Just one more post on science and "scientism"-- A commenter to one of the earlier posts recalled the words of the 14th Dalai Lama -- "If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change." I agree with the quote, but I also think it's mostly irrelevant to the Buddha dharma.
That's because "beliefs" aren't the point. They are more of an auxiliary feature of Buddhism, not its main purpose or function.
In some schools various beliefs are used as upaya, skillful means, to open the heart-mind and realize wisdom. Whether they are literally "true" or not isn't the point. The beliefs are there to do a job, and like the Buddha's raft, once they've served their purpose they can be dropped away and forgotten.
(And, of course, this use of beliefs varies from one school to another. For example, Vajrayana and Pure Land depend on belief a lot, it appears, although in very different ways. But then there's Zen, which could be understood as a practice of sniffing out all the beliefs and assumptions and cultural conditioning that color our perception, and letting them drop away. It has been said that Zen teaches us to believe as little as possible.)
This utilitarian function of belief can be difficult for some of us in the West to wrap our heads around. For years the western religions have been locked into arguments about the literal truth, the actuality, of their beliefs. And if there is no scientifically provable truth to a belief, then we're supposed to drop it.
It's hard to fathom that a belief in itself can have value that does not depend on the status of the object of that belief. But there are lots of examples of believing in untrue things in the Lotus Sutra. For example, in the parable of the phantom city, a man leading people on a difficult journey conjures the image of a beautiful city in the distance to give them the heart to keep going. When the true destination is reached, it no longer mattered that the beautiful, distant city was a mirage.
The larger truth is that we all believe all kinds of unmitigated nonsense, mostly about ourselves and our lives. We are all perpetually rationalizing, denying and fantasizing. We experience and perceive our lives and ourselves through a thick haze of social and cultural constructs. That haze is the only "reality" most people ever know, and it's not real at all.
And most of the time it's the unmitigated nonsense we believe about ourselves that gets us into trouble, not belief in gods or ghosts. Frankly, I think the people who are so all-fired eager to denounce un-scientistic beliefs in other peoples' heads ought to be confronting their own mental gods and goblins, most especially the belief in a permanent self. Just a suggestions.
On the other hand, awhile back I interviewed Zen teacher Norman Fischer, and one of the things he talked about was the stories, true and false, we tell ourselves about ourselves. He said that sometimes even the false stories can take us where we need to go. If we hold all of our stories lightly and understand they are all temporary, they are more likely to instruct us than confuse us, he said.
But let's get back to Buddhist beliefs. The fact is, over the past couple of centuries Buddhism has made a lot of adjustments to modernity and to scientific knowledge, and most of these adjustments have been made in Asia, by Asian teachers. The Mount Meru cosmology is just one example.
So, yes, Buddhist beliefs do change in the light of scientific knowledge. They also change through time and across cultures, because a belief that functions well in one time and place may not work at all in another time and place. Even the historical Buddha adjusted the way he presented the dharma, depending on his audience.
What has not changed are the Four Noble Truths and the Dharma Seals. All the rest of the teachings are just training wheels.
No comments:
Post a Comment