Dhamma Talks - Is Buddhism Scientific :: Buddhapadipa Thai Temple

Written by Roy Allan on 02/14/2008

Is Buddhism Scientific?

Introduction

In my talk this evening, I will attempt to answer the question ‘Is Buddhism Scientific?’ in the particular context of the following Albert Einstein quotation.

“A human being is part of a whole called by us ‘the Universe’, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

Einstein, the greatest scientist of the twentieth century, with his theories of relativity and mass energy equivalence (better known as ‘E = MC²’) made a major contribution to mankind’s knowledge and understanding of the world around us.

And although he made this quotation as recently as 1954, it comes very close to the Buddha’s teachings of 2,500 years ago.

So in the next 15 minutes or so, I will try to explain this quotation using the Buddhist philosophy of consciousness and the ‘five aggregates’ and give my view on the question ‘Is Buddhism scientific?’

Why pose the question anyway?

But when asked to give this talk, I initially found myself wondering why anyone would want to ask whether a 2,500-year old philosophy (or religion, if you prefer) is scientific. It’s not as if science as we now understand it existed when the Buddha was alive, so why try to link the two?

Well, the supreme goal of Buddhism is the purification of the mind, the cessation of suffering and the attainment of Nibbana, a dimension beyond time and space. This is a very lofty goal for the vast majority of people, primarily because one cannot fully appreciate the magnificence of this state until it is achieved – descriptive words and intellectual discussions fall far short. However – and again with lay people in mind – I would like to propose the term ‘absolute happiness’ as a working compromise for this talk.

And getting one’s life to the point where ‘absolute happiness’ is achieved some if not all of the time is surely as valid and universal a goal amongst people now as it was in the Buddha’s day.

So we are talking about something (ie Buddhism) that has the potential to help a person experience absolute happiness in their life. And particularly for Westerners who are well-used to marketing claims hyping up the key features of innovative products and services, the question about Buddhism being scientific is not that unusual.

After all, any claim that something is scientifically proven equates (rightly or wrongly!) in the public eye to ‘it works!’. You only have to Google on that term to get some 1.7 million hits on all sorts of things from aromatherapy to toothpaste and credit cards!

The Buddha’s teaching on the human condition

The Buddha gave a very comprehensive analysis of the various components comprising a ‘human being’ or ‘personality’ in his teaching of the five aggregates of attachment – respectively matter, sensations, perception, mental formations and consciousness.

Buddhist teachings have been repeatedly found relevant to modern day life and it has even been suggested that, in the analysis of personal experience given by the five aggregates, we have a psychological equivalent to the table of elements (‘the periodic table’) worked out in modern science. This is because it gives a very careful inventory and evaluation of the elements of our experience.

So in Buddhism, we can take the concept of ‘self’ – one’s ‘self’ – as a convenient term for a collection of physical and mental factors represented by the five aggregates, in the same way that ‘forest’ is a collective term for a collection of trees. This is clearly a major step forward from being able to look at personal experience in terms of the body and mind only.

The first aggregate of matter or form corresponds to what we would call material, or physical factors of experience. It includes not only our own bodies but also the material objects that surround us – the earth, the trees, the buildings, and the objects of everyday life. Specifically, the aggregate of matter includes the five physical sense organs and the corresponding material objects of those sense organs: the eyes and visible objects, the ears and audible objects, the nose and olfactory objects, the tongue and objects of taste, and the skin and tangible objects.

The second aggregate of sensations or feelings includes all our sensations pleasant of unpleasant or neutral, experienced through the contact of physical and mental organs with the external world. They are of six kinds: the sensations experienced through the contact of the eye with visible forms, ear with sounds, nose with odour, tongue with taste, body with tangible objects and mind (the sixth faculty in Buddhist psychology) with mind-objects or thoughts or ideas.

The third aggregate of perception is an aggregate that many find difficult to understand. When we speak of perception, we have in mind the activity of recognition, or identification. In a sense, we are talking about attaching a name to an object of experience. The function of perception is to turn an indefinite experience into an identifiable, recognizable one. Here we are speaking of the formulation of a conception, or an idea, about a particular object. As with feeling, where we have an emotive element in the form of pleasure, displeasure, or indifference, with perception we have a conceptual element in the form of the introduction of a definite, determinate idea about the object of experience. It is the perceptions that recogise objects whether physical or mental. Like sensations, they are produced through the contact of our six faculties with the external world.

The fourth aggregate of mental formations or volition can be described as a conditioned response (good, bad or neutral) to the object of experience. In this sense it partakes of the meaning of habit as well. Volitions are the impressions created by previous actions, the habit energy stored up over the course of countless former lifetimes. Volition (the power of the will) has not only a static value but also a dynamic value because, just as our present actions are conditioned by past actions, so our responses here and now are motivated and directed in a particular way by volition. Volition therefore has a moral dimension, just as perception has a conceptual dimension and feeling has an emotive dimension.

The fifth aggregate of consciousness has one of the six faculties (eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and mind) as its basis, and one of the six corresponding external phenomena (visible form, sound, odour, taste, tangible things and mind-objects (ie ideas or thoughts) as its object. For instance, visual consciousness has the eye as its basis and a visible form as its object. Mental consciousness has the mind as its basis and a mental object (ie idea or thought) visible form as its object and so on. So consciousness is connected with other faculties. So like sensation, perception and volition, consciousness also is of six kinds, in relation to the six internal faculties and corresponding six external objects.

Examples of the inter-operation of the five aggregates

This summary description of the five aggregates – not the easiest subject to get to grips with on first hearing – hopefully gives you some understanding of how the physical and mental factors of experience work together to produce personal experience.

