From the same source...
While American thinkers and newly converted Western Buddhists thought they saw a natural fit between Buddhism and science, Buddhist teachers more steeped in the traditional discipline were less apologetic and often more critical of such facile comparisons. Two notable contemporary examples come to mind: Master Hsuan Hua, from the Mahayana tradition, and Wapola Rahula, a Theravada scholar-monk, both threw cold water on this notion.
The Venerable Hsuan Hua, a Ch'an and Tripitika master from China, arrived in America in the early 1960s to propagate the Dharma in the West. As he observed and studied the trends and currents of contemporary thought, he showed little enthusiasm for what seemed to him the exaggerated claims of modern science—theoretical or applied. He said, “Within the limited world of the relative, that is where science is. It’s not an absolute Dharma. Science absolutely cannot bring true and ultimate happiness to people, neither spiritually nor materially.” This is strong criticism that portrays science as a discipline limited to relative truths, and as an unsatisfactory way of life. In another essay, he wrote:
Look at modern science. Military weapons are modernized every day and are more and more novel every month. Although we call this progress, it’s nothing more than progressive cruelty. Science takes human life as an experiment, as child’s play, as it fulfills its desires through force and oppression.
In 1989, Venerable Walpola Rahula, a Theravadin monk from Sri Lanka, also warned that daily life is being permeated by science. He cautioned, “We have almost become slaves of science and technology; soon we shall be worshipping it.” His comments come well into the final decades of the twentieth century, when many people had in effect turned science into a religious surrogate. The Venerable monk observed, “Early symptoms are that they tend to seek support from science to prove the validity of our religions.” Walpola Rahula elaborated on this point:
We justify them [i.e. religions] and make them modern, up-to-date, respectable, and accessible. Although this is somewhat well intentioned, it is ill-advised. While there are some similarities and parallel truths, such as the nature of the atom, the relativity of time and space, or the quantum view of the interdependent, interrelated whole, all these things were developed by insight and purified by meditation.
Rahula's critique goes to the heart of the matter: the capitulation of religion to scientific positivism; the yielding of almost all competing schemes of values to the scientific juggernaut. Huston Smith, the eminent scholar on the worlds religions, recently said that the weakness of modern religions in the West stems from their successful accommodation to culture. The contribution that Buddhism and other religions can make to the spiritual crisis facing modern society, therefore, may not lie in their compatibility with science, but in their ability to offer something that science cannot.
More importantly, as Rahula argues, Dharma, or abiding spiritual truths, were discovered without the help of any external instrument. Rahula concluded, “It is fruitless, meaningless to seek support from science to prove religious truth. It is incongruous and preposterous to depend on changing scientific concepts to prove and support perennial religious truths.” Moreover, he echoes the deeper moral concerns expressed by Master Hua regarding the unexamined aims and consequences of the scientific endeavor:
Science is interested in the precise analysis and study of the material world, and it has no heart. It knows nothing about love or compassion or righteousness or purity of mind. It doesn’t know the inner world of humankind. It only knows the external, material world that surrounds us.
Rahula then suggests that the value of Buddhism redoubles, not as it can be made to seem more scientific, but in its reaffirming a different sensibility, an overarching and unyielding vision of humanity's higher potential. He concludes emphatically:
On the contrary, religion, particularly Buddhism, aims at the discovery and the study of humankind’s inner world: ethical, spiritual, psychological, and intellectual. Buddhism is a spiritual and psychological discipline that deals with humanity in total. It is a way of life. It is a path to follow and practice. It teaches man how to develop his moral and ethical character, which in Sanskrit is sila, and to cultivate his mind, samadhi, and to realize the ultimate truth, prajna wisdom, Nirvana... |
