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Empiricism and the Very Idea of “Buddhist Science” Commentary On Empiricism and the Very Idea of “Buddhist Science” Commentary on Janet Gyatso, Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet Evan Thompson Department of Philosophy University of British Columbia 2016 Toshide Numata Book Award Symposium Center for Buddhist Studies University of California, Berkeley Since the nineteenth century, one of the striking features of the Buddhist encounter with modernity has been the way both Asian Buddhists and Western Buddhist converts have argued that Buddhism not only is compatible with modern science but also is itself “scientific” or a kind of “mind science.” In our time, the most prominent exponent of this idea is Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. At a recent Mind and Life Institute Dialogue on “Perception, Concepts, and the Self,” which took place in December 2015 at the Sera Monastery in India, the Dalai Lama interjected during the opening remarks to clarify the nature of the dialogue. The dialogue, he stated, was not between Buddhism and science, but rather was between “Buddhist science and modern science.” The idea of “Buddhist science” is central to the Dalai Lama’s strategy in these dialogues. His overall aim is to work with scientists to reduce suffering and to promote human flourishing. But his purpose is also to preserve and strengthen Tibetan Buddhism in the modern world. This requires using science to modernize Buddhism while protecting Buddhism from scientific materialism. A key tactic is to show—to both the scientists and the Tibetan Buddhist monastic community—that Buddhism contains its own science and that modern science can learn from it. One of the things I learned from Janet Gyatso’s rich book, Being Human in a Buddhist World, is that Tibetan Buddhist medical scholars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had already confronted some of the same issues that have figured in the Mind and Life Dialogues—in particular, the status of the tantric system of subtle energy channels in the body in relation to medical descriptions of the body—but that they did so well before Tibetan Buddhism had made any contact with European science. In my comments today, I would like to call attention to how the Dalai Lama repeats some of the moves they made when he engages in dialogue with modern scientists. I would also like to argue that it is impossible to separate something called “Buddhist science” from something else called “Buddhist religion” in these dialogues. Gyatso mentions the Dalai Lama’s interest in science but differentiates it from the earlier “medical mentality” on which she focuses. I quote: The Buddhism that the thinkers in this book were engaging, be that positively or oppositionally, was not the same as the one envisioned by the current and very modern Fourteenth Dalai Lama when he says that Buddhism should change its doctrine wherever it is contravened by scientific data. In short, this book is less about a Buddhist science than it is about an evolving scientific tradition that flourished within a Buddhist world (p. 17). 2 I cannot tell whether Gyatso means to endorse the term “Buddhist science” or whether she is using it simply to record the Dalai Lama’s position. In any case, the term strikes me as problematic. To what exactly does it refer? Although the Dalai Lama does have a particular referent in mind, namely, Buddhist logic and epistemology, he often shifts registers in his discussions with scientists and draws from the Vajrayana or tantric conceptions of the body, thereby deploying a “religious” framework. Suppose we distinguish, as Charles Hallisey suggests and as Gyatso wishes us to do, between Buddhism as a religion and Buddhism as a civilizational force (pp. 17, 406). When the Dalai Lama uses the term “Buddhist science” his aim is both to bolster Buddhism as a religion among his own Tibetan people and to assert Buddhism as a civilizational force in the modern world. His aim is also partly to promote an evolving scientific tradition that would include Buddhism and would flourish, if not within a Buddhist world, within a pluralistic one deeply informed by Buddhism. My point is that separating something called “Buddhist science” from something else called “Buddhism as a religion” seems impossible. The term “Buddhist science” seems inseparable from modern Buddhist (or Buddhist modernist) apologetics, in contrast to the more historically and culturally descriptive terms, “Tibetan science,” “Indian science,” “Chinese science,” and “European science.” Indeed, I would argue that there really is no such thing as “Buddhist science.” When the Dalai Lama uses this term, he means Buddhist philosophy and Buddhist meditation. Both offer deep insights. But Buddhist philosophy is no more or less scientific than Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, or Jain philosophy. And Buddhist meditation is no more or less scientific than the kinds of meditation or contemplation these other religions practice. It is also important to