Contemplative Science, page 11
There are, nevertheless, many significant differences between scientific and Buddhist pursuits of objective knowledge, in terms of methods and goals. According to Galileo and the majority of the founders of modern science, salvation is granted by an act of divine mercy, which one receives by faith, by surrendering to the will of God, and by applying oneself to a life of virtue in accordance with God’s commandments. This is the way to achieve meaning and goodness in this life and salvation in the hereafter. The practice of science, in contrast, entails an intellectual challenge to understand the objective, physical universe. This not only is unnecessary for salvation but also can be pursued independently of any concern for meaning, virtue, or heavenly rewards. Nevertheless, some of the pioneers of the scientific revolution, such as Francis Bacon, believed that the development of experimental science was sanctioned by God as a means for understanding and controlling nature. Thus, faith was seen as the key to inner happiness, and scientific knowledge was seen as the key to material well-being. This split between the goals of science and religion is every bit as radical and far-reaching in its implications as Descartes’s absolute demarcation between mind and matter.
When he left the comforts of his home and family at the age of twentynine, Gautama—the Buddha-to-be—set out to “seek what is good,” which, he envisioned, would lead to “the supreme state of sublime peace.” But he chose a path primarily involving the pursuit of knowledge, as opposed to the adoption of faith in the hope of divine rewards. His first step was to seek out the most accomplished contemplatives of his day to learn from them how to refine his own mind. The first of his teachers, Āḷāra Kālāma, initially gave him practical instructions on a range of increasingly subtle states of meditative concentration. Gautama surmised that he was not simply speculating on these matters but was reporting direct knowledge from his own experience, and when he questioned him on this matter, Āḷāra Kālāma confirmed that this was indeed the case. According to early Buddhist accounts, Gautama then engaged in a meditative discipline under the guidance of his teacher. In a remarkably brief time he achieved Āḷāra Kālāma’s own state of focused attention, in which the mind gains access to a formless dimension of existence that is devoid of all content apart from an experience of pure nothingness. His teacher was so impressed at his extraordinary progress that he invited Gautama to teach with him, but Gautama felt that this state alone did not fulfill his deepest aspiration. He then sought out an even more accomplished contemplative named Uddaka Rāmaputta, under whose guidance he achieved an even subtler state of meditative absorption that transcended the very concepts of discernment and nondiscernment.
In both these meditative states, the mind transcends the world of sensory experience and even the realm of mental imagery, and for as long as one remains in such a state, one remains profoundly at peace. But Gautama recognized that meditative absorption alone did not reveal the true nature of reality or result in “the supreme state of sublime peace.” Moreover, after one emerges from such meditation and engages with the everyday world, the mind is still prone to suffering and its underlying causes. Gautama seems to have taken very much to heart the principle that only truth can make one free, and it is evident from the beginning of his spiritual venture that he was not satisfied merely to accept others’ theories on the basis of authority and tradition.23
As indicated by Gautama’s initial meditative training, Indian contemplatives of his day had apparently learned how to refine and focus the attention in extraordinary ways, far surpassing anything known to modern science. It was on the shoulders of these contemplative giants that he developed his own unique methods for using the mind to explore the nature of reality. In the earliest records of Gautama’s own narration of his achievement of spiritual awakening, he describes how, with his mind concentrated, purified, malleable, and calm, he recollected the specific circumstances of many thousands of his own former lives over the course of many ages of world contraction and expansion. This, he declared, was his “first true knowledge” on the night of his awakening, gained through his own direct experience. He next proceeded to observe the succession of lifetimes of other beings, ascertaining the relations between their deeds and their effects as they played out in subsequent lives. He reported, “I understood how beings pass on according to their actions. This was the second true knowledge attained by me in the second watch of the night.”24 Finally, his contemplative insight into the nature of reality was so thorough that his mind was utterly freed from all afflictions and obscurations. This was his culminating realization of the Four Noble Truths: “I had direct knowledge, as it actually is, that ‘This is suffering,’ that ‘This is the origin of suffering,’ that ‘This is the cessation of suffering,’ and that ‘This is the way leading to the cessation of suffering.’”25 It was at this point that Gautama became a buddha, “an awakened one,” and he later reported:26 When liberated, there came the knowledge: “It is liberated.” I had direct knowledge: “Birth is exhausted, the holy life has been lived out, what was to be done is done, there is no more of this to come.” This was the third true knowledge attained by me in the third watch of the night. Ignorance was banished and true knowledge arose, darkness was banished and light arose, as happens in one who is diligent, ardent and self-controlled.
The liberation that Gautama sought and found was freedom from duḥkha, our fundamental vulnerability to mental afflictions and suffering in this and in all possible future lives. The achievement of nirvāṇa, or spiritual liberation, brings with it the experience of a genuine, lasting state of well-being, or sukha, which stems from insight into the ultimate nature of reality. Contrary to all stimulus-driven pleasures, realization of such sukha arises from the very nature of pure awareness itself, freed from all afflictions and obscurations. It can be described as a state of human flourishing that is compassionately attentive to the joys and sorrows of others, is free of all tendencies toward vices such as malice and greed, and effortlessly gives rise to all virtues.
