What is the difference between science, philosophy and religion? Science is the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment. Philosophy is the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality and existence. Religion is the belief in and worship of a god or gods, or a system of belief in a god or gods.
My reason for writing this is because I believe that, in the strict sense of the definition of religion, Buddhism is not a religion. In my opinion, it is philosophy/science when looked at from the perspective of the earliest contributors. It is the study of the physical world, reality and its relation to human consciousness.
In a recent My Turn on “flow” by Jean Stimmell, he referred to the use of the same concept by Buddhism as “religious practice.” He will have to clarify his reason for this as I do not presume to know his reasoning. That being said, western science and philosophy tend to look at Buddhist ontology and epistemology as religious and thus not the same form of inquiry.
“The most significant difficulty with the dismissal of Asian philosophy as religion is not the fact that in the relevant sense that charge is false, but that in the very sense, as well as in the deeper sense at which I am driving at here, western philosophy is also profoundly religious,” writes Jay L. Garfield in Empty Words.
Western thought has categorized Buddhism as one of the “great religions.” I fully understand that it has been, and is, practiced as a religion, has many of the trappings, and has evolved, like many western religions, to look very little like its earliest form.
“The trappings and practices, the efficacy and propriety of which may be challenged like those of any other western religion,” Garfield continues.
“The European enlightenment has no historical counterpart in India or China. There was never a cataclysmic rift between religion and science, and so philosophy never had to take sides. Buddhism is atheistic, rejects revelation as epistemically authoritative, and is committed to infinite human perfectibility through empirical inquiry and rational analysis, culminating in full awakening, or Buddhahood.”
The word atheist has a negative connotation. From my years at an evangelical Christian college, the term was only used in a derogatory sense. Non-theist, while having the same meaning, suggests simply not having a theistic basis. This, in my opinion, better represents the Buddhist dialog.
Buddhist philosophy/psychology offers a non-religious and cogent viewpoint as a tool to understanding current social and political events. Adding a view that pertains to how beliefs are formed and how the experience of consciousness combined with society’s need for meaning and truth value can provide insights from a different perspective.
My perspective has evolved over time through studies in primatology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, etc. Societies tend to be insular so we view “other” not by immersion but interpretation against our own.
The most important existential question facing mankind is not who we are, as in how we self-identify politically, culturally and religiously, but what we are. Created or evolved, subject or object?
Do we force all of mankind’s history and future into a narrow inescapable view, via Revelations, Nostradamus, and the Prophets or as impermanent, indeterminate and ultimately capable of change?
Human consciousness, the experience of experience, with its attendant sense faculty and the evolution of symbolic thought, has created conventional reality. The challenge we face is to understand the meaning of humanity, not from a parochial sense of self, but as an ape that evolved to have the power to destroy itself because we chose hate above compassion, greed above generosity and delusion above wisdom.
(Jim Seidel lives in Center Barnstead.)