early record of Buddhist views concerning science, a record that stresses the similarity of the two, is the proceedings of the World Parliament of Religions, held in Chicago as part of the Columbian Exposition of 1893. It was as part of that meeting that the Sri Lankan Buddhist leader Anagarika Dharmapala “launched into a favorite theme of the nineteenth-century Buddhist reformers: that it was Buddhism, not Christianity, that could heal the breach between Science and religion” (Fields 1981:126).¹⁶ Stressing the fact that Buddhism repudiated the notion of a creator, Dharmapala claimed that in Buddhism there was no need for explanations that went beyond that of science, there being no need for miracles or faith.¹⁷ As part of that same convocation the great Japanese Zen Master Soyen Shaku drew at least implicit parallels between the law of karma and the laws of science. Paul Carus, an influential American editor and publisher, a monistic rationalist, and himself already a strong advocate of the view that Buddhism was in a unique position among the world’s religions to be reconciled with science, was greatly influenced by the World Parliament and especially by its Buddhist representatives, a fact attested to by his subsequent efforts on behalf of Buddhism in the United States and his writings on Buddhism. These included his widely read Gospel of the Buddha, in which, in the words of D. T. Suzuki, he “combined the spirit of science and philosophy.”¹⁸ Tweed (1992:23) points out that this trend to see Buddhism, and more specifically the Buddhist repudiation of God and soul, as compatible with Western science was a view prevalent among Buddhist sympathizers in the United States in the last half of the nineteenth century.

Taking the views of the figures mentioned here together with others of the same period, like Thomas B. Wilson and Dyer Daniel Lum, we can glean something of the general tenor of the rhetoric of the compatibility of Buddhism and science in the mid to late Victorian era. Influenced by the prevailing rationalism, empiricism, and free-thinking views of the Enlightenment, these men saw in Buddhism a lack of credal dogmatism that they believed was in marked contrast to the tenets of traditional Christianity. Buddhism was therefore like, or concordant with, science precisely because it partook of those elements that, lacking in Christianity, made a reconciliation between the latter and science impossible. The perceived Buddhist emphasis on “the authority of the individual” and its critical spirit were seen as analogous to the methods of science, and the “universal law” of karmic causation was perceived by many as harmonious with science’s search for causes, especially for impersonal causal laws that were independent of the will of a deity. Given that, especially in the wake of Kant, ethics was seen as the core of religion, it should also be noted that many of these thinkers saw the Buddhist path as offering a scientific, that is, systematic and empirically verifiable, method for the moral perfection of the individual.

Some late nineteenth-century North American Buddhists seem to have been content simply to point out what they saw as the similarities between science and Buddhism. They believed Buddhism to be more versatile in its ability to respond to the findings of the (then) “new sciences” (especially evolutionism and psychology). Some, while considering Buddhism and science as distinct spheres, saw between them an unspecified but “close intellectual bond.” Others believed that when science had brought about the final demise of Christianity, Buddhism would stand alone as the only plausible alternative religious view. Others would go further. For example, Paul Carus grew to believe that Buddhism was the “Religion of Science,” the religion that would make “scientific truth itself . . . the last guide of a religious conception of mankind.”¹⁹ In these various views we see reflected the entire range of opinions of this second mode of interaction: from vague similarity to total identity. It is important to consider these early views because they will in many ways set the tone for the rhetoric of compatibility that is to follow.

In the late 1950s the English-trained Sri Lankan scholar K. N. Jayatilleke wrote what has become one of the most influential essays on the relationship between Buddhism and science.²⁰ “Buddhism and the Scientific Revolution” reiterates many of the themes of the nineteenth-century rhetoric of compatibility, although now in a more sophisticated way. Jayatilleke’s basic thesis is that the rift between religion and science would not have occurred had the scientific revolution “taken place in the context of Early Buddhism.” This is not only because Buddhism “accords with the findings of science” (similarity in content and conclusions) but also because Buddhism “emphasizes the importance of a scientific outlook,” in that “its specific dogmas are said to be capable of verification” (similarity in method). As is evident from his other writings, most notable his Early Buddhist Theory of Knowledge, Jayatilleke, heavily influenced by the prevailing tendencies in British philosophy, sought to portray the Buddhism of the earliest Pāli texts as “an analytical approach, combined with an empiricism” (1980:276). In the essay under discussion Jayatilleke points out similarities between the Buddhist and scientific conceptions of the cosmos and between Buddhism and psychology. While acknowledging that Buddhism offers no theory of biological evolution, he sees the former as compatible with the latter, a view put forward more recently and in much greater detail by Robin Cooper.²¹ But Jayatilleke is concerned more with showing similarities in the methods of Buddhism and science than in demonstrating parallels as regards content or conclusions. Both science and Buddhism, he claims, are committed to critically (and not dogmatically) establishing the existence of universal laws, laws that can be verified through “personal experience.” While acknowledging, for example, that rebirth and karma may not seem very scientific to the modern mind, he stresses that these “laws” were accepted by early Buddhists not dogmatically but only after they had been personally verified. Underlying this search for laws is the common belief in universal causation: that everything can be explained “without the need for teleological explanations or divine intervention.”²²

Despite these parallels, Jayatilleke does not hold the stronger view of the identity of Buddhism and science. He makes this abundantly clear when he states that it is not his intention to show that “Buddhism teaches modern science.” This does not mean that such a view is dead. A century after the Victorians, and over two decades after Jayatilleke, we find the rhetoric of identity still very much alive, and there is arguably no clearer statement of it than in the work of Gerald Du Pre (1984). For Du Pre, just as the Madhyamaka is the philosophy of Buddhism par excellence, so too is it the philosophy of science (105). Scientific psychology, he tells us, was not founded in nineteenth-century Germany by Wundt, but “two thousand five hundred years earlier, in India, by Prince Siddhartha” (110). Du Pre finds many “amazing” instances of modern scientific findings being prefigured in the Buddhist (mostly Pāli) texts. Finally, meditation, he states “is scientific examination itself!” (1984:141).

