Buddhism and science

• 1. Introduction

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  Buddhism and science have been circling each other for over a century and a half, and the conversation between them remains one of the more genuinely strange intellectual encounters of modern times. When the 14th Dalai Lama stood before the Society for Neuroscience and listed a "suspicion of absolutes" and a reliance on causality and empiricism as principles shared by both traditions, he was participating in a debate that stretches back to the Victorian era. The questions that debate raises are not simple ones. Is Buddhism a religion, a philosophy, or something closer to a science of the mind? Does the ancient Pali Canon contain ideas that anticipate the findings of quantum physics, or is that just a flattering story that modern Buddhists tell themselves? And when scholars point out that Buddhism also encompasses dogmatism, belief in supernatural spirits, and vast cosmological myths about a mountain at the center of a flat ocean, what happens to the tidy narrative of rational compatibility? The story of Buddhism and science is really several stories at once: a story about empire and resistance, about modernism and identity, and about what happens when two very different systems for understanding reality are placed side by side.

• 2. Ancient Texts and Rational Inquiry

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  The Kalama Sutta, catalogued as AN 3.65 in the Pali Canon, is the Buddhist text most frequently cited in arguments that the tradition has always valued free inquiry over blind faith. In it, the Buddha addresses a group of villagers who are uncertain which teachings to believe. The passage that Buddhist modernists have returned to again and again reads: "Come, Kalamas, do not go by oral tradition, by lineage of teaching, by hearsay, by a collection of scriptures, by logical reasoning, by inferential reasoning, by reasoned cogitation, by the acceptance of a view after pondering it, by the seeming competence of a speaker, or because you think: 'The ascetic is our guru.'" The villagers are told instead to judge teachings by their own direct experience of whether those teachings lead to harm or wellbeing. Buddhist philosopher K.N. Jayatilleke read this and similar passages as evidence that early Buddhism promotes an "honest, impartial search for truth" compatible with a scientific outlook. Bhikkhu Bodhi, however, cautions that the sutra does not rule out faith as a component of the path.

  A second text, the Vimasaka Sutta (MN 47), has been described by Bhikkhu Analayo as "a remarkable advocacy of free inquiry." Alongside these canonical passages, Buddhism developed a sophisticated tradition of epistemology. Philosophers like Dignaga and Dharmakirti argued that there were only two valid instruments of knowledge: perception and inference. According to Cristian Coseru, Dignaga's theory is grounded strongly in perception. Dharmakirti went further, holding that scripture should not be used to decide questions that can be resolved through rational means, and that unreasonable scriptural passages could be rejected outright. The one exception he allowed was for "radically inaccessible things" such as karma, where scripture remained a fallible but permissible guide.

  The scholar Santaraksita (725-788 CE), in his Tattvasamgraha, preserved a scriptural passage that the 14th Dalai Lama himself has cited: "O monks, like gold that is heated, cut, and rubbed, my words should be analyzed by the wise and then accepted; they should not do so out of reverence." This injunction to test even the Buddha's own words before accepting them has become a touchstone for those who argue that Buddhism has always been open to empirical scrutiny. The medieval Buddhist university at Nalanda, located in what is now the state of Bihar, was also an important center for the study of natural philosophy, medicine, and astronomy, suggesting that the tradition's engagement with the physical world goes back well before the modern period.

• 3. Victorian Modernism and Its Architects

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  In 1893, Anagarika Dharmapala and Shaku Soen both presented Buddhism at the World's Parliament of Religions, framing it as a tradition founded on the law of cause and effect and aligning the Buddhist doctrine of dependent origination with scientific ideas of causality. This was not a minor theological footnote. It was a deliberate strategy, and it worked. The narrative of Buddhism as rational and scientific spread rapidly across Asia and the West in the decades that followed.

  The architects of this narrative were a varied group. Paul Carus wrote that the Buddha was "the first positivist, the first humanitarian, the first radical freethinker." D.T. Suzuki, in an 1907 work, held that the Buddhist view of karma could be seen as "an application in our ethical realm of the theory of the conservation of energy." Henry Olcott published a popular Buddhist Catechism that included a chapter rejecting miracles as explanations for the Buddha's supposedly supernatural feats, offering instead natural explanations such as hypnotism. George Grimm (1868-1945) wrote The Teaching of the Buddha, the Religion of Reason, an influential exposition of this rationalistic Buddhism. In Leipzig, Karl Seidenstücker and Grimm's Society for the Buddhist Mission promoted similar ideas, as did the British Buddhist Society.

  According to the scholar David McMahan, these western commentators were responding to "the Victorian crisis of faith and the emergence of the immense symbolic capital of scientific discourse." Geoffrey Samuel notes that some of these modernists went so far as to suggest that Buddhism was "barely a religion at all in the Western sense, but a scientifically-based philosophy in its own right." For many Asian Buddhists, the scientific framing was also politically useful. It served as a counter to Christian missionary attacks on Buddhism as backward and irrational. Shaku Soen spoke of his desire to "wed the Great Vehicle Mahayana Buddhism to Western thought." The movement these figures created had consequences that are still being felt. As Donald Lopez Jr. has argued, it began in the Victorian era with European scholars reading Buddhist literature in Sanskrit and Pali and tending to portray the historical Buddha as a rational humanist critical of Brahmanical superstition. That portrait was then taken up by Asians and theosophists and promoted as a counter to colonial Christianity.

