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This
article is intended as a serious contribution to the debate between science
and religion, more specifically a contribution to the debate currently
promoted by the John Templeton Foundation. Templeton, a wealthy philanthropist,
once pressed for the Nobel prize to be issued for advances in religion,
but after the rejection of his idea decided to create his own alternative
annual award, which has gone to a number of leading figures, including
the British scientist Paul Davies. This essay is submitted under Templeton's
current theme of `expanding humanity's vision of God can we have a more
comprehensive, more humble theology?' My answer to his question is yes,
if we can find a more fluid way of thinking about God, one for example
that the great traditions of Buddhism could engage with. The other part
of Templeton's question is, how can science contribute to an expanded
vision of God? My answer to this is as follows: through a better understanding
of the religious impulse, in particular the non-theistic religious impulse
which lies at the heart of a religion like Buddhism, and which has much
in common with science.
To develop my answers in full, I would like to press some simple distinctions
on the reader, asking them that they at least temporarily adopt my terminology.
The first distinction that will be helpful in this discussion is the grouping
of religious phenomena into three broad (and admittedly overlapping) categories:
the `social', the `occult', and the `transcendent'. The `social' dimension
of the spiritual is the most easily visible: the popular religions of
the world, involving creed, practice and priesthood. The `occult' dimension
refers to the world of spirits or disembodied beings, and to related gifts
or siddhis, also called occult powers, such as clairvoyance, astral
travel and so on. Note that in defining the term this way I am neither
positing nor denying such phenomena, but merely responding as a form of
open enquiry to the fact that the existence of such phenomena are presented
by occult teachers of considerable integrity independently of each other
across history and geography. They do so with considerable consistency,
even for example with Rudolf Steiner and Paramahansa Yogananda in the
early part of the twentieth century, who could not have known about each
other's spiritual development or teachings. The third and most difficult
category to explain, in most contexts, is the `transcendent', though the
Buddhist reader should be relatively comfortable with it. The transcendent
is the profound experience or state when an individual ceases to identify
with their body, history, family, and most importantly, their desires,
and when the discursive mind is silenced, revealing the pristine nature
of reality. We accept that such a state is rare and hard to achieve, but
exemplified in the purest degree by the Buddha.
Buddhists will agree, intellectually at least, that the term `Buddha'
is a generic one, and that in principle there can be more than one, or
even countless Buddhas living at different times through history, even
today. In practice most Buddhists have a doctrinal commitment to the historical
Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama. The Bodhisattva ideal has been a way of dealing
with the problem of the generic nature of a Buddha, though I will go into
this further later on. For now, I want to press on with the idea that
we can see all the geniuses of religion, including Krishna, Christ, Mohammed
and Lao Tsu as embodiments of the transcendent ideal, but with one important
distinction to be made: that between a devotional and a non-devotional
orientation.
This distinction is the most important idea that I would like to introduce
into the contemporary debate between science and religion. However, because
we have no suitable term in the West for a non-devotional spirituality,
I am going to use two Hindu terms: bhakti for the devotional and
jnani for the non-devotional. (The `jn' in jnani is pronounced
like the `n' in the Spanish `signor'.) Christ was a bhakti and
founded a bhakti religion, while the Buddha was a jnani
and founded a jnani religion. In the inner purity and silence of
the realised individual, the distinction is meaningless, but, as soon
as the great religious teacher, whether Buddha or Christ, or Eckhart or
Ramakrishna, attempt to teach, they will use a language and experience
that is conditioned by the three factors in their own personal history:
nature, nurture, and karma. (Karma is just nurture and nature extended
across lifetimes.) My contention is that the most significant personal
factor in the formulation of an enlightened teacher's doctrine is their
instinctive spiritual orientation: bhakti or jnani. Where
the cultural context tends to favour the opposite, for example in Eckhart's
case, we can expect a convoluted message. Indeed much of the history of
both Christianity and Buddhism can be seen as a faith of one orientation
under continual assault from within by individuals of the other orientation.
A bhakti orientation is a religious impulse that springs from the
heart, one that centres on love. But love for what? The answer to this
question, and an answer that lies hidden from most of us, is that it is
an objectless love. It is a love extended to everything or to nothing,
and in most bhakti traditions of the world the only word that can
describe it is `God' or its equivalent. Unfortunately, as few people in
contemporary Western culture have, or admit to, bhakti moments,
the debate around God has been a mainly futile one as to whether or not
God `exists' in some objective sense. When we look at the geniuses of
bhakti religion, individuals like Ramakrishna, Richard Rolle, Julian
of Norwich, and Teresa of Avila, we can see that for them, nothing exists
but God. When the secular mind is confronted with their writings it naturally
balks at the first hurdle: does or does not God exist? It is at this level
that much of the debate between science and religion has taken place.
