Prof. of Astronomy Chris Impey, U of Arizona (theconversation.com, 6/16/20); Wisdom Quarterly
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The 14th Dalai Lama speaks about quantum effects with Chinese scientists at the Main Tibetan Temple, Nov. 1, 2018, in Dharamshala, India (Shyam Sharma/Hindustan Times via Getty Images). |
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| Buddhists love science books. |
These are trying times. A global recession sparked by the coronavirus pandemic, and widespread civil unrest, have created a combustible mix of angst – stressors that heighten the risk for long-term health woes.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently issued guidelines to cope with this anxiety. Among them is meditation.
Buddhists have been familiar with this strategy for thousands of years. And as the CDC example shows, scientists increasingly believe they can learn from Buddhism.
Momentum for dialogue between Buddhism and science comes from the top. When Mr. Tenzin Gyatso – now serving as the 14th Dalai Lama – was a child in rural Tibet, he saw the moon through a telescope and marveled at its craters and mountains.
His tutor told him that, according to Buddhist texts, the moon emitted its own light. But Gyatso had his doubts. He discovered what Galileo saw 400 years earlier, and he became convinced that dogma should bend to observation [or the changing dictates of gatekeepers at the university].
As the current Dalai Lama, Mr. Gyatso has engaged in dialog with scientists ever since. “If science proved some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change,” he has said.
These are striking words from the leader of a major world religion [of which there three universal missionary religion, Buddhism being the oldest].
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| Tell me again, Wallace, but I'm not sharing credit. I published your idea blah blah blah. |
- The scientific Theory of Evolution by natural selection was conceived independently by Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin in the mid-19th century but was set out in detail in Darwin's book On the Origin of Species. More
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| Buddhism teaches cyclic devolution - evolution. |
As a professor of astronomy who has been teaching Tibetan monks and nuns for over a decade, I’ve found them to be highly receptive to science as a way of understanding the natural world.
The program I teach started in response to the Dalai Lama’s desire to inject science into the training of Buddhist monastics.
In our spartan classroom – where the windows are open to catch a breeze in the monsoon heat and the monkey chatter in the pine trees outside – we talk cosmology.
The monks and nuns eagerly absorb the latest research I present – dark energy, the multiverse, the Big Bang as a quantum event.
Their questions are simple but profound. They approach learning with joy and humility. Outside class, I see them applying critical thinking to decisions in their daily lives.
Yes, the Buddhist monastic tradition has been rebooted with a dose of 21st-century science. But how has Buddhism influenced science?
Buddhists as skeptics
Scientists are increasingly using Buddhist wisdom for insight into several research topics and to illuminate the human condition.
When psychologists use Buddhist concepts in their work, for example, they find their patients are less inclined to exhibit prejudice against people outside their social and religious group.
Buddhism and Science: Essays
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| Science caused a revolution by hating religion. |
Not only did science controvert the specific dogmas of Western religion, but it seemed to have undermined the foundations as well as the fundamental concepts implicit in the religious outlook on things.
The new cosmology of Copernicus, Galileo, and their successors altered the geocentric picture of the universe although it was pronounced to be “contrary to the Holy Scriptures.”
The new biology (the Theory of Evolution) upset the doctrines of the special creation and the fall of Man.
And the new psychology seemed to show that the human mind like this physical body worked on a pattern of causal law and that however deep one plumbed into its depths, there was not discoverable in it an unchanging soul which governed its activities entirely (Wheel #3, Buddhist Publication Society).
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