Y Series: Parallel Foundations of Buddhism and Modern Scientific Theory

Today, I’d like to take a small departure into the world of philosophy. Recent events have highlighted in my mind the value of religion and philosophy in an integrated life and this section will be a small exploration of that integration with two of my favorite topics: science and Buddhism. The following summation and commentary are based on the Dalai Lama’s and Thubten Chodron’s co-authored book, Samsara, Nirvana, and Buddha Nature, from the compendium of wisdom and compassion series. Now, full disclosure, this series is heavily technical and assumes that the reader has completed all four books prior to this one, including the self-study sections on Buddhism basics, foundational concepts, and historical evidence. Additionally, the Dalai Lama has produced a stand-alone work allying Buddhist philosophy with conventional scientific understanding of certain topics that I am also drawing from (colloquially) here. That work is even more technical and filled with religiosity than this one, so I have elected to merely mention it and not reference specifics, since it can get very wordy and weird with very little encouragement.

Let us begin.

Mahayana sutras and Kalacakra Tantra reference something called ‘space particles.’ These particles function very similarly to our current concepts of atoms in the scientific paradigm, only in religious and philosophical mythology. These particles are the seeds of world systems in some Buddhist mythologies that arise, disintegrate, and remain dormant in basically a random fluctuation. A modern parallel may be the quantum field, where particles or energy probabilities arise, disintegrate, or remain stable in random patterns beneath what we consider empty space. These quantum fluctuations are only visible when they interact with each other in specific ways that result in the harmonization of energies, giving rise to ‘strings’ or quantum dimensions consistent in string theory. In the Buddhist mythology, these energies also only ‘exist’ when they form relationships with each other and result in material building blocks of the external universe.

These material building blocks of the universe do not exist independently from one another, rather, the relationships between them govern their existence and shape. As they are impermanent and constantly changing as the relationships within and between them change, they are subject to evolution and natural laws of cause and effect, each attribute and whole arising and altering as a condition of its internal and external environment as a cohesive whole.

We know this environment to be without inherent existence because each component changes and adapts to every other component in a constant dance of environment, sentience, and growth dependent not only on the constituent parts, but on the system as a whole moving through space-time as we and the rest of sentience perceives and changes it.

As the first Dalai Lama questions in The Treasury of Knowledge:

“If one asks: This manifold world which has been explained – the environment and the sentient beings living in it – where does it come from?

It does not arise without cause or from a discordant cause because it arises occasionally. And it does not arise from [the creator God] Isvara and so forth because it arises gradually. As it says this, if one asks, from what does it arise? The manifold world of the environment and the sentient beings living in it arise from karma.”

Karma here is a technical term with a specific meaning. In the west, we tend to view karma as a ‘do good deeds, get good things,’ sort of pay-to-play experience promising happiness and wealth through begrudging virtue. Not so, my dear countrymen. Karma here is the simple law of cause and effect with afflictions and ethical behavior stamped into a constantly flowing mind-stream that wanders through bodies like a great subtle wind. Yours, but not yours. A shared experience of consequence moving from life to life.

But this idea of shared cause and effect influencing environment and individual in a constantly changing system sounds a lot like, what? Anyone?

Yes, that’s right. Evolution.

Our understanding of genetic diversity, adaptation, and growth (at least from a scientific standpoint) is deeply rooted in the idea of descent with modification, or, evolution. This is the idea that our genes may be modified by environmental or biochemical conditions to better survive in the existing ecology of the organism. These modifications may happen all at once ( a jump discontinuity to survive in extreme situations) or gradually over many millennia to build species most able to survive on a planet that grows by millions of years instead of decades. Does this sound at all similar to our Buddhist friends? We can show that mothers and fathers under stress can pass those biochemical markers to their children. That people’s homes are reflected in their very bones with the unique mineral content in their air and earth built into the very fabric of our bodies. We are repositories for the physical and emotional choices of our communities. Sounds a lot like karma.

