howard Gregg

From 'The Messenger' July 2008 pp. 8-10

The Magazine of the Blavatsky Lodge of the Theosophical Society, Sydney Australia

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In a letter written in Ithaca and dated, 20th September, 1875 and addressed to N. A. Aksakov, Blavatsky writes:

“ I am now writing a big book, which I call by John’s advice (John King) ‘The Skeleton Key To Mysterious Gates.’ ”

“I’ll show them up, your European and American men of science, Papists, Jesuits, and that race of the half learned, Les châtrés de la science (châtrés – emasculated) who destroy everything without creating anything, and are incapable of creating.”

There is certainly a lot of passion within these words written almost 133 yrs ago, but is it still correct to consider science as materialised? I don’t think so. The book to which Blavatsky referred became known as Isis Unveiled.

The science Blavatsky refers to, has moved on. Consider these words of the 14th Dalai Lama:

“Because I am an internationalist at heart, one of the qualities that has moved me most about scientists is their amazing willingness to share knowledge with each other without regard for national boundaries. Even during the Cold War, when the political world was polarised to a dangerous degree, I found scientists from the Eastern and Western blocs willing to communicate in ways the politicians could not even imagine. I felt an implicit recognition in this, spirit of oneness with humanity and a liberating absence of proprietorship in matters of knowledge.”[1]

A high proportion of Western people see Tibetan Buddhism as some sort of ideal, but this rose coloured view, belies the reality. Here’s a quote from Gendün Chöephel:

“In olden days, even in Europe, the world was thought to be flat. And when some intelligent people claimed the opposite, they were exposed to various difficulties, such as being burnt alive. Today, even in Buddhist countries everybody knows, that the world is round. However in Tibet, we still stubbornly state that the world is flat.”[2]

It was Tibetan isolation that led to a form of dogma where, as Gendün Chöephel says:

In Tibet, everything that is old,
Is a work of Buddha.
And everything that is new,
Is a work of the Devil.
This is the sad tradition of our country. [3]

Who was this Gendün Chöephel who would dare to challenge the buddhist canon? The Dalai Lama writes:

Many years after I went into exile in India, I came across an open letter from the 1940's addressed to Buddhist thinkers of Tibet. It was written by Gendün Chöephel, a Tibetan scholar who not only mastered Sanskrit but also uniquely among Tibetan thinkers of his time, had a good command of English. He travelled extensively in British India, Afghanistan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka in the 1930's. This letter, composed toward the end of his twelve-year trip, was amazing to me.  It articulates many of the areas in which there could be fruitful dialogue between Buddhism and modern science. I discovered that Gendün Chöephel’s observations often coincide remarkably with my own. It is a pity that this letter did not attract the attention it deserved, partly because it was never properly published in Tibet before I came into exile in 1959. But I find it heartwarming that my journey into the scientific world has a precedent within my own Tibetan tradition.....[4]

Some readers of this article may be challenged by Gendün’s writing when he says this:

“As for me - I have little shame I love women. Every man has a woman. Every woman has a man. Both in their mind desire sexual union. What chance is there for clean behaviour? If natural passions are openly banned, unnatural passions will grow in secrecy. No law of religion - no law of morality can suppress the natural passion of mankind.”[5]

Now is this ‘law’ as spoken of by Gendün true dharma? Or is this law, a man-made contrivance for the control of man. I will leave the reader to speculate upon this, suffice to say that a great deal of church control of parishioners (western Christianity) has been done in the name of this law which I think is not dharma; however the actual reason for using the example above is to show how Gendün Chöephel challenged the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.

Let us now contrast Buddhist thought with that of western science, by using two of Einstein’s commentaries.

The first:

“In Honour of Arnold Berliner's Seventieth Birthday (Arnold Berliner is  the editor of the periodical Die Naturrvissenschaften.) I should like to take this opportunity of telling my friend Berliner and the readers of this paper why I rate him and his work so highly. It has to be done here because it is one's only chance of getting such things said; since our training in objectivity, has led to a taboo on everything personal, which we mortals may transgress only on quite exceptional occasions such as the present one.”[6]

Buddhism considers the personality (lower ego) as something of ephemeral nature and related to the objective body which our EGO uses as a container. This personality dissolves when the physical body dies. Einstein here, rejects the personal because it interferes with objective science.

Emotional expectations interfere with unbiased observation.  Here you can see parallels with Buddhist thought.

The second, Einstein continues:

“And now, after this dash for liberty, back to the objective! The province of scientifically determined fact has been enormously extended, theoretical knowledge has become vastly more profound in every department of science. But the assimilative power of the human intellect is and remains strictly limited.”[7]

Here Einstein points out the limits of human intellect but is he also considering the EGO? Is the EGO another aspect of ourselves which can penetrate (with training) the most esoteric qualities of the universe? Einstein considers religion in this way:

“The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. It was the experience of mystery – even if mixed with fear – that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms – it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.”[8]

If you introduce ‘economic rationalism’ (results based) to scientific studies, then the quality of research is reduced to a $ motive. Thus the far reaching vision of Einstein above, narrows to a point where, as the Dalai Lama says:

“...the potential for nihilism may ensue. Nihilism, materialism, and reductionism are above all problems from a philosophical and especially a human perspective, since they can potentially impoverish the way we see ourselves. For example, whether we see ourselves as random biological creatures or as special beings endowed with the dimension of consciousness and moral capacity will make an impact on how we feel about ourselves and treat others. In this view- many dimensions of the full reality of what it is to be human — art, ethics, spirituality, goodness, beauty, and above all, consciousness — either are reduced to the chemical reactions of firing neurons or are seen as a matter of purely imaginary constructs. The danger then is that human beings may be reduced to nothing more than biological machines, the products of pure chance in the random combination of genes, with no purpose other than the biological imperative of reproduction.

It is difficult to see how questions such as the meaning of life or good and evil can be accommodated within such a worldview. The problem is not with the empirical data of science but with the contention that these data alone constitute the legitimate ground for developing a comprehensive worldview or an adequate means for responding to the world's problems. There is more to human existence and to reality itself than current science can ever give us access to.

By the same token, spirituality must be tempered by the insights and discoveries of science. If as spiritual practitioners we ignore the discoveries of science, our practice is also impoverished, as this mind-set can lead to fundamentalism. This is one of the reasons I encourage my Buddhist colleagues to undertake the study of science, so that its insights can be integrated into the Buddhist worldview”.

Footnotes

[1] Dalai Lama, The Universe in a Single Atom, 2005 Morgan Road Books, New York p3.
[2] Gendün Chöephel, Newpaper article, Tibet Mirror, Kalimpong, 1938
[3] Gendün Chöephel, Poem Tibet, 1946.
[4] Dalai Lama, The Universe.... p2
[5] Gendün Chöephel, Foreword of a Kamasutra Translation into Tibetan, Calcutta 1939
[6] ebook Einstein, A. The World As I See It. No paging http://lib.ru/FILOSOF/EJNSHTEJN/theworld_engl.txt
[7] Ibid
[8] Ibid
[9] Dalai Lama The Universe in a Single Atom, 2005 Morgan Road Books, New York pp 12-13.

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