Buddhism & science : a guide for the perplexed

280 Pages·2008·1.768 MB·English

by  Donald S. Lopez Jr

Buddhism science
&
BUDDHISM AND MODERNITY
A series edited by Donald S. Lopez Jr.
RECENT BOOKS IN THE SERIES
Critical Terms for the Study of Buddhism, edited by
Donald S. Lopez Jr. (2005)
The Madman’s Middle Way: Reflections on Reality of the Tibetan
Monk Gendun Chopel, by Donald S. Lopez Jr. (2006)
The Holy Land Reborn: Pilgrimage and the Tibetan Reinvention
of Buddhist India, by Toni Huber (2008)
Buddhism science
&
A Guide for the Perplexed
DONAlD S. lOpEz jR.
the university of chicago press
Chicago and London
DONAlD S. lOpEz jR. is the Arthur E. Link Distinguished University
Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies in the Department of Asian
Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan. He is the author or
editor of a number of books, including The Madman’s Middle Way: Reflections
on Reality of the Tibetan Monk Gendun Chopel; Prisoners of Shangri-La:
Tibetan Buddhism and the West; Critical Terms for the Study of Buddhism; and
Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism under Colonialism.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2008 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2008
Printed in the United States of America
17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 1 2 3 4 5
isbn-13: 978-0-226-49312-1 (cloth)
isbn-10: 0-226-49312-1 (cloth)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lopez, Donald S., 1952–
Buddhism and science : a guide for the perplexed / Donald S. Lopez.
p. cm. — (Buddhism and modernity)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-226-49312-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-226-49312-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Buddhism and science.
I. Title.
BQ4570.S3L67 2008
294.3'36509—dc22
2008012963
¥
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
the American National Standard for Information Sciences—
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi Z39.48-1992.
In Memory of My Father
DonalD S. lopez
1923–2008
How easily these old worships of Moses, of Zoroaster, of
Menu, of Socrates, domesticate themselves in the mind.
I cannot find any antiquity in them. They are mine as
much as theirs. RAlpH WAlDO EMERSON, 1841
ConTenTS
  •  ix
Preface
  •  i
Introduction
1 First There Is a Mountain  •  39
2 Buddhism and the Science of Race  •  73
3 Two Tibetans  •  105
4 The Science of Buddhism  •  153
5 The Meaning of Meditation  •  197
  •  211
Conclusion: Measuring the Aura
  •  219
Notes
  •  255
Index

pReFaCe
In the winter of 1870–71, Ernst Johann Eitel (1838–1908), a member of
the London Missionary Society, delivered a series of lectures on Bud-
dhism at the Union Church in Hong Kong. Eitel was one of the great
missionary-scholars of the Victorian period, an accomplished sinologist
who also read Sanskrit. His ultimate goal was to demonstrate the falsity
of Buddhism. Yet in his third lecture, he enumerated some of the ways in
which Buddhism had anticipated science:
Though no Buddhist ever attained to the clearer insight and mathemati-
cal analysis of a Copernicus, Newton, Laplace or Herschel, it must be
acknowledged that Buddhism fore-stalled in several instances the most
splendid discoveries of modern astronomy. Teaching the origin of each
world to have taken place out of a cloud, the Buddhists anticipated 2,000
years ago Herschel’s nebular hypothesis. And when those very patches
of cloudy light or diffused nebulosities which Herschel believed to be
“diffused matter hastening to a world birth” dissolved themselves before
the monster telescope of Lord Rosse into as many assemblages of suns,
into thousands of other world-systems dispersed through the wilds of
boundless space, modern astronomy was but verifying the more ancient