Buddhism & science

This problem treats of the question as to the arising of the world in general and life in particular—thus, has its foundation in the methodical play against one another of two absurdities; as indeed follows from the possibility of reversing the positions. If the materialist asks, “How has life come into the world?” the idealist equally inquires, “How has the world entered into life, i.e. into me, into my consciousness?” From the outset, it is obvious that here both are provided with unlimited scope for the performance of mental feats worthy to rank on equal terms with the derring-do of a “raging Roland.” And as the Duke of Florence asked of the worthy Ariosto, “Messer Ludovico, where ever did you learn all those tricks?” so here, in similar wise, one might ask, “Master of the lecture-room, master of the crucible and the retort, where ever did you learn all those tricks?”

For biologist and physicist the train of reasoning here runs as follows:—

“Life is present! Proof: I, the thinker!” The first rule of play in the cosmic game, according to scientific principles, is: “God” does not count—just as in a vaulting contest the stick does not count. This granted, the whole problem embodies itself in these two possibilities:—

(a) Has life arisen through spontaneous generation? (b) Has it descended hither from beginninglessness?

The question of spontaneous generation has undergone manifold vicissitudes. Aristotle made use of spontaneous generation with perfect ingenuousness, not to say unstinted lavishness. The more, however, continued experiment taught that where one had hitherto imagined one beheld the arising of new life, serious mistakes had been made—that germs of life had found their way into the medium, all the more did men turn away from the idea of a generatio spontanea. The experiments of Pasteur seemed to give the decisive blow. Wherever life is present, life is presupposed.

To-day men give their opinion on the subject of the possibility of spontaneous generation with that cautious reserve which has been learnt from the calculation of probabilities.

A modern physiologist expresses himself as follows:—

“The question as to whether out of dead substance a living cell can be produced, whether so-called spontaneous generation is a possibility, does not in the present condition of our knowledge permit of being answered in a decided negative. We are bound to admit the possibility, even though all experiments yield a negative result.”⁠[33]

The necessity which, despite all negative results, compels one to cling to the possibility of spontaneous generation, is the truly heroic violence with which biology identifies “life” and “cell.”

The entire sum of biological wisdom comes to a point in the saying, Omnis cellula e cellula—against which as little objection is to be urged as against the statement of the fact that every living being arises from another living being.

At this point, however, geology steps in and plays the spoil-sport by producing indubitable proofs of the one-time molten condition of our globe, thereby setting an insurmountable limit to “life” in the biological acceptation of the word.

This fact served as spur to all sorts of attempts at imparting a more scientific character to the belief in spontaneous generation.

In these endeavours the main support received came from organic chemistry.

The first achievement on the road to the chemical “synthesis” of life was Wöhler’s demonstration of artificial urea. But this event has been so far outstripped that to-day one only looks back at it in order to bring visibly before the eye the progress that has been made in a comparatively short space of time. To-day one is already beginning to talk of the possibility of producing living albumen.

The following passage from Huxley’s On our knowledge of the causes of the phenomena of organic nature may serve as a sample of the “scientific circumspection” with which one sets to work upon this most difficult of tasks also.

After laying it down that there are two possible proofs of the origin of life: first, the historical one as found in geology; and second, that derived from experiment—of which the former is unsatisfactory and the latter not carried out, the writer proceeds:—

“To enable us to say that we know anything about the experimental origination of organization and life, the investigator ought to be able to take inorganic matters, such as carbonic acid, ammonia, water, and salines, in any sort of inorganic combination, and be able to build them up into protein matter, and then that protein matter ought to begin to live in an organic form. That nobody has done as yet, and I suspect it will be a long while before anybody does do it. But the thing is by no means so impossible as it looks; for the researches of modern chemistry have shown us—I won’t say the road towards it, but, if I may so say, they have shown the finger-post pointing to the road that may lead to it.”

O agnus dei! lend me but a little of thy lamb’s patience, that so I may be able to smile at this tangle of profound absurdities, this docta ignorantia. And this they call weighing a difficult problem with “scientific circumspection”! It is not difficult, God wot, to be circumspect when it is the purely imaginary that is in question. For the famous Monsieur “Life” of whose organization and structure mention is made above has precisely as much actuality as that Mr. Table d’Hôte for whom the farmer from the country inquired. Such a being is the most effective of subjects for science, for it admits of being solved without remainder in learnedness. Quousque tandem professores!

