I am not sure what you are going on about.
I cannot make myself any clearer than I have already. If Sun Tzu’s last post does not convince you, there is little left to say, for he seems to understand quite clearly, and what he has laid out is clear as daylight. I will give it one more shot.
Thus, it means nothing to say that the topics were addressed prior to the 16th century, since the issue is whether they were addressed in a way that involved rigorous induction and, when possible, the experimental testing of hypotheses, and the development of theories with sufficient predictive power to be testable through further observation.
What you seem to have your head in the sand about is that the Buddha developed methods designed to achieve Liberation, that is he designed a set of very specific techniques to escape the cycle of death and birth. Perhaps you think this strange or weird or just not a suitable subject for "science". Perhaps you think that this is just not possible. My contention is that not only was the framework you speak of established well before the 16th Cent, but that the Buddha himself was a scientist, and used scientific methods. The object of his experiments was himself. Perhaps it’s this that you find unscientific, despite the fields and fields today of cognitive sciences. So I say, first scientific principle satisfied. He came to his truth through his own experience. He was about to be King, about to have it all, but he decided that this was not the Way so he became an ascetic, but decided that this was not the Way either. In the end he came up with a theory dubbed The Middle Way, or Path. Second scientific principle satisfied. But this was not enough, for he clearly and plainly taught to not just believe him just because he says so.
"It is extremely important for you to analyze and examine my teachings, and then, in the end, you can decide whether to adopt them. If there is any wisdom, you can adopt it. If there is nothing, just leave it. You do not have to accept these teachings." Buddha said, "Do not accept my teachings because they are taught by a King, or a Prince. Do not accept them because they are taught by someone called "Buddha." However, accept them if they are logical, if they are reasonable, if there is wisdom in them, and if there is some benefit." buddha
Others learnt his techniques and reported similar effects. Third scientific principle satisfied. What don’t you understand. As for what you think of as science, why is it that modern science with all it’s bells and whistles still cannot detect the mind. Do you think it exists or not. In ancient times the ancient world was on the cutting edge of modernity, how else do you explain the fact that for eg that acupuncture is now being proven efficacious in certain instances by western medical studies. If it’s scientific now, how come it wasn’t scientific back then.
It is accepted as being way beyond doubt by those who are Buddhists, and by those who are scholars of Buddhism, even still, by lapsed Buddhists, that under any sort of definition that you want to name, that the Buddha gave specific medical teachings, so on this I think you are quite wrong, because what was this Way that he was on about, about. It was that given the absolutely true existence of aging, illness and death, he taught the elimination of Suffering and the obliteration of pain, which sounds like quite a doctorly approach to things, no. The Tibetan Medical Sysytem is derived from his teachings and understanding of the forces and flows he identified. If you have any doubts about this you can do your own research, but the buddhas foundational thinking might sound simpleminded to you, so simple that you might not want to bother continue reading, but they’re quite short really. They are laid out very clearly in the Four Noble Truths and Noble Eightfold Path. Too bad that these simple ideas are so vexacious to understand properly due to their complexity.
Science is nothing if not about the quest for the true nature of reality, as opposed to say separating reality, by dividing it into dogmas and becoming a “scientific” expert in one of them. Buddha understood that he would have to construct a matrix of receptivity and thus the Teachings, for example, the Heart Sutra or as Buddha apparently called it, The Illumination of the Profound, or what we know as the teaching on Emptiness or the Void where all is one and nothing at the same time, which is a teaching on transcendent knowledge and liberation wisdom. In this state there is no suffering, no origination, no cessation, no path, no intuitive wisdom, no attainment or attachment and no nonattainment, no nonattachment either.
Now getting to this point is quite a quite a tall order, and he wanted to lay it out quite clearly, so he started with what was at hand, namely himself. A critical intelligence, an analyzing self and a penetrating observation were required for insight. He called this The Diamond Drill, how is it that he should pick such an apt metaphor. His theory was that if he sorted himself out, the rest would follow, and it did whereby he turned to the rest of us and addressed the great problem of how to alleviate personal suffering.
Having already figured out what he himself was made of, he gave the ideation of humans as being composed of the five aggregates, the five body/mind processes, or skandhas, accurately translated from the Sanskrit as The Five Heaps. These are the aggregate of matter, the aggregate of sensation, the aggregate of ideation, the aggregate of volitions (emotions) and the aggregate of consciousness. Now although modern science has yet to define or unequivocally locate the mind, what the Buddhists think of as the mind, or what they would call the continuum of consciousness, are the four non physical aggregates taken together, and in the simplest terms it would be this that they think of as what discards the body, (the material aggreagate), and is that which takes on another physical embodiment in the, what would be called the next life, after a transitional period which they delved into quite deeply too. Even their determination of the point of death, the point of separation so to speak, was investigated, and it turns out to be quite different to what is accepted in the West.
