Buddhism and Science

Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves
by Sharon Begley

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Although science and religion are often portrayed as chronic opponents and even enemies, that misses the mark for science and Buddhism. There is no historic antagonism between the two, as there has been between science and the Catholic Church (which put Copernicus's work on the Index of forbidden books) and, lately, science and fundamentalist Christianity (which, in the United States, has used the wedge issue of creationism to argue that science is "just" another way of knowing). Instead, Buddhism and science share the goal of seeking the truth, with a lowercase t. For science, truth is always tentative, always subject to refutation by the next experiment; for Buddhism-at least, as the Dalai Lama sees it-even core teachings can and must be overturned if science proves them wrong. Perhaps most important, Buddhist training emphasizes the value of investigating reality and finding the truth of the outside world as well as the contents of one's mind. "Four themes are common to Buddhism at its best: ratio- nality, empiricism, skepticism, and pragmatism," says Alan Wallace, who spent years as a Buddhist monk in Dharamsala and elsewhere before turning in his robes to become a Buddhist scholar and who is a longtime participant in the dialogues between scientists and the Dalai Lama. "His Holiness embodies these. He often says with delight that if there is empirical evidence that contradicts something in Buddhism, 'Into the garbage!' He is quite adamant that Buddhism has to yield to rational argument and empiricism."

Consonances between Buddhism and science were recognized as early as 1889, when Henry Steele Olcott argued in Buddhist Catechism that Buddhism is "in reconciliation with science," that there is "an agreement between Buddhism and science as to the root idea." Olcott based this on the fact that Buddhism, like science, teaches "that all beings are alike subject to universal law." By this reasoning, says José Ignacio Cabezón, a former Buddhist monk and now a scholar of religion and science at the University of California-Santa Barbara, "Buddhism and science are in agreement because they subscribe to the view that there are natural laws that govern the development of both persons and the world." In 1893, at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, part of the World's Columbian Exposition, Buddhist leader Anagarika Dharmapala of Sri Lanka spoke passionately of how Buddhism, not Christianity, could bridge the chasm that for centuries had divided science and religion. He based his hope on Buddhism's status as a nontheistic tradition, one with no creator god and with "no need for explanations that went beyond that of science, there being no need for miracles or faith," Cabezón explains. As Alan Wallace puts it, "Buddhism is not a religion; it is a philosophy. It is not some eastern version of Christianity or Judaism. Buddhism does not culminate in faith, as the Abrahamic traditions do. It culminates in insight."

Some scholars have gone so far as to proclaim Buddhism the "Religion of Science." As the Sri Lankan scholar K. N. Jayatilleke argued in his essay "Buddhism and the Scientific Revolution" in the late 1950s, Buddhism "accords with the findings of science" and "emphasizes the importance of a scientific outlook" in that "its specific dogmas are said to be capable of verification." Like science, Buddhism is "committed to critically (and not dogmatically) establishing the existence of universal laws," José Cabezón says.

Which is not to deny that some silliness swirls around efforts to find consonances between science and Buddhism. Through the decades, there have been claims that Buddhism is science, that the Buddha was the founder of psychology, that Buddhism discovered the size of elementary particles and of the universe, that modern physics merely confirms what Buddhist sages knew centuries ago. But while such assertions are over the top, a growing number of neuroscientists are at least open to the notion that Buddhism has something substantive to say about the mind. If so, then Buddhism and science both stand to benefit from their interaction. "Science stands to gain by being pushed to consider mind or consciousness nonmechanistically, or by having to confront extraordinary inner mental states that are not normally within the purview of its investigations," says José Cabezón. "Buddhists stand to profit by gaining access to new facts concerning the material world (body and cosmos)-facts that have lain outside of traditional Buddhist speculation due to technological limitations."

The discoveries of neuroplasticity, in particular, resonate with Buddhist teachings and have the potential to benefit from interactions with Buddhism. The reason gets to the very core of Buddhist belief. "Buddhism defines a person as a constantly changing dynamic stream," says Mat- thieu Ricard, a French-born Buddhist monk. A veteran of the scientific dialogues with the Dalai Lama, he is anchoring the "Buddhist side" of the 2004 meeting.

Even scholars who were not involved in the meeting-but who have followed the dialogues closely-point out the consonances between Buddhist teaching and the idea, and potential, of neuroplasticity. "There are many strong parallels between the neuroscientific findings and the Buddhist narrative," says Francisca Cho, a Buddhist scholar at George Washington University. "Buddhism's is a story of how we are in pain and suffering and how we have the power to change that. The scientific findings about neuroplasticity parallel the Buddhist narrative of enlightenment because they show that, although we have deeply ingrained ways of thinking and although the brain comes with some hardwiring, we also have the possi- bility of changing. The idea that we are constantly changing means there is no intrinsic nature to the self or the mind, which is what Buddhism teaches. Instead, both self and mind are extremely plastic. Our activities inform who we are; as we act, so we shall become. We are products of the past, but because of our inherently empty nature, we always have the opportunity to reshape ourselves."

Copyright © 2007 by Sharon Begley.

About the Author

Sharon Begley, science columnist for The Wall Street Journal, inaugurated the paper's "Science Journal" in 2002. She was previously the senior science writer at Newsweek, covering neuroscience, genetics, physics, astronomy, and anthropology. The co-author of The Mind and the Brain, she has won many awards for her articles She is a frequent guest on radio and television, including The Charlie Rose Show, Today Weekend, CBS's The Early Show, and Imus in the Morning. She lives in New Jersey.