01.11.12

Buddhist nirvana empirically attested to by tens of thousands of yogis over many millennia

Posted in General at 2:13 pm by nemo

I have updated and expanded my review of The Bodhissatwa’s Brain at Amazon

Buddhists should not stand for this attempt on their basics. It is not science to make these criticisms. The reality of nirvana, and, less clearly, rebirth, have been attested to thousands of times over many millennia. To try and eliminate the nirvana issue on the basis of darwinism, and reductionism, is loony.

I think that this work, which falls in the rubric, or rut, of the ‘new atheists’, misses the point entirely: naturalizing buddhism is misguided if its tenets have always led to a deeper understanding of nature: the reality of ‘enlightenment’ as an aspect of man’s evolutionary psychology. I think that Owen’s attempted critique reflects more on the inability of scientists to find ‘nature’ than that of buddhists. Buddhism, whatever its fringe accumulation of superstitious add-ons, is, at its core, a critically skeptical take on what came before it, and, as a reform movement, anticipated the secular critique of religion. Its original form is arguably naturalistic to the core, including its understanding, which is rare, that ‘rebirth’ is an aspect of nature. In general the naturalism of Buddhism should be a lesson to modern science that nature is a larger framework that what it takes as the norm. So, in a real sense, it is modern science, so contracted in its reductionist mindset, that has missed ‘nature’. Scientism, the reductionist mirage of positivistic science, is the culprit in need of naturalizing, not buddhism.
The ‘secular’ was born in antiquity, in India, and Greece, in the Axial period. Buddhism’s rationalistic challenge to ‘Hindu’ legacies was an original and still relevant attempt to bring reason to religion, one that modern science seems incapable of.

Update: one of the sources of confusion here is the demand to make everything conform to Darwinian theory, as the author explicitly says. But that is the wrong approach, first, because Darwinian theory is open to challenge (not the same as ‘evolution’ in general), and second, because the understanding of human evolution is so meagre on the part of biologists that any attempt to criticize buddhism on that basis is misguided. A better question is to ask how, and when the potential for complex states of self-consciousness, and nirvana, arose in the course of man’s emergence. And to relate this with homo sapiens’ clear intersection with a ‘spiritual’ realm, in a way that changed his perspective completely from that of homo erectus. The question of self and, indeed, ‘soul’ (a bad word, admittedly) cannot be understood in the context of evolutionary psychology.
The assumption of Flanagan’s treatment is that science, being empirical, should be able to pass judgment on buddhist questions, and nix the discourses on enlightenment in the name of that empiricism. But that approach simply backfires. Thousands and thousands of yogis over the course of many millennia (especially in India)have given testimony to the empirical reality of nirvana, what it is, how it is arrived at, and what its consequences are. For scientists to reject this powerful, and empirical, testimnony is, ironically, unscientific.

Permalink