These aggregates were investigated and what was found that on the material level such things as bone, blood, organs, could be determined. Aditionally there were other objects of the physical world, things like an images in your head, sights sounds smells tastes etc, but what he discovered through investigation is that each of these very real things was devoid of any intrinsically substantial substance. For eg we talk of tasting something but where is the taste itself, when you delve deep down into either that piece of fruit, or your tastebuds, looking for the taste, the material essence of what we call taste cannot be found, but the funny thing is that now, more than two thousand tears later and with microscopes we can definitely identify the Void he was talking about. He discovered that when he analyzed things, the shit kept disappearing. What to do what to do.
Onto the next aggregate of sensation and here he identified three – pain, pleasure, numbness. The problem with these is that when he went in deep to find the source of the pain or pleasure, the damn shit disappeared again. Onto Ideation or conceptualization and this is where things get dangerous for this is where we invent words, make narrative, tell stories, develop names for things like science or physics etc. The danger is that it is here that a cloud of imagery of yourself fills the head and once again such things can be dissolved by analysis. Similarly with the emotions when he went to look for the source material of such a confounding phenomenon it dissolved under the analysis of his intellect. Same thing happened with his sense of individual consciousness and bringing this to bear at this point he gave the abovementioned teaching proclaiming the fundamental emptiness of the aggregates.
It is on this point, of well then what the heck is there then, that Buddhism draws distinctions compared to other religions for eg Hinduism and Christianity. The former uses the notion of Atman or Self, the latter the notion of the Soul, and while these may correspond to the buddhist notion of the four non physical aggregates, the difference is that the Buddhist notion, is a notion of mind as a non physical process that constantly changes. As such it is perceived as impermanent, and not as a fixed entity that travels through a medium. You cannot really understand what they mean when they talk of Mind without an understanding of what they call Clear Nature, but that's another teaching, so be it. In response to Hinduism the Buddha developed the contradictory notion of non-self, which is something that is not fixed, or rather it is something selfless. Similarly he would not have entertained the notion of an immortal soul such as it it conceived in the Christian world.
Wrt this notion of the different religions I’d like to clarify something I said yesterday which was the word from the top chap is that folks should stick to their traditions and find the light therein, and only after doing this, if you are really really serious about it, then become a buddhist.
When I re-read that I thought some might confuse my own arrogance with that of a great teacher who is actually without arrogance or contradiction between this, and his worldview. He knows that when you see the light, you see the light, and this could be wrt to something as mundane as learning how to programme that remote, but of course he talks of more complex things, but the truth of this experience is simply one that is known by experience, never mind about a truth that is determined by observing something or describing it properly. This is an individual experience and an individual truth, but since we humans are discriminating by virtue of different conditions and causes, we are in the aggregate on the more subtle levels, going to be, all together, a very diverse lot, and so to think that there can only be one religion just doesn’t make sense in the light of the practicality of the facts on the ground.
He is keenly aware of how unlikely it is that anyone would ever take his advice to see the light in their own tradition first and then become a Buddhist which is why what he says about it is not arrogant. He simply says that if after you see the light, and then you still want to become a Buddhist, then you must be very very serious about becoming a Buddhist, what more is there to say, except that it is in this way that we will achieve world peace.
That’s about it for now. I think that one thing you maybe fail to realize is just how much depth there is to this method. It is not just some sort of hocus pocus, every single thing is investigated on the basis of logic and reason, of course you are free to disagree. My ultimate contention was that the Buddha was a scientist given his framework and his method. The teachings take the framework of a uniquely dialecticist centrist system and they are likely to be different from any other technique you’ve used, witnessed being used, or experienced. This does not mean that they are not scientific. There are lots and lots of things that he taught, of course what we have today are the commentaries, to try and divorce these from the Buddha is an exercise in hair splitting and insistence on the unrelated nature of things. For example for some depth, you could turn to the teachings on The Method of Determining the View : The Identification of Addictive Misknowledge. Good luck.
If you are going to blandly call pre 16th cent science, a fairly primitive collection of observations about the natural world. I and others are likely to call you on it, we refuse to look backwards and think of such ideations as being primitive, which it only seems to be because of the tricks that time plays with the mind, or ego for that matter, which is something that the hard sciences are still looking for. Look forwards, realizing that at the time of all these discoveries not only were they made scientifically, so by definition they were what constituted modern science, but in many many cases, the methods used were fundamentally sound. It’s being proven nowadays in our modern labs.
To be clear there is an enormous wealth of literature and great sophisticated debate on the many ideations in Buddhism, and the details thereof, and there are different schools that developed over differences in different texts, but this is how they are determined to work things, by constantly examining and asking questions and accepting only logical answers. On the level of my take as is above, I think it would be broadly accepted, although to identify it properly, it draws heavily from Tibetan Buddhism or the Mahayana, or Greater Vehicle, school. The thing is to not get ethnically confused in the beginning because this can lead to intellectual complications later on. Despite the name, the cradle is really that of an ancient culture from India that was lost to the rest of the world through the effects of materialism, the Islamic conquests all over Asia, the Christian conquests and finally the French and British. They fled to the hills and hidden behind fortress Himalaya a culture was preserved. The Chinese invasion thrust the culture out into the open, which is where we're at today. One more thing I want to clarify is that in no way shape or form would I think to call myself a practicing Buddhist. |
