Out of a living silence

The Universe is thought to have been created about 13.7 billion years ago. Measuring two long-lived radioactive elements in meteorites, uranium-238 and thorium-232, has placed the age of the Milky Way at in the same time frame. From these measurements, it appears that large scale structures like galaxies formed relatively quickly after the Big Bang. Read more at http://www.universetoday.com/15575/how-old-is-the-solar-system/

My father wrote a book entitled Cambrian and Ordovician rocks of southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico. Although I have had the book in my library since it first came out in 1978, I still haven’t managed to read it all the way through, but I am gradually working my way up to it by reading more elementary and accessible works on geology. It is my hope to use my retirement years to learn enough about geology to be able to understand at least a few paragraphs of that book before it’s time to return all the molecules in my body back to planet from which they came. I am discovering about myself, however, that I have a tendency to put almost everything I learn into a contemplative context. So what follows is a Buddhist meditation—albeit by no means exclusively Buddhist—with a bit of a geological flavor.

Given that I live on the escarpment of Virgin Mesa a bit north of Jemez Springs, which is located in San Diego Canyon in the Jemez Mountains a bit southwest of Valles Caldera National Preserve in the northwest quadrant of what has, for the last century or so, been known as New Mexico, I thought a good place to start my amateurish exploration of geology would be Fraser Goff’s Valles Caldera: A geologic history, a most accessible book with plenty of maps and charts and photographs accompanying an admirably lucid text. Reading this book has multiplied my enjoyment and appreciation of this beautiful area and helped me understand how it is that less than a hundred meters from my house, at an elevation of around 2033 meters (6670 ft), one can find fossils of shellfish that lived their lives at the bottom of a shallow sea when this piece of the earth’s crust was located near the equator. One of my favorite reveries is to hold one of these fossils and try to imagine how much force, and how much time, it took to move this piece of crust more than 30º to the north and to raise it to more than 2000 meters above sea level. I love thinking about that, because it makes me feel so very insignificant. It puts my life, and the life of the species to which I belong, into proper perspective. Almost all the rocks I can see from my front porch have been here for millions of years, an exception being some tuff that dates back a mere 55,000 years—practically yesterday in geologic terms—and more than likely they will remain pretty much as they are until there is another episode of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, probably any time between later this year and 10,000 or more years from now.

Notwithstanding the relative longevity of geologic formations when compared to timescales that human being can comprehend, everything on the earth is impermanent, subject to change, liable to undergo violent and catastrophic transformation. As Fraser Goff reminds his readers, nearly everything that can be seen in this area has taken its present form during a period of time that represents only about 5% of the 4.5 billion-year history of the planet Earth. Like the human beings and the other mammals and the reptiles and insects that now scurry about on the rocks, the rocks themselves are just passing through, on their way to being transformed into something else. It’s just that their impermanence is not quite as obvious to us. As the Zen Master Dōgen observed back in the thirteenth century, “The blue mountains are constantly walking.” So are the red and yellow and tan mountains of New Mexico. Even this vast landscape that makes my own life so puny and insignificant is itself puny and insignificant in the context of the overall history of the Earth, and the Earth itself has been around for about a third as long as the Universe, which itself has an uncertain future, although we can be sure it will keep changing for as long as it exists.

For as long as I can remember, I have been exposed to terminology such as “Proterozoic Eon” and “Devonian Period” and “Halocene Epoch of the Quaternary Period of the Cenozoic Era” (the latter being the name geologists have given to the time during which most readers of this blog were born), and to time scales such as 13.7 billion years ago (Big Bang), 2.5 billion years ago (beginning of Proterozoic Eon), and 200,000 years ago (earliest Homo sapiens). An indispensable part of that geologic package was the conviction that all planetary change, including the evolution of species, has been essentially without purpose or design or intelligence and that it is therefore a mistake to attribute features of human intelligence and aspiration to the workings of the universe as a whole.

