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“A Bridge Between Western Science and Eastern Faith,” a recent New York Times story by Kim Severson about the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative, begins with the assertion, “Quantum theory tells us that the world is the product of an infinite number of random events. Buddhism teaches us that nothing happens without a cause, trapping the universe in an unending karmic cycle. Reconciling the two might seem as challenging as explaining the Higgs boson to a kindergarten class. But if someone has to do it, it might as well be the team of scholars, translators and six Tibetan monks clad in maroon robes who can be spied wandering among the magnolias at Emory University here.”
This is a cognitively odd way to begin, since the notion of causality, if not of karma, has been pretty much uppermost in Western thought despite the best efforts of David Hume and, lately, the New Materialists and the Object Oriented Ontologists. (Which, by the way, would not make an excellent name for a rock band.)
The notion that randomness rules is also as old as the Pre-Socratics, but the argument over whether God plays dice with the universe remains one in which it is possible to take sides in hard-nosed physics, even if quantum randomness seems to be winning against old-school determinism time and time again.
So why aren’t the Tibetan monks trying to grapple with the extent to which their traditional ideas agree with current research, instead of struggling to reconcile them with opposing beliefs? The answer is, they are doing both, as Severson indicates. “’We understand impermanence of things as simply existing through our traditions,’ said Jampa Khechok, 34, one of the new monks on campus. ‘We are now challenged to understand the nature of impermanence through the study of how fast particles decay.’”
It might be more profitable to consider Buddhist impermanence alongside, say, the successors to process philosophy, but the findings of the hard sciences are what have to be grasped first. They are now a required part of monastic study, thanks to the decision of the Dalai Lama seven years ago to bring Tibetan Buddhism into the twenty-first century by letting the neuroscientists study the monastic techniques and requiring the monks to study all the sciences. (I would like to own the ETSI science textbooks just for the English-language pages facing the Tibetan translations on the opposite page—an introductory survey course for grown-ups.)
The Dalai Lama has remarked that the Buddha told his disciples that if anything he said proved to be incorrect, the disciples must discard it at once and go with the truth rather than with the words of the Buddha. So getting rid of the traditional assertion that the world is flat was easy enough; just as Westerners always said, the cosmic mountain linking earth and heaven is a metaphor for inner relationships with higher realities (“inner” and “higher” also are spatial metaphors, but let that pass). But the inner relationships have measurable physiological effects, and this is where the neuroscientists come in.
But what is the relationship between quantum randomness and the churning ocean of impermanence that Buddhism envisions as the actual state of affairs behind what looks to us like solid reality? Might the preposterous-sounding claim of karmic entanglement throughout the universe be an analogue to the outlandish claims of quantum entanglement, despite our resistance to what surely must be a misunderstood metaphor that, in any case, cannot possibly operate on the macro level even if it describes subatomic particles well enough?
Einstein didn’t think entanglement worked on the micro level, either; just as he claimed he couldn’t believe that his nonexistent God played dice with what ought to be a rigidly deterministic universe, Einstein sneered at “spooky action at a distance.” But Tibetan Buddhists have no problems with spooky action at a distance; it’s what the universe is made of in its very core, as far as they are concerned. All relationships are interconnected by a subtle chain of causality through which small interactions in one corner of the planet may eventually or instantaneously lead to large interactions in some other corner of it.
If the Dalai Lama wants to get rid of whatever parts of Tibetan Buddhism are not demonstrably correct, can Eastern and Western empiricism meet? Or are the conceptual gulfs just too enormous, given the fact that the conceptual gulfs within Western thought are too great to allow for meaningful conversation among many academic disciplines?
Donald Lopez is skeptical of current efforts to create a “Buddhism for atheists” that downplays the religious aspects of Buddhist practice, and makes note of the year in which this kind of thinking first arose (I think it was about the time of the World Parliament of Religions at the 1893 World’s Fair, a singularly consequential event, as it turned out). But Tibetan Buddhism has evolved dramatically from the collision between literalistic folk beliefs in assorted gods and subtle South Asian psychologies of mental transformation, with a little shamanistic visionary practice thrown in for good measure. Who is to say that it cannot continue to evolve, or that it is misleading to claim cognitive benefits for it?
