and quantifying things that have a material or mechanistic explanation, such as the structure of DNA, but it cannot do any more than that. This inbuilt limitation does not invalidate the usefulness of the scientific enterprise, but it entails that it can have nothing of value to say about such topics as the nature of mind itself. Nor can it add anything of value about the nature of ethical behaviour and altruism, and liberation from the cycle of suffering, which are the core concerns of Buddhism. Of course, science has many valuable things to say about the brain and nervous system, which, from a Buddhist point of view, are the co-operating conditions that must be present for the mind to interact with the world.
While science itself is not dangerous for the Buddha’s teaching, what is dangerous is when the call for a ‘scientific Buddhism’ is actually an insistence that Buddhism must accord with the materialist propositions of ‘scientism’. To insist that Buddhism must accord with principles that are, in fact, philosophical tenets of materialism (going beyond the proper scientific praxis of science) would be to contradict the essential philosophical views of Buddhism. Such a Buddhism would be no Buddhism. It would be a shrunken, desiccated apology for Buddhism, denuded of core Buddhist teachings.
A Buddhism refashioned to accommodate materialism would, for instance, necessarily be a Buddhism without rebirth. Thus, if there is no mind but merely material processes, there can be no past and future lives. This would follow, because, once this present body came to an end at death, there could be no further basis for experience.
One might say at this point that the Buddhist teaching of rebirth is too remote from our experience and so we must insist on a new type of Buddhism. Yet, in actuality, rebirth is both extraordinarily simple and a continuous process: we pass away both from moment to moment and life to life. In fact, we can find the profound and thus temporarily hidden truth of rebirth from life to life by seeing the process as it occurs here and now. The more we understand that our nature is one of fluidity, that we are in fact always in the process of being born, the more relaxed we become about the movement from life to life. In short, it is our attachment to the idea of ourselves as a static fixed entity, one bounded around either by God (which is, in general terms, the view of ‘theists’) or the sleep of non-existence (which is generally the view of ‘materialists’), that makes us resist the truth of rebirth, which is, finally, nothing more than the truth that all reality is process – a process in which, ultimately, there are no radical discontinuities.
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