Abstract
With the naturalist worldview having become widely accepted, the trend of naturalistic Buddhism has likewise become popular in both academic and religious circles. In this article, I preliminarily reflect on this naturalized approach to Buddhism in two main sections. In section 1, I point out that the Buddha rejects theistic beliefs that claim absolute power over our destiny, opting instead to encourage us to inquire intellectually and behave morally. The distinguishing characteristics of naturalism such as a humanistic approach, rational enquiry, empirical observation, as well as a pragmatic and realistic outlook can all be seen in the Buddha’s teachings. In section 2, however, I advance arguments to show that while the Buddha is opposed to theistic doctrines, his views are not entirely in accordance with the presuppositions of naturalism. Firstly, the Buddha’s foremost concern is not purely intellectual in nature—the purpose of his teachings is to realize a soteriological goal through spiritual practice. Secondly, naturalism tends to subscribe to ‘self-being,’ while the Buddha holds all things to exist conditionally and impermanently. Because of the dependent nature of all things, it is not possible to discover their essence through reduction. Thirdly, naturalized philosophy would be a kind of belief-habit that follows from certain preconditioned assumptions. But the Buddha encourages us to re-examine our conceptual proliferation leading to biased views, as that ultimately leads to suffering. I conclude by proposing a broader naturalist outlook that would allow for a more inclusive conception of the natural world that would take the axiological dimension of human transcendence into account and increase an overall understanding of human potentiality.
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Notes
Publications employing scientific methods to study humanistic disciplines regularly use the term ‘neuro’ to signify this naturalistic approach, with the implication often being that neuroscience is capable of fully explaining the various intricate aspects of life. Common examples include topics such as neuroethics and neuroaesthetics.
For this reason, he uses the term ‘material’ world in the same sense as ‘natural’ or ‘physical’ world in The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World (Flanagan 2007).
There would be two different themes or doctrines of scientific naturalism, one is ontological, the other is methodological. The ontological theme of scientific naturalism regards the world as consisting of nothing but the entities to which scientific explanation commit us. And the methodological theme of scientific naturalism considers that scientific inquiry is our only genuine source of knowledge or understanding. All other forms of knowledge are either illegitimate or are reducible in principle to scientific knowledge (or/and justifiable by scientific methods.) Though the two themes may come apart, most scientific naturalists are inclined to commit to both the ontological and methodological themes. See De Caro and Macarthur (2004, 2010) for more about scientific naturalism, particularly the ‘introduction’ sections.
This paper, especially in section 3, responds to this kind of naturalism with three points. Firstly, the seeming ‘supernatural’ in Buddhism is mainly the concern of axiological and soteriological objectives. Secondly, the presumption of physical substance as the only element or component of the universe may violate the Buddhist theory of Emptiness. Thirdly, from the Buddhist point of view, science is one way to understand the world, but not the only way, it is still a kind of epistemic habit or cultural ideology that deserves to be re-examined.
Apart from the features of humanism, rationalism, empiricism, and pragmatism, the Buddhism also emphasizes the values of independence, freedom, openness, diversity, tolerance and so on. See Lin (2016) for more information.
Humanism is centered around human values and interests, but that does not mean it neglects the welfare of other beings or necessitates human domination over any other species. Humanism, and especially Buddhist humanism, is therefore neither a form of anthropocentrism nor a form of human chauvinism.
The story of Upāli’s conversion is a case in point (Nanamoli & Bodhi 1995, 475–492).
The 14th Dalai Lama (2009, 9–11) similarly encourages faith that is founded on reason and accompanied by wisdom, explaining that faith in the Buddhist teachings should come on the basis of genuine understanding. Healthy skepticism is therefore a means to empower the individual, so that he or she can be confident in their faith and pursue understanding based on rationality and open-mindedness.
