New Mandala

22 responses so far ↓

• 1 Richard // May 23, 2007 at 10:28 am

  As far as Buddhism and Science goes I can tell you as a psychology major, various Bhuddhist mediation practices, particulary Mindfulness, have been used more and more in treating many mental and physical illnesses. In fact, research reports come out every other day about the benefits of meditations and health. You could write a book on the subject.

  Not sure if that’s where you were going with this post but I thought I would share.

  I’m actually reading a book right now which applies Mindfulness as an aid to increase thorough objectivity when doing social science research.

• 2 Jon Fernquest // May 23, 2007 at 9:45 pm

  This idea Buddhism and Science is a brilliant idea in a historical context.

  Buddhist Kings in Burma and Thailand have always engaged periodically in religious reform and renewal. Like Dammazedi’s breaking up of monastic estates and the end of the infamous Ari monk practice of drinking alcohol at large feasts.

  One dimension of religious renewal has always been substituting the more universal beliefs of Buddhism with a strong moral-ethical (and thus community solidarity) component for local beliefs centered around the worship of local (ammoral but necessarily immoral) spiritual forces like ghosts and magical practices, including talismans, tatooing and other forms of gaining invulnerability or protection from the random local forces of nature.

  Tradition itself can also be a force that prevents people from looking after their health. An older member of my family recently broke her arm and refused to put a cast on it and do what the doctor told her because traditionally massage was used, she said (it cost a lot was another reason). I’ve seen seriously mentally disturbed children in Burma treated by monks also (not that the mental health professionals were there either).

  Anyway, modern medical science saves lives and Buddhism reveres life of every form, so science seems like a promising new dimension to align religious reform efforts along, particulrly in rural areas where education is not valued so much. (Monks in development is another interesting thing mentioned in a Bangkok Post Op-ed piece by WIlliam Klausner today.)

• 3 Sawarin // May 23, 2007 at 11:03 pm

  I find the relation between Buddhism and science interesting. It has been noted for a while in the field of theoretical physics, in String and Super String theory, eg. My own interest on Buddhism is in the philosophy of mind. I feel well known philosophers of mind have left something to say on the relation of mind&brain (and a number of other issues). It would be interesting to see how Buddhism can offer to the social sciences (the relative science).

  I once attended a conference on Mindfulness& clinical sciences in DC (in 2005 or 2006 I think), were you there Richard #1?

• 4 david w // May 24, 2007 at 9:06 am

  Claims about the compatability of Buddhism and Science have been a rich vein of discussion ever since the 19th century when Euro-Americans ‘discovered’ Buddhism and positioned it in very positive light as a contrast to theistic (anti-Englightenment) Christianity. And Asian Buddhists were more than happy to pick up this line of argument and run with it as well, for obvious reasons. While the greater compatability of Buddhism with science in contrast to Christianity is not unreasonable, the notion that the foundational methodology, epistemology and ontology of Buddhism and Science are compatible, even in agreement, can’t be taken very seriously in my opinion, at least with regards to how science is currently understood and practiced. While elements of Buddhist belief and practice, taken out of context, are comparable, much of the classical Buddhist vision of the world and proper action in it have to be quietly and discretely set aside for it to get a serious hearing at the table of modern Science. And vice-versa as well. These claims of compatability are typically built upon highly selective readings of either (or both) Buddhism and Science.

  Quit frankly, I would take claims and assertions about the compatibility of Buddhism and Science more seriously if those same advocates were quite open about the disagreements, and even contradictions, between them as well. The various essays in the edited collection by B. Alan Wallace, Buddhism and Science, do a much more balanced job of evaluating the relative compatability (and incompatability) of them from the perspective of the natural and psychological sciences than most of the other highly romantic, highly selective and highly self-serving works. I suggest those interested in the topic take a look at that volume.

• 5 Republican // May 24, 2007 at 1:42 pm

  David W makes an interesting point, but it could be taken further. One wonders whether there is a “hidden agenda” in this conference to give international scientific respectability to Buddhist nationalist discourses in Thailand today (even if these discourses would be expressed at the conference in a more sophisticated way than by those clamouring for Buddhism to be made the national religion). As soon as one sees that the conference is sponsored by “K-brand”, and that it is taking place under a royalist dictatorship, then one automatically has one’s suspicions.

• 6 Pig Latin // May 24, 2007 at 3:34 pm

  Biologists should use telescopes and astronomers, microscopes.