To make this a little clearer, let us say that you are in India and you decide to take a walk in the garden. As you walk, your eyes come into contact with a visible object. As your attention focuses on that object, your consciousness becomes aware of a visible object which is as yet indeterminate. Your aggregate of perception then identifies that visible object as, let us say, a snake. Once that happens, you respond to the object with the aggregate of feeling-the feeling of displeasure. Finally, you react to that visible object with the aggregate of volition, with the intentional action of perhaps running away or picking up a stone. Simple, isn’t it?

In all our daily activities, we can see how the five aggregates work together to produce personal experience. At this very moment, for instance, you are probably experiencing contact between two elements of the aggregate of form – me (or perhaps the table) and your eyes. Your consciousness is aware of the words you are hearing me speak. Your aggregate of perception is identifying the meaning of the words. Your aggregate of feeling is producing an emotional response--pleasure, displeasure, or indifference. Your aggregate of volition responds with a conditioned reaction – sitting at attentively, daydreaming or perhaps yawning. Or in the worst case, fighting to stay awake – though hopefully not!

So where does that get us?

We can analyse all our personal experience in terms of the five aggregates, always remembering that each of them is in constant change. The elements that constitute the aggregate of form are impermanent and constantly changing. They will do this as the body grows old, weak, and sick and of course the things around us are all impermanent and constantly altering as well. Our feelings, too, are forever changing. Today we may respond to a particular situation with a feeling of pleasure: tomorrow, with displeasure. Today we may perceive an object in a particular way; later, under different circumstances, our perceptions will change. In semidarkness, we may perceive a rope to be a snake until moment the light of a torch falls on it when we perceive it as a rope.

We can also alter our habits. We can learn to be kind and compassionate. We can acquire the attitudes of renunciation, equanimity, and so forth. Consciousness, too, is impermanent and constantly changing dependent on the objects and sense organs involved, as it cannot exist independently. As we have seen, all the physical and mental factors of our experience – like our bodies, the physical objects around us, our minds, and our ideas – are impermanent and constantly changing. All these aggregates are constantly changing and impermanent. They are processes, not things. They are dynamic, not static.

So what is the use of this analysis of personal experience in terms of the five aggregates? What is the use of this reduction of the apparent unity of personal experience into the elements of form, feeling, perception, volition or mental formation, and consciousness?

The purpose is to create the wisdom of non-self. What we wish to achieve is a way of experiencing the world that is not constructed on and around the idea of a self. We want to see personal experience in terms of processes – in terms of impersonal functions rather than in terms of a self and what affects a self – because this will create an attitude of equanimity and compassion, which will help us overcome the emotional disturbances of hope and fear about the things of the world and be more open to ‘the way it is’.

We are not separate, self-contained individuals cut off from all other sentient beings, even though our respective ‘five aggregates’ would have us believe this to be the case. Einstein clearly understood that as did the Buddha, who regularly performed acts of the utmost compassion, such as caring for the sick, a prominent feature of the Buddha’s everyday life. "He who attends on the sick attends on me," was a famous statement he made on discovering a monk lying in his soiled robes, desperately ill with an acute attack of dysentery whereupon, with the help of Ananda, the Buddha washed and cleaned the sick monk in warm water.

So if by we can overcome the five aggregate-supported sense of self, developing equanimity and compassion in the process, as Einstein asserted in the opening quotation, we should be well on the way to “widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty” because we will have broken free of “our optical delusion of consciousness restricting us to our own personal desires and affections for the few persons nearest us”.

Is Buddhism scientific?

To answer that question, let us start by defining the word 'science'. Science, according to the dictionary is: "knowledge which can be made into a system, which depends upon seeing and testing facts and stating general natural laws, a branch of such knowledge, anything that can be studied exactly".

There are aspects of Buddhism that would not fit into this definition but the central teachings of Buddhism, including the Five Aggregates as just described and the Four Noble Truths, most certainly would.

If we take the First Noble Truth that in life there is ‘Suffering’, this is an experience that can be defined, experienced and measured. The Second Noble Truth states that suffering has a natural cause – craving, which likewise can be defined, experienced and measured. No attempt is made to explain suffering in terms of a metaphysical concept or myths.

Suffering is ended, according to the Third Noble Truth, not by relying on upon a supreme being, by faith or by prayers but simply by removing its cause. This is axiomatic. The Fourth Noble Truth, the way to end suffering, once again, has nothing to do with metaphysics but depends on behaving in specific ways. And once again behaviour is open to testing.

Buddhism dispenses with the concept of a supreme being, as does science, and explains the origins and workings of the universe in terms of natural law. All of this certainly exhibits a scientific spirit.

Once again, the Buddha's constant advice that we should not blindly believe but rather question, examine, inquire and rely on our own experience, has a definite scientific ring to it. He says: "Do not go by revelation or tradition, do not go by rumour, or the sacred scriptures, do not go by hearsay or mere logic, do not go by bias towards a notion or by another person's seeming ability and do not go by the idea 'He is our teacher'. But when you yourself know that a thing is good, that it is not blameable, that it is praised by the wise and when practised and observed that it leads to happiness, then follow that thing."

So we could say that although Buddhism in not entirely scientific, it certainly has a strong overtone and is certainly more scientific than any other religion.

Conclusion

Having started this talk with Einstein, it is fitting to finish with him and bearing in mind his standing as the greatest scientific mind of the twentieth century, it is significant he said of Buddhism:

"The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal God and avoid dogmas and theology. Covering both natural and spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual and a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description. If there is any religion that would cope with modern scientific needs, it would be Buddhism."

Yes, I think we can fairly say that although Buddhism is not entirely scientific, it is certainly more scientific than any other religion.

Thank you.

05 February 2008

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