As naive and unsophisticated as this view may seem to many of us today, it is by no means a relic of bygone ages, for even today we find scholars given to the hyperbolic claim that Buddhism is science, and Buddha the quintessential scientist. Guenther (1984), while claiming to be utilizing the concepts and terminology of science only metaphorically and heuristically (4, 56)—in his case as a way to make the Buddhist rDzogs chen material more accessible to a Western audience²³—at times betrays his underlying belief in some real and substantial compatibility between the two spheres, even as regards the size of elementary particles and the size of the universe (98–99). Far more prevalent and more subtle, though nonetheless a vestige of the rhetoric of identity described here, is the view that Buddhism is its own unique type of science: an interior science, a mind science. But this takes us into a new mode of the engagement of Buddhism and science, one that I call complementarity.

Conflict/ambivalence as a mode of interaction between Buddhism and science presumes radical and irreconcilable differences between the two spheres. In a parallel fashion the rhetoric of compatibility presumes a fundamental similarity between (and in its extreme form, the identity of) Buddhism and science. Complementarity as a mode of engagement lies somewhere between the first two modes: negotiating both similarities and differences.

Just as conflict and compatibility as modes of engagement were seen to be of different types, depending upon the kind and degree of difference or similarity they stressed, so also with complementarity. Where similarity in method, and difference in the object of study, is maintained, there emerges the rhetoric of Buddhism as an interior science, or a science of the mind. Here Buddhism—now seen as an empirical and verifiable technology, but a technology of the spirit—is portrayed as complementing science whose object of study is the exterior world of matter. While different in what they analyze, they are claimed to be similar in how they go about the analysis.²⁴ The challenge then is seen as one of building on that common methodology (the similar how) to extend the purview of each sphere (the disparate what). In this model science stands to gain, for example, by being pushed to consider mind or consciousness nonmechanistically or by having to confront extraordinary inner mental states that are not normally within the purview of its investigations.²⁵ Buddhists stand to profit by gaining access to new facts concerning the material world (body and cosmos)—facts that have lain outside of traditional Buddhist speculation due to technological limitations. This, in any case, is the rhetoric of this way of envisioning the complementary nature of Buddhism and science.

Another form of complementarity stresses difference in method and similarity in content. Here both Buddhism and science are seen as engaging the selfsame object (whether matter or consciousness or both), but do so utilizing different modes of analysis. Science is seen as operating rationally, conceptually, and analytically. Buddhism, it is claimed, engages its object experientially, using nonconceptual modes of intuitive understanding that emerge as the result of the practice of meditation. Science yields factual knowledge that is useful in practical and mundane tasks; Buddhism is the purveyor of transformative knowledge that brings about positive personal and social change. In studies that exemplify this mode of engagement it is claimed that, even if Buddhists and scientists continue to utilize their own unique methods of gaining knowledge in their respective traditions, as human beings they can (and should) learn to access reality using the entire range of epistemic possibilities. Thus the complementarity of Buddhism and science here lies in the ability of each sphere to contribute epistemically to a more complete way of knowing a common object.

Obviously, what I have just outlined are ideal-typical forms of complementarity. These modes of engagement in the real world will be more complex and often intertwined. Regardless of what types and degrees of similarity are stressed, however, the various forms of the rhetoric of complementarity all have in common the tendency to see in the differences between Buddhism and science the basis for a dichotomizing of the field or mode of knowledge that makes of each a part that, when united, creates an even greater and more worthwhile whole. It is this holism that distinguishes complementarity from mere compatibility. While the intrinsic value of each of the two parts—Buddhist and scientific modes of knowledge—may not be denied, the implication of course is that in isolation each is also lacking, if only because each by itself fails to realize its full potential as part of—that is, that in isolation each fails to realize its full contribution to—the whole.²⁶

Complementarity as a mode of engagement operates, then, according to a structuralist logic that uses the perceived differences between Buddhism and science to construct them as the binary parts of the greater whole. Hence, science is concerned with the exterior world, Buddhism with the interior one. Science deals with matter, Buddhism with mind.²⁷ Science is the hardware, Buddhism the software.²⁸ Science is rationalist, Buddhism experiential.²⁹ Science is quantitative, Buddhism qualitative.³⁰ Science is conventional, Buddhism contemplative.³¹ Science advances us materially, Buddhism spiritually.³² But whether the difference is identified principally in terms of content, of method, or of goal, the perceived problem—diagnosed in terms of the overemphasizing of one of the two elements³³—is overcome by a balance that is achieved when the two parts are brought together harmoniously. Unlike conflict/ambivalence as a mode, the logic of complementarity eschews the kind of triumphalism in which one of the two spheres emerges as victorious over the other. Unlike identity/compatibility as a mode, by holding firmly to the notion of irreconcilable differences it refuses to allow either Buddhism or science to be reduced to the other.

It should also be mentioned that the logic of complementarity being described here is ultimately axiological insofar as it presumes and promotes certain values, e.g., a balance of external/rationalist/material and internal/ experiential/mental development. In brief, in the mode of complementarity Buddhism and science, though distinct, and though individually valuable, each contribute to the creation of a whole that is of even greater worth.

