Wisdom in Exile. Lama Jampa Thaye
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Название: Wisdom in Exile
Автор: Lama Jampa Thaye
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Религия: прочее
isbn: 9782360170227
isbn:
In this respect, as we have mentioned above, the profound nature of Buddha’s thought is most fully understood by utilising the insights of the great thinkers such as Nagarjuna, whose Middle Way view dispensed with any belief in permanent entities, while preserving the continuity between actions and results, which continuity is, of course, merely another name for karma.
To be specific, in the Middle Way view, all phenomena are empty of any inherent existence – selfhood, if you like – precisely because they arise through dependence, whether it be dependence upon an assembly of causes and conditions, dependence upon their own constituent parts or dependence upon merely being designated as existent by an observing mind. Thus, emptiness and dependence are the same reality seen from two different sides. The world and the beings within it are not static entities and thus there is both change and continuity interwoven as the very fabric of everything that appears.
What all this means is that Buddhism offers a way out of the chaos that has descended upon Western thought in four particular areas.
First, where the retreat from ideas of God and the soul has fatally undermined the rationale for moral action, since it has dissolved the notion both of a divine authority who will administer reward or punishment, as well as any entity who might receive such, Buddhism provides a sure foundation for it. In other words, while it is non-theistic, Buddhism retains a moral seriousness, since it does not need to invent imaginary static entities, whether souls or gods, to argue for the consequences of actions – consequences which often stretch beyond this very life to ripen at a later moment in the stream of being of which our present human existence is just a temporary manifestation.
Secondly, although Christianity had offered, at least in its more contemplative forms – such as Hesychasm11 or that of the Rhineland mystics12 – a species of religious experience, but one tethered to a theism, just as Judaism had done in such systems as the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria (1534–1572),13 such systems are vulnerable to attack by reasoning, due to their essential theism. Buddhism, by contrast, offers its repertoire of contemplative practices in a non-theistic setting. It is this that renders it an approach to spiritual experience particularly suitable for our somewhat sceptical modern temper.
Thirdly, where scientism claims to represent reason triumphant over religion, Buddhism’s philosophical praxis counters this and reinstates human subjectivity and the transcendent without any retreat to blind faith and submission to a divine authority.
Finally, where political ideologies promise a radical transformation of society but can end up delivering enslavement, the Buddha’s teaching offers the means, necessarily human-scale, to begin this work in a wiser way by acknowledging that such transformation needs to begin in the intimate sphere of our own heart. We discuss these twin themes in further detail in Chapters 4 and 9.
Therefore, one might say that Buddhism remedies the deficiencies of both Christianity and her rebellious daughters: science and politics. If this is so, its appearance in the West could not be more timely.
Nevertheless, for Buddhism to be effective in this way, the temptation to accommodate it to the ruling ideas of our age must be resisted. After all, it is precisely their insufficiency and their blindness which have created the space for the teachings of the Buddha. This is a theme we will return to in the next two chapters, which will examine Buddhism’s relationship to both science and politics: two areas where untutored enthusiasm and an unawareness of underlying assumptions could be somewhat problematic for Buddhism’s development in the West.
Chapter 3
Science
Science seems omnipresent in the modern world; its explanatory force and benefits are hard to deny. Indeed, its seemingly unstoppable rise in status, which we touched upon earlier, has led some to argue that Buddhism itself must be made more ‘scientific’ if it is to survive. We will examine that argument here in this chapter, since it is essential to distinguish ‘science’ – a means of analysing and describing the world, which is not itself dependent upon any particular philosophical view of the world – from ‘scientism’, which is an offshoot of the philosophical theory of materialism.
On the face of it, the suggestion to make Buddhism more ‘scientific’ seems quite compelling. Nevertheless, if we examine the true implications of suggestions such as this, it will become clear that such a project could not really work, and would not be any help, even if it were achievable. It’s not, by the way, that one should argue that Buddhism needs to be placed in a special protected category reserved for ‘faiths’, a reservation into which reasoning is not allowed. In this respect, Buddhism does not resemble the varieties of theism, the authority of which rest (contrary to what Descartes had hoped), in the final analysis, on the acceptance of divine revelation. Rather, it is because the dharma, the body of Buddha’s teachings, need only be defended by direct experience and reasoning, and it has no need to borrow these from science. In other words, Buddhism already possesses the reasoning that is needed as a tool to verify and defend its views. Moreover, it seems that those who claim the need for a more ‘scientific’ Buddhism are perhaps in fact trying to subvert Buddhism to a philosophical belief system disguised as science.
Most of that which is presented as ‘science’ in these discussions is not actually scientific praxis but a philosophical theory – ‘materialism’ – and it is essential that we distinguish between the two. Whereas scientific discoveries continue to be made, modern philosophical materialism is, in most important respects, identical to the materialist systems of ancient India, systems which Buddha and the great masters of our tradition knew and rejected. In both its ancient and modern iterations, materialism asserts that consciousness is, at best, merely an epiphenomenon deriving entirely from physical sources (‘the four elements’, or, nowadays, electrical and chemical processes in the brain). However, in either case, the assertion that sentience as an effect can be conjured from non-sentient causes violates all reasoning. No matter how many electrical or chemical processes there may be, they do not add up to consciousness (the formless continuity that experiences and cognises the world), but only the rearrangement of physical processes. So much, incidentally, for materialism’s ‘cutting edge’ modernity – a notion advanced solely to intimidate us in to thinking that it’s the irresistible wave of the future.
In fact, the contemporary insistence that science alone can answer all questions about the nature of reality is actually ‘scientism’, as we have described it earlier, a type of quasi-religious faith that scientific knowledge is the only knowledge worthy of the name. Most embarrassingly for its proponents, though they keep it well hid, this very belief in science is a premise and not a finding ever arrived at by any type of investigation.
Materialism cannot explain how life arose out of non-life, or how consciousness arose from the non-conscious, with any more compelling seriousness than the theist who declares that God simply said: ‘Let there be light.’ This modern materialism adds nothing to older materialist theories except the illusion that if complex physical processes are described in minute enough detail, we, the audience, will not notice the sleight of hand involved when sentience is magically conjured out of non-sentient matter – a notion about as plausible as Pinocchio becoming a real boy. The descriptions of how physical processes appear may be valid enough, but inferences from those about how life arose, and the ontological nature of those appearances, are not.
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