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| I trust the Orgy Pit's been scraped and buttered |
Many of the most formidable social and cultural problems we face today are rooted in the sharp divide (schism) that has divided Western civilization between science and religion.
Science claims invincible knowledge based on testing (empirical investigation of) the natural world. Most religions do little more than call for faith in supernatural beliefs along with obedience to codes of morality and ethics that require restraint, self-discipline, and worst of all self-sacrifice.
Since most religion, as traditionally understood, often rests on no more than blithe promises and pompous threats, its appeals to our allegiance seldom win.
The ethical ideals it claims to advocate (when not being hypocritical) don't stand a fighting chance against the constant injunction — thrust in our faith by screens, radios, and signboards — to ENJOY life to the hilt while we can.
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| What'd you do in there? - Well, I took the butter |
As a result, a most of humankind has become alienated from religion as any kind of meaningful guide to life, left with no alternative but to plunge headlong into another kind of religion: secularism, the religion of rejecting religion through mass consumerism and
hedonism.
Too often, those in the religious camp, sensing the threat secularism poses to their own security, feel driven toward an aggressive fundamentalism in a desperate bid to salvage traditional loyalties.
The quest to establish a sound basis for proper conduct in today's world has been made particularly difficult. Why? A consequence of the "scientific" worldview has been to banish values from real life.
While many scientists, in their personal lives, are staunch advocates of such ideals like world peace, social justice, and greater economic equality (parity), the worldview promoted by modern science gives values no objective grounding, not in the grand scheme of things. Thinking like this, values' root and basis is purely subjective. So they bring along all the qualities that subjectivity suggests: being
The overall effect of this is that, despite the best intentions of many of them, scientists give a green light to lifestyles founded on a quest for personal gratification. Not only that, it's also based on a power drive aimed at exploiting others.
The Buddha's Teaching
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| "If there's any religion...it would be Buddhism" |
In contrast to the classical Western
antithesis of religion and science, Buddhism shares with science a common commitment to personally test and uncover the Truth about the world.
Both Buddhism and science draw a sharp distinction between the way things appear and the way they really are. And both offer to open our minds to insights into the real nature of things normally hidden from us, sometimes in plain sight as falsified ideas based on distorted sense perceptions and "common sense."
Forget science-school and meditation. Let's dance!
Still, despite of Buddhism and science's affinity, it is necessary to recognize the great differences in the aim that separates Buddhism and science. Both may share certain conceptions about the nature of reality, but science is essentially a project designed to provide control and objective, factual knowledge, with information about the public domain. Buddhism is a spiritual path intended to promote inner transformation and the direct realization of the highest good, called awakening, enlightenment, liberation, or nirvana.
In Buddhism, the quest for knowledge is important but not as an end in itself or to control others. The main cause of our suffering and bondage is ignorance.
What does that mean?
Ignorance (
avijja) is not understanding things as they really are. Instead, we distort things even as we perceive them, judge, and label them. So the antidote needed to heal ourselves is knowledge or liberating-insight.
The type of knowledge acquired by practicing Dhamma differs from that sought by science in several ways. Most importantly, the knowledge sought is not gaining objective information about the physical world. It is about a deep personal insight into the real nature of our personal existence.
The aim is not to understand reality from the outside. It is to understand it from the inside, much as psychology originally intended to do. Knowledge from the perspective of one's own living experience is the key -- as it is to shamans, Gnostics, and experimenters on a quest in this lifetime.
We seek not debated "facts" and "opinions" as knowledge, but insight, wisdom, personal knowledge that is inescapably subjective. That's the point. The whole value of it lies in its transformative power and impact on our own life.
Concern with the outer world as an object of direct knowledge arises only insofar as the outer world is inextricably implicated in personal experience.
As the Buddha says, "In this body, with its perception and thought, I declare
- the world,
- the origin of the world,
- the cessation of the world, and
- the way to the cessation of the world."
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| First, I'll be born as a prince then renounce it all |
Buddhism takes personal experience as the starting point, without aiming to use experience as a springboard to an impersonal, objective type of knowledge. Buddhism includes within its domain the entire spectrum of qualities disclosed by personal experience.
This means that Buddhism gives prime consideration to values. But even more, "values" for Buddhism are not merely projections of subjective judgments fashioned according to our personal whims, social needs, or cultural conditioning.
On the contrary, they are written into the texture of reality itself just as firmly as the laws of motion and thermodynamics. So values CAN be evaluated: rated in terms of being true or false and ranked as valid or invalid.
And part of our task in giving meaning to our lives, which means unearthing the true scheme of values. To determine the true gradation of values, we have to turn our attention inward and use subjective criteria of investigation. So what we find, far from being private or arbitrary, is an integral part of the objective order.
This order is permeated by the same lawfulness that governs the movement of the stars and planets.
Science says it's for something
Affirming the
objective reality of values implies another major distinction between Buddhism and science. For liberating-insight or knowledge of enlightenment to arise, an investigator has to undergo a profound
personal transformation guided by the inner perception of genuine values.
