How can we reconcile Buddhism with expressive individualism (“be your self”) and with pure science? After I had beforehand turned to Wilfrid Sellars for assistance on this query, I had in contrast Sellars’s view to two Buddhist metaphysical positions on final fact, that are fairly totally different from one another. One in every of these was Buddhaghosa’s view that final fact is reductionist, and I not discover that comparability useful. However I additionally turned to Śāntideva’s view that the final word is normatively inert, with no good or unhealthy concerned. Śāntideva’s view rejects Buddhaghosa’s in some crucial methods – and I believe that philosophically his metaphysics is significantly extra highly effective.
That’s a giant deal for me as a result of, having come to my Buddhism in Thailand, I’ve usually seen myself as a Theravādin like Buddhaghosa. I’ve been skeptical of essentially the most well-known piece of Śāntideva’s metaphysics, his moral deconstruction of self and different in chapter VIII of the Bodhicaryāvatāra. I’m not satisfied by his or some other argument for a common neutral altruism – a key Mahāyāna doctrine. But I do now discover myself shifting nearer to a Mahāyāna or no less than Madhyamaka view, due to a distinct side of Śāntideva’s metaphysics: the metaphysics of vacancy in chapter IX, which I believe are significantly deeper.
In that chapter, like Buddhaghosa or a contemporary physicist, Śāntideva breaks actuality up into the smallest doable components, referred to as aṇus in Sanskrit. Most individuals translate aṇu as “atom”, based mostly on the literal which means of “atom” (Greek a-tomos, indivisible) – however the irony of contemporary physics is that what we at the moment name “atoms” are divisible. For that motive I translate aṇu as “quark”, since quarks are (so far as I do know) the smallest half we acknowledge in our trendy cosmology. Nevertheless it’s the subsequent step Śāntideva takes, after dividing issues into quarks, that will get actually attention-grabbing. He claims that “that quark too will be divided into directional components” (IX.86) – that’s, you’ll be able to nonetheless strategy a quark from the left or the precise, the underside or the highest, which suggests it should have sides, and people successfully represent additional components. However then, he says: “The directional components, as a result of they don’t have any part components, are simply empty house. Subsequently the quark doesn’t exist” (IX.87). If you happen to take the following step after reductionism, you get to śūnyatā, vacancy or zero-ness.
That is all necessary to Śāntideva as a result of we get connected to issues, and seeing issues’ final vacancy helps break that attachment:
When all issues are empty on this means, what will be acquired, what taken away? Who will be honoured or humiliated by whom? From what can there be happiness and distress, what will be appreciated and what loathed? What craving can there be? For what’s that craving, when examined as to its true nature? (BCA IX.151-2)
Now Buddhaghosa’s reductionist view had beforehand drawn me as a result of I had seen it, just a little clumsily, as near pure science. But when something Śāntideva’s view is no less than as shut. Sellars’s thought of the scientific picture attracts closely on physicist David Eddington’s thought of “two tables”, from Eddington’s The Nature of the Bodily World: the desk he’s writing on is without delay a commonsense and acquainted object that seems earlier than our eyes (“It has extension; it’s comparatively everlasting; it’s colored; above all it’s substantial”) and a “scientific desk”. The latter shouldn’t be part of “that world which spontaneously seems round me once I open my eyes”, however somewhat “a part of a world which in additional devious methods has pressured itself on my consideration”, one which makes for a extra satisfying rationalization in a wider vary of circumstances. However right here is Eddington’s personal description of the scientific desk:
My scientific desk is generally vacancy. Sparsely scattered in that vacancy are quite a few electrical fees speeding about with nice velocity; however their mixed bulk quantities to lower than a billionth of the majority of the desk itself.
Largely vacancy! Precisely that English phrase mostly used to translate the Buddhist Sanskrit śūnyatā (even when that’s not the very best translation). On this nice physicist’s account, what distinguishes the scientific desk from the manifest, observable one shouldn’t be merely that the desk is made from atoms, but additionally that the desk is largely empty house. In a purely bodily sense, we’re all largely empty – although after all the “largely” does lots of work!

Bodily, it will appear, every little thing is generally empty house. Mentally, consciousness – thoughts – had a starting and it’ll have an finish. There’s a motive individuals ask the query “why is there one thing somewhat than nothing?” Nothing is the pure baseline. It seems that even one thing largely is nothing. The query is why this certified nothing arose – why we’re, why every little thing is, largely nothing somewhat than all nothing, as The Princess Bride may put it. Every part we care about is in that “largely nothing”, that fragile substratum like sea foam. In that means we’re like mud within the wind. And yathābhūtadassana as I perceive it requires acknowledging this, embracing it.
That’s not to repeat the error of homogenizing the 2: on Śāntideva’s view the final word actuality is ineffable. For him it’s not that the more true actuality is largely empty house, however it’s in some sense all empty house, which isn’t what Eddington’s physics implies. Nonetheless, it is rather vital that if we hold going from both of the reductions I proposed previously – the natural-scientific discount or the Buddhist abhidhammic discount – we get an additional discount that lands us in some type of vacancy. And so, I believe, if we try to harmonize Buddhism and pure science, we seemingly do it higher with vacancy than with atomistic reductionism.
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