One of the most striking results of the development of science is the change in our understanding of the structure of the world in the light of new discoveries. For example, physics is still trying to get used to the new scientific paradigm that arose at the beginning of the 20th century. as a result of the emergence of the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. Scientists and philosophers are now forced to constantly deal with two conflicting models of reality – the classical Newtonian model, which assumes the mechanistic and complete predictability of all events in the Universe, and the relativism of quantum mechanics, which introduces the principle of uncertainty into the understanding of the world. The application of this second model to understanding the everyday reality around us has not yet been fully clarified.
My own picture of the world is based on the philosophy and teachings of Buddhism, which arose in the intellectual environment of Ancient India. I was introduced to Indian philosophy at a very early age. My teacher at that time was the regent of Tibet, Tadrag Rinpoche, and also Ling Rinpoche. Tadrag Rinpoche was then already quite an old man, respected by everyone and very stern. The much younger Ling Rinpoche was very gentle in character, which was evident in his words and actions, deeply educated and taciturn (at least during my childhood). I remember being in awe of both mentors. I had two assistants in philosophy with whom I had to conduct debates on the subjects I studied. These included Trijang Rinpoche and the famous Mongolian scholar monk Ngodrub Tsoknyi. After the death of Tadrag Rinpoche, Ling Rinpoche became my senior teacher, and Trijang Rinpoche took the place of the junior teacher.
Both of these masters remained my teachers until the end of my formal training, and from both of them I continuously received teachings from various lineages of Tibetan Buddhism. They were very friendly, but their characters were completely different. Ling Rinpoche had a stocky, strong figure and a completely smooth bald head; when he laughed, his whole body shook. Outwardly, he did not at all look like an expert in philosophy. Trijang Rinpoche, on the contrary, was a tall and thin man, with very refined and courteous manners and a thin, sharply defined nose, rather uncharacteristically for a Tibetan. He was very kind, had a deep voice and recited ritual texts very melodiously. I remember Ling Rinpoche as a brilliant philosopher with keen logic and phenomenal memory, and Trijang Rinpoche as one of the most remarkable poets of his time, with a magnificent sense of art and literature. In my temperament and innate inclinations, I am probably closer to Ling Rinpoche than to any of my other mentors. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Ling Rinpoche had the greatest influence on me.
When I began to study the philosophical systems of the various schools of ancient India, I was not able to relate them in any way to my own personal experience. For example, the Sankhya theory of causation considers the result to be a manifestation of what already exists within the cause; The Vaisesika theory of universals states that the set constituting any class of objects has a constant ideal common independent of its parts. There are arguments from Indian theistic schools that prove the existence of a Creator, and Buddhist counter-arguments that substantiate the opposite point of view. In addition to all this, I had to memorize many complex differences in the viewpoints of the various philosophical schools of Buddhism. These differences were too far removed from the daily life of a ten-year-old boy, whose interests tended more to disassemble and reassemble watches, tinker with cars, or look at photographs of World War II scenes in Life magazine. When Babu Tashi was dismantling and cleaning the generator, I always tried to be next to him. I enjoyed watching this process so much that at such moments I often forgot not only about my lessons, but also about food. And when my mentors came to remind me about my studies, my thoughts still returned to the generator and its many parts.
But by my sixteenth birthday everything had changed. Events began to develop with rapid speed. When the Chinese army approached the borders of Tibet in the summer of 1950, Regent Tadrag Rinpoche decided that the time had come to make me the full-fledged leader of the country. Probably, it was precisely this forced separation from the period of adolescence in view of the frightening proximity of the coming crisis that turned my mind to the need to obtain an education. Be that as it may, from the age of sixteen my attitude towards the study of Buddhist philosophy, psychology and spirituality became qualitatively different. Not only did I begin to make a sincere effort to study these subjects, but I was also able to relate many of the points I was learning to my life and the events around me.
I devoted myself ever more diligently to study, reflection and meditative absorption according to the theory and practice of Buddhism, and meanwhile the relations of the Tibetans with the Chinese forces that invaded the country became increasingly tense. Attempts were made to reach some kind of at least relatively acceptable political agreement. Finally, I completed my formal training and passed the Geshe exam in the holy capital of Tibet, Lhasa, in the presence of several thousand monks. The memory of this event, which marked the pinnacle of my academic studies, still fills me with a sense of joy and satisfaction. But soon after, the political crisis that erupted in Central Tibet forced me to flee my home country to India and begin the life of a disenfranchised refugee. This is my official status today. But having lost citizenship in my own country, I gained it in a broader sense and now I can rightfully say about myself that I am a citizen of the world.
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One of the most important philosophical insights of Buddhism is what is known as the doctrine of emptiness. At its core is a profound understanding of the fact that there is a fundamental difference between the way we perceive the world, including our own existence in it, and the way things actually exist. In our everyday experience we tend to treat the world and ourselves as if these entities constituted a self-contained, definable, discrete and permanent reality. For example, when we look at our self-image, we find that we tend to believe that there is some kind of core of our being that characterizes our individuality and self-identity as a separate ego, independent of the physical and mental elements that make us up. The philosophy of emptiness shows that such a concept is not only a fundamental delusion, but also becomes the basis of attachments, predilections and numerous prejudices.