No physicist would be so irrational as to say, “I see the wind—in the swaying bough of a tree and so forth; I hear, smell, feel, measure it; but where now is he—this Mr. Wind himself?” The biologist, however, manages to say, “I see, hear, smell, taste, touch, think life; but where now is that unknown god ‘Life’ himself?” Once for all, Man, know that thy seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, thinking—even were they biological tricks such as thine—are life itself; other life there is not. To seek to have it issue like some homunculus from the retort or the incubator—this oughtest thou rather to leave to the other poets—the genuine ones!

It is far from my intention to embark upon polemics; but it is well-nigh impossible to pass anywhere near folly when it masquerades in the black of the most profound seriousness and resist the temptation to give it a good push, so that the public, by the fluttering of the rags, may recognize the hollow scarecrow. But after all, there is some sense in everything, even if this “sense” is oftentimes “non-sense!”

This is one of the attempts made to bring life—as “cell”—and the facts of geology into harmony. The other runs as follows:—

Force and matter are imperishable: it is only the form that changes. The world of astronomy displays this beginninglessness in the form of the ceaseless mutation of the heavenly bodies. Accordingly, organic life also must be beginningless, not as a sort of mystic primeval slime but as a something formed, as a cell or group of cells. Consequently it is only a question of explaining how life could find its way over from a worn-out world into a youthful one just solidifying from the molten state.

This theory presents a good example of how similarity of sound may conceal complete difference in sense.

Like the Buddha, this theory, too, teaches the beginninglessness of organized life. But whilst with the Buddha there is an actual new arising as flames arise new, by an energy encountering the material, “striking in,” here there is only an inept pushing back of the facts perceptible to sense; in which latter procedure meteorites are made to serve as a sort of cosmic jam-jar, the precious stuff “life,” in a conserved condition, so to speak, being passed over therein from one world to another.

A variation of this problem is the question as to whether “life” has arisen on the earth in one single place, or in several places simultaneously.

In the Buddha-thought all such questions are reduced to impotence.

The Buddha teaches:—

There are countless worlds; and as here on our world things may be destroyed by fire or water, or otherwise, so also with the worlds in space.

But as the disintegration of anything here on the Earth only means its reintegration anew in some other place, so also is it with the worlds. Nothing is destroyed, nothing perishes: it is only that a change takes place in the centres of tension—nothing more. An Earth, a Sun, a Jupiter, a Sirius, and so forth, as identities, as corporealities complete in themselves—these as little exist as there exist identities as personalities. Even as here, so also in the infinitudes of space, there are condensations having their foundation in definite energical tensions which, for the sake of easier comprehension and because the process runs its course at a rate of speed sufficiently low, we designate by the names of Earth, Sun, Jupiter Sirius, and so forth. Like every I-process that presents itself to my senses, they possess significance only as symptoms; they are nothing but forms in which certain definite energies make themselves manifest.

In the Buddha’s system there are no such things as worlds in themselves. A world is nothing but the summation of the single processes of which it is made up, just as a banquet is nothing but the summation of the guests and the ingredients of the feast. As birds flock together because there is something present that attracts them in large numbers; as crows gather round a mango-stone; as a saline solution from the centre of shock outwards proceeds to crystallize; so does this unitary experience, whether it manifest itself in organic or non-organic shape, conglobate into cosmic groups, burst into systems of worlds. Here one must hold to it firm and fast that “non-organic” is not the converse of “organic,” but is simply the not organic, and an indication that energies are here concerned upon which we ourselves even by analogy can say nothing.⁠[34] For the rest, however, all is the same—all is the self-interweaving of energy and material—all is Sankhāra. Whether the processes are of such a nature as in the course of their development to permit of flowering forth into consciousness or whether they are not—this makes no essential difference. When the Buddha says: “The arising of the world will I teach you,” and then proceeds with his sequence of thought: “Where the eye and forms are, there arises visual consciousness; the conjunction of the three results is contact; contact yields feeling,” and so on; or when he says: “The world is where the six senses are”—this is not meant in the philosophical idealistic sense. There is no arising of the world other than that experienced at every moment as a self-interweaving of energy and material in me, in every being, in every process in the world. The summation of this individual experience—that is the world. Other world there is not. This moment that now says “I”—this is the arising of the world, and never and nowhere in all the universe does it take place otherwise. As eater, as self-nourisher, I am world-maker in the strictest sense of the word. In this actual world nothing new arises. Centres of tension, tendencies, shift about hither and thither, heave up and down like mist-wreaths over the dark depths of unfathomable abysses—a beginningless coming together, a beginningless falling asunder, in which nothing persists save the never-sated thirst, the ever-sleepless lust for food. It is the terrible game “law” that here is played. Worlds, the arena; fates, the players; and the prize—nothing!

