Buddhism and Science: A Guide for the Perplexed. By Donald S. Lopez Jr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 264 pages. $25.00.
摘要
A quick electronic search of “Buddhism and science” will yield hundreds of enthusiastic articles, books, and web pages claiming the compatibility or complementarity of these two seemingly disparate ways of thought and practice. Many claim that science studies the material world, while Buddhism studies the mind with similar empirical precision, or that Buddhism is a kind of science itself rather than a religion. What is often lost in these claims is that they have been in circulation for over a century and have frequently served political and polemical purposes rooted in the broader history of colonialism and the efforts of Buddhists and Buddhist sympathizers to legitimate, defend, and promote Buddhism in Asia and the West. While Donald S. Lopez, Jr. is not the first to critically address and historicize the encounter of Buddhism and science, Buddhism and Science is the first book-length treatment and the most expansive exploration to date. Lopez is clearly skeptical of the claims of compatibility, and it quickly becomes apparent that the “perplexed” in the subtitle are those who take such claims at face value.
In the introduction, Lopez demonstrates how the idea of the compatibility between Buddhism and science originated in the nineteenth century with defensive polemical assertions of Buddhists under colonization and Christian missionization. Figures like Anagarika Dharmapala, Henry Steel Olcott, Taixu, and Soen Shaku presented a Buddhism stripped of “superstition,” ritual, and the supernatural, often making exaggerated claims of the scientific nature of Buddhism and asserting that the Buddha himself understood the major scientific developments of the modern world over two millennia before the West. The modernized Buddhism constructed in this period served as the focal point of what Lopez calls the “discourse of Buddhism and Science,” even as the referents “Buddhism” …
