Buddhism gets a good press in the West for its positive relationship to science. Three kinds of claims are made. The first concerns similarities between Buddhist and scientific styles of thinking. The Buddha was sensitive to experience and causality, and condemned appeals to tradition as an authority – qualities central to scientific enquiry. Second, Buddhist theory apparently anticipated key scientific concepts, from magnetism and radioactivity to insights of cosmology and neuroscience. Similarities and anticipations sometimes feed a third sort of claim. Buddhism can be naturalised – rendered consistent with the modern natural scientific understanding of the world. One philosopher says Buddhism, to become “acceptable”, must be “stripped of mind-numbing and wishful hocus pocus” like rebirth and karma.1 Naturalised Buddhism must be ‘tamed’ by having its supernatural elements excised and replaced, where necessary, by superior scientific components.
A surprising number of Buddhists cheerfully endorse talk of the compatibility of science and their teachings. Or maybe it’s not so surprising. Such claims have a long history going right back to the earliest European encounters with Buddhism. Jesuit missionaries asked perplexed monks to locate Mount Meru, the sacred mountain of Buddhist cosmology, on a map. Victorians wondered if Buddhism’s emphasis on ‘dependent co-origination’ was a crude awareness of the laws of nature. In this timescale, 1970s enthusiasts for Buddhism, like EF Schumacher or Fritjof Capra, were late to the game.
Nowadays ‘Buddhism and science’