In the West, religion is often affiliated with transcendentalism, while science is associated with empiricism. This dichotomy is based on the premise that all empirical data are gathered through the five physical senses and the instruments of technology, which refine and extend those senses. In this context, the mind is commonly characterized as being comprised of representations of sensory impressions and the memory and imagination of them. The possibility of humans being endowed with a sixth mode of perception, namely mental perception, is rarely considered, let alone developed and refined. But it should be obvious that we are directly aware of our thoughts, emotions, desires, dreams, ideas, and mental imagery, and of the very existence of our own consciousness. We also mentally, not only sensorially, perceive our bodies and external environment. While the eyes perceive only visual objects and the ears perceive only sounds, with the mind we are capable of perceiving all manner of inner and outer phenomena, from the realm of mathematics to distant stars and galaxies. Perhaps our most robust, certain knowledge is the immediate knowledge of our own consciousness—something undetectable with all the instruments of modern technology. That which uniquely provides direct knowledge of mental phenomena is mental perception (manas-pratyakṣa), and Buddhist contemplative practice begins with the refinement and extension of this basic mode of observation.
As soon as mental perception is added to our faculties for observing reality, the scope of empiricism must include the full range of subjective mental events, which are so often excluded or marginalized in scientific research. In this regard, Buddhism, like science, can be said to be primarily an empirical, not a philosophical or metaphysical approach to understanding reality. There is an obvious complementarity between Buddhist and scientific empiricism. Buddhists meditatively refine and extend mental perception through the cultivation of mindfulness and introspection,27 primarily as a means of exploring and controlling the mind. Scientists technologically refine and extend their physical senses as a means of exploring and controlling physical phenomena. As a result of such technological advances, scientists now have the use of a wide range of “extrasensory” modes of perception, such as radar, sonar, electron microscopes, and the like. Buddhist contemplatives claim to have developed a wide range of “extrasensory” modes of perception, such as remote viewing, precognition, and recollection of past lives.
Such claims quite rightly meet with skepticism from the scientific community. Given the current scientific understanding of the mind, it is hard to imagine how such modes of perception could be possible in principle. And given the lack of rigorous, scientific corroboration, it is hard for many people to take these claims seriously. But the history of science reveals that great leaps of progress have been made when the orthodox rules of scientific research have been broken. It does not seem impossible then, and certainly not undesirable, for science to expand its modes of empirical observation to include the refinement of mental perception and then put these Buddhist claims to the empirical test.
In Buddhist contemplative practice, after a sustained, rigorous training in developing the stability and vividness of attention, one then uses enhanced powers of mental perception to learn to distinguish between the phenomena that are presented to the senses and the conceptual superimpositions one compulsively imputes upon them. This entails the cultivation of discerning mindfulness28 of the nature of the body, feelings, mental states, and all other outer and inner mental objects, examining, for instance, whether they are enduring or momentary, of the nature of duḥkha or sukha, and inherently personal or impersonal. Buddhist contemplatives, like scientists, are centrally concerned with all manner of causal relationships in the natural world. The Four Noble Truths, which provide the structure for Buddhist practice as a whole, are all about causality, with the central theme being the true causes of duḥkha and sukha. In this way, the Buddhist pursuit of knowledge is none other than the pursuit of the life of perfection and the realization of genuine happiness.
PERCEPTUAL KNOWLEDGE OF EVIDENT PHENOMENA
As noted in the previous account of Gautama’s initial training with Āḷāra Kālāma and Uddaka Rāmaputta, from the very origins of Buddhism there has been a strong emphasis on the primacy of experience, or “direct knowledge,” over conceptual inference, metaphysical speculation, or simple belief. This is reflected in the common response by the disciples of the Buddha to others who expressed an interest in his teachings: “Come and see!” (ehi passi). This emphasis entailed rigorous training in ethics and attentional training, which can reasonably be viewed as experiments in altering one’s lifestyle and modes of attention. Buddhist contemplatives were then trained in using their finely honed attention to observe and analyze a wide range of inner and outer phenomena. If a mode of inquiry is deemed empirical if it is based on experiment and observation rather than theory alone, then Buddhist “insight” (vipaśyanā) meditation can be regarded as highly empirical. However, a major difference between Buddhist, contemplative empiricism and scientific, technological empiricism is that the latter involves quantitative measurements and sophisticated mathematical analysis, resulting in the formulation of precise mathematical laws of nature. Buddhist empiricism, in contrast, is qualitative rather than quantitative, and it is primarily concerned with understanding and transforming conscious experience, rather than understanding and controlling the objective world that exists independently of it.