The theory of emptiness asserts the inconsistency of any belief in objective reality based on the idea of the existence of independent objects endowed with their own properties. All objects and events, be they material or speculative entities, or even such abstract ideas as time, do not have an objective self-existence. The assumption of the existence of such an independent, inherent existence by their own nature has as a consequence the conclusion that things and events are completely complete in themselves, and therefore completely self-sufficient. From this, in turn, it follows that all phenomena are not able to interact with each other and influence each other. But we know that there are causes and effects: we turn the key in the ignition – a spark appears, gasoline ignites in the engine cylinders and the engine starts working. In a world of self-sufficient objects, complete in themselves, this could never happen. I wouldn’t be able to write with pen on paper, and you wouldn’t be able to read the words on this page. So, since we interact and influence each other, we must recognize that we are not independent, although we ourselves may think otherwise.
In fact, the idea of independent self-existence is incompatible with the idea of causality primarily because causality implies uncertainty and dependence, whereas that which exists independently must be unchanging and closed in itself. All the contents of the world are interacting objects that do not have any unchanging essence and are in the process of continuous change. Things and events are “empty” precisely in the sense of the absence of this unchangeable essence inherent in them by their own nature, or absolute being, the presence of which would make them independent. This fundamental truth about how all things in the world actually exist is called in the Buddhist scriptures the truth of emptiness, called shunya in Sanskrit.
In our everyday worldview, we treat things and events as if they had an unchanging essence of their own. We tend to believe that the world really consists of things and events, each of which is itself a separate, independent reality, and that these things, with their original self-identity and independence, interact with each other. We believe that in a real sense, a real seed produces an equally real shoot over a real period of time and in an absolutely real place. We believe that each of these elements—seed, sprout, time, place, process of growth—has a strong ontological status in its own right. This idea of the world as consisting of individual objects with their inherent properties is then reinforced by the means of our language, built on subjects and predicates, which are formed using nouns, adjectives, verbs and other parts of speech. But everything is made up of parts, starting with our own personality, which combines body and mind. Further, the very definition of things depends on many factors, such as the name given to them, their functions and our ideas about them.
The theory of emptiness in Buddhism is based on ancient Buddhist texts, compiled, according to legend, from the speeches of the Buddha himself, but it was first systematically expounded by the great Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna (2nd century AD). Little is known about the life of Nagarjuna: we know that he came from southern India and was the second most important propagator of Buddhism in that country after the Buddha. Historians credit him with founding the Middle Way school of Mahayana Buddhism, which remains the leading school in Tibetan Buddhism to this day. His seminal philosophical work, the Root Verses on the Middleness, continues to be memorized, studied, and debated during classical Tibetan monastic education.
I spent a lot of time studying the provisions of this text in detail, discussing them with my teachers and colleagues. In the 1960s, during my first decade in exile in India, I was able to immerse myself deeply and in a very personal way in the philosophy of emptiness. Unlike today, my life back then was much freer and I had relatively few responsibilities. I hadn’t started traveling yet, but now traveling around the world takes up a significant part of my time. During this wonderful decade, I had the good fortune to spend many hours with my mentors, who were both great experts in the philosophy of emptiness and masters in meditating on emptiness.
I also received teachings from a simple but very gifted Tibetan scholar named Nyima Gyaltsen, better known as Gen Nyima, who had the rare gift of expressing profound philosophical truths in the simplest words. He was slightly bald and wore huge round glasses with tinted lenses. He had a slight tic in his right eye, causing him to blink frequently. But his ability to concentrate, especially when, after a series of discussions, he mentally immersed himself in the issue at hand, was truly amazing. Being in this state, he completely forgot about his surroundings. And since the philosophy of emptiness was Gen Nyima’s specialty, the hours spent with him were extremely useful for me.
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One of the most striking and exciting consequences of the successes of modern physics is the change in everyday ideas about the nature of reality as a result of elucidating the peculiarities of the interaction of microparticles that obey the laws of quantum mechanics. The fact that light can be viewed as both a stream of particles and a wave process, the uncertainty principle that we cannot calculate both the coordinates and momentum of an electron at the same time, and the principle of quantum superposition* all suggest a completely different understanding of the device world, different from that accepted in classical physics, in which all observable objects interact in a completely specific and predictable way. For example, in Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment, in which a cat is placed in a closed box with a radioactive source that has a 50% chance of decaying and releasing a poisonous toxin, we are forced to accept that until the experimenter opens the lid of the box to see the result, the cat is both alive and dead, which clearly violates the logical law of excluded middle.
From the point of view of Mahayana Buddhism, largely built on the philosophy of Nagarjuna, there is an undoubted correspondence between the ideas of emptiness and the views of modern physics. If, at the quantum level of consideration, matter turns out to be not at all as dense and definite as it seems to us during ordinary observation, then, in my opinion, science has come quite close to the Buddhist meditative comprehension of emptiness and interdependence. Once at a conference in New Delhi, I listened to a talk by the Indian physicist Raja Ramanan, in which he drew parallels between the philosophy of Nagarjuna and quantum mechanics. As a result of many years of conversations with my scientific friends, I came to the conclusion that the great ideological revolution in the field of physics goes back to the discoveries of Copernicus, namely, to his understanding that reality is not as it appears to us in our perception. By subjecting the world to careful analysis – be it a scientific experiment, a philosophical analysis based on the Buddhist philosophy of emptiness, or contemplative methods of meditative absorption – we discover that the objects under study are much more subtle than our ordinary perception, and often the results of such examination directly contradict everything what we know about the world from our everyday experience.
