One of the great challenges of our time is how to reconcile advances in technology and science (materialism and cognition) with compassion, or moral and spiritual development (spiritualism or the heart and the mind). Many have explored and discovered the remarkable convergence between traditional contemplative insights in Buddhism and the empirical investigations in modern science. In Einstein and Buddhism--The Parallel Sayings, a new paradigm for a synthetic view of truth and reality seems to have emerged to meet the 21st-century challenges.
In order to search for truth or the nature of reality, both Buddhism and science demand rigorous training and discipline. When practicing meditation or carrying out a scientific investigation, the Buddhist pratitioner(meditator) and the scientist must develop mindfulness, or "a non-interfering, non-judgmental awareness" (Wes Nisker, p. ix). They both have to be as objective as possible. However, even when the scientist examines the seemingly external world, and the meditator observes his own mind and body, what they investigate is relative to their own mind as observers --the co-creator of the observed. And yet their respective experiment should be replicable; so that those who follow the same procedures will finally attain similar results or insights into the nature of reality. Knowledge of the ultimate reality requires both reason and intuition, facts and values, doubt and faith, internal and external factors or conditions. There is no distinction between inner and outer, the observed and the observer as one approaches the nature of reality. Doctrines and conceptual models or theories are just metal designations of reality, not ultimate reality itself, which is beyond all ordinary perceptions and verbal descriptions.
Buddhism and quantum physics reveal that the world is an intricate, coherent whole of interconnected and interdependent objects and events, and that space and time are only theoretical designations, or names. Like causality in physics, the law of karma links actions with results, but it is not absolute. There is spontaneity and freedom.
There are many parallel sayings in both modern science and Buddhism:
Interdependence
An object does not have any “intrinsic” properties (for instance, wave or particle) belonging to itself alone; instead, it shares all its properties mutually and indivisibly with the systems with which it interacts.
David Bohm
Things derive their being and nature by mutual dependence and are nothing in themselves.
Siddha Nagarjuna
Time and Space
Eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.
Erwin Schrodinger
The past and future are both rolled up in this present moment of illumination, and this present moment is not something standing still with all its contents, for it ceaselessly moves on.
D.T. Suzuki
Direct Experience
Truth is what stands the test of experience.
Albert Einstein
The real meaning of the Dhamma must be directly experienced.
Nagarjuna
Conventional Reality vs. Ultimate Truth
The classical concepts, i.e., “wave” and “corpuscle”…do not describe the real world and are, moreover, complementary in part, and hence contradictory. Nor can we avoid occasional contradictions; nevertheless, the images help us to draw nearer to the real facts. Their existence no one should deny. “Truth dwells in the deeps.”
Niels Bohr
If a man becomes attached to the literal meaning of words and holds fast to the illusion that words and meanings are in agreement, especially in such things as Nirvana which is unborn and undying…then he will fail to understand the true meaning and will become entangled in assertions and refutations.
Buddha
The Mind
Every man’s world picture is and always remains a construct of his mind and cannot be proved to have any other existence.
Erwin Schrodinger
The objective world rises from the mind itself.
Buddha
Time and again the passion for understanding has led to the illusion that man is able to comprehend the objective world rationally by pure thought without any empirical foundations –in short, by metaphysics.
Albert Einstein
By becoming attached to names and forms, not realizing that they have no more basis than the activities of the mind itself, error arises and the way to emancipation is blocked.
Buddha
Matter is like a small ripple on this tremendous ocean of energy, having some relative stability and being manifest.... And in fact beyond that ocean may be still a bigger ocean… the ultimate source is immeasurable and cannot be captured with our knowledge.
David Bohm
Universal Mind is like a great ocean, its surface ruffled by waves and surges but its depth remaining forever unmoved.
Buddha
The environment of space and time and matter, of light and color and concrete things which seem so vividly real to us has melted into a shadow.
Sir Arthur Eddington
All the minds arbitrary conceptions of matter, phenomena, and of all conditioning factors and all conceptions and ideas relating thereto are like a dream, a phantasm, a bubble, a shadow.
Buddha
The plurality that we perceive is only an appearance; it is not real.
Erwin Schrodinger
Wherever you see as duality is unreal.
Shankara
The original and the mirror-image are identical. The world extended in time and space is but our representation.
Erwin Schrodinger
There is only one world; there are not two worlds....People think there are two worlds by the activities of their own minds. If they could get rid of these false judgments and keep their minds pure with the light of wisdom, then they would see only one world and that world bathed in the light of wisdom .
Buddha
(see also Science and Buddhism , a blog entry in January 2012)
Source:
Einstein and Buddhism--The Parallel Sayings. Edited by Thomas J. McFarlane. (Berkeley, CA: Ulysses Press, 2002). ISBN I-56975-337-7.
