"When Buddhist modernists say that Buddhism isn’t a religion and try to use science to justify Buddhism, that’s an instance of misunderstanding what religion is and what science is." @evantthompsonhttps://buff.ly/38Xyr2o
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Replying to @buddhadharma @evantthompson
Agree. But I can’t think of a contemporary Buddhist teacher - modernist or not- who actually justifies Buddhism through science as opposed to just claiming that Buddhism and science are compatible. Wonder who he is thinking of.
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Replying to @grahamlock7 @buddhadharma
Virtually every Western teacher I've encountered uses science to support Buddhism. As for compatibility, this claim is no more plausible to me than claiming Christianity or Hinduism or Islam is compatible with science
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Replying to @evantthompson @buddhadharma
When neuroscientists etc. say there is no evidence for an “I” essence underlying our mental processes, Isnt it ok to say that this is compatible with understanding of “anatta” but not with the usual understandings of the soul in Christianity etc? This isn’t to justify.
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Replying to @grahamlock7 @buddhadharma
Yes, if we just take those ideas out of context. Anatman has both descriptive and normative aspects. Descriptive: anatman is the denial that there is a permanent & unchanging self or soul [1]
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Normative: one should dis-identify with everything making up the body and mind and treat it all as not-self. The normative aspect is ethical/religious/soteriological, not scientific [2]
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Also, the Buddha insisted on both anatman and karma. Karma isn’t compatible with science. If we drop karma and just have anatman, that’s much closer to materialism than Buddhism [3]
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Replying to @evantthompson @buddhadharma
This is what happened at first with Buddhism and Daoism in China.
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But a creative synthesis eventually developed.
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Yes, distortion can happen, but also evolution and innovation
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