One might ask, what else, besides a not entirely accurate reflection of reality, is bad about belief in the independent existence of things in the world? According to Nagarjuna, such a belief has very serious negative consequences. Nagarjuna shows that it is the belief in the independent, inherent existence of things themselves that forms the basis for egoism in our attitude both to the world and to the living beings around us. Believing that certain things are inherently attractive, we develop passionate attachments towards them; On the contrary, we consider other things disgusting, and rejection arises in us. In other words, Nagarjuna shows that belief in the independent existence of things leads to the emergence of harmful affects, which, in turn, give rise to a series of destructive actions, which ultimately results in suffering. Thus, according to Nagarjuna, the theory of emptiness is not limited to just an intellectual understanding of reality, but has deep application on the psychological and moral levels.
I once asked my friend the physicist David Bohm, what, from the point of view of modern science, is the danger of believing in the independent existence of things, besides the incorrect interpretation of facts? His answer was impressive. Bohm said that if we consider the various ideologies that lead to division between people, such as racism, extreme nationalism or the Marxist theory of class struggle, we see that the key factor in their emergence is the tendency to see things as inherently separate and unrelated yourself. From such a false approach arises the belief that each of these entities, seen as separate, exists independently and has its own existence. In this answer, based on his understanding of quantum physics, Bohm points out the same disastrous consequences of believing in the intrinsic existence of things as
Nagarjuna, who wrote his works about two thousand years ago. Of course, strictly speaking, science does not concern moral issues and does not deal with value categories, but nevertheless, being one of the types of human activity, it remains associated with the fundamental problems of human well-being. Therefore, there is nothing surprising in Bohm’s answer. I would like as many scientists as possible to have a similar understanding of the relationship between the basic principles of science and humanism.
As I understand it, the modern crisis of the scientific worldview arose at the beginning of the 20th century. The majestic edifice of classical physics, built by Isaac Newton, James Maxwell and many other scientists, which provided such a seemingly flawless and common sense explanation of all surrounding reality, was shaken by the discovery of the principle of relativity and the strange behavior of matter at the subatomic level observed in quantum mechanics . As Karl von Weizsäcker once explained to me, classical physics is based on a mechanistic picture of the world, according to which certain universal physical laws, including gravity and mechanics, completely predetermine all interactions that occur. In this model, there are four objectively real categories: body, force, space and time, and a strict division is made between the cognizable object and the cognizing subject. But relativism and quantum physics, according to von Weizsäcker, imply the abolition of the principle of strict separation of subject and object, and with it our confidence in the possibility of complete objectification of empirical data. Meanwhile, and von Weizsäcker considers this extremely important, all the concepts that allow us to describe quantum mechanical interactions observed in experiments confirming a new picture of reality are drawn from the very classical physics that is refuted by this quantum theory. But, despite the presence of such a problem, according to Weizsäcker, scientific research should strive to establish the interconnection of natural processes, as well as move towards an understanding of reality, science and the place of humanity in the world, which is most consistent with the latest achievements of scientific knowledge.
In the light of such scientific discoveries, I believe that Buddhism should also recognize its own early atomistic theory as obsolete, no matter how authoritative the names of its founders may be for the Buddhist tradition. For example, according to the early and still not subject to significant revision of Buddhist ideas about the structure of atoms, it is argued that all matter is formed by a collection of eight atomic substances: earth, water, fire and air, that is, the four primary elements, as well as form, smell, taste and tactility, which are so-called derivative substances. The element “earth” has the property of stability, “water” has the property of binding, “fire” has the property of spreading, and “air” has the property of mobility. The atom, according to this theory, is a compound of these eight substances; Based on the accumulation of such composite atoms, the existence of macro-objects in the visible world is explained. According to Vaibhashika, one of the early schools of Buddhism, such individual atomistic substances are the smallest constituent parts of matter, while themselves being indivisible, and therefore having no parts. Vaibhashika theorists argued that when such clusters of atoms form an object, each individual atom is not in contact with the others. Thanks to the action of the element “air” and other forces, the particles form a system, without sticking together, but also without being scattered into infinity.
Of course, the development of such theories took place in the context of a struggle with the views of other philosophical schools of India, especially the Nyaya and Vaisheshika. If we study the philosophical works of India since ancient times, we will see a highly developed culture of debate, dialogue and argument between the followers of different schools and systems. In all the classical schools of thought in India, such as Buddhism, Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Mimamsa, Samkhya and Advaita Vedanta, there was a deep interest in the methods of analytical consideration. From the earliest period of the spread of Buddhism to medieval Tibet, and perhaps even to the present day, these intense debates between different schools of thought have been the main instrument for the development of knowledge and the renewal of philosophical concepts.
