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Chapter 3

Science

Science seems omnipresent in the modern world; its explanatory force and benefits are hard to deny. Indeed, its seemingly unstoppable rise in status, which we touched upon earlier, has led some to argue that Buddhism itself must be made more ‘scientific’ if it is to survive. We will examine that argument here in this chapter, since it is essential to distinguish ‘science’ – a means of analysing and describing the world, which is not itself dependent upon any particular philosophical view of the world – from ‘scientism’, which is an offshoot of the philosophical theory of materialism.

On the face of it, the suggestion to make Buddhism more ‘scientific’ seems quite compelling. Nevertheless, if we examine the true implications of suggestions such as this, it will become clear that such a project could not really work, and would not be any help, even if it were achievable. It’s not, by the way, that one should argue that Buddhism needs to be placed in a special protected category reserved for ‘faiths’, a reservation into which reasoning is not allowed. In this respect, Buddhism does not resemble the varieties of theism, the authority of which rest (contrary to what Descartes had hoped), in the final analysis, on the acceptance of divine revelation. Rather, it is because the dharma, the body of Buddha’s teachings, need only be defended by direct experience and reasoning, and it has no need to borrow these from science. In other words, Buddhism already possesses the reasoning that is needed as a tool to verify and defend its views. Moreover, it seems that those who claim the need for a more ‘scientific’ Buddhism are perhaps in fact trying to subvert Buddhism to a philosophical belief system disguised as science.

Most of that which is presented as ‘science’ in these discussions is not actually scientific praxis but a philosophical theory – ‘materialism’ – and it is essential that we distinguish between the two. Whereas scientific discoveries continue to be made, modern philosophical materialism is, in most important respects, identical to the materialist systems of ancient India, systems which Buddha and the great masters of our tradition knew and rejected. In both its ancient and modern iterations, materialism asserts that consciousness is, at best, merely an epiphenomenon deriving entirely from physical sources (‘the four elements’, or, nowadays, electrical and chemical processes in the brain). However, in either case, the assertion that sentience as an effect can be conjured from non-sentient causes violates all reasoning. No matter how many electrical or chemical processes there may be, they do not add up to consciousness (the formless continuity that experiences and cognises the world), but only the rearrangement of physical processes. So much, incidentally, for materialism’s ‘cutting edge’ modernity – a notion advanced solely to intimidate us in to thinking that it’s the irresistible wave of the future.

In fact, the contemporary insistence that science alone can answer all questions about the nature of reality is actually ‘scientism’, as we have described it earlier, a type of quasi-religious faith that scientific knowledge is the only knowledge worthy of the name. Most embarrassingly for its proponents, though they keep it well hid, this very belief in science is a premise and not a finding ever arrived at by any type of investigation.

Materialism cannot explain how life arose out of non-life, or how consciousness arose from the non-conscious, with any more compelling seriousness than the theist who declares that God simply said: ‘Let there be light.’ This modern materialism adds nothing to older materialist theories except the illusion that if complex physical processes are described in minute enough detail, we, the audience, will not notice the sleight of hand involved when sentience is magically conjured out of non-sentient matter – a notion about as plausible as Pinocchio becoming a real boy. The descriptions of how physical processes appear may be valid enough, but inferences from those about how life arose, and the ontological nature of those appearances, are not.

Buddhism has nothing to fear from science, nor, crucially, any need to prostrate to it. It is the proper job of science to formulate and test hypotheses about how physical processes appear to work. Thus science is no doubt unparalleled in detecting and quantifying things that have a material or mechanistic explanation, such as the structure of DNA, but it cannot do any more than that. This inbuilt limitation does not invalidate the usefulness of the scientific enterprise, but it entails that it can have nothing of value to say about such topics as the nature of mind itself. Nor can it add anything of value about the nature of ethical behaviour and altruism, and liberation from the cycle of suffering, which are the core concerns of Buddhism. Of course, science has many valuable things to say about the brain and nervous system, which, from a Buddhist point of view, are the co-operating conditions that must be present for the mind to interact with the world.

While science itself is not dangerous for the Buddha’s teaching, what is dangerous is when the call for a ‘scientific Buddhism’ is actually an insistence that Buddhism must accord with the materialist propositions of ‘scientism’. To insist that Buddhism must accord with principles that are, in fact, philosophical tenets of materialism (going beyond the proper scientific praxis of science) would be to contradict the essential philosophical views of Buddhism. Such a Buddhism would be no Buddhism. It would be a shrunken, desiccated apology for Buddhism, denuded of core Buddhist teachings.

A Buddhism refashioned to accommodate materialism would, for instance, necessarily be a Buddhism without rebirth. Thus, if there is no mind but merely material processes, there can be no past and future lives. This would follow, because, once this present body came to an end at death, there could be no further basis for experience.

One might say at this point that the Buddhist teaching of rebirth is too remote from our experience and so we must insist on a new type of Buddhism. Yet, in actuality, rebirth is both extraordinarily simple and a continuous process: we pass away both from moment to moment and life to life. In fact, we can find the profound and thus temporarily hidden truth of rebirth from life to life by seeing the process as it occurs here and now. The more we understand that our nature is one of fluidity, that we are in fact always in the process of being born, the more relaxed we become about the movement from life to life. In short, it is our attachment to the idea of ourselves as a static fixed entity, one bounded around either by God (which is, in general terms, the view of ‘theists’) or the sleep of non-existence (which is generally the view of ‘materialists’), that makes us resist the truth of rebirth, which is, finally, nothing more than the truth that all reality is process – a process in which, ultimately, there are no radical discontinuities.