and the Very Idea of “Buddhist ” 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 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 . At a recent Mind and Life Institute Dialogue on “Perception, Concepts, and the Self,” which took place in December 2015 at the in India, the 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 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 , he often shifts registers in his discussions with scientists and draws from the 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 . 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 “ 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 for , 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 . 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. While the Dalai Lama’s concern in the current religion and science exchange has more to do with the ethical and spiritual implications of scientific research than 4

with the nature of the physical world as such—on which he says he is willing to acknowledge errors in the Buddhist tradition—the existence in Buddhist doctrine of soteriologically based constraints on what constitutes direct perception is important to note. In contrast, this chapter documents a moment in Tibetan history where medical theorists sought evidence for the truth of the Buddha’s Word in the physical evidence known to medical practice. In this atmosphere a discrepancy between such evidence and Buddha Word was not to be explained away merely as a function of the ordinary deluded mind of the physician (pp. 197-198). This passage raises the important and complicated issue of the status of empiricism and what is directly observable. Although Gyatso contrasts the way the earlier medical scholars confronted this issue with the way the Dalai Lama deals with it, her book made me realize that he repeats some of their pivotal moves. To explain this point I need to give a little background. When the Dalai Lama discusses perception and cognition with Western cognitive scientists, he usually speaks from the perspective of Abhidharma and Buddhist epistemology, specifically the Tibetan philosophical elaborations of Dharmakīrti’s philosophy. He also usually speaks from the “external realist” perspective of the Sautrāntika system, rather than from the “idealist” perspective of the Yogācāra system or the “conventionalist” perspective of the Madhyamaka system. Inevitably, a problem arises because the Sautrāntika system is dualist: It maintains that material phenomena and mental phenomena have different natures. Cognitive scientists, however, generally think that mental events are instantiated in or realized by biological processes and cannot exist independent of the living body and the brain. When the scientists challenge the dualist viewpoint, the Dalai Lama does not shift to a Yogācāra or Madhyamaka perspective, instead he appeals to the Vajrayana. The following passage from his book, The Universe in a Single Atom, explains the basic idea: At the most fundamental level, no absolute division can be made between mind and matter. Matter in its subtlest form is , a vital energy which is inseparable from consciousness. These two are different aspects of an indivisible reality. Prana is the aspect of mobility, dynamism, and cohesion, while consciousness is the aspect of cognition and the capacity for reflective thinking (p. 110). Notice that the Dalai Lama invokes precisely the tantric perspective that the earlier Tibetan medical scholars had worried about how to reconcile with medical anatomy. Their problem was that the subtle tantric energy channels are not physically locatable in the dissected human body. Hence, some scholars argued that the energy channels are invisible projections created by the imagination in meditation practice. But the sixteenth century medical scholar, Zurkharwa, one of the main figures of Gyatso’s book, refused this view; he reasoned that because tantric meditation is efficacious, the energy channels cannot be imaginary but rather must exist in their own right. To the objection that the channels should therefore be able to appear to direct perception, he responded that they are too fine or subtle to be visible to ordinary perception. The Dalai Lama makes exactly the same kind of move in the Mind and Life Dialogues. Specifically, he appeals to the tantric idea that there is an interdependency between subtle levels of consciousness and subtle levels of energy, neither of which is apparent or accessible to ordinary perception, but which could be made apparent or 5 accessible to advanced, meditative perception (yogic perception). In this way, he uses the Vajrayana perspective, rather than Buddhist logic or epistemology, to respond to a scientific challenge. Specifically, he uses a “religious” and ritualistic conception of the body to try to enlarge the framework of what can counts as empirical and directly observable. Once again, “religion” and “science” are thoroughly intertwined. Let me illustrate this point in a bit more detail. At the twenty-fourth Mind and Life Dialogue, I asked the Dalai Lama to explain the passage from his book I just read to you. He answered by saying that different Buddhist schools give different accounts of the mind and that when these schools contradict each other, one should rely on the highest perspective, the school that uses the most comprehensive means of investigation. This is the Vajrayana system, which is especially important for the