Religion & Science

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Permalink Reply by Hiram on December 30, 2009 at 9:19pm

Buddhism is very complex and has many traditions. ZEN BUDDHISM, stripped of any religious or petitionary trappings, would be entirely scientific. It is pure, pristine awareness in the NOW, it's experiential and resists dogma and it allows anyone to observe directly how all things are energy in motion, constantly changing.

The most up to date insight we have from quantum physics depicts a world that is ultimately void, all things are constantly moving at the atomic level, this is sunyasi (emptiness), one of the foundations of Buddhist metaphysics.

Buddhism is not nihilistic like some people think: Sunyasi does not teach that all things are void, but that they are empty of inherent reality by themselves, that they are interrelations and composites of many things and that nothing is by itself alone. This is exactly as it is.

One of the prominent experiments in quantum physics has to do with the influence that the observer has on that which is observed, and how by observing phenomena one affects it. This is a profound discovery. In Buddhism, all is mind and Buddha is mind. Buddhist religious metaphors and poetry are perfectly in line with this: in Buddhist cosmology there are millions of Buddhas in all directions living in their own Buddhalands. Each presence produces its own reality. There can be no paradise without someone to experience the paradise. Therefore, a Buddhaland can only be created around a presence that is aware, that is, a Buddha.

There are cultural things, like belief in reincarnation and karma that can be done away with or redefined, and are redefined in Zen Buddhism. One of the three marks of existence is anatta, non-being: if there is no inherent being, what is it that reincarnates? Therefore, it is understood that reincarnation is not compatible with Buddhist doctrine, as taught originally by Siddhartha Buddha, and that belief in reincarnation is a vestige of the Hindu roots of Buddhist tradition.

In Buddhist understanding, there is only now, and we reincarnate only now at every moment. All else is irrelevant and illusory, therefore the metaphor used by Buddhists is that there are 'mindstreams', currents of experience and identification that take place over the course of the lifetime and that form identities. We tend to grab on to these mindstreams in our field of experience. Mindstreams are the closest thing to a soul, but they're illusory and ever changing. They are not the soul, there is no soul.

Buddhism also affords us the scientific method to be applied to spiritual practices and the opportunity to create spiritual sciences because it is empirical and pragmatic by nature. Buddha said never to accept anything that we didn't experience directly.

Atheist writer Sam Harris published an article in the Shambhala Sun arguing for a 'science of contemplation', and he's a neuroscientist. This field in specific has been studying the meditative practices of the Tibetan lamas for some years and documenting the effects of different kinds of meditation on the brain via CT scan. This science of contemplation will be essentially a secular form of Buddhism, maybe with a secular label, but it will be essentially based on Zen and other Buddhist practices. He argues that just as we don't speak of Muslim algebra although the Moslems invented algebra, in the same way we will change Buddhism as we subject it to the empirical and scientific methods and create a science out of it. We won't label it Buddhism, or religion.

In this article Sam Harris argues for a science of contemplation. Killing the Buddha is the original Shambhala Sun article where he proposed a science of contemplation, the title of the article is based on a traditional koan.

Permalink Reply by Karam Gill on January 1, 2010 at 5:11pm

Another, thing is the re-occuring theme of 'empitiness' or 'the void'. 99.9%(+ thirteen more 9's) of an atom is mostly empty space. With the additional empty space betwee the atoms, our world is not as material as it seems.