As William James (1842–1910) observed, it is the tendency of human beings to hold onto the first beliefs they acquired through childhood indoctrination and to abandon them only when “experience boils over,” that is, when the circumstances of life conspire to make it impossible to fit what one has experienced into the framework of one’s beliefs. Experience has never boiled over for me. Nothing has occurred in my life to make me question the teachings I received as a child that life is essentially accidental, undesigned and without purpose and that the universe in general, and planet Earth in particular, could have gotten along very well without it. Life does, however, happen to be here, and as long as it is here, those who happen to participate in it can, if they so choose, find some purpose to their own existence. James (who, along with Charles Darwin, was one of the most highly revered thinkers referred to by the adults in my life) also said “Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.” In keeping with that observation, I was encouraged to explore the world until I could find something that seemed worth living for; purpose in life is not given by anyone from the outside, I was told, but is created by one’s own mind.

As my own experience kept stubbornly refusing to boil over, thus leaving me quite comfortable with my childhood beliefs, my needs for religion were close to non-existent. When crises did finally arise (all of them entirely created by human beings), the only traditional religious teachings that spoke to my condition were the basic teachings that Buddhists claim were given by the Buddha (although I personally suspect these teachings have probably been around in some form for as long as Homo sapiens have felt an urge to teach their children): namely, that life is disappointing to those who have unrealistic expectations, and it is unrealistic to expect anything to endure without undergoing change, and therefore the only way not to be disappointed with life is to learn to accept that things will change, often in unexpected and unwelcome ways. For any observation beyond those, I never found any need, and so Buddhism has remained part of the framework of my system of beliefs since the day I became aware of it.

One of my favorite television programs of all time was the Canadian Broadcast Corporation program called The Red Green Show, which featured a slightly curmudgeonly country bumpkin who occasionally said “Remember, I’m pulling for you. We’re all in this together.” That pithy saying perfectly sums up the Buddhist approach to ethics. All of us beings who have consciousness are together in this vast, purposeless, meaningless and largely hostile universe that keeps delivering up changes that few of us asked for, and all we have to turn to for comfort and help is one another. If we don’t pull for each other, there is no one else around to pull for us. So I’m pulling for you. And maybe when I get into a jam, if I get lucky, you’ll pull for me. Beyond that, there really is nothing much more to say about moral philosophy.

That being my own unboiled-over worldview, when I look out onto the escarpment of Virgin Mesa every morning, I see the consequences of millions of years of sedimentation at the bottom of a sea, followed by periods of upheaval caused by unintelligent forces of magnitudes beyond my ability to reckon, and violent volcanic eruptions that deposited hundreds of feet of ash and pyroclastic flow, and I note that some trees have managed to grow in an arid region and that birds live in those trees and that a few mammals have learned to eke out a livelihood in this environment, and I go into a village in which just about everyone is kindly and helpful, because they all know that life is not particularly easy in these starkly beautiful canyons, and all of those observations reinforce my Buddhist leanings. Everything in life is uncertain; we’re all in this together; let’s pull for one another.

Perhaps what intrigues me the most is that these very same surroundings also seem to reinforce the convictions of the Jews and the Christians and the Sufis and the atheists who have been attracted here. Even people who have never even heard of Cambrian and Ordovician rocks seem to feel quite at home here. How could one not love such people and pull for them?

When I was a graduate student learning to read ancient philosophical texts written in Sanskrit, there were two schools of thought on how best to approach these old texts. One school advocated the view that the best way to understand a text is to read all the commentaries that have been written on the text in later generations, including all the translations (which are, after all, also commentaries of a sort) of the source text into Tibetan, Mongolian, Chinese, Japanese, German, French, Italian and English. The other school advocated the view that the best way to get an insight into the mentality of an author is to read as much of possible of what that author had probably read; reading later commentators and translators, said partisans of this school, is anachronistic. Surely a commentator like Candrakīrti, writing some five hundred years after the time of Nāgārjuna, lived in an entirely different world from Nāgārjuna’s and would therefore be a poor guide to Nāgārjuna’s thoughts. Both of these schools of thought made sense to me, so my own tendency was to do both—learn as much as possible about the author’s worldview and then be open to hearing whatever insights subsequent generations might have had into the text in question. This makes the study of any given text an endless task. No matter how much one may learn about a text, the amount one has not learned, and can never learn, about it is incalculably greater.

