Buddhism and Science: A Guide for the Perplexed (Buddhism and Modernity) Paperback – September 15, 2010

Lopez does a stellar job at giving the context and complicating the assumptions behind modern interpretations and myths around Buddhism. His foray here into Buddhism and Science is particularly interesting focusing on both Western engagements and engagements in Asia and the creation of "Buddhist Modernism" in both Asia and the US through the 19th and 20th centuries and dipping into the 21st. Lopez picks representatives of Sri Lankan, Chinese, Tibetan, and Japanese adaptions to science as well as Orientalist narratives about it and the current discourse around the Dalai Lama and his role in Buddhist modernism. Some has said Lopez does not let science speak for itself and capitalizes it as if it is an equal discourse on religion, but it appears to me that Lopez is pointing out that concepts of science being applied to Buddhism are not "science" as practiced at the moment and more science as abstraction divorced from practice. Strongly recommended.

Lopez does a solid job of backgrounding the century-plus of dialogue between Buddhists attempting to put their best foot forward to the West, along with some Western acolytes, and purveyors of Western science. (That said, other books cover this part of Lopez's acreage in more detail.)

From the historic overview, Lopez then looks at some specific Buddhist issues, such as meditation, or the idea of whether we can talk about a "science of Buddhism."

He does a good job of presenting Buddhist beliefs and texts in all of this, and explaining where the Buddhist approach comes from.

That said, contrary to claims that he is so academic that, like a Bart Ehrman, he in no way acts as an apologist for Buddhism, he indirectly does exactly that. And, that's where this book gets disappointing.

The dialogue or discourse Lopez presents is actually more of a monologue. Even when science gets to speak for itself, in the last and shortest chapter, on meditation. And, this is part of the book's disappointment.

Reading reviews on this site, I was hoping for more critical analysis of Buddhism's claims to be scientific, such as the Dalai Lama claiming Buddhism and science are totally compatible even as he holds onto beliefs in karma, reincarnation and other matters metaphysical and says he will never surrender those belies. Sure, Lopez tells us this is what the Dalai Lama has said, but, that's it.

Also, I do NOT like the consistent capitalization of the word "Science." To me, it seems like Lopez is implying it is itself a religion.

So, this is a very good book about how Buddhism does -- or, even more, about how Buddhism **wants to** -- interact with science. Except briefly in the meditation chapter, we are given little comment on the other side of the discourse.

Buddhism and Science should be on every Buddhist's reading list, especially those who quote the Kalama Sutta.

The book is not about experiments and doctrinal categories of metaphysics, but the history of Buddhism as it intersects the West, transmuting into a "rational" religion, sometimes not even a religion at all but a philosophy, a method of inquiry into the natural laws of the universe. A scientific religion.

Even if you know very little about Buddhism, you may have seen a paraphrase of the Buddha's words from the Kalama Sutta printed on a t-shirt, or posted on a friend's webpage. I was presented with a copy screened on a refrigerator magnet.

[Believe nothing just because a wise person said it. Believe nothing just because everyone else does. Believe nothing just because it is said in ancient books. Believe nothing just because it is said to be of divine origin. Believe only what you yourself test and judge to be true.]

This is an example of what Donald Lopez might call Victorian Buddhism, the religion as presented to the world by 19th century European Sanskrit scholars. Previously what was known of Buddhism amounted to scattered fragments, stories brought back by traders and adventurers from the lands east of India, tales of gods and religious practices that when compared began to look suspiciously similar. Using manuscripts sent back from British India and Nepal, philologists provided the first glimpse of the foundational teachings of Buddhism.

What these scholars thought they found was something unique, a religion that conformed to their own prejudices, a religion confirming the intellect over the emotions, empiricism over revelation, reason over superstition. They uncovered a Buddhism that had no major conflicts with the discoveries of science, which could in fact be seen as predicting those discoveries, an infinite atomistic universe operating on natural laws and requiring no first agent.

In many Asian countries the view was quite different. Modernizers saw Buddhism as a drag on development, a superstitious anachronism whose continued existence could be traced to clerical corruption and low levels of public education. A few forward thinking clergymen, though, saw in this westernized version of Buddhism a means of protecting traditional culture, of inoculating against the spread of Christianity and westernization. If Buddhism were more rational and scientific than Christianity, there would not only be no need to change or get rid of the old religion, Buddhism could be used as a tool to mobilize the masses for national development. At the 1893 Chicago World's Parliament of Religions, the Japanese and Sri Lankan delegates expounded to their mostly western audience on the rational, scientific aspects of Buddhism, feeding back to the west it's European version of Buddhism.

In the years since, as our ideas of science and the universe have changed, proponents of scientific Buddhism have kept pace, finding parallels in psychology, cognitive science, and quantum physics. Is it possible, Lopez asks, that an Iron Age mendicant was able to foresee such discoveries? Or is it perhaps that we are witnessing the latest manifestation of Buddhist adaptation? As it accommodated Taoism and Confucianism in China, as with Bon in Tibet, and Shintoism in Japan, Buddhism is perhaps now undergoing an adaptation to the ethics and ethos of scientific materialism.

If so, what do we stand to loose in the process?

Lopez hints at this with a closing quote from the Buddha, one that runs counter to the idea propounded by modern interpreters of the Kalama Sutta. Perhaps the one thing missing from Lopez' book is a chapter on this very topic, an essay on the Buddhism being left behind. This is otherwise one of the most interesting and challenging books on Buddhism that I have yet come across. Readers might like to supplement the historical details with another excellent volume, Charles Allen's The Buddha and the Sahibs, the story of the European archeological discovery of Buddhism.

[Sariputta ... should anyone say of me: 'The recluse Gotama does not have any superhuman states, any distinction in knowledge and vision worthy of the noble ones. The recluse Gotama teaches a Dhamma [merely] hammered out by reasoning, following his own line of inquiry as it occurs to him' - unless he abandons that assertion and that state of mind and relinquishes that view, then as [surely as if he had been] carried off and put there he will wind up in hell. - Mahasihanada Sutta (The Greater Discourse on the Lion's Roar), MN12]

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