The earliest sources of the atomistic theory of the Vaibhasikas are probably Dharmasri’s Essence of Supreme Knowledge (Abhidharma-hrdaya-shastra) and the famous Great Interpretation (Mahavibhasha). Modern scholars date the first of these works to the period of the 2nd century. BC. – 1st century AD This work has never been translated into Tibetan, but its Chinese translation is known, which was probably completed in the 3rd century. AD This work represents an extensive systematization of the key tenets of early Buddhist philosophy, and many of the ideas it contains must have existed in Buddhist usage before it was written. In contrast, the treatise The Great Interpretation, dating from the 1st to 3rd centuries. AD, is a composite text. It establishes doctrinal principles common to all orthodox schools of Buddhism, and contains answers to the main objections to the main doctrines, providing them with the necessary basis of rational philosophy. Despite the fact that the provisions contained in this work are close to all schools of Tibetan Buddhism, it itself has never been fully translated into the Tibetan language.
Based on these two texts and especially on the last of them, Vasubandhu, one of the luminaries of the philosophy of Indian Buddhism, wrote at the end of the 4th century. AD your Treasury of supreme knowledge (Abhidharmakosha). In this work, the key points of the Great Interpretation are brought together and further analyzed. In Tibet, Vasubandhu’s work became the basis for the study of early Buddhist philosophy and psychology. Thus, when I was a young monk, I myself had to learn the root text of the Treasury of Vasubandhu by heart.
Regarding the collection of atoms and their interaction with their constituent parts, early Buddhist philosophy developed a number of speculative theories. Interestingly, the Treasury of Higher Knowledge even discusses the physical size of various atoms. Specifically, it says that the smallest indivisible particle is about 1/2400 the size of a “hare atom,” whatever that means. Personally, I have no idea how Vasubandhu came to this conclusion.
But even while accepting basic atomic theory, other Buddhist schools question the indivisibility of atoms. Some of them object to the view that the so-called “derived substances” – form, smell, taste and tactility – are among the basic constituents of matter. And Vasubandhu himself is known for criticizing the idea of the existence of objectively real indivisible atoms. If such independent and indivisible atoms existed, he argues, it would be impossible to explain the process of the emergence of macro-objects in the observable world.
In order to explain how such objects arise, it is first necessary to understand how the simplest atoms are connected to each other into complex composite systems.
If such a collection takes place, as it must, one should imagine a single atom surrounded by six different atoms, one in each of the four cardinal directions, and also above and below. One may ask: Is the part of the central atom that borders the atom to the east also in contact with the atom located to the north? If not, then the central atom must have more than one part, and therefore it is divisible, at least conceptually. After all, the atom in the center has a part that is in contact with the atom located in the eastern direction, but does not touch the atom in the north. If, on the contrary, this eastern part of the atom also comes into contact with the atom located in the northern direction, then nothing prevents it from coming into contact with all the other surrounding atoms. In this case, Vasubandhu reasons, the spatial position of all seven atoms – the central one and the six others – will be the same and they will stick together into a single atom. Based on such a thought experiment, Vasubandhu concludes that it is impossible to explain the existence of objects in the visible world based on ideas about the accumulation of the simplest material particles, such as indivisible atoms.
Personally, I have never been able to understand how qualities such as smell, taste or tactility could be the basic constituents of material objects. I understand how a logically consistent theory of the construction of matter can arise based on the idea of the four primary elements as constituent parts. But in any case, it seems to me that this aspect of the philosophical thought of Buddhism, being essentially a kind of speculative, primitive physics, must now be reconsidered in the light of modern detailed and experimentally confirmed understanding of the basic structure of matter in terms of particles, such as an electron orbiting around atomic nucleus consisting of protons and neutrons. When I encounter the description of subatomic particles in modern physics, such as quarks or leptons, it becomes obvious to me that the atomic theories of early Buddhism, with its concept of the smallest indivisible particles of matter, are at best very crude models. However, I believe that the Buddhist thinkers were on the right track in their basic insight that even the smallest constituent parts of matter should be understood as consisting of parts.
The scientific and philosophical study of the basic components of matter is based on an attempt to find the smallest indivisible unit of matter. This task was posed not only by the philosophers of Ancient India and modern physicists, but also by the atomists of Ancient Greece. It is actually an attempt to determine what the absolute nature of reality is, whatever we call it. Buddhist thinkers use logical reasoning to show that such a search takes us in the wrong direction. At a certain stage in the development of science, scientists believed that the atom of matter they found was the final unit of matter, but experimental physics of the 20th century was able to divide the atom into even smaller particles. But despite the fact that, according to one interpretation of quantum mechanics, we will never be able to discover a finite objectively real indivisible particle, many scientists still believe in the possibility of its discovery.
In the summer of 1998, I visited the laboratory of the Austrian physicist Anton Seilinger at the University of Innsbruck. Anton showed me a tool that allows me to examine a single ionized atom. I tried my best, but I didn’t see anything. Perhaps my karma is not yet mature enough for such a spectacle.
I first met Anton when he came to Dharamsala in 1997 to take part in the Life and Consciousness conference. Outwardly, Anton is the opposite of David Bohm: he is a huge man with a beard and glasses, with a wonderful sense of humor and a roaring laugh. As an experimental physicist, Anton shows a remarkable openness to any possible reformulation of theoretical positions in the light of the latest experimental data. His interest in dialogue with Buddhism lies in comparing the theoretical positions of quantum physics with Buddhist philosophy, since both of these schools of thought, in his opinion, lead to the denial of the concept of an independent objective reality.