There was yet another approach to classical texts that none of my own teachers explicitly advocated but that made a good deal of sense to me, probably because of my years of being influenced by Quakers. George Fox, the founder of what eventually came to be called Quakerism took the view that no one could possibly understand Biblical passages unless they opened themselves up to the same Spirit that had inspired the authors of those passages in the first place. This contemplative approach involves sitting quietly until all the chatter of one’s own thinking subsides and then reading a passage and letting it speak to one’s own particular condition. Spirit, the person who wrote inspired words, and the reader of those words all collaborate in the composition of a new text. This approach, I concede, would probably not make for very good academic scholarship—Spirit is rather difficult to footnote—but it is still the only way of reading a text that makes sense to me when the goal is to be inspired by a text, a goal that is quite different from the goal of writing something about a text for a publication destined to be vetted by highly critical academic referees.

Now that I have retired from professional life and have little interest in submitting my writing to academic referees before making it available to the public, I find myself doing far more reading in the Quaker manner than in either of the two academic approaches that I learned as a graduate student. Nowadays when I read a Sanskrit text, I like to read just a few verses, or perhaps a paragraph or two of prose, then close the book and just let the text percolate through my memories and random thoughts and half-baked speculations and unexamined assumptions to see whether all this percolation makes any lights go on. Sometimes they do. Often they do not. I am equally content either way.

My fear of cliché is not as robust as it used to be, so I don’t mind saying that life itself is rather like a text. The task of making some sense of it may be approached by reading commentaries, listening to the wise counsel of elders, studying it methodically and analytically, forming hypotheses and testing them or reading blogs written by wild and undisciplined conspiracy theorists. There is no lack of material out there that can be used to put the experiences of life into convenient containers filled with predigested pap. As I get older, however, I find myself not wanting to avail myself of any commentaries at all. It is not so much that I want to make sense of life all by myself without any help form others—an attitude that is quite common among us off-the-scale introverts. Rather, it is that I find myself not feeling a need to make sense of life at all. Life needs no commentary; it goes on quite well whether sense is made of it or not. When sense is added to it, often quite artificially, I find it does not enhance the flavor very much. Indeed, it often masks the subtle flavors that raw experience delivers up.

I love to watch the birds that come to our feeders. There are days when I crave to know the genus and the species of every visitor and to read about their mating habits and the way they make nests and care for their young and their migration patterns. Knowing as much as possible about what others have learned by observing birds can add a dimension of pleasure to watching birds. Some days I crave that kind of pleasure. Other days, I just like to sit quietly and watch the birds eat and chase rivals away from the feeder and dart around in the branches of nearby trees. They do not care what names human beings have given them, nor do they care what generations of human observers have recorded about their lifestyles. They care only about eating and not being eaten in this very hour, an hour to which they have no need to attach a number.

As much as I may learn about birds by reading what other human beings have observed about birds, I think I learn more about how to go about being human by listening to the teaching of the birds—without a commentary.

I apologize for disturbing your day with my thoughts.

My father had a sign on the door of his office that read, “Those who freely share their opinions are operating on the assumption that the demand for them is brisk.” Little did I know it at the time, but my father was preparing me for the interest in Buddhism that has haunted my entire adult life. The sign on the office door was, in my opinion, a bit too wordy, but I never shared that opinion with my father, because he never asked for it. (He did ask for my opinion on a number of things, but not on that sign.)

In one of my favorite dialogues in the Majjhima Nikāya (The Middle-length discourses), the Buddha is reported to have told one Prince Abhaya how he decides what is worth saying;

1. In the case of words that the Tathāgata knows to be unfactual, untrue, unbeneficial (or: not connected with the goal), unendearing & disagreeable to others, he does not say them.
2. In the case of words that the Tathāgata knows to be factual, true, unbeneficial, unendearing & disagreeable to others, he does not say them.
3. In the case of words that the Tathāgata knows to be factual, true, beneficial, but unendearing & disagreeable to others, he has a sense of the proper time for saying them.
4. In the case of words that the Tathāgata knows to be unfactual, untrue, unbeneficial, but endearing & agreeable to others, he does not say them.
5. In the case of words that the Tathāgata knows to be factual, true, unbeneficial, but endearing & agreeable to others, he does not say them.
6. In the case of words that the Tathāgata knows to be factual, true, beneficial, and endearing & agreeable to others, he has a sense of the proper time for saying them. Why is that? Because the Tathāgata has sympathy for living beings. Abhaya Sutta