The jnani concept should allow for a much more interesting debate
however. But, if the concept of bhakti is hard for the Western-educated
scientist to empathise with, it is at least culturally familiar. Jnani
is not. This is a paradox, because, as we shall see, the jnani
orientation is close to the scientific one. We can start describing it
through negatives: it is non-devotional, and non-theistic. Its practices
will tend to be grouped under the heading `meditations' rather than `prayer'
or `worship'; it will tend to be tranquil rather than demonstrative. In
the highly developed jnani we will find an emphasis on the mind,
on intelligence, on enquiry, on doubt, and on the will, in contrast to
the bhakti who will place emphasis on the heart, on trust, on faith,
and on surrender of the will.
In any given culture we will find a population that, by instinct, is divided
approximately 50-50 bhakti and jnani. What happens then
to the individual of one persuasion who happens to be born into a religion
of the other persuasion? In most religious eras or cultures they will
have no choice but to use the prevailing language to express their own
spiritual experiences, resulting in a convolution of message, or perhaps
to risk heresy. The best example in the West may be Meister Eckhart, whose
continual emphasis on the power of detachment above love, and on will
above surrender, mark him as a great jnani. The whole of the development
of Christianity, and the eventual inability to fend of the destruction
of its `God' by science, can be seen as a struggle to maintain the bhakti
origins of the faith. Although Saint Augustine rejected the major Western
jnani tradition, called Neoplatonism, because of his bhakti
leanings, Neoplatonism nevertheless became the spiritual and intellectual
reservoir for all thoughtful Christians of jnani persuasion to
draw on. If we see Neoplatonism as the jnani vine encircling the
bhakti tree of Christianity, then much of the great debates and
definitions of Christian dogma can be understood as the continued efforts
to prune back the perceived threat of the vine of jnani influence.
Even a few years ago, the Pope was moved to remind his flock that their
practice was to be understood as prayer and worship, and not as meditation.
Can we see a mirror-image development of Buddhism as a jnani tradition
under continual pressure to include bhakti elements? Certainly
the impression we receive of the Buddha's teachings from the Dhammapadda,
or the Elder's Verses, are of a jnani practice par excellence.
Some of the Mahayana teachings, with its pantheon of deities, can be seen
as attempts to temper the extreme asceticism and purity of the original
teachings for a lay public (rather than to the bhikkus of the original
Sangha), and also to adapt to cultural conditions outside of India. Some
of the more occult elements of Tibetan Buddhism can be seen as an example
of yet another force acting on all religions: a desire by the occultists
to claim the transcendent teacher as one of their own. Esoteric Christian
sects have done this down the ages with Christ, right up to Besant, Bailey,
and Steiner in the 20th century, and esoteric Buddhist sects have also
done this with the Buddha. But, I would contend, the biggest force on
the Mahayana schools would have been from the 50% of adherents with bhakti
instincts, possibly a factor in the development of the Bodhisattva ideal.
The eventual demise of Buddhism in India under the Muslim onslaught can
also be seen in this light: Islam, with its intensely demonstrative bhakti
orientation, could make something of an accommodation with Hinduism, but
would have found Buddhism quite baffling, and would have mistaken the
Buddhist temple imagery as idolatrous, thus leading to the widespread
destruction of Buddhist temples in the 12th century.
It is in the West however, that the lack of a mainstream jnani
tradition has had the biggest impact on the eventual relationship between
religion and science, and the eventual secularisation of contemporary
Western society. But the West so nearly did have a jnani
religion: one that could have been founded by Socrates. He had two great
jnani predecessors: Pythagoras and Heraclitus, and one great jnani
successor: Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonism. Historians have often
mused on the similarities between Socrates and Christ, and it may well
be that it was simply in the personality of their immediate apologists
(Plato for one, and Saint Paul for the other) that Europe became Christian
instead of Socratic. Plato's gift, for better or for worse, was part literary,
part philosophical, and part political (particularly in the Republic
and Laws). He was a genius in his own right, rather than the inspired
and gifted devotee that we find in Paul, but the eventual impact on the
intellectual and spiritual development of Europe was profound: the development
of philosophy rather than jnani. The Christians of the Middle
Ages were persuaded by the bhakti church that inquiry into the
nature of the universe was unnecessary, that the Revelation in the Bible,
was sufficient. The collapse of the certainties of Empire was another
force that tended to give the population a passive outlook, drawing comfort
from the Redeemer and giving obedience to the Church. It was only in the
Renaissance that a confidence returned that man could shape his world
and destiny, and that an outward enquiry could reveal the laws of nature,
not adequately delineated in the Revelation of Christ. This was time of
renewed interest in the jnani tradition of Neoplatonism, and became
the time of Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler. But the Church needed to
defend the natural structures of a bhakti faith, which cannot easily
accommodate doubt and enquiry. Ironies abound: Galileo was forced to recant
his heliocentric theory, the first theory that could properly explain
the movements of the planets, yet it was the very ignorance of this in
the Manichean bishop Faustus that caused Saint Augustine to turn away
from Manicheanism and become such a powerful force in early Christianity.