One of the clearest examples of the rhetoric of complementarity is found in a work that, though not strictly devoted to the dialogue between Buddhism and science, has been extremely influential in the subsequent conversation between the two. The work is Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics (1984 [1976]). Despite its many limitations—not the least of which is the fact that it conflates many of the “Eastern” traditions, treating them as if their most fundamental doctrinal claims were the same—the implications of Capra’s work are to be felt even today. As the yin/yang symbol on the cover admonishes, The Tao of Physics touts the complementarity of physics and “Eastern mysticism.” Capra’s work stresses the similarity—and even the “complete harmony”—of the conclusions of modern physics and the “mystical” (especially Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist) traditions, and thus at times reads more like a work belonging to the second mode of engagement, that of compatibility or identity. But in the epilogue to The Tao of Physics Capra makes it clear that his view is one of complementarity:

I see science and mysticism as two complementary manifestations of the human mind; of its rational and intuitive faculties. . . . The two approaches are entirely different and involve far more than a certain view of the physical world. However, they are complementary, as we have learned to say in physics. Neither is comprehended in the other, nor can either of them be reduced to the other; but both of them are necessary, supplementing one another for a fuller understanding of the world. . . . Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science, but men and women need both. Mystical experience is necessary to understand the deepest nature of things, and science is essential for modern life. What we need, therefore, is not a synthesis, but a dynamic interplay between mystical intuition and scientific analysis. (297)

The dialogue between Buddhism and science has come a long way since Capra’s work, but the underlying logic of complementarity can still be found in a great many studies even today. Vic Mansfield, a physicist with a longstanding interest in Buddhism, writes in a recent essay:

I hope to show that understanding a little about time in modern physics helps us more deeply appreciate some of the most profound ideas in Buddhism. Furthermore, I will also suggest that some appreciation of Middle Way Buddhist ideas could aid in the development of physics. Thus a nontrivial synergy between these two very different disciplines is possible, one that results in deeper understanding and more compassionate action.

Mansfield’s synergistic model of the interaction of Buddhism and science is prevalent today; it evokes a specific kind of complementarity. It is not that Buddhism and science use similar methods or reach identical conclusions but that each has implications for the other, implications that, when seriously considered, can yield greater insight in each of the two spheres.

The dialogue between Buddhism and physics is by no means in its infancy,³⁴ but it cannot compare to the state of the dialogue between Buddhism and the mind sciences. Let us turn to a discussion of some of the recent work in this latter field to see the model of complementarity at work. In a recent book (Goleman and Thurman 1991:7–8, 59, 73) Robert Thurman suggests that, whereas the West has been concerned principally with the exploration of the material universe, Buddhism has been concerned with developing a refined “inner science,” and that, whereas Western science has been concerned with the hardware of the brain, the Tibetan mind sciences provide us with the software for understanding and modifying the mind. In the end, however, it is not clear whether Thurman’s is a form of complementarity or a kind of triumphalism, for in both the work just mentioned and in a more recent book (Thurman 1998:275 et passim) it eventually becomes clear that for Thurman the “whole” to which both Buddhism and science contribute is none other than Buddhist omniscience, something that Thurman clearly believes can be accessed through the Buddhist path alone. (Cf. the discussion of Subhadra above.)

Daniel Goleman (Goleman and Thurman 1991), though recognizing that there are similarities in content between Western and Buddhist psychology, believes these to be “surface” similarities and, instead, sees the complementarity in their methods to be the locus of their most fruitful interaction:

The telling difference is in the methods, the means to mental health that exist in each system. . . . By and large, psychotherapy focuses on the content of consciousness. It does not attempt the more radical transformation posited in the Tibetan Buddhist approach, which focuses on the process of consciousness. . . . When you put the two psychologies together, you get a more complete spectrum of human development. (100–101)

This “full spectrum” model is a view that has been put forward most clearly and forcefully by Wilber, Engler, and Brown (1986). Transformations of Consciousness, a collection of essays by these three (and other) authors, reprinted mostly from the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, puts forward the view that there is a basic underlying similarity to the structure of developmental (meditative) stages in various contemplative religious traditions.³⁵ Buddhism plays a major role in their analysis. Science (specifically psychology) has provided us with a map of the “conventional” stages of human development. Buddhism extends those stages by providing a further structuring of human development beyond the conventional realm. Only when the conventional and contemplative templates are taken together (and in that order) do we have a full picture (the full spectrum view) of human development. Despite these authors’ (and especially Brown’s) very detailed attempt to argue for a common structure to the meditative path across cultures and religious traditions—a view that, even if not a perennialism of goal, is a perennialism of method (220)—I remain unconvinced about such a common structure, just as I remain unconvinced that the various “conventional” psychological schemes of human development can be harmonized into a unified and consistent template that would be acceptable to each of the various Western theorists on whose work these three authors draw. Equally problematic is the tendency in this study to ascribe to the contemplative traditions a lack of thematization concerning the conventional workings of the mind and the nature of the conventional self. Be that as it may, Transformations of Consciousness presents us with one of the clearest examples of the logic of complementarity. In their words,

If it is true that the conventional schools have much to learn from the contemplative schools (especially about possibly higher development), it is equally true—and we believe as urgent—that the contemplative schools surrender their isolation and apparent self-sufficiency and open themselves to the vital and important lessons of contemporary psychology and psychiatry. (8).

Thus in Transformations science and Buddhism complement each other by contributing, respectively, models of the conventional and contemplative stages of human development, which, when taken together, provide a complete picture of what it means to be fully human. Taken in isolation, each provides us with only a partial picture of human development.