Some people of our times have boiled the essence of those criteria down to a mnemonic: “Before speaking, THINK.” That is, ask whether what you are about to say is

• True
• Helpful
• Inspiring
• Necessary
• Kind

Speaking, according to traditional Buddhist authors, is a manifestation of what one is thinking. All speech acts and physical actions are preceded by mental actions. When Buddhists speak of karma, they are speaking primarily about one’s thoughts, for it is from thoughts that verbal and physical actions arise. Buddhists have a good deal to say about thinking, and they have numerous categories by which they analyze different kinds of thinking. This is not the place to go into those details. There is, however, one kind of thinking that Buddhists never recommend. It is called prapañca, a term that will be left untranslated for now.

The fact that prapañca is never recommended is a sign that this kind of thinking is regarded as unhealthy or unwholesome (akuśala). But what exactly is this kind of unhealthy thinking, and how can one know that one is indulging in it? How can one take precautions against it? In looking for answers to these questions, we encounter a variety of interpretations.

Early translators of the Pali canon sometimes rendered the term papañca (the Pali equivalent of the Sanskrit prapañca) as “obsession”. While it is true that there is an obsessive dimension involved in the kind of thinking called prapañca, that translation does not tell the whole story. What the term often means outside of Buddhist contexts is something more like elaboration. If, for example, one states an idea briefly and the idea is misunderstood, then one can offer a more elaborate account of the idea. Alternatively, if one makes a claim, and someone else disputes the claim, one might then counter the dispute by offering a more carefully qualified version of the claim. That more carefully qualified claim is called a prapañca. In this context, prapañca is a verbal action, whereas in Buddhist contexts prapañca tends to be the thinking underlying the speech. If a person making a claim is too attached to the claim being made and defends it against all criticism, no matter how reasonable, then the verbal prapañca may be characterized as intellectually obsessive in nature. An idea of which someone simply will not let go, no matter how good the reasons may be for dropping it, may generate a good deal of verbal prapañca. The verbal prapañca is not the obsession per se but rather the verbal manifestation of the obsessive clinging to the idea; clinging to ideas tends to make one rather talkative.

In Buddhist contexts, the mental prapañca that is so often warned against is, I am inclined to think, the making of unnecessary narrative. It is generating explanations above and beyond the mere observation of what is happening. Not being content merely to observe what is taking place, one may well try to tell a story about why something is taking place. For example, if I see someone behaving in a particular way, I may be tempted to try to explain the behavior by telling some story about the hidden (to everyone but me) motives of the person whose behavior I have observed. But attributing motivation to a mind I cannot directly observe is gratuitous in the sense that it oversteps the limits of observation. It is this overstepping the limits of observation that is the root cause of what Buddhists in India called prapañca. It is telling stories of the kind that no one can be sure whether they are true or false.

People who imagine that they have figured something (or someone) out often have a difficult time keeping their hypotheses to themselves. And so gratuitous thinking often gives rise to gratuitous speaking, for example, sharing one’s opinions with those who have not asked for them. (In really extreme cases, gratuitous thinking may even result in writing posts on a blog. When the disease has developed to that degree, the prapañca may well be incurable).

Prapañca is one of the principal ingredients in modern culture. Indeed, it is probably one of the principal ingredients in any human culture, for much of what we call culture is simply common agreement on which stories deserve to be told and called true, despite their overstepping the limits of observation. Nearly all of religious doctrine is prapañca that has come to be accepted by a community of people, despite being neither verifiable nor falsifiable through experience. Nearly all political conviction is prapañca, for very few political disputes can be settled by an impartial appeal to evidence collected through careful observation. Most philosophy is prapañca, and I would hazard the guess that one can also find traces of prapañca in other academic disciplines as well.

