What Buddhism and science can teach each other – and us – about the universe

Prof. of Astronomy Chris Impey, U of Arizona (theconversation.com, 6/16/20); Wisdom Quarterly

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.

In this article the spiritual leader of Tibet the 14th Dalai Lama speaks about quantum effects.

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.

Buddhism and Science: Essays (BPS.lk)

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].

Tell me again, Wallace, but I'm not sharing credit. I published your idea blah blah blah.

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Buddhism teaches cyclic devolution - evolution.

Most Americans believe science and religion clash. But Buddhists accept evolution as the source of human origins more than any other religious group.

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.

And scientists have used the harmonic principles built into Buddhist “singing” bowls to design more efficient solar panels. More

Buddhism and Science: Essays

Science caused a revolution by hating religion.

It is a historical fact that the Scientific Revolution which took its rise in the 17th century in the West was largely responsible for upsetting the earlier religious conception of the universe.

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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