A different form of complementarity is found in Christopher deCharms’s Two Views of the Mind (1998), a work that explores the complementary perspectives on the mind offered by Buddhist Abhidharma and neuroscience. Although the two perspectives, he claims, are very different—“The Tibetan approach to mind is largely descriptive, explaining by illustration and metaphor, whereas Western science is predominantly mechanistic, explaining in terms of simple material forces acting on small constituent parts” (50)³⁶—deCharms believes that the two spheres can contribute to each other, but not by justifying each other’s conclusions. Many studies that tout the complementarity of Buddhism and science focus on the ways in which the former can contribute to the latter. DeCharms’s work, for all its limitations, at least gives equal time to the other side of the equation. He believes that science can contribute to Buddhism because the former has at its disposal methods for achieving consensus through verifiability. DeCharms portrays Buddhism (and the contemplative religious traditions generally) as fractured in regard to the details of their views of the mind. “By using the methods of science, methods based on commonly verifiable observations, it might be possible to start to find a similar kind of consensus regarding debated points within Buddhism, or even debated points within traditions” (48). Hence, science, the paragon of consistency in deCharms’s view, will act as the adjudicator of—or, perhaps more accurately, the model for adjudicating—intra-Buddhist and interreligious doctrinal disputes. Whatever one might think of such a view (and the work of Kuhn and Feyerabend alone may be enough to seal its fate), at least it evinces the virtue of offering some concrete suggestion as to how Buddhism stands to gain in its encounter with science. But if Buddhism can profit, so, of course, can science. Buddhism can contribute to neuroscience insofar as “the observational methods of Buddhism are what the present [Western] science of mind largely lacks in systematic form” Their main value to Western thinking may be that they are both subjective and systematic to a level of detail that current Western systems of observation have not yet reached” (1998:46).

A similar view can already be found in the 1991 work of Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, The Embodied Mind, a study that also sees in Buddhism a dialogue partner for cognitive science, one that can infuse the latter with a perspective that it is presently lacking: “a direct, hands-on, pragmatic approach to experience.” Both similarities in content (e.g., both Buddhism and cognitive science claim the self to be “fragmented, divided or nonunified”) and similarities in method (both Buddhism and science are pragmatic, systematic, and disciplined techniques for dealing with the phenomenal world and with human experience, respectively) are important to the authors of this work. Buddhism’s sophisticated phenomenology of experience allows it to confront science on equal terms, as it were, and ultimately allows it to serve as a corrective to science, which, up to now, has given “the spontaneous and more reflective dimensions of human experience . . . little more than a cursory, matter of fact treatment” (1991:xviii). Buddhism thus complements science by providing it with the means to reclaim a sense of the embodiment of experience, something that it has lost. But, in addition to this, Buddhism, and especially the Buddhist philosophical perspective known as Madhyamaka, serves as another kind of corrective, a corrective to the “nihilism”—both in the cognitive sciences and in society generally—that is the natural response to groundlessness in general, and to the breakdown of a belief in a unified self in particular. Like Mansfield, then, Varela, Thompson, and Rosch believe that Buddhism is more than just intellectually useful to science. It is also an ethical corrective to the problems that face us as human beings today, problems that have in large part been either caused or exacerbated by science.

This notion of Buddhism as dual corrective—both intellectual and ethical—is also at the core of Alan Wallace’s earlier study, Choosing Reality (1996). The first part of this work is unique in taking as its subject matter not Buddhism and science itself but Buddhism and the philosophy of science. Wallace is concerned, first of all, to establish the naïveté of the view that science (and his focus is principally on physics) is metaphysically neutral. He next shows how two metaphysical views—“realism” and “instrumentalism”—have acted as philosophical underpinnings for science and argues that they have failed in that regard. Wallace then suggests that the philosophy of the Madhyamaka school may be a more suitable alternative.³⁷ In addition to being intellectually complementary in the way just described, Buddhism, according to Wallace, can also complement science ethically, by reinvigorating it with the spirit of ethical responsibility, “the longing to be of service to others,” a spirit that is found in science at its best but has too often been lost as science became disassociated from religion and philosophy.

Finally, let me mention, if just briefly, and by way of concluding this discussion of the dual-correctionist form of complementarity, the work of Jeremy Hayward (1984, 1987), who was one of the first scholars to take the discussion in this direction. Much of what has already been said as regards the complementary nature of Buddhism and science in the work of Varela, Thompson, and Rosch and of Wallace is also true of the work of Hayward. Where Hayward perhaps differs is in his more detailed and historical thematization of the role that modern science has played in creating personal and social alienation. For him Buddhism complements science by counteracting/correcting this tendency of modernist science to create a rift between nature and its observer, and between matter/body and mind. In this way Buddhism acts as a force for reenchanting the world.

Even a cursory survey of the interaction of Buddhism and science, which is all that the present essay purports to be, would be remiss in failing to mention the role that the present Dalai Lama has played in the ongoing dialogue. His interest in the dialogue between Buddhism and science is evidenced by wide-ranging engagements: from conversations with physicist David Bohm (Weber 1986:231–242) to the series of Mind and Life conferences that, in turn, have dealt with topics as diverse as the mind sciences (Hayward and Varela 1992), emotions and health (Goleman 1997), sleep, dreaming, and dying (Varela 1997), compassion and altruism, physics, and, most recently, destructive emotions. On one level, the Mind and Life conferences, by consciously striving to choose topics and participants carefully, have brought the level of the dialogue between Buddhism and science to new heights, both in the level of sophistication, and in terms of public exposure. At the same time, the Mind and Life conferences are conversations between Western scientists and the Dalai Lama, almost exclusively, as the sole Buddhist interlocutor. Although these dialogues have become accessible to Western audiences through the publication of proceedings, they are known in the Tibetan world, again, almost exclusively, through the efforts of the Dalai Lama himself. No one figure, even one as extraordinary as the Dalai Lama, can carry the burden of being the sole Buddhist representative in Buddhism’s engagement with science, nor, for that matter, of being the sole representative of that dialogue before an entire culture. If that dialogue is to flourish, then, it will require greater participation and commitment on the part of the Buddhist scholarly world, both Asian and Western.