There was nothing in Galileo's teachings that went against the Bible,
but, according to Richard Tarnas, it was Dante's sublime artistry in the
Divine Comedy that impressed on the late medieval mind the image
of the heavenly spheres with the Earth at their centre, and God at the
highest.
The Church fought science and lost. It fought it for many reasons. One
of these was that the repressed jnani geniuses of Christianity
found little scope for expression of their instincts, other than in ever
more convoluted arguments proving the existence of God. If we look at
Descartes and Spinoza for example, we find that the bulk of Meditations
and the Ethics devoted to nothing else, yet these men are clearly
jnani types for whom a theistic world-view is somewhat unnatural.
The activities of Christians like these led to the growing acceptance
of the `argument from design', of God as the extraordinary creative force
behind the universe. (The bhakti of course needs no proof or argument.)
This unfortunately led to a collision course with science, which began
to explain the richness and complexity of natural phenomena in terms that
required no deity. In the 18th and 19th centuries God retreated to the
position of original creator, one who set up the starting conditions and
stepped back as the universe unfolded. This was termed the `Deist' view,
but was unsatisfactory either from a religious or scientific worldview.
We see the final irony of the West: that the bhakti faith of Christianity
could not accommodate its jnani geniuses; their activities, though
not intended initially to be anti-religious, led to the development of
science, which in turn proved an incompatible system of thought to that
largely developed by the jnani element in Christianity.
In the East we find that despite Buddhism taking hold on vast populations,
science as we know it today never developed. Could this be because jnani
individuals could express their sense of inquiry through religious channels?
Could it also be because the renunciative traditions of the East were
balanced by the concept of an active compassion, rather than the active
love of the Christians, a difference in emphasis that none the less allowed
for the Christian to be more actively engaged in the world? An engagement
that provided a fruitful soil for science, and a science-based medicine?
Whatever these speculations it is clear that the West had its own Buddhas,
lost to the West because they have been understood as philosophers, or
as men of God struggling to express themselves in a bhakti faith.
We can list them as Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Socrates, Plotinus, Eckhart,
and Spinoza. In more recent times we could include Walt Whitman, Krishnamurti,
Douglas Harding and Andrew Cohen. However, the most significant figure
for jnani in the West is probably Plotinus, because, according
to the scholars, his writings are relatively complete and authentic, despite
some attempts at mythologising by his chief disciple, Porphry. Plotinus,
as a third-century Buddha of the West, is doubly misunderstood: firstly
as a philosopher, and secondly as being in thrall to Plato. If we re-examine
him alongside Buddhist writings of comparable authenticity, then we might
pick the fourteenth century Tibetan Buddhist, Longchenpa, who's `explication
of the words of the Victorious One' is both in the tradition and yet powerful
because of Longchenpa's own jnani insight. Neoplatonists, Buddhists,
and Christians may find this controversial, but I would suggest that Plotinus
needs Plato no more than Longchenpa needs the Buddha, or Eckhart needs
Christ.
But, if we take the original Buddhist illumination in as far as we can
get to it, how does it relate to the world of the scientist of comparable
stature? I would argue that almost all the great scientists talk about
moments of awe in confrontation with the sublime order revealed by their
researches, and about a lifetime devoted to these peak moments. Whether
it is Einstein, whose religious instincts found resonance with those of
Spinoza, or Richard Dawkins, who believes that science is incompatible
with any kind of religious leaning, scientists of the 20th century have
been increasingly vocal in describing the exalted vision that science
can present. I would suggest that these moments are really jnani
moments, and that the lifelong passion for science comes from the same
inner ground as do the religious imperatives of a jnani genius
like the Buddha. But the Buddha turned inwards, while the scientists turned
outwards. If we sometimes doubt the extent of the Buddha's renunciative
stance, then one only has to look at the Elder's Verses, a collection
of the sayings of the earliest disciples to see that not only has each
individual (probably several dozen men and women) been profoundly illuminated
by contact with the great teacher, but that they are convinced of the
end of birth and death. Some even comment that they are merely waiting
out their days before their complete and joyous extinction. While I am
personally moved by their collective testimony, it is here that I suspect
that many scientists will find difficulties. By establishing a new harmony
between the inward and outward impulses, these difficulties should disappear
however.
To conclude: the debate between science and religion has been sidetracked
by the emphasis on theistic issues. The language of God belongs to the
bhaktis. It is said that God exists through faith, but for the
bhakti this is a weak statement, rather God exists through love.
And science will never have a voice on this subject. But the language
and vision of the jnanis, though inwardly directed, is not so far
removed from the language of the scientists, with intelligence, reason,
doubt, enquiry and determination of will at the forefront. The scientist
conquers the outer nature, the jnani conquers the inner nature
(hence the Buddha's sobriquet as the `Victorious One'). By re-assessing
the `lost Buddhas of the West' we should discover the proper common ground
between science and religion.
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