The Buddha reportedly said that there were a good many topics of conversation that he avoided. He did not like to talk about current events, sports or what people were doing and saying. He did not like to offer speculations about how the world came about or how it might come to an end. He did not like to speculate about how big or how old the universe is. All such topics of conversation were regarded as what in Pali was called samphappalapa, usually translated as “idle chatter” or “pointless speech.” Pointless speech is based in prapañca, which might therefore be called pointless thinking or generating pointless narrative or telling unnecessary stories.

No one asked me what my opinion is about the meaning of the Buddhist term prapañca. I shared it anyway. I obviously failed to absorb the lesson on the sign on my father’s door. So my advice to you is not to read this post.

One of the most difficult of all Buddhist doctrines is anātman, which literally means non-self. A typical way of framing this doctrine is in contemplative exercises in which one is instructed to pay attention to the incoming and outgoing breaths. Paying attention to breathing requires deciding to focus attention on that one thing, and remembering to return to the breathing when attention drifts to some other topic (as it almost always does). Typically, when this exercise is done in a Buddhist context, one is told to make a mental note that paying attention is just a mental process; it is not the self, nor is there a self to which paying attention belongs. Similarly, deciding is just a mental process, remembering is just a mental process, distracted drifting off topic is just a mental process. None of these is the self, nor is there a self to which these processes belong.

It is easy to say all those words, and not especially difficult to follow the instructions for that particular contemplative exercise. Less easy is to know what is gained by disowning all those mental processes and not letting oneself see a self in any of them. The standard answer is that seeing all those processes in impersonal terms is conducive to wisdom, the antidote to delusion, and that delusion is one of the three mental processes that result in dissatisfaction (the other two principal causes of dissatisfaction being desire and aversion). But that is simply a claim. To say that looking at mental processes in personal terms is delusional and that looking at them impersonally is wise is to beg the question. Why should anyone believe such a claim? Why should one deem any thought to be either wise or delusional?

I do not have an answer, at least not one that I find satisfactory or am willing to try to defend. At this stage in my life, all I have is the question: What warrants the claim that thinking in personal terms causes dissatisfaction?

In the past I have experimented with several different ways of talking about the dogma of anātman. My approach has been to answer the question what exactly is being denied when one denies that something is the self or part of the self or a property of the self. Three possible answers have suggested themselves to me. One possible reply is that what is really being denied is individuality. Another possible reply is that what is being denied is identity. And a third possible reply is that what is being denied is autonomy.

The word “individual” literally means that which is not divided, that which remains a single thing, no matter how many aspects it may have. Denying individuality could be seen as affirming our internal dividedness, acknowledging and perhaps even accepting the fact that some of our motivations are in conflict with some of our other motivations and that our psyches are not always in the same mood.  Jungian psychologists sometimes say that the healthy psyche is not so much an authoritarian government in which the Supreme Leader (the ego) directs all decision-making and banishes all dissidents to dark dungeons; rather the healthy psyche is a round-table discussion in which the ego is but one voice among many, and not always the voice that prevails. Delusion might then be the feeling that we somehow should be consistent, always on course, never wavering from a single point of view. Since it is impossible to be that way, striving to be that way and then failing is a recipe for dissatisfaction.

A second possible interpretation of the dogma of anātman is that what is being denied is identity, again in the etymological sense of the word. “Identity” literally means sameness. To say that one has an identity is to say that there is something essential that remains the same when accidental properties change. If one had this sort of identity, then the temporary angry or grumpy moments are aspects of an enduring self that is at other times calm and cheerful. An abiding identity of this kind would have no abiding qualities; it would make no sense to say, for example, of a person in a fit or rage that he is not himself today. On the contrary, he is very much himself at all times, whether drunk or sober, pleasant or unpleasant, careful or reckless. It is not obvious what is gained by believing in a self of that kind, nor is it clear what is gained in denying it. It is not obvious whether belief in an abiding sameness that is essentially unaffected by temporary association with different properties is delusional or wise, whether it engenders contentment or disappointment. Something that can be said about identity in the sense of something that remains stable as its aspects change is that denying it flies in the face of how nearly everyone experiences the world. It is a very unusual person who wakes up in the morning without feeling that she is the same person as the one who went to bed to night before. What could the point be of denying the validity of experiences that seem so very intuitive?