Richard Gombrich notes that the Buddha undeniably places his emphasis on experience: the experience he had had himself and the experience he wants others to have. The Buddha often appeals to reason, in the sense that he uses rational argument; yet the appeal to experience is even more important (Gombrich 2006, 28). Also as Hamilton correctly says, ‘What really matters is understanding one’s experience: it is this, no more and no less, that brings liberating insight.’ (Hamilton 2000, 107) The Buddha’s emphasis on experience is also evident from Stephen Batchelor’s reflections (Batchelor 2015, 178–205).
The Buddhist empiricist approach should however not be confused with the sensation-oriented empiricism of seventeenth and eighteenth-century British philosophers such as John Locke and David Hume (Holder 2013, 224–225). A richer type of radical empiricism proposed by William James could perhaps be said to more closely resemble the Buddhist method (Wallace 2012, 125–143). For more on the significances of human experience in the teachings of early Buddhism, please refer to Hamilton’s book Identity and Experience.
The Dalai Lama also suggests that knowledge obtained through reason or inference must be derived from observed facts gained through experience (‘foreword’ in Impey 2014, vii-viii). He considers Buddhism and modern science to both share a deep suspicion of any notion of absolutes on the philosophical level, both preferring to account for the evolution and emergence of life and the universe in terms of interdependence and the principle of causality. In methodological terms, both traditions take an empirical stance. For example, among the three recognized sources of knowledge accepted in Buddhism—experience, reason, and testimony—the evidence of experience takes precedence, with reason coming second and testimony last. Jayatilleke also points out that the Buddha identifies himself as an experientialist more than a traditionalist and that authority from tradition and testimony is not as important as our own experience (Jayatilleke 1980, 244–247).
Gombrich (2009) reiterates this point many times, suggesting that this purely ethical concept of karma is an innovative contribution to Indian culture.
This is similar to the idea of ‘quietism’ as explained by Wittgenstein, wherein the main purpose of philosophy is taken to be its therapeutic or remedial outcomes. Philosophical problems are thus viewed as pseudo-problems and the value of philosophy is not its ability to deliver any positive thesis, but rather its ability to help clear up confusion on a linguistic and conceptual level.
Paul Williams also noted that Buddhism is a soteriological system concerned with bringing about liberation, and freedom from experiences held to be negative, unpleasant, and not wanted. The primary orientation of Buddhism is thus towards the transformative experience of the individual. One is bound by one’s own mind, and it is by working on one’s own mind that one becomes liberated, attaining the highest possible spiritual goal (Williams 2000, 2–3).
Bertrand Russell first made the famous distinction between ‘knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description’ (Russell 1912, 25–38). Similarly some supernatural or supernormal cognition may be acquired through meditative experience, particularly following the development of samādhi. In Buddhism up to six forms are recognized: clairvoyance, clairaudience, mind reading, abilities of psychic travel, reminiscence of previous lives, and the ability to terminate defilements.
Mikel Burley delves into ways that the belief in rebirth bears upon and manifests in believers’ lives and how this relates to ethical behavior and human values (Burley 2016, 1 & 156).
The human mind is well equipped to cope with religious ideas, and there is often a cognitive basis for a religious claim that renders it more easily acceptable than scientific theories. By contrast, certain scientific hypotheses actually appear unnatural to our cognitive dispositions (Boyer 1994; McCauley 2011).
He did not, for example, ask ‘what is a man?’ but rather dug into the question of ‘how is a man?’ (Hamilton 1996, xxiv). Even where there is the pursuit of the question of knowing-what/that, such as in the approach of the Abhidharma, it is mainly for the soteriologial concern.
See Garfield (2015, 217 & 240) for more on Buddhist anti-essentialist and nominalist leanings.
Alfred Whitehead has called the accidental error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete as ‘The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness’(Whitehead 1967, 51–52 & 58).
See Inada (1971, 1975) for a compelling account of the common features between Whitehead’s philosophy and Buddhist theory. Though some of the basic insights overlap between the Buddha and Whitehead, there are also differences between the two thinkers. Please see Hartshorne (1975) for further discussion.