In connection with such a beginningless integration and disintegration, to speak of a condition of greater or lesser development is the notion of a child. As little as the clenched fist is more developed than the five fingers outspread, just as little is a world in space peopled with thinking, living beings more developed than one spread out in masses of nebula; all things are only phases in a beginningless proceeding here presenting itself to me symptomatically, but of which I obtain a direct comprehension in consciousness. To ask whether suns and Milky Ways are without beginning is meaningless; for they are positively nothing else but the expression of the hither and thither movement of energies; but that which I now experience in consciousness, that is—rightly considered—beginninglessness itself; and the self-integration and self-disintegration of worlds is nothing but the functional concomitant phenomenon of the beginninglessness of the I.

If now such a Lokadhātu (world-system) goes to decay, this, conformable to its nature, is nothing but a summation of single dyings. The Kamma of the single things takes fresh hold in the universe there where it can take hold—and therefore must take hold. Actual energies take hold immediately, independent of space and time. There is no need to trace their course from meteorites and cosmic nebulæ, from one heavenly body to another, somewhat as one might trace a letter from its place of postage to its destination; but even as our thoughts are immediate, independent of time and space, as our loves are able to “lay hold” in the remotest ends of the earth, so do the Kammas lay hold immediately, independent of time and space, in the most distant abysses of infinitude, even to where no light-year any more can measure—lay hold there, whither, in virtue of their propensities, their tendencies, they reach out.

From the commanding position of such a conception it follows that Buddhist cosmogony does not fit in with our crude astronomical ideas. As it is not always the case that “birds of a feather flock together”—there are solitary denizens of air, noble creatures that wing their way through the ether alone—so Buddhist cosmogony makes mention of solitary beings who segregate themselves at the initial beginnings of a new world.

When, after the break-up of a system of worlds, here and there worlds again begin to form, to sprout; when again here and there energies take hold even because they can take hold, then these beings appear as pure creatures of light, self-luminous, wheeling through boundless space, through boundless epochs of time, compact all of light, compact all of bliss, yet even as we, belonging to the world, differing only in the circumstances and antecedent conditions of their “taking hold.”

One reads of this in the colossal thought-symphony of the Brahmajāla Sutta of the Dīgha Nikāya. It is thus that a spirit speaks who has burst through the barriers of self-imposed conceptions and unimpeded launches out into the infinitudes where thought finds never a bound save that itself enjoins, nor any halt save that it sets itself.

In conclusion I recapitulate:—

Like all the other problems of science, this too is of a dialectical nature. One is operating with one identity “world” and another identity “life,” and afterwards strives in vain to bring the two into comprehensible association. In the simple entertaining of such ideas one has cut oneself off from every possibility of a solution. There is no identity “world,” no identity “life.” There are nothing but self-sustaining, i.e. beginningless processes which here and there group themselves into systems of worlds. If one has comprehended the whole world as Sankhāra, there is no cosmological problem. World and life are there as the beginningless unity of “processioning.”

As a working hypothesis, what service is here rendered by the Buddha-thought?

The Buddha-thought explains how it comes to seem as if life had a first beginning upon a world. For as a matter of fact there is such a first beginning, and it permits of being proven historically and geologically. All this is beyond possibility of dispute: it is only the interpretation that is mistaken. This first beginning is such, much in the same way that the spring welling from the rock is the first beginning of the river. It is the first beginning only where one objectifies the river as an identity. If science seeks to explain the first beginning of life by spontaneous generation, she resembles a man who should derive the spring from the rock itself. If she seeks to derive the first beginning of life from other worlds, she then is like a man who would fain derive the spring as such, as an abstract objectified something, from one or another of various localities. Only in the Buddha-thought is the first beginning of life conceived of in a genuinely cosmogonical manner, as form of the play of world-events. It is no migration of duly shaped and formed “spring”-elements, which out of atmospherical vapour and the waters of the sea fashion a spring, but a self-displacement of centres of energy. In the selfsame way it is no migration of life-elements hither out of other worlds, but a self-displacement of centres of energy, which makes it that life “sprouts” anew upon a world. Here, to speak about a first beginning as such, and consequently of a condition of greater or lesser development, has about as much meaning as if one should speak of a condition of greater or lesser development in the case of the waters of the ocean, the vapour of the atmosphere, the fountain on the hill. What is true with reference to science’s problem of heredity is even more true of her cosmological problem: it is wholly Hebraic.