There is another sense of identity, that which attends the phrase “to identify with” as when we say that a person identifies with being of a particular ethnic group or nationality or political party or profession or religion or gender or lifestyle or that someone identifies with being a hapless victim or a successful entrepreneur or a no-nonsense pragmatist or a far-sighted visionary or a compassionate vegetarian. Perhaps the traditional Buddhist proponents of anātman were making the observation that identifying too strongly with particular candidates for selfhood entrains the dissatisfaction that naturally comes from feeling alienated from all those things perceived to be contrary to what one strongly identifies with. To insist that I am this and not that may make me uncomfortable with those who insist they are that and not this; it may also serve as an obstacle to recognizing that no matter how much I may insist on being only this, I can’t help also being a little bit of that. Perhaps the traditional Buddhist was saying, “the more you can desist from identifying with this to the exclusion of that, the less frustrated you will be with life.”

There is one further thing that the doctrine of anātman may be denying, or at least questioning: autonomy. Different cultures seem to have different attitudes toward the notion of autonomy, to being one’s own law and master. Generally speaking, in post-Enlightenment European culture, autonomy is more highly prized than it is in more traditional cultures. Perhaps the traditional Buddhists deserve credit for observing that the perception of autonomy is largely an illusion. We are all conditioned by the actions and attitudes of people around us, by the environment in which we live, by the indoctrination we have received from family and friends and social institutions, by the health of our physical bodies, and by countless other determinants over which we have very little or no control. We are all like corks being tossed this way and that in a maelstrom, and it may be no more than a fantasy to think we are steering our own course. In most Buddhist contemplative exercises, the instruction is given to observe things as they are, to accept them to whatever extent that is possible without passing judgment. In short, the instruction is to relinquish the conceit of autonomy.

Whatever it may be driving at, the doctrine of anātman is worth thinking about. One way to avoid thinking about it (or anything else) is to have too-ready an answer, too glib a reason for taking on the habit of saying that thinking is just a mental process, not the self and not a property that belongs to the self.

Having grown up in a family of scientists, at a very early age I acquired the notion that science is interested almost exclusively in the investigation of nature for the sole purpose of discovering what there is and formulating hypotheses about how what there is works and why it is as it is. This investigation, I was taught, is ideally carried out with no contamination from commercial interests, political or social agendas, moral considerations or aesthetic tastes. I was also taught that in practice quite a bit of scientific investigation falls short of that ideal. Now I am well aware that this essentially Peircean notion of what science is all about has been critiqued by many worthy philosophers of science and is considered by some to be hopelessly naive. Nevertheless, I cling to that vision of science and admire all scientific investigation that comes anywhere close to that ideal.

Having come to Buddhism as an adult (insofar as any young pup at the age of twenty-three can be considered an adult), I no doubt misinterpreted a great deal of what I encountered, because I interpreted what I encountered on the basis of the prejudices I had acquired through the system of indoctrination that in the United States of America is mistakenly called education. To be more specific, I saw Buddhism as being an entirely different sort of project from the scientific project. Buddhism, as I saw it, is not at all interested in acquiring an understanding of what there is and how it works but is rather interested in reducing eliminable forms of human unhappiness. Unlike science, Buddhism is ideally dealing in morality and in political and social agendas and in aesthetic taste—the very factors that are absent in ideal science. 

My conclusion from all this was that, because people are multifaceted, it is possible for one person (and yes, I do believe in the reality of persons and selves and all those other realities that Buddhists try to dismiss as being merely conceptual) to be a scientist and a Buddhist, but that it is impossible to be doing good science at the same time that one is practicing good Buddhism. In much the same way that one person can be both a tightrope walker and a Grand Prix racing driver, but that it is impossible to be walking a tightrope at exactly the same time one is driving a racing car, it is impossible for a person to practice science at exactly the same time as one is practicing Buddhism. The practices are incompatible. At any given moment, one must choose which of the two to be doing.

