cut off from the continuity of human experience present in tradition. Relatively few, such as the English poet William Blake (1757–1827), seem not to have completely accepted this.
In such a way, scientific praxis became illegitimately wedded to an ideology that might more properly be termed ‘scientism’.9 Although scientism claims the authority of science, it has as many unexamined assumptions as any form of theism. The roots of this grim alchemical wedding between science and ideology lie in the anti-religious philosophical materialism that grew steadily throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and now enjoys considerable popularity amongst those who regard themselves as both fashionable and intellectual.
In an amusing parallel to the optimism of the political ideologues concerning their utopian societies, devotees of this scientistic ideology confidently anticipate the day when the ‘problem of consciousness’ will be solved and all will be forced to accept the materialist thesis. In the meantime, any beneficial advances, such as, for instance, in medical care and treatment, properly due to the application of genuine scientific praxis by scientists, can be falsely claimed for materialism.
It is essential to be clear about this point: the analysis to determine which particular physical processes are implicated in a particular disorder or disease, and, likewise, the formulation of specific remedies, does not entail a commitment to any one particular world-view of the ultimate nature of reality. Hence, the medical researcher may be Christian, Jewish, materialist or Buddhist, as scientific praxis is merely based upon the observation and understanding of how particular causes and conditions interact to produce particular effects in a given situation.
However, it is by this illegitimate stratagem of disguising itself as science that scientism attempts to maintain its prestige. In this regard, it is noteworthy that it is particularly popular among those who are often untutored in science but may be hostile to religion for other reasons.
Just as surely as the blindness in political vision has had unfortunate consequences, so also with the scientistic ideology. Unchecked, there is every possibility that it will render sentient beings into mere scientific specimens, whose defects and malfunctions it imagines can be eliminated and whose lives are to be managed from the time of controlled conception to controlled death. Its ambitions are such that it is determined to deny that human beings have consciousness and moral agency, by asserting that they are mere physical matter which acts in accordance with environmental conditions. Of course, such an approach will leave intact the fundamental causes of suffering: causes which reside in the human heart itself.
When one adds to these flaws of scientism and political ideology the danger to the human capacity for stillness, reflection and wise judgement that is signalled by the proliferation of electronic media to satisfy our immediate desires, one can easily understand why it is that our culture can appear to be spiritually bankrupt. Although it has made some advances, in many ways it has only added to the sum total of unhappiness and alienation. So, what is to be done?
The first step is to admit that the solution to this crisis in modern culture is not to imagine that we can turn back the clock and all will be well. In other words, a voluntary return to theism (the belief in a creator god), in order to recover the lost unity of the sacred and secular, is not possible for most people. Freedom of thought has already exposed much that seems incoherent in theistic belief. In addition, a great deal of religious practice in the West has been fatally damaged. The very facts that popular devotion is increasingly moribund outside of certain redoubts, or that once-great monastic orders face continual shrinkage, only confirm that sombre analysis. Thus, with all due apologies to the great T.S. Eliot, who decided that salvation for the individual and the culture could only be found in the embrace of Christian tradition, there is little reason to look for aid there.
It is this fact, then, that creates a space in our culture for Buddhism, a system which, unlike its spiritual rivals, can create confidence by its very accessibility to reasoning – an accessibility made possible by its sophisticated traditions of logical enquiry and philosophical analysis. It was Buddha himself who set the tone for this in his well-known dictum that his teaching was not to be accepted through blind faith. Instead he insisted that, just as a merchant first tests the weight and purity of gold before purchasing it, so one should assess the veracity of his teachings for oneself before giving assent to them.
In the centuries after the Buddha, this emphasis upon the role of reason gave rise to an astonishingly rich body of philosophical work, which is so far little-known in the West. Perhaps the most significant of the great thinkers within the tradition were the Indian masters Dharmakirti and Nagarjuna. The former, through his work on the system of Valid Cognition, established a clear defence of Buddhist doctrines of perception, rebirth and causality, while Nagarjuna, in his Middle Way works, primarily concerned himself with elucidation of the Buddha’s teaching on ultimate truth. We will be drawing upon their work at various points in this book.
What is more, unlike systems of mere theory, Buddhism offers a system of contemplative methods through which the essential truth to which it points can be experienced directly. Thus, within the Buddhist tradition, it is not considered sufficient merely to possess the correct theory of the world, since, unless one’s actual way of relating to that world is changed, the causes of suffering will still be emotionally operative within us. In other words, the truth about reality must be cultivated or ‘brought into being’ through ‘meditation’. Thus the role of meditation is to cultivate an attention to truth so that it may be experienced at first hand. In so doing, one is, of course, following the example of the Buddha himself, for whom the truth was liberating exactly because he knew it experientially, thus ‘awakening’ from his bewitchment by erroneous views.
Unlike theism, which commences from an appeal to faith in the authority of revelation, Buddhism asks us to start with a dispassionate examination of our experience, actions and motivations. Of course, for such analysis to be effective, systematic attentiveness is required, which therefore requires us to practise meditation, so that we do not flounder in a mere piling up of ideas about the world rather than unmasking and liberating ourselves from our projections.
Through such attentiveness, founded on the twin contemplative methods of ‘calm-abiding’ and ‘insight’, we will be able to scrape away the encrusted fantasies and misconstructions that characterise our present way of relating to the world. Thus, to engage in Buddhist spiritual practice is not a matter of an uncritical acceptance of particular notions about the world but of utilising the guidance left behind by the Buddha in order that we might awaken to the true nature of that world. We will have more to say about this in later chapters.
All other philosophical opinions are characterised by Buddhism as either ‘eternalist’ or ‘annihilationist’. Although these are technical terms drawn from Buddhism, they represent a very useful way of categorising the core beliefs of all non-Buddhist thinkers. In this respect, then, ‘eternalist’ systems are those philosophies or religions which propose that there are entities which possess permanence. One form of such an opinion would be the belief in a creator god and the immortal souls created by him, as maintained in Christianity, Judaism, Islam and some forms of Hinduism. Another version would be the postulation of a permanent self that dwells within all beings, which is, at the same time, fully identical with the supreme reality itself, as is argued in the Hindu Advaita system. Obviously, however, it was ‘eternalist’ theories in a Christian form that provided the dominant intellectual assumptions of the West until recent times.
Those opinions that one might label ‘annihilationist’ are all those theories that argue, by contrast with the ‘eternalists’, that there can be no past or future lives, because there is no reality to the mind, it being nothing more than physical processes. Thus, according to those theories, at death the body merely returns to the elements and that is the end of life. Such notions were maintained by the Lokayata school10 over two millennia ago in India and by certain schools of thought in Ancient Greece, and they are held nowadays by the proponents of philosophical materialism
