The old monk cut quite a figure up at the lectern. Incongruous at best. This might be an admirably curious audience, but it was also a skeptical gang of hardened old technocrats. A tough sell, one would think, for a wizened man in robes, now peering out at them as if from a distant century, looking in fact quite like an early hominid.
And yet there he stood, and here they sat. Something had brought them together, and it wasn’t just the air-conditioning. They sat in their chairs, attentive, courteous, open to suggestion. Frank felt a small glimmer of pride. This is how it had all begun, back in those Royal Society meetings in London in the 1660’s: polite listening to a lecture by some odd person who was necessarily an autodidact; polite questions; the matter considered reasonably by all in attendance. An agreement to look at things reasonably. This was the start of it.
The old man stared out with a benign gaze. He seemed to mirror their attention, to study them.
“Good morning!” he said, then made a gesture with his hand to indicate that he had exhausted his store of English, except for what followed: “Thank you.”
His young assistant then said, “Rimpoche Rudra Cakrin, Khembalung’s ambassador to the United States, thanks you for coming to listen to him.”
A bit redundant that, but then the old man began to speak in his own language—Tibetan, Anna had said—a low, guttural sequence of sounds. Then he stopped, and the young man, Anna’s friend Drepung, began to translate.
“The rimpoche says, Buddhism begins in personal experience. Observation of one’s surroundings and one’s reactions, and one’s thoughts. There is a scientific…foundation to the process. He adds, ‘If I truly understand what you mean in the West when you say science.’ He says, ‘I hope you will tell me if I am wrong about it. But science seems to me to be about what happens that we can all agree on.’”
Now Rudra Cakrin interrupted to ask a question of Drepung, who nodded, then added: “What can be asserted. That if you were to look into it, you would come to agree with the assertion. And everyone else would as well.”
A few people in the audience were nodding.
The old man spoke again.
Drepung said, “The things we can agree on are few, and general. And the closer to the time of the Buddha, the more general they are. Now, two thousand and five hundred years have passed, more or less, and we are in the age of the microscope, the telescope, and…the mathematical description of reality. These are realms we cannot experience directly with our senses. And yet we can still agree in what we say about these realms. Because they are linked in long chains of mathematical cause and effect, from what we can see.”
Rudra Cakrin smiled briefly, spoke. It began to seem to Frank that Drepung’s translated pronouncements were much longer than the old man’s utterances. Could Tibetan be so compact?
“This network is a very great accomplishment,” Drepung added.
Rudra Cakrin then sang in a low gravelly voice, like Louis Armstrong’s, only an octave lower.
Drepung chanted in English:
“He who would understand the meaning of Buddha nature, Must watch for the season and the causal relations. Real life is the life of causes.”
Rudra Cakrin followed this with some animated speech.
Drepung translated, “This brings up the concept of Buddha nature, rather than nature in itself. What is that difference? Buddha nature is the appropriate…response to nature. The reply of the observing mind. Buddhist philosophy ultimately points to seeing reality as it is. And then…”
Rudra Cakrin spoke urgently.
“Then the response, the reply, the human moment—the things we say, and do, and think—that moment arrives. We come back to the realm of the expressible. The nature of reality—as we go deeper, language is left further behind. Even mathematics is no longer germane. But…”
The old man went on for quite some time, until Frank thought he saw Drepung make a gesture or expression with his eyelids, and instantly Rudra Cakrin stopped.
“But, when we come to what we should do, it returns to the simplest of words. Compassion. Right action. Helping others. It always stays that simple. Reduce suffering. There is something…reassuring in this. Greatest complexity of what is, greatest simplicity in what we should do. Much preferable to the reverse situation.”
Rudra Cakrin spoke in a much calmer voice now.
“Here again,” Drepung went on, “the two approaches overlap and are one. Science began as the hunt for food, comfort, health. We learned how things work in order to control them better. In order to reduce our suffering. The methods involved—observation and trial—in our tradition were refined in medical work. That went on for many ages. In the West, your doctors too did this, and in the process, became scientists. In Asia the Buddhist monks were the doctors, and they too worked on refining methods of observation and trial, to see if they could…reproduce their successes, when they had them.”
Rudra Cakrin nodded, put a hand to Drepung’s arm. He spoke briefly. Drepung said, “The two are now parallel studies. On the one hand, science has specialized, through mathematics and technology, on natural observations, finding out what is, and making new tools. On the other, Buddhism has specialized in human observations, to find out—how to become. Behave. What to do. How to go forward. Now, I say, they are like the two eyes in the head. Both necessary to create whole sight. Or rather…there is an old saying: ‘Eyes that see, feet that walk.’ We could say that science is the eyes, Buddhism the feet.”
Frank listened to all this with ever more irritation. Here was a man arguing for a system of thought that had not contributed a single new bit of knowledge to the world for the last twenty-five hundred years, and he had the nerve to put it on an equal basis with science, which was now adding millions of new facts to its accumulated store of knowledge every day. What a farce!
And yet his irritation was filled with uneasiness as well. The young translator kept saying things that weirdly echoed things Frank had thought before, or answered things Frank was wondering at that very moment. Frank thought, for instance, Well, how would all this compute if we were remembering that we are all primates recently off the savannah, foragers with brains that grew to adapt to that particular surrounding—would any of this make sense? And at that very moment, answering a question from the audience (they seemed to have shifted into that mode without a formal announcement of it), Drepung said, still translating the old man:
“We are animals. Animals whose wisdom has extended so far as to tell us we are mortal creatures. We die. For fifty thousand years we have known this. Much of our mental energy is spent avoiding this knowledge. We do not like to think of it. Then again, we know now that even the cosmos is mortal. Reality is mortal. All things change ceaselessly. Nothing remains the same in time. Nothing can be held on to. The question then becomes, what do we do with this knowledge? How do we live with it? How do we make sense of it?”