• 4. Physics and Emptiness

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  The 14th Dalai Lama has written in The Universe in a Single Atom (2005) that "there is an unmistakable resonance between the notion of emptiness and the new physics." He cites his conversations with physicists David Bohm and Anton Zeilinger as support for the idea that the Buddhist view of emptiness (the lack of any independent and fixed essence in phenomena) is consistent with the insights of quantum physics. The Dalai Lama has also engaged with physicists Arthur Zajonc and Zeilinger, and some of those discussions have been published.

  The Vietnamese-American astrophysicist Trinh Xuan Thuan has drawn similar comparisons. He cites Erwin Schrodinger's observation that "it is better not to view a particle as a permanent entity, but rather as an instantaneous event. Sometimes these events link together to create the illusion of permanent entities." Thuan sees this understanding of sub-atomic particles as similar to the understanding of reality in Buddhist metaphysics. He and Matthieu Ricard also discuss, in their book The Quantum and the Lotus, similarities between Buddhist views of interdependence and phenomena such as quantum nonlocality and Mach's principle. Thuan argues that the views of Bohr and Heisenberg seem to support the Buddhist position that physical particles do not exist as independent phenomena but can only be said to exist in dependence on our conceptual designations and the process of observation.

  The Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, in his book Helgoland (a defense of the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics), cites Nagarjuna directly. Rovelli writes that "Nagarjuna has given us a formidable conceptual tool for thinking about the relationality of quanta: we can think of interdependence without autonomous essence entering the equation." Oxford physicist Vlatko Vedral, in Decoding Reality, mentions the Buddhist theory of emptiness as an ancient example of the philosophy of "relationalism," stating that "Quantum physics is indeed very much in agreement with Buddhistic emptiness." Physics professor Vic Mansfield has written on the similarities between the modern understanding of time, special relativity, and Madhyamaka thought, arguing that "a nontrivial synergy between these two very different disciplines is possible." The physicist David Ritz Finkelstein developed a theory of "universal relativity" influenced directly by Madhyamaka philosophy and his participation in the Mind and Life dialogues.

• 5. The Mind and Its Sciences

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  William James, one of the founding figures of American psychology, drew on Buddhist ideas and saw Buddhism as "the psychology of the future." He promoted meditation and coined the phrase "stream of consciousness" under the influence of Buddhist thought. In the late 20th century, Jon Kabat-Zinn developed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), drawing on Buddhist meditation practices and creating one of the most widely studied psychological interventions in clinical history.

  James H. Austin was among the first westerners to study the neurology of meditation, publishing Zen and the Brain in 1998. The number of studies on Buddhist and Buddhist-derived meditation techniques grew dramatically in the 21st century; by 2015, there were 674 such studies. Richard Davidson conducted physiological and neurological research on meditation, with the encouragement of the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso. A later overview of related findings appeared in Altered Traits, co-authored by Davidson and Daniel Goleman, which drew on studies conducted with Buddhist monks including Matthieu Ricard and Mingyur Rinpoche.

  Robert Wright argued in Why Buddhism Is True (2017) that the Buddhist analysis of human suffering and delusion is backed up by evolutionary psychology, which helps explain how natural selection wired humans with powerful but distorted cognitions. Wright cites the modular view of the mind defended by Michael Gazzaniga as support for the Buddhist view of not-self (anatta). However, several scholars have argued that the clinical study of meditation misrepresents it by abstracting the practice out of its original religious, conceptual, and socio-cultural context. Evan Thompson writes that neuroscientific studies tend to confuse the biological markers for mindfulness with mindfulness itself, which he sees as "a host of cognitive, affective, and bodily skills" situated in an ethical way of life. David McMahan similarly argues that the general assumption that meditation techniques can be studied in isolation is likely mistaken, since "meditation 'works' as a systemic part of the ecology of a sociocultural system."

• 6. Scholars Push Back

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  Donald Lopez Jr. has been the most prominent scholarly voice urging caution about the narrative of Buddhism as uniquely scientific. In his reading, the traditional Buddhist worldview treats the Buddha's ancient understanding of reality as complete: "nothing beyond that reality has been discovered since." This makes traditional Buddhism a deeply conservative tradition, wary of innovation, and one in which the full truth has already been found. This is the opposite of the scientific worldview, which holds that the complete truth of the universe has not yet been discovered. Lopez argues that the "scientific" Buddhism discourse is historically specific, tied to colonial and missionary pressures that have now largely subsided, and that it severely restricts Buddhism by eliminating much of what has been essential to the monks and laypeople who have practiced it over more than two thousand years.

  Evan Thompson extended this critique in Why I Am Not a Buddhist (2020), criticizing the narrative of Buddhism as being uniquely scientific. Martin J. Verhoeven has argued that the differences between Buddhism and science are at least as important as the similarities, and that it is precisely the points of disagreement that are most likely to force each tradition to confront its own contradictions and shortcomings. David McMahan, while taking a more nuanced position than Lopez, has noted a genuine danger: if Buddhism adapts too far to scientific discourse, it risks losing "a great deal of its diversity" and becoming an "impotent tradition that has nothing to offer to modernity."

  Geoffrey Samuel suggests that the more significant developments in the dialogue may lie not in how Buddhism can adapt to science, but in the potential of Buddhist thought to provoke "genuine rethinking and transformation within science itself." Jose Ignacio Cabezon, meanwhile, has written that the complementarity discourse can be useful if understood as a fluid metaphor, but becomes a stunted dialogue if treated as a strict binary opposition. He concludes that Buddhism and science are "complete systems that resist dichotomizing: systems that can both support and challenge each other at a variety of different levels." The Mind and Life Institute, closely connected to the 14th Dalai Lama's promotion of scientific education among Tibetan Buddhist monks, stands at the center of ongoing efforts to work through exactly these tensions.