Around this time I met the American physicist Arthur Zajonc. Arthur, with his soft voice and piercing gaze, which is especially noticeable when he lingers on a topic, is a gifted speaker, able to achieve clarity in the presentation of even the most complex topics. As a moderator of the conference, Arthur summarized and summarized the arguments as briefly as possible, which was especially important for me personally.
A few years earlier, I had the fortunate opportunity to visit the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen to take part in an informal dialogue. About a couple of days before this visit, during a brief stop in London, David Bohm and his wife had dinner with me at the hotel. When I said that I was going to participate in a discussion about physics and Buddhist philosophy at the Niels Bohr Institute, Bohm kindly wrote me a two-page abstract summarizing Niels Bohr’s philosophical views on the nature of reality. I was very interested to hear David’s explanation of Niels Bohr’s planetary model of the atom in comparison with Rutherford’s model of the atom as a nucleus surrounded by electrons orbiting around it; both models were created in response to a theory of the atomic structure of matter called the “raisin pudding” model.
The “raisin pudding” model was developed in the late 19th century. after Joseph John Thomson’s discovery of the negatively charged electron; It was then suggested that the positive charge, balancing the negative charge of the electron, filled the atom like a pudding, in which the electrons were like raisins. At the beginning of the 20th century. Ernest Rutherford discovered that when gold foil is bombarded with a stream of positively charged alpha particles, most of them penetrate through it, but some bounce back. From this he quite rightly concluded that the positive charge cannot fill the gold atoms like pudding, but must be concentrated in their center; When an alpha particle hits the center of a gold atom, the positive charge of the latter is sufficient to repel it. Based on this observation, Rutherford formulated the orbital theory of atomic structure, according to which negatively charged electrons revolve around a positively charged nucleus, just as the planets of the solar system revolve around the Sun. Niels Bohr later improved Rutherford’s model, thereby laying the foundations of modern quantum mechanics.
During this conversation, Bohm also outlined to me the essence of the dispute between Niels Bohr and Einstein over the interpretation of quantum physics. The essence of the issue came down to Einstein’s denial of the uncertainty principle; At the center of the dispute lay the problem of whether reality at its most basic level is indeterministic, unpredictable, probabilistic. Einstein completely denied this possibility, as reflected in his famous statement “God does not play dice.” This story vividly reminded me of my own Buddhist tradition, in which debate plays a significant role in the formulation and renewal of many philosophical ideas.
Unlike the theorists of early Buddhism, modern physicists can expand the perceptive capacity of the eye to incredible limits through the use of various instruments such as giant telescopes (such as the Hubble Space Telescope) or electron microscopes. The result was the accumulation of previously unimaginable volumes of empirical knowledge about the structure of material objects. In light of these changes, I insisted on the need to teach the fundamentals of modern physics in some monastic educational institutions of Tibetan Buddhism. At the same time, I pointed out that in this way we are not actually introducing any new subject into the curriculum, but are only improving the existing curriculum. And I am very glad that now in some academic monastic educational institutions, professors and senior students of Western universities conduct regular seminars on modern physics. I hope that the result of this process will be the full introduction of modern physics into the curriculum of Tibetan monasteries.
Although I had been aware of the existence of Einstein’s special theory of relativity for quite some time, I received my first explanation of it, along with some philosophical conclusions, again from David Bohm. Since I lack the necessary mathematical background, teaching me the basics of modern physics, and especially such a mysterious thing as the theory of relativity, was not an easy task. When I remember Bohm’s patience, his soft voice and calm demeanor, and his care to ensure that every aspect of the explanation was fully understood, I am filled with gratitude towards the man.
Any person who tries to understand the theory of relativity, even at the most general level, will immediately be faced with the fact that the principles set forth by Einstein contradict our common sense. In his theory, Einstein puts forward two postulates: the constancy of the speed of light and the principle of relativity, according to which all physical laws must be absolutely the same for all observers in motion relative to each other. From these two premises, Einstein completely transformed the scientific understanding of space and time.
His theory contains the well-known formula connecting matter and energy: E = mc 2 (I must say that this is the only scientific formula that I know, which is not surprising, since it is now even written on T-shirts), as well as a number of amazing thought experiments with paradoxical results. Many of them, such as the twin paradox from the special theory of relativity, time dilation or the compression of objects at near-light speeds, have now received experimental confirmation. The twin paradox, in which one brother flies off in a spaceship traveling at nearly the speed of light to a star twenty light years away, and then returns to find his twin brother twenty years older than him. , reminds me of the story of how Asanga was ascended to the heavenly abode of Maitreya Buddha, where he received the five now famous Mahayana texts, all in the time it took to drink a cup of tea. When he returned to Earth, it turned out that fifty years had already passed there.
Fully understanding the twin paradox requires the ability to perform complex mathematical calculations, which is beyond my capabilities. But, as far as I can understand, the main conclusion from Einstein’s theory of relativity is that the concepts of space, time and mass cannot be considered absolute; these categories cannot be considered as independent, permanent and unchanging substances or entities. Space is not an independent three-dimensional entity, and time is not a separate entity either; on the contrary, they coexist in the four-dimensional space-time continuum. In short, Einstein’s theory of special relativity states that while the speed of light is a constant, there is no absolute, exclusive frame of reference in the world, and everything, including space and time, is relative in an absolute sense. This is truly a significant discovery!