John Searle notes: ‘A useful distinction, for certain purposes, is to be made between the biological and the non-biological. At the most fundamental level, consciousness is a biological phenomenon in the sense that it is caused by biological processes, is itself a biological process, and interacts with other biological processes. Consciousness is a biological process like digestion, photosynthesis, or the secretion of bile. Of course, our conscious lives are shaped by our culture, but culture is itself an expression of our underlying biological capacities.’ (Searle 2002, 60)
Recently the Newtonian idea of a materialistic and mechanistic world view has been challenged, and some would argue even replaced by a conception of nature as a realm of diverse powers, potencies, capacities, and dispositions—a ‘dappled world.’ It is true we live in an ordered universe, but we need to rethink the classical idea of the ‘laws of nature’ in a more dynamic and creatively diverse way. (Cartwright & Ward 2016)
See Burton (2004, 106–107) for a discussion on the unbridgeable gap between experience and reality, and the similarities between the Mādhyamikas and the Kantians. Though Murti (1955, 123) suggests that the “Copernican revolution” in Indian philosophy was brought about by the Mādhyamika, the revolution may in fact hark back to the original insights of the Buddha.
In certain societies for example, frequent sexual activity is deemed a sign of vitality, yet in others certain spiritual practices may allow a practitioner to lessen or even do away with sexual desire altogether. There are also meditative practices that have been shown to reduce the biological craving for food and sleep. It would not be reasonable then to interpret every ‘supernormal’ outward manifestation as an ‘abnormal’ biological function or biological ‘dysfunction.’
See Smith (2009) for more about constructivist-pragmatist epistemology. Also see Wallner (2006) for further arguments about the dependency of science on culture, and how culture is the pre-supposition of scientific construction. Rupert Sheldrake (2012) and Curtis White (2014) similarly suggest that science is in many ways really no more than a common faith or an ideology—a set of assumptions agreed upon by the scientific community.
Over the last hundred years or so, Newtonian absolute conceptions of space and time have been challenged by Einsteinian relativity and/or the growth of quantum theories. That is, the machine-model implied by ‘mechanistic’ and ‘deterministic’ has been largely called into questions by modern physics, more or less deconstructing the assumption of such a ‘pre-defined realm.’
To illustrate this point, the Dalai Lama makes the distinction between proof of absence and absence of proof: the former is found not to exist or justified that it is not existential but the latter is a case of having not yet found its existence. This is similar to the difference between seeing its non-existence and not seeing a thing (Dalai Lama 2006, 35). That which has yet to be discovered or measured through the scientific method should not be seen as non-existent or at this time refuted.
Kalupahana (1975) suggests that the ‘causality’ is the central philosophy of Buddhism. In fact, not only the Buddha but also a number of great Buddhist philosophers emphasize causality/causation and incline to an empiricist point of view (without turning towards physicalism.) Dharmakīrti, an Indian Buddhist philosopher in the seventh century, is a case in point. See Arnold (2012) for further discussion.
As Ganeri (2012, 31–32) suggests, there are various forms of liberal naturalism, and the teachings of the Buddha can be categorized as one form in the Indian tradition.
In the book Naturalism in Question, a group of leading academics propose the idea of a more inclusive or liberal type of naturalism that would not go so far as to endorse some form of supernaturalism. They argue that scientific naturalism faces severe challenges in terms of self-consistency, and cannot solve the problems of mind, free will/freedom, action/agency, and normativity in ethics and aesthetics (De Caro and Macarthur 2004). There is even a promotion of ‘religious naturalism’ as an increasingly plausible and potentially rewarding form of religious moral life, resisting the false dichotomies of faith and reason, religion and science; and construing forms of religious transcendence through immanently and eminently naturalistic frames of reference (Hogue 2010).
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Many thanks to Ciska Joubert for correcting and rephrasing the English writing.
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Lin, CT. Could the Buddha Have Been a Naturalist?. SOPHIA 59, 437–456 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-019-00734-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-019-00734-y