The problem arises when the claims are shoddily conceptualized, and there has been enough of that at some of the gatherings of monks and scientists. But it hasn’t been the monks doing the shoddy conceptualizing; scientists seem as capable as anybody of misunderstanding or failing to recognize metaphors, or drawing the wrong conclusions from experimental research.
This is a cognitively odd way to begin, since the notion of causality, if not of karma, has been pretty much uppermost in Western thought despite the best efforts of David Hume and, lately, the New Materialists and the Object Oriented Ontologists. (Which, by the way, would not make an excellent name for a rock band.)
The notion that randomness rules is also as old as the Pre-Socratics, but the argument over whether God plays dice with the universe remains one in which it is possible to take sides in hard-nosed physics, even if quantum randomness seems to be winning against old-school determinism time and time again.
So why aren’t the Tibetan monks trying to grapple with the extent to which their traditional ideas agree with current research, instead of struggling to reconcile them with opposing beliefs? The answer is, they are doing both, as Severson indicates. “’We understand impermanence of things as simply existing through our traditions,’ said Jampa Khechok, 34, one of the new monks on campus. ‘We are now challenged to understand the nature of impermanence through the study of how fast particles decay.’”
It might be more profitable to consider Buddhist impermanence alongside, say, the successors to process philosophy, but the findings of the hard sciences are what have to be grasped first. They are now a required part of monastic study, thanks to the decision of the Dalai Lama seven years ago to bring Tibetan Buddhism into the twenty-first century by letting the neuroscientists study the monastic techniques and requiring the monks to study all the sciences. (I would like to own the ETSI science textbooks just for the English-language pages facing the Tibetan translations on the opposite page—an introductory survey course for grown-ups.)
The Dalai Lama has remarked that the Buddha told his disciples that if anything he said proved to be incorrect, the disciples must discard it at once and go with the truth rather than with the words of the Buddha. So getting rid of the traditional assertion that the world is flat was easy enough; just as Westerners always said, the cosmic mountain linking earth and heaven is a metaphor for inner relationships with higher realities (“inner” and “higher” also are spatial metaphors, but let that pass). But the inner relationships have measurable physiological effects, and this is where the neuroscientists come in.
But what is the relationship between quantum randomness and the churning ocean of impermanence that Buddhism envisions as the actual state of affairs behind what looks to us like solid reality? Might the preposterous-sounding claim of karmic entanglement throughout the universe be an analogue to the outlandish claims of quantum entanglement, despite our resistance to what surely must be a misunderstood metaphor that, in any case, cannot possibly operate on the macro level even if it describes subatomic particles well enough?
Einstein didn’t think entanglement worked on the micro level, either; just as he claimed he couldn’t believe that his nonexistent God played dice with what ought to be a rigidly deterministic universe, Einstein sneered at “spooky action at a distance.” But Tibetan Buddhists have no problems with spooky action at a distance; it’s what the universe is made of in its very core, as far as they are concerned. All relationships are interconnected by a subtle chain of causality through which small interactions in one corner of the planet may eventually or instantaneously lead to large interactions in some other corner of it.
If the Dalai Lama wants to get rid of whatever parts of Tibetan Buddhism are not demonstrably correct, can Eastern and Western empiricism meet? Or are the conceptual gulfs just too enormous, given the fact that the conceptual gulfs within Western thought are too great to allow for meaningful conversation among many academic disciplines?
Donald Lopez is skeptical of current efforts to create a “Buddhism for atheists” that downplays the religious aspects of Buddhist practice, and makes note of the year in which this kind of thinking first arose (I think it was about the time of the World Parliament of Religions at the 1893 World’s Fair, a singularly consequential event, as it turned out). But Tibetan Buddhism has evolved dramatically from the collision between literalistic folk beliefs in assorted gods and subtle South Asian psychologies of mental transformation, with a little shamanistic visionary practice thrown in for good measure. Who is to say that it cannot continue to evolve, or that it is misleading to claim cognitive benefits for it?
The problem arises when the claims are shoddily conceptualized, and there has been enough of that at some of the gatherings of monks and scientists. But it hasn’t been the monks doing the shoddy conceptualizing; scientists seem as capable as anybody of misunderstanding or failing to recognize metaphors, or drawing the wrong conclusions from experimental research.
