By Mitsuo Hirai, February, 2010, Tokyo, Japan
At a food market in Bhutan
“The Dalai Lama once said, ‘Gotama Buddha was a scientist,’” reports the cover story of TIME magazine (March 31, 2008). The Dalai Lama dismisses Buddhist teachings if disproved by science, and he values science as the important part of the monastic curriculum in Dharamsala, India where he lives in exile from Tibet, the article says.
Questions arose to me, “How come Gotama was a scientist, a man lived some 2,500 years ago in the Northern India when there was no study of science, nor even the writings? Buddhism that began with the teaching of Gotama, will it ever be compatible with the contemporary world where science and technology dictate? If so, how? Can Buddhism survive?”
If the science is defined as activities to identify the law governing natural phenomena, the reason Gotama was a scientist may be understood in a way that he found the law governing the “human mind” instead of the natural phenomena, that our passion has a tendency to sway to the greed which causes us suffering, and it is the freedom from the greed that brings peace in our mind.
Not only Gotama found the law, but developed a method how to control the greed to bring peace in the human mind, taught it to his followers, and proved it by himself. The method consists of a few simple principles of conducts in our daily lives to live a righteous, and morally clean life. In their practice Zazen (sitting in meditation) played an important part, but Gotama disregarded ascertism. In a sense, he may be called a technologist as well as a scientist in the field of human mind, inasmuch as the technology is defined as a method and activity to apply science to achieve human needs, in this case human happiness.
For example, one of his teachings, the Right View, suggests that, if we want to overcome our suffering, we must start looking at all phenomena relative to the suffering squarely without any prepossession and recognize cause and effect of it. There is no room for God to play here. It is precisely in conformity with the scientific approach. If the word science is construed broadly to include technology, Gotama may be called a “scientist” in the field of human mind, in place of natural phenomena. In that sense I can agree with the Dalai Lama that Gotama was a scientist.
In light of the Right View, if we see our existence in this world, we would come to realize that we are not living alone independently, but interdependently on all environments surrounding us—all living and non-living beings in the universe, which would ultimately lead us to the spontaneous feeling of tolerance and compassion.
Mankind on earth would be able to live peacefully and happily, should this scientific and peaceful teaching of Gotama Buddha prevail globally. Then, the religious institution of Buddhism which began with the teaching of Gotama, how will it be influential globally as a social momentum?
According to H.G.Wells (1866-1946), the great English historian of the last century, in describing the early history of Buddhism in his lifework book, The Outline of History, he attributes the stagnation and fading of the primitive Buddhism in India to the lack of any directive idea, in contrast with Judaism which remained bright and expectant because of its idea of Promise. Outlining the rise and fall of Buddhism in India thereafter, he writes, “It is quite curious to note that while the one great Aryan religion (Buddhism) is now almost exclusively confined to Mongolian peoples, the Aryans themselves are under the sway of two religions, Christianity and Islam, which are essentially Semitic. ” But he writes also somewhat prophetically about Buddhism saying, “It is quite possible that in contact with western science, and inspired by the spirit of history, the original teaching of Gotama, revived and purified, may yet play a large part in the direction of human destiny.”
It may be true, as Wells pointed out, there was no progressive or directive idea in the original teaching of Gotama. The propagating and organizing power of the Buddhist institution may not be as strong as other major religion such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, or Hinduism, as manifested by the fall of Buddhism in India, the birth place of Gotama Buddha. It seems from the very beginning there was no ambition in the mind of Gotama to compel his belief to the entire world in which he lived his life, but he simply pursued freedom from the greed and told his belief only to those who followed him.
What will be the destiny of Buddhism in the future? Will it going to be replaced by other religions which are stronger in propagating power than Buddhism, or by so-called “non-religious” or atheist group of people who don’t believe Buddhism, or any religion, as is prevailing in Japan? Whatever the guise, religious conflicts do exist persistently in the world. In fact, the difference of religion is the deep-rooted cause of most of the major fatal conflicts occurring in various places of the world, citing just a few of them, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, etc., although other factors such as territorial, national, or racial conflicts are entangled. Even within the same religion, there are severe conflicts between different sects, e.g., between the Shiites and Sunnites of Islam. If we are to kill each other for the religious reason, we would even think it better not to have such religion. In reality, the religion is consoling people’s soul on the one hand, but threatening people’s security on the other.
While science and technology have no control over how they are going to be utilized, be it for good or bad, they are utilized for such conflicts as well. In the present world where the weapons of mass destruction, the products of science and technology, are proliferating, what would happen if the human greed should come out of control? Even before bringing up the nuclear disaster, haven’t we just had the global economic disaster triggered by those marketers of Wall Street armed with the state of the art monetary technology whose greed was out of control? Again in the words of Wells from his book, “We (human beings) have tamed and bred the beasts, but we have still to tame and breed ourselves.”
I have no idea to what extent can Buddhism be influential to “tame and breed ourselves,” at the collective and social level, nor if Buddhism can survive in the future, but I wonder if the human beings can survive without the philosophy of Gotama Buddha.



[Mr. Suigan Yogo (Photo) was the head of the Daiyuzan Saijoji, a temple of Soto school of Zen, in Odawara, some 100 km. southwest of Tokyo]

The Dalai Lama once said, “Gotama Buddha was a scientist,” reports the cover story of TIME magazine (March 31, 2008). According to this article, the Dalai Lama dismisses Buddhist teachings if disproved by science, and he has brought science as the important part of the monastic curriculum in Dharamsala, India where he lives in exile from Tibet.

Gotama Buddha, how did he really look like? Not as a serene statue sitting in meditation as we often see in the dark altar of the temple, but as a man vividly living in his every day life? It won’t be myself alone to imagine such a personal Gotama Buddha. It happened to me to encounter an opportunity to satisfy such a long-sought curiosity when I saw a few statues of the standing Buddha exhibited at the “Gandhara Art & Bamiyan Site” held recently at the Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art in Shizuoka City, Japan.




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