• 7 Sawarin // May 24, 2007 at 10:28 pm

  Science, as well as religions, belong to mankind, and the world didn’t begin from a manmade schema of ‘the modern age’ There, 16th Century onwards, we began our process of compartmentalizing and truncating our knowledge.

  Does anybody follow the development of Continental Philosophy, (esp. in France)? What goes on in Continental philosophy will generally provide an epistemoglocial shift to ‘other disciplines’ (discipline– another useless term) in a following decade or so. Wait for at least ten years (or even sooner), you’ll begin to sense the impact of the ‘next turn’ in human sciences.

  As for the real objective of this conference, I don’t know. But the fact that the organisers don’t need any registration fee from participants/attendants is kinda saying they already have ’sufficient sponsorship’.

• 8 david w // May 25, 2007 at 8:52 am

  I certainly don’t doubt that the conference will be used for the glorification of establishment Thai Buddhism and the Chakri dynasty. Should we guess in advance how many times Mongkut’s “experiments” with astronomy, practical technology and whatnot will be valorized as a sign of royalist-led investigations into the compatability between Buddhism and science? Dozens and dozens of times by Thai scholars, no doubt. (Of course, few will comment on the stunning almost complete silence of subsequent generations of Thai monarchs and monks in engaging with modern science.)

  I suspect though that this will be a “supplemental” effect rather than a “hidden agenda”. More information about when the conference was planned and by whom though might provide clues as to the motivations of the organizers. The fact is, these sorts of conferences are almost ritualized in their global appeareance and dynamics – much commentary on how science should learn from the teachings, practices or methods of Buddhism, but little if any comments about how Buddhism could learn or be rethought in light of modern science. I suspect little of anything new will be offered up when compared with the volumes and volumes of previous (rather simplistic) reflections. I wait with baited breath for a northeastern forest meditation master who asserts that the claims and arguments of neuroscience have caused him to critically rethink classical Buddhist claims about perception, awareness, consciousness and meditative states. When that happens, then we will know that true, critical dialogue has begun between science and Buddhism.

• 9 Jon Fernquest // May 26, 2007 at 7:15 am

  “I wait with baited breath for a northeastern forest meditation master who asserts that the claims and arguments of neuroscience have caused him to critically rethink classical Buddhist claims about perception, awareness, consciousness and meditative states.”

  Well, from my perspective the relevance of science in everyday life is more important than abstract philosophical questions.

  Like if poorer people can live and not die because of a more scientific way of thinking among doctors, nurses, and the general population.

  Like this weekend the wife of a friend who is only 37 years old slipped into a coma and looks to die shortly, after several hospitals, over 50,000 baht in expenses, and……this is the really incomprehensible thing….NO DIAGNOSIS…this boggles my mind….it also boggles my mind that so many of my fellow countrymen think that the abstract value of big pharma’s intellectual property and patents is somehow in some abstract sense worth more than the lives of the people who would otherwise die if not allowed access to these drugs on some abstract legal principle, I think they just view Thailand as some monolithic one-minded actor when in actuality there are people who are dieing every minute for want of a few hundred baht and for want of a more scientific attitude towards disease and their own health

  Part of that is the way that people treat their own health, how doctors treat it, how the nurses treat it.

  A scientific way of thinking

• 10 Pig Latin // May 26, 2007 at 6:57 pm

  david w, consider what the hippocampus is physically and then consider what neuroscientists believe it to do.

  Jon, philosophical questions are only abstract if one is unable or unwilling to apply the dialectic. Maybe what you are talking about here is feudalism and liberal modernity rather than spiritual poverty. Goodluck with your friends wife.

• 11 The venerable Ajaan Chah // May 26, 2007 at 10:39 pm

  Jon, I was in a coma at my monastary for many years and now can talk to you from cyber space so there is hope with your friend.
  David W, I am willing to engage on scientific questions and even Richard Dawkins if he is reading this blog.

• 12 david w // May 27, 2007 at 6:03 am

  Jon: I can fully sympathize with your concerns and anger over the moral inequalities and immorally disfunctional uses and consequences of scientific technologies, applications and methods. That is however a separate topic than the one I was addressing. Whether it is more relevant and important than what I was discussing is another issue. I was addressing the issue of Buddhism and Science as I imagined it would be discussed at the forthcoming conference.