Now insofar as a person takes on the completely foolish project of trying to be consistent in all his beliefs and practices, a person may decide that he has to choose between accepting prevailing scientific hypotheses and the very well-thought-out and purposeful dogmas of Buddhism. In my own early life, I foolishly strove for consistency and therefore jettisoned about 95% of the dogmas of Buddhism on the grounds that I deemed them scientifically false, or at least untestable and therefore lacking scientific meaning. And so I jettisoned karma, rebirth, hell realms, celestial realms, and nirvāṇa for starters and moved on from there to empty the entire medicine cabinet. As more than one person pointed outl, I pretty much discarded all of Buddhism, except for the haircut.

In my latter years, as I have grown less concerned with intellectual integrity and logical consistency, I have come to see that there is a great deal of value in the aspects of Buddhism I formerly discarded. This is not to say I believe the dogmas I once rejected. I just see a real value in acting as if I didn’t not believe in them. Buddhist dogmas are very good at doing precisely what they were designed to do. They make life uninteresting and boring, and that makes one less resentful and afraid of one’s inevitable mortality. We are all going to die. But given that life is so insipid and devoid of meaning and utterly lacking in fun anyway, who will miss it? Nothing could be much better as death approaches (as it does with every breath we take) than the studied indifference to life that Buddhist dogmas instill in those who allow themselves to entertain them.

We live these days in a world in which the incompatibility of the scientific project and the religious project has led to increasing jettisoning of scientific method rather than of religious dogma. Fundamentalism (which began in the Christian world as a conscious rejection of scientific method and has found its way into every other religious tradition) is growing in cultures all over the world with the result that people build their lives, and dare to try to compel others to build their lives, on ideas that have proven themselves throughout history to be intellectually and morally bankrupt—such as the idea that the creator of the entire universe gave a particular parcel of land to one small group of people to own and rule until the end of time, or the idea that women ought always and forever to be subservient to men, or the idea that homosexuality and abortion are offensive in the eyes of the creator, or the idea that the world can be saved only by a savior with a particular name rather than through the collective efforts of human beings who have learned from their experiences and shared their insights with one another through respectful dialogue. The human race could very well perish because of its attachment to the kind of rigid adherence to religious dogmas and practices that we now call fundamentalism. (Of course, none of this matters. If people wipe themselves out, something else will come along to take our place, and then something else after that until eventually the sun explodes without any consciousness that any of us who are made of star dust ever existed.)

When I heard the Dalai Lama say in an address to a small group of scholars and political activists in Montreal in 1993 that he thought the time had come to replace (yes, he used that word) much of Buddhist abhidharma with scientific hypotheses that have not yet been defeated, I was the first to jump to my feet in thunderous applause. A few moments later, a much more reflective voice spoke up quietly and said directly to the Dalai Lama: “Don’t be so quick to discard the tradition that has produced a man of your caliber.” My reaction in 1993 was to think to myself, “Oh God, another cloying uncritical devotee of His Holiness.” Now, twenty years later, I have come to see that the gentle, reflective voice, which belonged to the philosopher Charles Taylor, was saying something rather important to heed.

I fear that the mixing of two incompatible projects—science and Buddhism—is likely to weaken and ultimately undermine both. The only way I can see to keep them both vibrant is to keep them separate, to let each of them be the right tool for the task it was designed to accomplish, and to recognize that it has never been the case and never can be the case that life can ever be reduced to just one legitimate task. Gathering knowledge impartially without any political, commercial, social, moral or aesthetic motivations is important. That is the task for which the tool of scientific method was developed. Learning to switch narratives from those that inflict pain and suffering to those that heal and enable peoples to live peacefully with one another is also important. That is a task for which the tool of Buddhism was developed. Using each tool to do the task for which it was designed strikes me as wise. Choosing only one of the two tools and discarding the other strikes me as foolish. Allowing oneself to think that the two tools are both designed to do the same task also strikes me as foolish, even dangerously so. I do not have confidence that the Dalai Lama fully comprehends what the consequences of replacing fourth-century scholasticism with cognitive science and quantum mechanics are likely to be. I would therefore recommend learning to use scientific method when it is appropriate, and to study classical abdhidharma when it is appropriate.