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Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground |
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| Author |
Wallace, Alan
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| Date | 2003.04.15 |
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| Pages | 432 |
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| Publisher | Columbia University Press |
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| Publisher Url |
http://cup.columbia.edu
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| Location | New York, NY, US [紐約, 紐約州, 美國] |
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| Series | Columbia Series in Science and Religion |
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| Content type | 書籍=Book |
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| Language | 英文=English |
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| Keyword | 生死=life and death=rebirth and redeath=birth and death=Samsqra; 西藏佛教=藏傳佛教=Tibetan Buddhism; 佛教人物=Buddhist; 佛教經典=Buddhist Scriptures=Sutra; 佛教與科學=Buddhism and Science; 長行=契經=修多羅=Sutra; 修行方法=修行法門=Practice; 惟物主義=物質主義=materialism; 轉世=輪迴=Samsara=Rebirth=Reincarnation |
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| Abstract | Buddhism and Science - are they two great enterprises bound to enrich each other, or two competing traditions doomed to a fight over who really has the truth? This is the underlying question explored in the 14 contributions to this collection.
The book begins with a scholarly overview of the meeting and conflict between religion and science by the editor Alan Wallace. Far from treating them as Stephen Jay Gould's 'non-overlapping magisteria', Wallace looks at their similarities. For example, some religions do make testable claims just as science does, while science has unquestioned dogmas just as religions do. As for Buddhism, it doesn't fit neatly into either. It is certainly not a science in the modern western sense, but nor does it fit most definitions of religion. In particular, says Wallace, Buddhism stands out because of its long tradition of investigating subjective phenomena. Buddhists claim that there are, or were, 'virtuoso Buddhist practitioners' who achieve cessation, understand the causes of suffering, realise the ground of being, and become Enlightened. So Buddhism is not just a transcendental doctrine but is based on empirical methods.
Wallace then attacks what he calls 'the scientific dogma of materialism'. This, he says, 'presents formidable obstacles to any meaningful collaboration between Bud-dhism and science'. This is where I began to part company from his views. He takes as an example the work of socio-biologist, E.O. Wilson. Wilson, he says, promotes the principles of objectivism, reductionism, physicalism (the principle that the universe is causally closed) and monism. 'Thus, with a single metaphysical stroke of the pen, subjective experience is written out of nature and consigned to the status of an epiphenomenon or illusion'. And free will, too, becomes an illusion.
But what if they are illusions? Taking just the ordinary definition from the dictionary, an illusion is something that is not what it appears to be. Since Buddhism has a long history of claiming that ordinary experience, and ordinary willed action, are not as they appear to be, this could be an important meeting point for Buddhism and science. Indeed in later chapters both the neuropsychologist, David Galin and the Buddhist scholar William S. Waldron explore the origins of our erroneous view of self, and how evolution might have landed us with such an illusion. This seems to me to be much more constructive than deriding scientists for talking about illusions as Wallace does.
Even more curious is Wallace's rejection of monism (i.e. oneness or one-stuff), when one of the deepest aims of Buddhist practice is to drop the discriminating mind, lose the distinction between self and other, and arrive at non-duality. Scientific materialism may be wrong in insisting that the one stuff of the universe is material stuff (whatever that means), but it surely agrees with Buddhism that deep down there can be no separation between material and non-material phenomena.
In contrast, I suspect that for most scientists the most 'formidable obstacle' is Wallace's own notion of reincarnation as 'the reality of individual experience following death and prior to conception' and 'a continuity of individual con-sciousness after their own death'. Perhaps this interpretation reflects Wallace's training in Tibetan Buddhism, which developed in a culture already steeped in notions of personal rebirth, for it is not found in quite the same form in Zen or Ch'an, with which I am more familiar.
For example, the Sutra of Hui-Neng explains the extinction of birth and death in terms of dropping the four images of self, person, being, and a 'liver of life'. In other words, there is no individual 'liver of life' whose consciousness can continue, and clinging to the idea of the individual is an obstruction to awakening. This Zen view fits much more happily with the uncomfortable point that Wilson makes about the human brain when he says, 'W |
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| Table of contents | Introduction: Buddhism and Science-Breaking Down the Barriers 1
Part 1 Historical Context 31
Buddhism and Science: On the Nature of the Dialogue 35
Science As an Ally or a Rival Philosophy? Tibetan Buddhist Thinkers' Engagement with Modern Science 71
Part 2 Buddhism and the Cognitive Sciences 87
Understanding and Transforming the Mind 91
The Concepts "Self," "Person," and "I" in Western Psychology and in Buddhism 107
Common Ground, Common Cause: Buddhism and Science on the Afflictions of Identity 145
Imagining: Embodiment, Phenomenology, and Transformation 195
Lucid Dreaming and the Yoga of the Dream State: A Psychophysiological Perspective 233
On the Relevance of a Contemplative Science 261
Part 3 Buddhism and the Physical Sciences 281
Emptiness and Quantum Theory 285
Time and Impermanence in Middle Way Buddhism and Modern Physics 305
A Cure for Metaphysical Illusions: Kant, Quantum Mechanics, and Madhyamaka 325
Emptiness and Relativity 365
Encounters Between Buddhist and Quantum Epistemologies 387
Conclusion: Life As a Laboratory 399
Appendix: A History of the Mind and Life Institute 417 |
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| ISBN | 9780231123358; 0231123345; 0231122353 |
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| Hits | 1966 |
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| Created date | 2008.07.23 |
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| Modified date | 2016.08.24 |
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