While
natural science can be undertaken as an intellectual discipline, the Buddhist quest is an existential discipline. That can only be implemented by regulating and restraining our conduct, purifying our mind, and refining our capacity for attention.
What is there to pay attention to? To our own physical (bodily) and mental processes.
This kind of Buddhist training requires ethics all the way through. Ethical guidelines support and pervade the entire training. The starting point is right action, and the culmination is the highest liberation of the heart/mind.
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| OK, there's escape from this lack-of-fulfilment? |
What is noteworthy is that the ethical thrust of Buddhist training and the mental thrust of it converge. Where? They converge on the realization of the ultimate truth of selflessness (
anatta). [This is an advanced notion, but it is the gateway to stream entry, the first stage of enlightenment.]
It is just here that contemporary science approaches Buddhism in its discovery that "nature" is a process actually. It reveals the lack of any ultimate substance hiding behind a sequence of events. There are events. But this correspondence again points to a fundamental difference.
In Buddhism the impermanent, unsatisfying (unfulfilling), and impersonal nature of reality is not just some factual truth to apprehend (or believe in). It is above all an existential truth. It is a transformative principle.
It offers the key to being able to stop clinging to the false and to let go as we gain right understanding.
Right understanding (seeing things as they really are) leads to right liberation. To use this key for its sole purpose, which is to open the door to spiritual freedom, we must govern our conduct on the premise that the false idea of a substantial self is a delusion.
It is insufficient to merely intellectually grasp this selflessness as some idea or to turn it into a plaything of thought. The principle must be penetrated by training ourselves to discover the absence of selfhood in its subtlest hiding place, the deep recesses of our own bodies and minds.
- [HOW? How can this ever be accomplished? Buddhist Meditation Master Pa Auk Sayadaw explains. By mastering "meditation" (the absorptions or jhanas), the mind/heart is purified and able to see. What does it look at? It breaks down this body, this materiality, into its components, the smallest of which are "form particles" (rupa kalapas). The body is not "body," but rather countless constituent elements constantly built up and torn down, rising and falling away. The mind is not "mind," but rather countless constituent elements (a stream of "mind-moments" called cittas) constantly built up and falling away. This is what's really there, if only we could ever see it as it truly is.
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| Venerable Pa Auk Sayadaw of Burma |
We can see it. That is to say, we can know-and-see directly. How? First, we settle the mind into absorption, emerge and move to a deeper absorption. With practice, this comes at will. Then we turn our attention to the "fourfold setting up of mindfulness." This is just a fancy way of saying we give systematic attention to body, feelings, the mind, and various phenomena. With exercises to directly perceive the Dependent Origination of things (the fact that everything that arises arises dependent on causes and conditions), the mind is made ready to see things as they really are. And in doing so, it naturally lets go of ignorance, illusion, and falsehoods. It thereby gains light, knowledge, wisdom, and liberation.]
Buddhist thinkers and open-minded scientists, if they were to share insights and reflections, could show us an effective way to heal the divide. What divide? The rift between seeking "objective" knowledge and spiritual wisdom. We could bring about a reconciliation of science and spirituality.
In this way, spiritual practice could become an integral part of the discipline that aims at knowledge. Spiritual practice and knowledge combined could become the tools for achieving the highest good stuck in the world and breaking beyond limitations to enlightenment and spiritual freedom.
This has always been the position of Buddhism. The evidence is in the most ancient texts. The Buddha, the "Enlightened One," is not only a kind of scientist, a
lokavidu or "knower of the world." He is also, above all, "one complete in both knowledge and conduct" (
vijja-carana-sampanno). Could a scientist say that? Could one ever get to that through science?
Source: Two Paths to Knowledge
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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| American Theravada monk Bhikkhu Bodhi |
Bhikkhu Bodhi (born Dec. 10, 1944) is an American Theravada scholar-monk and prolific translator of ancient Buddhist texts from the Pali canon. He was born in New Jersey and moved to California to get his PhD from
Claremont before heading to Asia to ordain as a Buddhist monk. He went in search of a teacher and found one in Sri Lanka,
Balangoda Ananda Maitreya Thero, along with many fellow Jewish Buddhists from Germany in and around the
Buddhist Publication Society (BPS). He now teaches at the Buddhist Association of the United States (
BAUS) in Upstate New York (
Chuang Yen Monastery) and in New Jersey (
Bodhi Monastery, which is not named after him). He is a Buddhist author, translator, and commentator,
who was Wisdom Quarterly Dharma Editor Dhr. Seven's first theoretical Dharma teacher [who himself studied at Berkeley and UCLA before journeying to Sri Lanka in Bhikkhu Bodhi's steps and onto India, Nepal, Thailand, and Burma to meet his
practical teacher, the great living Buddhist meditation master
Pa Auk Sayadaw]. Bhikkhu Bodhi was appointed BPS's second president [2] after its founder,
Ven. Nyanaponika, following in the footsteps of the great Western maverick
Ven. Nyanatiloka. He is currently president of
BAUS and the founder of the Buddhist feminist charity
Buddhist Global Relief [3].
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