difficult subject of how mind and matter relate to each other. The main issue, he said, concerns the different levels of consciousness, from gross to subtle. Just as there are progressively subtler levels of consciousness—from waking awareness to dreaming, deep sleep, and what happens to consciousness at death—there are progressively subtler levels of energy. From the Vajrayana perspective, so long as a phenomenon is a conscious one, it is necessarily contingent on a physical phenomenon. The caveat is that the physical basis—the energy—for subtle consciousness is also of a very subtle kind. So, the scientific concept of matter, he concluded, needs to be modified to appreciate this subtle energy. In this way, he used the Vajrayana system to try to reframe the problem of consciousness away from materialism. Finally, the Dalai Lama suggested that the way for science to investigate this kind of subtle consciousness is to study advanced meditation practitioners, especially ones who practice tantric visualizations. He told us that for a long time he has thought that the Buddhist explanations of consciousness are like paper money in that whether they remain valuable depends on the gold reserve of these meditative techniques and the experiences they produce. For this reason, he encourages monks and yogis who live up in the mountains to dedicate themselves to these practices. He described them as making up a lab that reproduces experiences through meditation. One needs a single-pointed concentration that can remain fully alert and stable on a chosen object without the slightest wavering for many hours. That mental power can then be used to meditate not on external things but on the energy channels within the body, and this will eventually make the energy move, with actual effects on the body. He concluded by saying that if Buddhists have that level of meditation practitioner with these kinds of experiences, then they can challenge the scientists, and that will give the scientists new phenomena and a new understanding. We see here a very similar line of reasoning to the one Gyatso presents Zurkharwa as making: Meditating on the tantric energy channels has real, physical effects, so they must be real, and therefore we need to enlarge our conception of the empirical. Gyatso writes: in bucking the ill-advised trend in medicine to look for the tantric channels in the observable body, Zurkharwa preserved their explanatory power for other purposes… [H]e was ever vigilant to prevent the religious imagination from being confused with what is observed in the light of plain day. Yet having achieved such a division, he went on to let that same imagination—once identified and put in its proper place—help medicine understand what it 6

might not detect in a superficial look (p. 249). Similarly, the Dalai Lama is ever vigilant to distinguish between what he describes as “Buddhists’ private business,” namely, Buddhist religious practice, and what he calls “Buddhist science,” which, though based on Buddhist religious practice is concerned to investigate reality and can, he thinks, help science to see things it might not otherwise detect. In conclusion, let me point to what I consider to be a deeper tension in the Dalai Lama’s approach. This tension concerns the role of culture and its philosophical implications. Largely because of the Dalai Lama’s urging, scientists are now investigating Tibetan Buddhist tantric practices, such as Tummo “inner heat” meditation and Thukdam death meditation. In these investigations, scientists are increasingly recognizing the need to appeal to the cultural and social contexts of the practices to understand their physiological effects. Purely biological models that leave out culture, language, and ritual seem inadequate. Anthropology is as important as neuroscience. From a Buddhist perspective, the philosophical system that seems most relevant here is Madhyamaka, which emphasizes the dependency of all phenomena on “convention,” that is, on how we frame them through concepts, language, and shared social practices. Ironically, however, whenever someone in the Mind and Life Dialogues uses Madhyamaka to argue that biological phenomena—and scientific findings more generally—are culturally configured and thus conventional, the Dalai Lama either resists or seems uninterested. He appears to be more comfortable with a strongly realist or objectivist view of science. I would argue, however, that beyond all the current popular hype about meditation and the brain, what we are really learning from science is the way that cultural practices, especially religious rituals, shape the physiology of individuals and groups as well as how we experience our bodies. Thus, classical empiricism, which posits an objective, “empirical body” that exists entirely beyond cultural representations and that is to be mapped by biology independently of cultural practices, cannot be upheld. Nevertheless, the Mind and Life Dialogues sometimes proceed as if there were such an objective, empirical body, especially an objective, empirical brain, which is taken to be the special province of “contemplative neuroscience” (and this despite Mind and Life’s founding scientist, Francisco Varela, having always been very critical of such empiricism). The Mind and Life dialogues—and the science-Buddhism encounter more generally— therefore need to be reframed. Gyatso’s book provides a rich and needed historical perspective for this task.