The theme of direct experience (Pāli: paccakkhañāṇa) is of central importance in early Buddhist literature,29 and “experience” (anubhāva) and “direct perception” (pratyakṣa) are also key terms in later Indian Buddhist writings on meditation and epistemology. Nevertheless, the importance of experiential knowledge in Buddhism has recently been called into question by a number of Buddhologists, many of whom take a postmodernist approach to this field of study. Stephen Batchelor, for example, has declared that the Buddha did not even claim to have insights into the nature of reality based on his own contemplative experience.30 Robert Sharf, pointing out that there is no premodern Japanese or Chinese lexical equivalent for “experience,”31 claims that the importance of experience was first introduced into Buddhism by a handful of twentieth-century Asian religious leaders and apologists.32
Batchelor’s claim is easily discredited by the above account of the Buddha’s enlightenment, as well as innumerable other early narratives of the Buddha’s life and teachings. Sharf ’s assertion is just as easily invalidated by the obvious presence of various terms denoting direct experience in Pāli, Sanskrit and Tibetan Buddhist literature. But Sharf’s larger claim cannot so readily be dismissed as an indication of poor scholarship. One of his central premises is that the authority of prominent Buddhist commentators, such as Kamalaśīla, Buddhaghosa, and Chih-I, lay not in their access to exceptional states of experiential contemplative insight but in their mastery of and rigorous adherence to sacred scripture.33 In a similar vein, upon finding no conclusive evidence that the fifth-century Indian Buddhist writer Vasubandhu was inspired by meditative experiences to adopt an idealist philosophical viewpoint within Buddhism, Johannes Bronkhorst concludes that this move was purely theoretical in nature—despite the absence of any conclusive evidence to that effect. However, in Tibetan Buddhism there emerged an important genre of “songs of meditative experience” (Tib. nyams mgur), such as The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa, spontaneously composed by an eleventh-century contemplative, which are cited widely by Tibetan Buddhist scholars and contemplatives alike.34 Moreover, within Tibetan Buddhism, the mode of meditative instruction that is traditionally most highly valorized is called “experiential guidance” (Tib. myong khrid), in which the mentor teaches his students from his own contemplative experience, not just from his theoretical training. This long-standing emphasis on experience is easily overlooked by scholars who have had no personal interaction with such accomplished contemplatives.
Sharf suggests that Buddhist meditation was never intended to result in the attainment of extraordinary states of consciousness, but was rather designed to eliminate mental defilements, accumulate merit, and achieve supernatural powers.35 This is certainly true for a wide range of meditations within Buddhism, in which the real or imagined benefits were valued more than any experiences one might have while meditating. But this must not obscure the fact that experiential insights, especially those derived through “yogic perception” (yogapratyakṣa), are viewed as the most effective ways to purify the mind, accumulate merit, and tap the potentials of consciousness. Certain Buddhist scriptures and treatises have been deemed doctrinally authoritative based on the assertion that they themselves are either directly or indirectly based on authoritative contemplative experiences.
Buddhist tradition in India, Tibet, and other Asian countries has traditionally valued three ideals for Buddhist adepts: the scholar (paṇḍit), the contemplative (yogin), and the saint (bodhisattva). One may achieve greatness in any of these three ways without being especially adept at the other two, but the highest ideal within Mahāyāna Buddhism is to achieve excellence in all three. The eleventh-century Buddhist adepts Nāḍapāda (Naropa) and Atīśa, both of whom exerted a profound influence on Tibetan Buddhism, are traditionally presented as individuals who embodied all three ideals. Within the modern academic study of Buddhology, only the ideal of scholarship is valued, while Western Buddhists who strive to achieve either contemplative insights or saintly qualities are at times even ridiculed by academics.36 As Sharf acknowledges, “Scholars of religion are not presented with experiences that stand in need of interpretation but rather with texts, narratives, performances, and so forth.”37 Thus, Buddhologists’ refusal to engage in rigorous, firsthand, or even secondhand exploration of the types of experiences derived through Buddhist practice leads to a rationalistic and dogmatic approach to the study of the relation between Buddhist theory and practice. Empiricism is dismissed as a central theme in Buddhism largely because it is so lacking in academic Buddhist studies.
Even if one grants the importance of experience in Buddhist practice, one may still argue that this should not be called “empirical.” As Buddhologist Luis Gómez rightly points out, the scientific use of this term includes methods of hypothesis testing and falsification, uncertainty and probability, and mathematical laws and predictability, all of which are alien to Buddhism.38 Robert Sharf goes a step further in declaring that because of its ambiguous epistemological status and essentially indeterminate nature, personal experience, no matter how extraordinary, can never serve as a reference point for truth claims.39 He concludes:40 Thus, while experience—construed as that which is “immediately present”—may indeed be both irrefutable and indubitable, we must remember that whatever epistemological certainty experience may offer is gained only at the expense of any possible discursive meaning or significance. To put it another way, all attempts to signify “inner experience” are destined to remain “well-meaning squirms that get us nowhere.”
This is a serious charge, and if it were true, it would undermine any constructive collaboration that would relate Buddhist contemplative experiences with empirical scientific findings. However, it would equally imply that the experiences of wine connoisseurs could never be reference points for claims about the quality of specific wines, and that there could not be any discursive meaning or significance to their experiences. Moreover, the experience of solving a mathematical proof and of all other types of mental phenomena—from internal chitchat to emotions to dreams—would also fall outside the realm of discursive meaning. But the notion that none of these experiences can be a reference point for truth claims is implausible, and it is no less unreasonable to assume that meditative experiences are uniquely immune to public discourse and the possibility of acting as the basis of truth claims.