  And for the record, classical Buddhist claims about perception, awareness, consciousness and meditative states are not abstract philosophical issues from the Buddhist perspective. They are foundational and essential if one believes that liberations from dukkha and samsara are supremely important goals, as the Buddha asserted. If they are abstract (and presumably from your perspective irrelevant or at least not so importantly relevant), then so is one of the central guiding goals of Theravada Buddhism.

  Pig Latin: I don’t feel comfortable responding to, in essence, what would have to be my assumptions about what you are implying in a rather oblique and somewhat cryptic fashion. Of course, neuroscientists disagree with each other a lot about a lot of things (just like Buddhists), so even if I got the general gist of what you are implying, I’m not sure I would still know what particular claim you are advancing. Hence, it’s difficult to respond.

• 13 Pig Latin // May 27, 2007 at 9:00 pm

  david w: Well briefly, the brain has two hippocampi which form part of the limbic system. The limbic system is what neuro scientists believe to be where emotional memory is ’stored’ for lack of a better word. The hippocampus is where the longer term memories are found. However, the hippcampus also has links to the visual cortex and spatial awareness (which the limbic system does not) The physical nature of the hippocampus is like tough gristle. Tasteless yet bitter like the truth.

• 14 Jon Fernquest // May 28, 2007 at 2:10 am

  “And for the record, classical Buddhist claims about perception, awareness, consciousness and meditative states are not abstract philosophical issues from the Buddhist perspective. They are foundational and essential if one believes that liberations from dukkha and samsara are supremely important goals, as the Buddha asserted. If they are abstract (and presumably from your perspective irrelevant or at least not so importantly relevant), then so is one of the central guiding goals of Theravada Buddhism.”

  I don’t think they are irrelevant, hooking up “classical Buddhist claims about perception, awareness, consciousness and meditative states” is important in and of itself, replacing magic with science (in Malinowski’s sense of the terms), replacing the local with the universal, but from where I am and have been situated, the most important aspect of that is that people will rely less on magic, and this is no abstraction on my part, I’ve witnessed everything from seances to every kind of ghost, to what in Burmese is called an auk-lan (outland) saya (black magician) hired to put a hex on the lover of someone’s 60 year old father, I won’t elaborate. Or believing that cancer was caused by a spell by hostile villagers on an outsider, actually the little exorcism was performed before they knew it was cancer. U Nu’s 1961 Thaka Ala play features the burning of a woman’s longyi (sarong) in a magic candle as part of a love hex..Quaritch Wales book on Southeast Asian warfare book has an ancient warrior chanting incantations over ground human foetus (Kuman Tong, I believe) used to make an amulet for invulnerability…I don’t openly disagreement in an culturally ugly fashion, to be sure, but I just can’t help my nagging scepticism about all this stuff…

• 15 Jon Fernquest // May 28, 2007 at 2:04 pm

  There’s a famous court case that listed a set of features necessary for Christian creationism to qualify as a scientific theory (it didn’t according to the court):

  1. It is guided by natural law.
  2. It has to be explanatory by reference to natural law.
  3. It is testable against the empirical world.
  4. Its conclusions are tentative, i.e. are not necessarily the final word.
  5. It is falsifiable.
  (McLean vs. Arkansas Board of Education, 1982)

  The last element, associated with philosopher of science Karl Popper seems to be very much in the spirit of the Buddhist notion of anicca. Buddhism seems to have a method built into it, rather than dogmatic belief in certain miracles.

• 16 david w // May 29, 2007 at 11:17 am

  I have read a fair bit of the philosophy of Buddhism, as well as philosophical reflections upon Buddhism, and I haven’t come across anyone who has argued that Buddhist teachings and philosophy are comparable to Popperian positivism. And I simply don’t understand how the idea of anicca (that all phenomenon is conditioned and thus not eternal) has anything to do with empistemological claims about truth and falsifiability as proposed by Popper.

  We clearly have radically different understandings of Buddhism as an intellectual system. While there is philosophy in it (of a particular Indian style; not to be confused with Western philosophy), it is not a philosophy per se. It is a soteriology, a method for achieving liberation from a samsaric world. It’s underlying logic has little do, if anything, with the search for causal explanations of material phenomenon and processes, ala modern Western science. Buddhism’s epistemological concerns with and need to explain the ‘empirical world’ (which is conceptualized quite differently from the Indian perspective when compared with the Greek) is much more limited and narrow than modern science’s need. There might be points of overlap, taken out of context, but they are strikingly different intellectual projects regarding their methods, goals, principles, etc. And I don’t think this fact does a diservice to either Buddhism or science as valuable exercises or human achievements.