Even in this brief and impressionistic account of the interaction of Buddhism and science, it would be difficult not to notice change and even progress. A dialogue that began in an idiom of broad generalities—“Buddhism,” “science,” “universal laws” and so forth—has shifted to a more concrete conversation that is increasingly cognizant of, and more informed about, the complex internal texture of these two spheres. Today the partners in the dialogue are not simply Buddhists and scientists but Japanese Rinzai Zen Buddhists and cognitive neuroscientists or Tibetan dGe lugs pa Buddhists and elementary particle physicists. Today we are more likely to see the partners in such a dialogue discussing not simply “cosmology” but the Buddhist and Western cosmological understandings of the structure of space in the early universe; not just “the mind” but the probable outcomes of PET-scan studies of dying meditators. This more specialized and sophisticated dialogue is partially the result of the development of the various fields themselves. We simply know more about human physiology, human behavior, the workings of the brain, the structure of matter, and the evolution of the universe than we did a few decades ago. Concomitantly, Western scholarship in Buddhist studies has progressed from the musings of armchair scholars to the serious study of texts in their original languages, to the exploration of the interface of text and culture in a variety of Asian settings. Specialization—both in science and in Buddhist studies—obviously has its downside, but it also has its advantages. In the absence of such specialization it is difficult to imagine that the dialogue between Buddhism and science could have reached the level of sophistication it has today.

But specialization alone is not enough to explain the changes that have occurred in the interaction between Buddhism and science. Increased accessibility of information about these two traditions has been just as important. Scientists now have access to resources for the study of Buddhism, both textual and human, that were simply unavailable a generation ago, and vice versa. Shifts in the intellectual ethos of the scientific West have also positively impacted the dialogue. Especially in recent years, we have witnessed a slowly decreasing resistance to the idea that mind may have a substantial role to play in medicine, neuroscience, and even physics. (Hayward 1987). Finally, there are sociological factors that have contributed to the changing nature of the conversation between Buddhism and science, not the least of which is the spread of Buddhism to the West. Despite a rhetoric that sometimes conceals this fact, many, perhaps even most, of the scientists active in the dialogue today are practicing Buddhists. Nor can the importance of the interest in science shown by a charismatic Buddhist leader like the Dalai Lama be underestimated as a factor in the current, and more refined, state of the dialogue.

That Buddhism and science are today engaged in a dialogue that is more nuanced and mature is not of course to deny that more naive ways of envisioning their mutual engagement still exist. There are still individuals—Buddhists, scientists, or both—who find a rhetoric of identity or conflict irresistible. What is less obvious, perhaps, is that even some models of complementarity can act as impediments to mature dialogue. Dialogue can be stunted by a dichotomizing logic of strict complementarity that is taken too literally, and applied too strongly, by a structuralist logic of binary opposition creating impermeable categories that cease to operate as metaphors and come to be believed as real. Let us consider for a moment the rhetoric that casts Buddhism as an inner science of the mind, and science as the investigation of matter. As a fluid metaphor this mode of complementarity certainly has its uses. It can be illuminating, and can enhance our understanding of the interaction of Buddhism and science. If taken too literally, however, this model would seem to imply that Buddhism has the spiritual realm as its sole concern, and that it is therefore unconcerned with the analysis of matter. Nothing could be farther from the truth, of course. Buddhist scholars have elaborated complex theories of matter. They have debated the relative merits of competing theories and have speculated extensively about the relationship of matter to other phenomena. Where the metaphor of Buddhism as an inner science is reified, it precludes a dialogue between Buddhism and science on the nature of matter; it prevents a serious engagement between Tibetan and Western medicine on the physical causes of illness. In short, it acts to silence Buddhism when it attempts to address any issue related to the material world. Similarly, a strict structuralism of this sort, by granting to Buddhism a monopoly on the life of the mind, dismisses in an ad hoc fashion the possibility that, say, psychoanalysis or cognitive science could have anything valuable to contribute on the nature of mental processes.

Of course, there is something to be gained by both Buddhists and scientists in creating and maintaining such a strict segregation of the two spheres, or so it would seem. Such a tactic, as Wayne Proudfoot (1985) has shown in a different context, serves as a kind of protectionist strategy: the kingdom is divided between the two factions for the sake of peace. In so doing, each side assures for itself total control over its own sphere of influence. Buddhism need fear no challenge from science when it comes to the realm of experience, and science can rest peacefully in its knowledge that Buddhism poses no threat when it comes to the external material world. Peace appears to be the reward, but it is a false peace, one based on convenience and not on truth, for the truth is that both Buddhism and science are highly complex, totalizing worldviews that defy the literalist and strict structuralist attempts to delimit them.

Protectionist strategies of the type just mentioned, whether conscious or unconscious, seem to me to be at work in many of the real-life dialogical encounters between Buddhists and scientists. How so? The tendency manifests itself in an unwillingness to go beyond the merely informative, in an intellectual laziness that too readily accepts differences, and that, when conscious, justifies such acquiescence in the name of complementarity, or its offspring, the romantic idealization of the other: Buddhist: “How can they be wrong about matter . . . they have the machines,” or scientist: “Who are we to dispute the fact that they can attain such states? . . . They have been doing this for generations.” Of course, the subtext here is, “Don’t challenge us about the mind, and we won’t challenge you about the brain,” or, “Don’t challenge us about the structure of matter, and we won’t challenge you about meditation.” The dialogue, when conducted in this vein, quickly degenerates into show-and-tell, as the critical faculty enters a state of suspended animation. That an informative stage is a prerequisite to dialogue is not of course at issue here. My point is simply that dialogue is not coterminous with show-and-tell, that it must go beyond it.

