VSI

I spent the day at a conference on Science and Buddhism here in Virginia. The Mind & Life Society has been doing these for years, and they’ve been somewhat conservative with the science, sticking to the effects of meditation on every biomarker they can find. This approach has been pretty successful at not frightening anyone, or inviting much ridicule. Some of the people here today are continuing in that tradition, with immediately practical studies of sleep disturbance in cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. Calling the esoteric practices “Tibetan yoga” instead of using the traditional Tibetan names, so that the patients and the peer reviewers of medical journals won’t freak out. Others are looking to push the envelope more.

I’d like to believe that science is a process, capable of studying anything with the proper technology. Except that science is made up of scientists, and scientists are human (all the ones I know, anyway), and humans are not entirely rational. The process of science can average away a lot of human folly, especially over time, but any community of humans is subject to fashion and ambition and prejudice. One of the anonymous reviewers of my BEACON grant this year said that since they were paying for the podcast, I should focus on their research. Funny -- I thought the American public was paying for it (See?  I'm just as vulnerable as anybody, trying to score points by being snarky).

I personally have never seen any evidence for reincarnation or psychic powers or any of the more colorful elements from the Buddhist scriptures. I’m not at all sure I would recognize such evidence if I did see it. I may be one of the blind men feeling an elephant’s tail, or maybe it really is just a rope. I don’t know. I do know that the history of science is one surprise after another. Just a couple hundred years ago, evolution was a crazy idea in the heads of a very small number of people. Now it is the absolute lynchpin of biology, an organizing principle of such gravity that it is warping the space in which every other field of human endeavor floats. Of course, that influence was based on its predictive power.

My favorite talk of the day was by a religious scholar, one of those humanities types who wanted to remind us abstracting, simplifying, pattern-hunting, reductionist science folk of the buzzing, confusing diversity of these religious traditions. Just in Tibet, just in the monasteries, there were several major lineages, composed of hundreds of individual teachers, each one adapting the ritual practices (as he interpreted them) to the needs of individual students.  Our Western imaginings of those rich traditions are really just cartoons.