But that is just the physical world. Science also has quite a bit to say on our ethical and social choices reflecting changes in the natural world – global climate change, for example. Humans seem to be an interface between heaven and earth, physical and non-physical. Our very structure is a representation of the various life forms and karmic choices that could occur on a sentient planet. And our communal nature and interaction with other life-forms seems to have built new relationships and interactions for the earth itself. We cause earthquakes with fracking, create underground brine rivers, pollute air and water with chemicals that have no natural parallel for destruction or degradation. Permanent, if you will (PFAS/PFOA would be a good example of this).

But Buddhism says that impermanent aggregates such as humans, sentients who arise and fall away dependent on all manner of causes and conditions from their environment, could not create something permanent. After all, in their mythology, the impermanent could not give rise to permanent and vice versa.

The Cittamatra school favors the idea that all external objects are illusions anyone. That our perception and the perceived object arise only from consciousness and are by nature impermanent. That everything will grow and change and adapt to new conditions, making any attempt to define a ‘thing’ as static impossible. Let us look at a river. The river is never the same. Its course may be fairly consistent, but it is always changing. The water is always different water (you can never step in the same river twice, after all). Yet, we name it as the Mississippi. The Amazon. But what are we actually naming? Only the symbolic representation of what the river is right now. The name is a place holder for whatever changes are happening in that loose area with that collection of aggregate changes at any one moment. We may build a bridge and tear it down. Animals may live and die in the river. The river may run dry sometimes. The river may flood and expand three or four times. Its banks may change or it may disappear altogether. Yet, we still call it the same name. But the name is not the thing. It is only the representation of a series of unknown relationships we must see to understand. So, the Cittamatra school says, what is this river we talk about? Even as you stand in the water, the relationships are changing all around you and nothing is constant. We have named something purely to define it in one sense of consciousness.

So are humans thus named. And plants. And animals. And all the things that ebb and flow in evolutionary time. The idea of a ‘missing link’ for example seems a little short-sighted on this continuity. We are all missing links, uncreated but creating ourselves and others all the time. And all of this is facilitated by those ‘space particles.’ Those things popping in and out of existence only to interact with others in a random ballet of what could be. If the interaction is synergistic, behold, a material relationship that can interact with more materials. If not, poof, the probability disintegrates and Schrödinger’s cat dies in the box. These are not the particles of Newtonian or Dalton’s atomic theory. These are particles that do not inherently exist. They are only the probability waves of what could be depending on what exists or does not exist at the time to interact with. They are designations, placeholders for potential relationships, just as we name ourselves as placeholders for all the relationships we form and dissolve.

Isn’t that delightful?

So here, we can start thinking of the nature of the universe, specifically, how it all began. As is the custom when one discusses quantum fields and particulate probability functions collapsing. The Dalai Lama says that he doesn’t particularly buy into a single particle exploding to create the universe. Fair. He’s not really an authority on astrophysics, after all. But let us perform a small thought experiment. What if the particle didn’t expand? What if our perception of the particle is all that is expanding? That we are still collapsing wave functions within a space particle popping in and out of existence and we just happen to have hit a nice eddy filled with relationships to interact with. There was no expansion. The expansion is our own concept of space-time and complex relationships pushing the perception of what is the universe further and further out. We are still in the particle and there is nothing but our own interacting sentient relationships and cause and effect reaching out to create more and more relationships with other particles and other elements of the quantum field to define the rules and conditions of our own universe?

I think that is what the Dalai Lama is saying as he explores the idea of subtle elements and mind control through the use of elements in the final section of the chapter.

He and Venerable Chodron do discuss a Buddhist cultural legend that describes humans as made entirely of light (and here, I am reminded of that eternal paradox between particle and wave that Einstein’s equations made so famous…is it energy or matter? Both? Neither? Energy sometimes and matter other times? Doesn’t that sound a lot like karmic relationships?) and that we only manifested when afflictions and coarser needs created the conditions for physical bodies to interact with the material world more definitely. In other words, we collapsed the wave function of our light bodies to make them matter.

What an interesting idea.