Buddhist philosophy is not alien to the idea that time is a relative category. Even at the beginning of the 2nd century. AD The Sautrantika school of philosophy objected to the absoluteness of the concept of time.
Dividing the time process into past, present and future, the Sautrantiks showed the interdependence of all these three categories and insisted on the inconsistency of any ideas about the existence of a truly independent past, present and future. They showed that time should not be considered in the true sense as a real entity independent of phenomena located in time, but that it should be understood as a way of describing the relations between them. Apart from and independently of the impermanent, transient phenomena on the basis of the observation of which we build the concept of time, there is no other real “time”, such as, for example, a huge vessel in which things and events appear and which would exist independently of them and by myself.
These arguments in favor of the relativity of time, later developed by Nagarjuna, relate primarily to the field of philosophy, but it is also important that in the Buddhist philosophical tradition about two thousand years ago there was talk about the relativity of the concept of time. And although I was told that some scientists see Einstein’s four-dimensional space-time precisely as a kind of gigantic, permanently existing vessel containing events and objects, for Buddhist thinkers familiar with Nagarjuna’s argument, the demonstration of Einstein’s principle of relativity, especially carried out through his famous thought experiments , can be very helpful in expanding our understanding of the relative nature of time.
I must admit that my understanding of quantum theory is far from perfect, although I have tried very hard to understand it. True, I was told that one of the greatest theorists in the field of quantum physics, Richard Feynman, wrote: “I can confidently say that no one has a complete understanding of quantum mechanics,” so in my lack of understanding I was at least in good company. But even for a person like me who is unable to follow all the intricate details of mathematical theory – and mathematics is a branch of modern science with which I seem to have no karmic connection at all – it is obvious that we cannot talk about subatomic particles as deterministic, independent entities for which the logical law of the excluded middle is fully satisfied. The elementary constituents of matter and photons (that is, the basic substances of matter and light, respectively) can manifest as particles, or as waves, or as both at the same time. (It is interesting that George Thomson, who received the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the wave properties of the electron, is the son of the same J. J. Thomson, who received the same prize for experimentally confirming that the electron is a particle.) We observe the electron as a particle or as a wave – it depends on our actions as observers, for example, on our choice of equipment and method of measurement.
Although I had long heard about this paradoxical nature of light, I was able to fully grasp the essence of the issue only in 1997, when the experimental physicist Anton Seilinger illustrated it to me in detail. Anton demonstrated how the experimental conditions themselves determine whether an electron will exhibit the properties of a particle or a wave. In Young’s famous experiment, a beam of electrons is passed through an opaque barrier with parallel slits, and the result is recorded on a photographic plate located behind the barrier. If only one of the slits is open, all the electrons leave traces on the plate as if they were particles. If both slits are open, then when a large number of electrons are irradiated, the imprint on the plate indicates that they all passed through both slits at the same time, creating a wave pattern.
Anton used equipment that gave a very pronounced result, which made all participants have great pleasure. This researcher tries to stay in line with the experimental aspect of quantum mechanics, basing his understanding on the data that he receives directly from experience. In this he is strikingly different from David Bohm, who is interested primarily in theoretical and philosophical aspects. I later learned that Anton is a strict adherent of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, while David Bohm is its implacable opponent.
I must admit that I myself have not yet fully understood what the conceptual and philosophical consequences of wave-particle dualism might be. I understand his main philosophical conclusion, which is that the very idea of reality, considered at the subatomic level, depends on the measurement system used by the observer, and therefore this reality cannot be considered completely objective. But at the same time, this paradox demonstrates – unless we accept that the electron has some kind of consciousness of its own – that when considered at the subatomic level, two of the most basic laws of logic seem to be violated: the laws of contradiction and the excluded middle. From the point of view of everyday experience, we would expect that something that is a wave cannot be a particle, but when viewed at the quantum level, light presents a contradiction because it can manifest itself in every possible way. Similarly, in Young’s experiment, some photons pass through both slits at the same time, which is a violation of the law of excluded middle, according to which one would expect them to pass through either one slit or the other.
As for the conceptual conclusions from the results of Jung’s experience, I believe that they are still subject to full discussion. According to the well-known Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the more accurately we measure the location of an electron, the less accurately we can determine the magnitude of its momentum, and vice versa – the more accurately we calculate its momentum, the less accurately we can know where it is. This fact again demonstrates to us the role and importance of the observer: by deciding to find out the momentum of the electron, we thereby exclude for ourselves the possibility of accurately calculating its location, and vice versa. Thus, the observer becomes an active participant in the construction of the observed reality. I believe that the question of the role of the observer is one of the most difficult in quantum physics. Indeed, at the Life and Consciousness conference in 1997, participants expressed very different points of view on this issue. Some have argued that the role of the observer is limited to the choice of observation tools, while others have insisted that the observer himself is a full participant in the emergence of the observed reality.