  But really, the book I suggested in an earlier post really does an excellent job of discussing such issues. There are also some fine essays on the matter in the Encyclopedia of Religion and the Encyclopedia of Buddhism. Well worth hunting down and then pursuing their suggested readings if one wants to delve into the topic in more detail.

• 17 anonymous // May 29, 2007 at 4:15 pm

  David W., sorry to say this, but those Thammayut Nikai northeastern forest meditation masters are too busy trying to kick out the Mahanikai interim Supreme Patriarch than in trying to understand the latest advances in the neurosciences.

• 18 Jon Fernquest // May 29, 2007 at 7:56 pm

  Re: B. Alan Wallace, Buddhism and Science, thanks for the reference, I’ll have to look into it. I haven’t read anything in this area, so mine are only casual musings.

  David: “It’s underlying logic has little do, if anything, with the search for causal explanations of material phenomenon and processes, ala modern Western science. Buddhism’s epistemological concerns with and need to explain the ‘empirical world’ (which is conceptualized quite differently from the Indian perspective when compared with the Greek) is much more limited and narrow than modern science’s need.”

  This is a useful observation for me. I am interested in the philosophy of science (which deals mostly with scientific method) and how it relates to historiography, particularly Burmese historiography which is heavily influenced by Buddhism.

  There is a tension between, for instance, the more positivist interpretation of historical texts of Than Tun who was educated in the British era (valorizing inscriptions and royal orders, discounting chronicle texts) and for instance the continually evolving literary interpretations in Buddhist chronicle texts. U Kala Mahayazawingyi chronicle, for instance, begins at the beginning of the universe with succesive recreations and covers the social contract of the first Mahasammata (Mahathammada king), much of this being adapted from the Sri Lankan Sasana Vamsa, kind of “Buddhist social science” or socio-political philosophy as opposed to the western you see in universities, i.e. Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, Montesquieie, etc…

• 19 Jon Fernquest // May 30, 2007 at 1:57 am

  Actually, the reason I brought Popper up was that he provides a solution to the so-called Induction Problem (See Bertrand Russell) also known as the Black Swan (in Australia) Problem or the Turkey Problem, which really has a Buddhist ring to it, namely the little turkey comes quickly to believe from induction that his human care giver will always give him care, but of course on the day before Thanksgiving (or Guy Fawkes Day or Christmas) he wrings his neck. There was absolutely no evidence that he would do this, that he was so cruel. In fact, Popper states that all hypotheses about the world must be falsifiable, but the only ones you know for sure are the ones that you successfully falsified, like the, in retrospect, incorrect belief that human care givers are kind, or like:

  Annica = no permanence
  Anatta = no self
  Dukha = no thukha (pleasure)

  That the Buddha falsified.

• 20 david w // May 30, 2007 at 9:39 am

  Jon:

  Another essay worth reading on Buddhism and Science is: David McMahan, “Modernity and the Discourse of Scientific Buddhism.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 72, No. 4 (2004), 897-933.

  Some of the most recent interesting thoughts about historiography, Theravada chronicles and understanding the Buddhist past, in my opinion, can be found in: Stephen Berkwitz, “Buddhist History in the Vernacular: The Power of the Past in Late Medieval Sri Lanka”, (Leiden: Brill, 2004). Unfortunately, it is a very expensive academic text. Fortunately, it is a Google scanned book and can be found in their expanding electronic book library.

• 21 “Buddhism in the Age of Consumerism” conference at Mahidol // Jun 21, 2008 at 9:32 pm

  [...] Last year I highlighted an interesting conference at Thailand’s Mahidol University on the topic of Buddhism and Science.  [...]

• 22 Nikhil Gangoli - Buddhism guide // Jun 23, 2008 at 12:55 am

  Hi,

  There is a deep connection between the mystical insights of Buddhism and the science of Quantum Physics. Gary Zukhav – in the book The Dancing Wu Li Masters – describes how the past, present and future converge to a single point – that is the Here and Now.

  I would certianly be interested in the findings of the conference as the above book – interesting though it was – described findings that were more than 30 years old and I would like to learn of further developments in Quantum Physics and Science in general that have in common with the Buddhist view of the Universe.

  If possible please explain the same in non scientific language.

  regards

  Nikhil

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