remember that modern science is not a monolithic edifice of final principles and established facts. Rather, it is a system of orderly and testable public knowledge comprising multiple and often rival views about the universe, life, and the mind. In the broadest sense, science includes not just experimental investigations with increasingly sophisticated technologies but also logic, epistemology, mathematics, and linguistics. Science in this broad sense is not an exclusively Western creation, for there were rich Arabic, Indian, and Chinese scientific traditions. In pre-colonial India, science comprised the fertile interactions between Hindu, Jain, Muslim, and Buddhist thinkers. It belonged to what historian Sheldon Pollock calls the “Sanskrit cosmopolis,” the trans- regional world of South Asia in which Sanskrit was the language of science and literature. So, although there is no such thing as Buddhist science, there is such a thing as Indian science. There is also such a thing as Tibetan science, especially medical science, as Gyatso’s book so eloquently and extensively shows. Tibetan medicine integrated medical knowledge from the Indian Ayurvedic, Tibetan Bön, and Chinese traditions, and so was never exclusively Buddhist. Let me also register that the Dalai Lama’s statement that Buddhism should change its doctrine wherever scientific data contravene it is not so straightforward as it sounds. He is always careful to add what Thupten Jinpa calls “the caveat.” In Jinpa’s words: The Dalai Lama . argues that it is critical to understand the scope and application of the scientific method. By invoking an important methodological principle, first developed fully as a crucial principle by Tsong Khapa (1357–1419), the Dalai Lama underlines the need to distinguish 3 between what is negated through scientific method and what has not been observed through such a method. In other words, he reminds us not to conflate the two processes of not finding something and finding its nonexistence. For example, through current scientific analysis so far we may have not found evidence for rebirth, but this does not imply by any means that science has somehow negated the existence of rebirth. Another way to state the caveat, using a distinction from the logic of experimental science, is that “absence of evidence” is not equivalent to “evidence of absence.” Thus absence of evidence for rebirth is not the same as evidence for the absence or nonexistence of rebirth. From the scientific perspective, however, although this argument may be logically valid, it does not come to grips with the main challenge that modern science poses to the Tibetan Buddhist view, namely, to give positive evidence for rebirth. Scientists would argue that first-person reports alone cannot provide that evidence, and that no reliable evidence has come from third-person observations. We also need to ask what “negating” something or “finding nonexistence” for it means. On the one hand, if “negating” something means denying its existence based on having evidence for its absence, then one can argue that since science is not able to detect any reliable, objective signs of rebirth, we do have evidence for its absence. Here the relevant principle is that, given reliable detection methods, if something is regularly not detected, then it is legitimate to conclude that it is absent. For example, given a Geiger counter and readings not above those for the background radiation, we conclude that additional radiation is not present. On the other hand, if “negating” something means deductively proving its nonexistence, then one can argue that science rarely proceeds this way, and when it does, it is only in abstract, theoretical areas that are highly dependent on mathematics where deductive proof is possible. So, again, the scientific issue is not whether one can prove the nonexistence of rebirth; the issue is whether there is any compelling empirical evidence to believe in its existence. The upshot of these considerations is that the Dalai Lama’s caveat can seem to the scientist like a ploy for protecting Buddhism from science when the two do not agree. Gyatso notes the ambiguities of the Dalai Lama’s view of science when she discusses the older controversy about how to relate the tantric channels to medical anatomy. I quote her at length: It seems to be decided in advance that the evidence provided by the directly observed body has an unquestionable authority of its own. In this the medical mentality I am tracking is not quite the same as what the modern-day Fourteenth Dalai Lama would seem to have in mind in his own reckoning of the authority of empiricism. There, true empiricism has to do with the deep knowledge revealed by the Buddha, based on the Buddha’s own enlightened realization, and is only directly knowable by him and similarly advanced yogis. For the Dalai Lama and indeed much of Buddhist epistemology, trust in these enlightened realizations trumps any possibility of proving them wrong; indeed, scientific testing will only prove them correct.
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