As I have stated, it is my belief that in many cases the failure of dialogue to do so is a result of the tendency on the part of the participants to take a literalist view of the dichotomies constructed in models of complementarity. Eventually, however, such dichotomies will have to be seen as the metaphors they are, and, when this happens, Buddhists and scientists will have to face the truly contentious issues—issues that “belong” exclusively neither to Buddhism nor to science, because they belong to both: Is there mind separate from brain? Is the human personality consciously mutable? If so, to what extent? Are there elementary particles that are fundamental in the sense that they have no constituent parts? Is sentient life separate from matter possible?

I do not mean to imply, of course, that there has not been any grappling over these issues, only that there has not been enough. This is certainly understandable. On the one hand, confronting such issues will undoubtedly be the cause of some discomfort, since intellectual antagonism will be unavoidable. On the other, the logic of strict and literalistic complementarity is seductive: scientists are the masters of matter, Buddhists of the mind: let us walk the road to inner and outer progress together! Or again, scientists provide the hardware, Buddhists the software, let us create the great computer together! The problem, of course, is that such segregationist metaphors are, like all metaphors, artificial. They are artificial because scientific claims impinge, and sometimes impinge negatively, upon Buddhist ones, and vice versa.

Let us consider just one example by way of illustration. The extent to which the Madhyamaka doctrine of emptiness is invoked in models that advocate the complementarity of Buddhism and science will not have gone unnoticed. In such contexts, the Madhyamaka is frequently characterized as a philosophical and/or religious system, one that neither affects nor is affected by conclusions concerning the physical world: a good example of the religion-mind-experience versus science-matter-fact dichotomy of strict complementarity. The problem, of course, is that this disregards an important though little known fact: that the Madhyamaka theory of emptiness³⁸ requires the existence of an external world, and it implies, additionally, that there can be no elementary particles fundamental in the sense that they have no constituent parts.³⁹ Why this is so—that is, the details of these arguments—need not concern us here. It is sufficient to note that the truth of the doctrine of emptiness—one of the most important and unique tenet of Mahāyāna Buddhism—depends upon a fact of the physical universe. If it can be shown that there are partless particles—particles that are no further divisible, that are not made up of anything more elementary—then the theory of emptiness as formulated in the classical Indian and Tibetan sources, and therefore Mahāyāna Buddhism as we know it, would be false. The point, of course, is that the realm of physics and metaphysics cannot be so easily segregated, that Buddhism is not simply a “philosophical view” or a “mind science,” and that the truth of Buddhist doctrine both implies and is dependent upon facts related to the material world.

What does all of this imply for the future of the dialogue between Buddhism and science? It implies, first of all, the necessity of realizing the metaphorical nature of the models we use to help us envision the interactions of Buddhism and science. Such a realization requires, in turn, an understanding of Buddhism and science (and their subdisciplines) as complete systems that resist dichotomizing: systems that can both support and challenge each other at a variety of different levels—no monopolies, no holds barred! Let me conclude by offering one very concrete suggestion for the future of the conversation between Buddhism and science, a suggestion that I believe can help us avoid the pitfalls that I have just described.

It is an astounding fact that of the various studies cited as part of my attempt to chart the interaction of Buddhism and science, almost all the serious studies in the last fifteen years—the period in which I believe we have witnessed the most sophisticated and interesting work—have been written by scientists. What has been missing, of course, is the voice of the Buddhist scholar, both Asian and Western.⁴⁰ Many of the scientists, or former scientists, who have published in this field, of course, have considerable background in Buddhism; many, in addition, have long-standing commitments to Buddhist practice, but none of them are trained scholars of Buddhism, nor have any, to my knowledge, mastered any of the languages of the Buddhist texts. If, as I have suggested, the strict dichotomizing and protectionist tendencies of a literalist model of complementarity is the next major hurdle to be overcome, and if this will require a broader and deeper understanding of science, and especially of Buddhism, as I think it does, then perhaps it is precisely the voice of the scholar of Buddhism in the dialogue that is the greatest desideratum at this point in time.⁴¹ But perhaps my suggestion is, as of the printing of this book, already moot, since one of the virtues of this volume is precisely that it has brought trained scholars of Buddhism formally into the discussion.

1. The Training of the Mind research project, funded by the Fetzer Institute, was an exploratory first attempt to determine principally what measurable cognitive changes occurred as a result of intensive, prolonged meditation. The primary subjects were a group of Tibetan monks who had been in long-term retreat in the mountains above Dharamsala, India. The other members of the research team were Richard Davidson, Clifford Saron, Gregory Simpson, Francisco Varela, and Alan Wallace.

2. This would suggest that it is not only fitting but indeed necessary that there be addenda to traditional human subject research guidelines that are more situationally specific. In the case under discussion there seems to me to be an urgency in creating specific guidelines that address the issues that follow.

3. That even conversation is not an ethically neutral enterprise—that it involves economic and political power differentials with definite ethical consequences—is of course an observation that has been made most forcefully by anthropologists. See Rabinow 1996; and Clifford and Marcus 1986. But, on the spectrum of urgency, dealing with ethical issues in the case of the one-sided scientific objectification of Buddhism seems to me clearly more pressing.

4. The metaphor of barrenness, with its obvious implications to procreation, is not my own. Jaki, for example, speaks of the “stillbirth” of science in non-European societies. See Jaki 1985:132.