This question has long remained the focus of debate among Buddhist thinkers. At one pole of this discussion are the Buddhist “realists,” who believed that the material world consists of indivisible particles that have an objective reality that does not depend on the consciousness of the observer. In contrast to this are the views of the “idealists,” represented by the Cittamatra school (mind-only school), who denied the presence of any objectivity in the external world. They believed that in the final analysis the external material world appears as a continuation of the mind observing it. There was, however, a third point of view, represented by the position of the Prasangika school, the most revered Tibetan tradition. According to this view, although the reality of the external world is not denied, it is nevertheless understood as relative. Its perception is dependent on our language, social customs and generally accepted ideas, and the idea of a completely objective reality independent of the observer is declared untenable. As in modern physics, here matter cannot be perceived or described independently of the observer: matter and mind are interdependent.
Recognition of the fundamental law of the interdependent nature of existence, called in Buddhism the “law of dependent origination,” underlies the Buddhist understanding of the world and man’s place in it. Briefly stated, the principle of dependent origination can be understood in the following three ways. Firstly, all things and events in the world acquire their existence as a result of the interaction of causes and conditions. They do not appear out of nowhere, already fully formed. Secondly, there is a mutual dependence between the whole and its parts: without the parts there cannot be a whole, and without the whole there is no point in talking about parts. This interdependence of parts and the whole is considered in both spatial and temporal aspects. Thirdly, we can talk about a thing’s own self-identity only in the broader context of everything that has at least some possible relation to it. No phenomenon exists as a completely independent, self-sufficient unit.
The whole world is permeated with many such complex relationships of interdependence. It is impossible to talk about reality as a set of individual entities that are outside the context of their position in relation to the environment and other phenomena, including language, ideas and other conventions. Thus, there is no subject without relation to the object it considers, just as there is no object without a subject apprehending it; there is no actor outside of connection with the activity he carries out. There is no chair apart from its legs, seat and back, as well as the wood, the nails, the floor on which it stands, the walls that enclose the room in which it is located, the people who made it, those who agreed to call this object a chair and who perceive it in as a seating device. Moreover, according to this principle, not only the existence of things is completely conditional, but their very identity also depends entirely on everything else.
In modern physics, the deep interdependence of the objects of reality has been carefully examined in the so-called EPR paradox, named after the first letters of the names of Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen – scientists who formulated it in order to point out the internal inconsistency of quantum mechanics. Suppose a pair of elementary particles were created and then separated, each of them going in the opposite direction from the other and over a very long distance: for example, one of them to Dharamsala, where I live, and the other to New York. One of the properties of such particles is that the spin of each such pair must always be oriented in different directions, so that if the spin of one of them was determined by measurement to be directed “up”, the other must certainly be oriented “down”. According to the laws of quantum mechanics, the correlation of measurements (if one particle is oriented “up”, then the other is certainly “down”) must be preserved even if the individual characteristics of the particle are not determined until the experimenters have measured the properties of one of the particles, say , in NYC. At the moment of measurement, a particle located in New York will receive a value, for example, “up,” and at that moment another particle must certainly be oriented “down.” The mutual establishment of up-down directionality occurs instantly, even for a particle located in Dharamsala, which itself has not yet been measured. Despite their spatial separation, the two particles behave like connected objects. It turns out that according to the laws of quantum mechanics, a striking and deep relationship is discovered at the very heart of physics.
Once, at a public conference in Germany, I drew the attention of the audience to the increased desire of professional scientists to listen to the spiritual experiences of followers of the various contemplative traditions existing in the world. I talked about the points of contact between my own tradition and modern science, especially the Buddhist rationale for the relativity of time and the denial of permanence. After some time, I noticed that von Weizsäcker was present at our meeting, and complained to him about my poor understanding of the fundamentals of quantum physics. To this he good-naturedly replied that his own teacher, Werner Heisenberg, had he been present at this meeting, would have been delighted to hear of such clear, obvious parallels between Buddhist philosophy and his own scientific insights.
Another set of questions in quantum mechanics concerns the problem of measurements. I know that there is a whole area of research devoted to this topic. Some scientists say that the very act of measurement leads to the collapse of wave-particle uncertainty, and the result here depends on the measurement method used by the experimenter; It is only through the very act of measurement that the possible becomes actual. Meanwhile, we ourselves live in the world of everyday reality. Therefore, the question arises: how, from the point of view of modern physics, does the coordination of our common sense-based perception of the surrounding world of objects and their properties, on the one hand, and the paradoxical world of quantum physics, on the other? And is such a correlation possible in principle? Or can we just put up with such inherently dual ideas about reality?
Once in Innsbruck, at a two-day closed seminar on problems of epistemology in the field of the foundations of quantum physics and Madhyamaka philosophy, where I met for discussion with Anton Seilinger and Arthur Zajonc, Anton told me that one of his colleagues had once remarked that most scientists working in the field of quantum physics, perceive their field of research with a slight tinge of a kind of schizophrenia. When they are in the laboratory doing research, they behave like realists, talking about photons and electrons flying here and there. However, if you turn their attention to philosophical issues and ask them to explain the basics of quantum mechanics, many of them will say that nothing really exists until the instruments show that it exists.
