How can we reconcile Buddhism with expressive individualism (“be your self”) and with pure science? After I had beforehand turned to Wilfrid Sellars for assistance on this query, I had in contrast Sellars’s view to two Buddhist metaphysical positions on final reality, that are fairly totally different from one another. Certainly one of these was Buddhaghosa’s view that final reality is reductionist, and I now not discover that comparability useful. However I additionally turned to Śāntideva’s view that the final word is normatively inert, with no good or dangerous concerned. Śāntideva’s view rejects Buddhaghosa’s in some crucial methods – and I believe that philosophically his metaphysics is significantly extra highly effective.
That’s an enormous deal for me as a result of, having come to my Buddhism in Thailand, I’ve typically seen myself as a Theravādin like Buddhaghosa. I’ve been skeptical of essentially the most well-known piece of Śāntideva’s metaphysics, his moral deconstruction of self and different in chapter VIII of the Bodhicaryāvatāra. I’m not satisfied by his or some other argument for a common neutral altruism – a key Mahāyāna doctrine. But I do now discover myself shifting nearer to a Mahāyāna or at the very least Madhyamaka view, due to a special side of Śāntideva’s metaphysics: the metaphysics of vacancy in chapter IX, which I believe are significantly deeper.
In that chapter, like Buddhaghosa or a contemporary physicist, Śāntideva breaks actuality up into the smallest attainable elements, known as aṇus in Sanskrit. Most individuals translate aṇu as “atom”, primarily based on the literal which means of “atom” (Greek a-tomos, indivisible) – however the irony of recent physics is that what we at present name “atoms” are divisible. For that purpose I translate aṇu as “quark”, since quarks are (so far as I do know) the smallest half we acknowledge in our fashionable cosmology. But it surely’s the subsequent step Śāntideva takes, after dividing issues into quarks, that will get actually attention-grabbing. He claims that “that quark too might be divided into directional elements” (IX.86) – that’s, you’ll be able to nonetheless method a quark from the left or the precise, the underside or the highest, which suggests it should have sides, and people successfully represent additional elements. However then, he says: “The directional elements, as a result of they haven’t any element elements, are simply empty house. Due to this fact the quark doesn’t exist” (IX.87). When you take the subsequent step after reductionism, you get to śūnyatā, vacancy or zero-ness.
That is all necessary to Śāntideva as a result of we get hooked up to issues, and seeing issues’ final vacancy helps break that attachment:
When all issues are empty on this method, what might be acquired, what taken away? Who might be honoured or humiliated by whom? From what can there be happiness and distress, what might be favored and what loathed? What craving can there be? For what’s that craving, when examined as to its true nature? (BCA IX.151-2)
Now Buddhaghosa’s reductionist view had beforehand drawn me as a result of I had seen it, a bit clumsily, as near pure science. But when something Śāntideva’s view is at the very least as shut. Sellars’s concept of the scientific picture attracts closely on physicist Arthur Eddington’s concept of “two tables”, from Eddington’s The Nature of the Bodily World: the desk he’s writing on is directly a commonsense and acquainted object that seems earlier than our eyes (“It has extension; it’s comparatively everlasting; it’s colored; above all it’s substantial”) and a “scientific desk”. The latter shouldn’t be part of “that world which spontaneously seems round me once I open my eyes”, however moderately “a part of a world which in additional devious methods has compelled itself on my consideration”, one which makes for a extra satisfying rationalization in a wider vary of circumstances. However right here is Eddington’s personal description of the scientific desk:
My scientific desk is generally vacancy. Sparsely scattered in that vacancy are quite a few electrical prices dashing about with nice pace; however their mixed bulk quantities to lower than a billionth of the majority of the desk itself.
Principally vacancy! Precisely that English phrase mostly used to translate the Buddhist Sanskrit śūnyatā (even when that’s not the perfect translation). On this nice physicist’s account, what distinguishes the scientific desk from the manifest, observable one shouldn’t be merely that the desk is manufactured from atoms, but additionally that the desk is principally empty house. In a purely bodily sense, we’re all principally empty – although after all the “principally” does plenty of work!
Bodily, it might appear, every part is generally empty house. Mentally, consciousness – thoughts – had a starting and it’ll have an finish. There’s a purpose folks ask the query “why is there one thing moderately than nothing?” Nothing is the pure baseline. It seems that even one thing principally is nothing. The query is why this certified nothing arose – why we’re, why every part is, principally nothing moderately than all nothing, as The Princess Bride may put it. The whole lot we care about is in that “principally nothing”, that fragile substratum like sea foam. In that method we’re like mud within the wind. And yathābhūtadassana as I perceive it requires acknowledging this, embracing it.
That’s not to repeat the error of homogenizing the 2: on Śāntideva’s view the final word actuality is ineffable. For him it’s not that the more true actuality is principally empty house, however it’s in some sense all empty house, which isn’t what Eddington’s physics implies. Nonetheless, it is vitally vital that if we maintain going from both of the reductions I proposed previously – the natural-scientific discount or the Buddhist abhidhammic discount – we get an extra discount that lands us in some type of vacancy. And so, I believe, if we are attempting to harmonize Buddhism and pure science, we doubtless do it higher with vacancy than with atomistic reductionism.
Cross-posted on the Indian Philosophy Weblog.
EDIT (15 Dec 2024): I misstated the physicist Eddington’s first identify as David. It’s Arthur.