5. That “science” in this form of historiography (and elsewhere) is simply assumed to be coterminous with science as it developed in the West not only vitiates against considering science to be culturally situated but also against the possibility that it can be situated elsewhere than in the West. It acts, among other things, against the possibility of considering science as a multicultural phenomenon and hence of even entertaining the possibility that certain forms of traditional speculation and practices specific to, say, Buddhist societies are forms of science. Although I will use the term science in this essay to refer to the specific form of science that emerged in Europe, I am cognizant of the fact that this tends to reinforce an unhealthy Eurocentrism as regards the nature of science, much in the same way as using the term man to refer to the generic human acts to reinforce androcentrism. For an excellent discussion of these and related issues, see Harding 1998.

6. See, for example, Singhal 1972:153–188; and Needham 1981, which is a synopsis of his multivolume Science and Civilization in China. Needham’s work suffers from the same kind of faulty generalizations about Indian and Buddhist views of time (that it is cyclical, idealist, subjectivist) as does the work of Jaki, but his work also shows, without question, that there was such a thing as science in classical China.

7. Science has encountered opposition in its spread to various Asian cultures, but I believe that this has been principally due to sociopolitical rather than ideological reasons.

8. How less cyclical is the doctrine of a coming foretold, and a second coming prophesied, and how less polytheistic is a trinitarian God that lords over a pantheon of angels and saints? As regards Indian and Buddhist notions of time, it can be pointed out that these are as varied and complex, and therefore as resistant to generalization, as any notion of time found in any other culture and religion. That, despite the cosmological doctrine of the repeated creation and destruction of the universe, there is, at least in many Buddhist texts, a definite sense of “linear time” is witnessed by the clear distinction made in these texts between past, present, and future (Poussin 1988:593) and by the notion of instantaneous and irreversible change (Poussin 1988:474). See also the considerable range of views in the debate over the nature of time in the Buddhist world in the early centuries of the Christian era, as reported in Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośa (Poussin 1989:808–816).

9. I should hasten to add that I find equally problematic the claim that the reason for the relative nonemergence of science in Asia can be easily identified. I find baseless, for example, Thurman’s claim that the nonemergence of science in India represents a conscious choice. Goleman and Thurman 1991:57. A choice on the part of whom?

10. On the sabotaged attempts on the part of Tibetans to introduce a Western system of education that included science into Tibet in the 1920s and then again in the 1940s see Goldstein 1989:121, 421–426.

11. On the life and works of Gendtin Chöphel, see Stoddard 1985 and Lopez 1996.

12. That the theoretical skepticism may, upon further examination, be found to be groundless, insofar as Buddhism has no qualms with the notion that mental states can have physical correlates, does not diminish my point here, which is meant as a report of monks’ actual views, reports based on extensive interviews with long-term meditators as part of my work with the Training the Mind research group; see note 1. See the report of one such meditator in Lobsang Tenzing 1990.

13. See, for example, Stephan Hawking’s dismissal of “eastern mysticism” as obscurantism, in Weber 1986:210.

14. See, for example, Hayes’s 1996 critique of the Internet in Cybersangha; and the Ven. Hsuan hua’s more thoroughgoing critique, one that almost borders on paranoia, “Electric Brains and Other Menaces,” in the same venue. Though not openly conflictual or polemical, there is also to be found in contemporary Asian Buddhist writing a rhetoric that seeks to portray Buddhism as the true innovation, and science as having to catch up with it. See, for example, Zoysa 1998 and Yin Tak 1998.

15. The edition available to me (Olcott 1889), which is a reprint of the Theosophical Publication Society’s edition, has no date, but bears the library classification number of 145.72 O43b 1889. The “certificate” in the preface is dated 1881, and Olcott’s preface 1886, but it is unclear to me when the first edition was printed.

16. Interestingly, H. H. the Dalai Lama has recently suggested a modified version of this claim, namely, that it is Buddhism’s position outside of both radical materialism and theistic religion, “as belonging to neither camp,” that could allow it to serve as a bridge between science and (other) religions. See Golemen and Thurman 1991:13.

17. In a later (1902–1904) lecture tour of the United States, Dharmapala visited several technical schools, and, seeing the need for greater knowledge of science in Asia, was himself instrumental in establishing such a school in Sarnath, India. See Fields 1981:134.

18. On Carus, see Fields 1981:128, 141–143; and Tweed 1992:65–67, 103–105. Although ostensibly a representative collection of Buddhist scriptural passages, the texts collected in The Gospel of the Buddha in actuality reflected Carus’s penchant for portraying Buddhism as a rational and science-compatible religion.

20. The importance of this essay is evidenced by the fact that after its original publication in the third issue of the Sri Lankan English-language journal the Wheel, it has, to my knowledge, been reprinted at least twice. Once in Nyanaponika 1971 and once in Kirtisinghe 1984.

21. Although making a case for the compatibility of Buddhism and evolution, Cooper also suggests ways in which evolutionary theory might be broadened under the influence of Buddhist insights, hence making his view fall, at least in part, under the mode of complementarity. For a very balanced review of Cooper’s study, see Jones 1997.

22. For a similar contemporary claim, see Fenner 1995:10: “This (Buddhist karmic theory of the workings of habit formations in consciousness) is in distinction, for example, to theistic religions and transformational paths that introduce indeterminacy by the inherently inexplicable influence of grace.”

23. Making the Buddhist material available to a wider audience is also Fenner’s motivation for his System-Cybernetics reading of the Madhyamaka school of Buddhist thought. See Fenner 1995.

24. Hence, Diana Eck (in Goleman and Thurman 1991:106) states that “there is a common agenda and method in the fact that both the mind science of the Buddhist tradition and the exploration of the medical researchers are based on the traditions of experimentation. (Buddhism is) an experimental practice. It is not a form of religiousness that simply says, ‘Believe this on faith.” It is an experimentally verified analysis of how the universe is.”