Somewhat similar problems arise in Buddhist philosophy regarding the discrepancy between our everyday common sense and the view of reality that follows from Nagarjuna’s philosophy of emptiness. Nagarjuna introduced the concept of two truths – relative and absolute. The first concerns everyday experience, and the second relates to understanding the absolute mode of being of things, that is, emptiness. At the relative level, we can talk about a multiple world of things and events that have an undoubted self-identity and are interconnected by the law of causality. In this world we can rightfully expect that the laws of cause and effect will be fulfilled, as well as the laws of logic – such as the principle of identity, the law of contradiction and the excluded middle. This world of empirical experience cannot in the true sense be called illusory or unreal. Its reality is that it is perceived by us. The wheat grain produces a wheat germ, which can later develop into an ear. Taking poison causes death, but medicine cures the disease. However, from the point of view of absolute truth, things and events do not have a separate, independent self-existence. Their absolute ontological status is emptiness, that is, the absence in them of any own, independent essence.
I can see some semblance of this principle of two truths in modern physics. For example, we can say that Newton’s model perfectly describes the everyday reality we know, while Einstein’s principle of relativity, based on completely different starting points, adds to this picture of the world an excellent model for describing a wider field of observation. Einstein’s model deals with that aspect of reality for which the statement of relative motion is fundamental, but in most cases it does not concern our ordinary understanding of the everyday world. In the same way, the model of reality proposed by quantum physics reflects interactions that exist in other spheres, mainly in the region of subatomic particles hidden from everyday observation. Each of these pictures is admirably suitable for describing its field, but if we decide that any of them describes in an absolute sense the true reality, we will be disappointed.
Here it is worth recalling the important distinction made by Chandrakirti (7th century AD) regarding the scope of application of the categories of relative and absolute truths. He shows that when formulating an understanding of reality, it is necessary to take into account the field of study with all its specifics. So, for example, one should not deny individual differences in objects of everyday perception, as well as the laws of cause and effect existing in the surrounding world, as some interpreters of the philosophy of emptiness do, on the sole grounds that all these categories are untenable from the point of view of absolute reality. This approach contains a methodological error.
At the relative level, we constantly observe the operation of cause and effect. For example, when trying to understand the causes of a traffic accident, we do not consider the fundamental nature of reality or the endless series of causalities that do not allow us to identify the person who is, in an absolute sense, the true culprit of the incident. Considering the empirical world from the point of view of the law of cause and effect, we do not plunge into the depths of metaphysical analysis, which considers the absolute ontological status of objects and their properties. On the contrary, we remain within the framework of everyday, generally accepted concepts, language and logic. In contrast, Chandrakirti argues, the metaphysical postulates of philosophical schools that recognize the existence of a Creator and an eternal soul can be refuted by speculative consideration of their ontological status at the absolute level. This is possible because such entities are established on the basis of reasoning concerning the absolute way of being of things.
In essence, Nagarjuna and Chandrakirti argue the following: when it comes to the everyday world of empirical experience, and if at the same time we do not attribute to things an independent, authentic self-existence, then the concepts of causality, identity and difference, as well as all the principles of logic remain unshakable. However, their reliability is limited to the sphere of relative, conditional truth. An attempt to substantiate such concepts as identity, existence and causality in the sphere of objective and independent being represents a violation of the generally accepted boundaries of logic and language. There is no need to postulate the existence of an objective, independent self-existence of things, since even from simple external observation of them we can discern sound and orderly foundations of reality, which allows us not only to understand their daily functioning, but also to create a solid basis for morality and spiritual activity. The world, according to the philosophy of emptiness, is a complex pattern consisting of interdependently arising and interconnected realities, in which interdependent causes give rise to interdependent consequences based on interdependent laws of causality. Therefore, all the thoughts and actions we make in life are very important: they affect everything with which we are in one way or another connected.
The paradoxical nature of reality, revealed by the Buddhist philosophy of emptiness and modern physics, makes us think about the limits of human knowledge. The crux of the problem comes down to a question asked from an epistemological point of view: how does our conceptual understanding of reality relate to reality itself? The Buddhist philosophers who founded the doctrine of emptiness not only developed and perfected an understanding of the world based on the elimination of the deeply ingrained habit of viewing reality as consisting of objectively real atoms, but also tried to integrate this understanding with their daily lives. The Buddhist solution to this apparent contradiction is to create the doctrine of two truths. Modern physicists also have to develop a theory of knowledge that will make it possible to build a bridge from the picture of the world created by classical physics and the experience of everyday perception to the world of quantum mechanics. So far, I personally have no idea how the Buddhist theory of the two truths can be applied to solving the problems of modern physics. At its core, the philosophical problem posed to physicists by discoveries in the field of quantum mechanics boils down to whether the idea of matter as consisting of tiny, but in an absolute sense real, particles is generally acceptable. The Buddhist philosophy of emptiness in this regard can offer a consistent model for understanding reality as not having, in the final sense, its own independent essence. Whether this will be useful remains to be seen.
Read online. The book “The Universe in One Atom: Science and Spirituality in the Service of the World.” Tenzin Gyatso
Content
Preface. Introduction
1. Meditation
2. My encounter with science
3. Emptiness, relativity and quantum physics
4. The Big Bang Theory and the Buddhist Beginningless Cosmos
5. Evolution, karma and the world of living beings
6. The problem of the emergence of consciousness
7. Towards a science of consciousness
8. Factors of consciousness
9. Ethical problems of modern genetics
Conclusion. Science, Spirituality and Humanity