25. Consider, for example, Francisco Varela’s urging that subtle states of mind “merit respectful attention by anybody who claims to rely on empirical science.” Varela 1997:216.

26. In the words of Wallace, “The meaningfulness of scientific and contemplative knowledge is therefore complementary. In the absence of either, the world is impoverished.” Wallace 1996:205.

28. This is the dominant metaphor used by Thurman in Golemen and Thurman 1991:53–73.

32. This is a theme that is to be found in much of the work of H. H. the Dalai Lama.

33. Capra 1984:xvi: “Our culture has consistently favored yang, or masculine, values over yin, or feminine, counterparts. We have favored self assertion over integration, analysis over synthesis, rational knowledge over intuitive wisdom, science over religion, competition over cooperation, expansion over conservation, and so on. This one-sided development has now reached a highly alarming stage; a crisis of social, ecological, moral and spiritual dimensions.”

34. See, for example, Weber 1986. The last of the Mind and Life conferences with the Dalai Lama was also dedicated to particle physics and cosmology (see below).

35. A similar, though by no means identical, project is Ornstein’s much earlier The Psychology of Consciousness (1972), in which several pages are devoted to different forms of Zen meditation.

36. It is not at all clear to me that the distinctions are as clear-cut as deCharms makes them out to be, for surely there are materialist explanations of mind in “the Tibetan approach,” nor is science allergic to the use of illustration and metaphor, as Ian Barbour and others have pointed out. More troubling, though, is deCharms’s view that the Tibetan system subscribes to some kind of paradoxical logic that can live with contradiction (1998:26, 49), a view that I have taken issue with elsewhere; see Cabezón 1994.

37. Mansfield 2002 makes a similar point, arguing, in this instance, that Cartesian dualism has hindered the progress of science, and that the Madhyamaka is a more effective philosophical basis for science. This same point is reiterated, using a similar argument, in Mansfield 1995–1996.

38. Or more accurately, the Prāsaṅgika interpretation of the Madhyamaka theory of emptiness.

39. The existence of an external world is necessitated by the Prāsaṅgika’s commitment to according with worldly conventions. The nonexistence of partless particles is a corrollary of the fact that the theory of emptiness implies that all phenomena exist as mere imputations, as labels that require some basis (gzhi) on which to, as it were, adhere. In the case of material particles, such a basis can be none other than their parts. See Cabezón 1992:144,149, 324–345.

40. The exception, from the Asian side, has of course been H. H. the Dalai Lama. The most prominent exception from the Western side has been Alan Wallace, though perhaps Peter Fenner and Herbert Guenther can also be named as exceptions in this regard.

41. One might say that expertise in the various sciences themselves is already well represented in the dialogue but that what has been missing from the side of science is a perspective with a broad overview of science, as exemplified in disciplines like the history, sociology, and philosophy of science. If I have a suggestion to make in regard to science, analogous to the one I put forward with respect to Buddhism, therefore, it is that representatives of these latter disciplines be brought into the discussion in a more consistent and self-conscious manner.

Austin, J. H. 1998. Zen and the Brain: Toward an Understanding of Meditation and Consciousness. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Barbour, I. 1990. Religion in an Age of Science. Gifford Lectures, vol. 1. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco.

Cabezón, J. I. 1992. A Dose of Emptiness: An Annotated Translation of the sTong thun chen mo of Mkhas grub dGe legs dpal bzang. Albany: State University of New York Press.

———1994. Buddhism and Language: A Study of Indo-Tibetan Scholasticism. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Capra, F. 1984 [1976]. The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism. 2d rev. ed. Toronto: Bantam, 1984.

Clifford, J. and G. Marcus. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cooper, R. 1996. The Evolving Mind: Buddhism, Biology, and Consciousness. Birmingham: Windhorse.

DeCharms, C. 1998. Two Views of the Mind: Abhidharma and Brain Science. Ithaca: Snow Lion.

Du Pre, G. 1984. “The Buddhist Philosophy of Science.” In B. P. Kirtisinghe, ed., Buddhism and Science, pp. 103–110. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.

———1984. “Buddhism and Psychology.” In B. P. Kirtisinghe, ed., Buddhism and Science, pp. 111–118. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.

———1984. “Buddhism and Psychotherapy.” In B. P. Kirtisinghe, ed., Buddhism and Science, pp. 97–102. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.

———1984. “Buddhism and Science.” In B. P. Kirtisinghe, ed., Buddhism and Science, pp. 92–96. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.

———1984. “Science and the Skandhas.” In B. P. Kirtisinghe, ed., Buddhism and Science, pp. 119–127. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.

———1984. “Science and the Way to Nirvāṅa.” In B. P. Kirtisinghe, ed., Buddhism and Science, pp. 137–145. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.

———1984. “Science and the Wheel of Life.” In B. P. Kirtisinghe, ed., Buddhism and Science, pp. 128–136. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.

———1984. “Scientific Buddhism.” In B. P. Kirtisinghe, ed., Buddhism and Science, pp. 146–154. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.

Fenner, P. 1995. Reasoning Into Reality: A System-Cybernetic Model and Therapeutic Interpretation of Buddhist Middle Path Analysis. Boston: Wisdom.

Fields, R. 1981. How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America. Boston: Shambhala.

Goldstein, M. C. 1989. A History of Modern Tibet: 1913–1951. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Goleman, D. 1997. Healing Emotions: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on Mindfulness, Emotions, and Health. Boston: Shambhala.

Goleman, D. and R. A. F. Thurman. 1991. Mind Science: An East-West Dialogue. Boston: Wisdom.