Well—indeed. Frank leaned forward, piqued, wondering what Drepung would tell them the old man had said next. That gravelly low voice, growling through its incomprehensible sounds—it was strange to think it was expressing such meanings. Frank suddenly wanted to know what he was saying.
“One of the scientific terms for compassion,” Drepung said, looking around the ceiling as if for the word, “…you say, ‘altruism.’ This is a question in your animal studies. Does true altruism exist, and is it a good adaptation? Does compassion work, in other words? You have done studies that suggest altruism is the best adaptive strategy, if seen from the group context. This then becomes a kind of…admonishment. To practice compassion in order to successfully evolve—this, coming from your science, which claims to be descriptive only! Only describing what has worked to make us what we are. But in Buddhism we have always said, if you want to help others, practice compassion; if you want to help yourself, practice compassion. Now science adds, if you want to help your species, practice compassion.”
This got a laugh, and Frank also chuckled. He started t
o think about it in terms of prisoners’ dilemma strategies; it was an invocation for all to make the always generous move, for maximum group return, indeed maximum individual return… Thus he missed what Drepung said next, absorbed in something more like a feeling than a thought: If only I could believe in something, no doubt it would be a relief. All his rationality, all his acid skepticism; suddenly it was hard not to feel that it was really just some kind of disorder.
And at that very moment Rudra Cakrin looked right at him, him alone in all the audience, and Drepung said, “An excess of reason is itself a form of madness.”
Frank sat back in his seat. What had the question been? Rerunning his short-term memory, he could not find it.
Now he was lost to the conversation again. His flesh was tingling, as if he were a bell that had been struck.
“The experience of enlightenment can be sudden.”
He didn’t hear that, not consciously.
“The scattered parts of consciousness occasionally assemble at once into a whole pattern.”
He didn’t hear that either, as he was lost in thought. All his certainties were trembling. He thought, an excess of reason itself a form of madness—it’s the story of my life. And the old man knew.
He found himself standing. Everyone else was too. The thing must be over. People were filing out. They were massed in a group at the elevators. Someone said to Frank, “Well, what did you think?” clearly expecting some sharp put-down, something characteristically Frank-ish, and indeed his mouth was forming the words “Not much for twenty-five hundred years of concentrated study.” But he said “Not” and stopped, shuddering at his own habits. He could be such an asshole.
The elevator doors opened and rescued him. He flowed in, rubbed his forearms as if to warm them from the conference room’s awesome a-c. He said to the inquiring eyes watching him, “Interesting.”
There were nods, little smiles. Even that one word, often the highest expression of praise in the scientific tongue, was against type for him. He was making a fool of himself. His group expected him to conform to his persona. That was how group dynamics worked. Surprising people was an unusual thing, faintly unwelcome. Except was it? People certainly paid to be surprised; that was comedy; that was art. It could be proved by analysis. Right now he wasn’t sure of anything.
“…paying attention to the real world,” someone was saying.
“A weak empiricism.”
“How do you mean?”
The elevator door opened; Frank saw it was his floor. He got out and went to his office. He stood there in the doorway looking at all his stuff, scattered about for disposal or for packing to be mailed back west. Piles of books, periodicals, offprints, Xeroxed sheets of stapled or loose paper, folded or rolled graphs and charts and tables and spreadsheets. His exteriorized memory, the paper trail of his life. An excess of reason.
He sat there thinking.
Anna came in. “Hi Frank. How did you like the talk?”
“It was interesting.”
She regarded him. “I thought so too. Listen, Charlie and I are having a party for the Khembalis tonight at our place, a little celebration. You should come if you want.”
“Thanks,” he said. “Maybe I will.”
“Good. That would be nice. I’ve gotta go get ready for it.”
“Okay. See you there maybe.”
“Okay.” With a last curious look, she left.
Sometimes certain images or phrases, ideas or sentences, tunes or snatches of tunes, stick in the head and repeat over and over. For some people this can be a problem, as they get stuck in such loops too often and too long. Most people skip into new ideas or new loops fairly frequently—others at an almost frightening rate of speed, the reverse of the stuck-in-a-loop problem.
Frank had always considered himself to be unstable in this regard, veering strongly either one way or the other. The shift from something like obsessive-compulsive to something like attention-deficit sometimes occurred so quickly that it seemed he might be exhibiting an entirely new kind of bipolarity.
No excess of reason there!
Or maybe that was the base cause of it all. An attempt to gain control. The old monk had looked him right in the eye. An excess of reason is itself a form of madness. Maybe in trying to be reasonable, he had been trying to stay on an even keel. Who could say?
He could see how this might be what Buddhists called a koan, a riddle without an answer, which if pondered long enough might cause the thinking mind to balk, and give up thinking. Give up thinking! That was crazy. And yet, in that moment, perhaps the sensory world would come pouring in. Experience of the present, unmediated by language. Unspeakable by definition. Just felt. Experienced in mentation of a different sort, languageless, or language-transcendent. Something other.
Frank hated that sort of mysticism. Or maybe he loved it; the experience of it, that is. Like anyone who has ever entered a moment of nonlinguistic absorption, he recalled it as a kind of blessing. Like in the old days, hanging there cleaning windows, singing What’s my line, I’m happy cleaning windows. Climbing, surfing…you could think far faster than you could verbalize in your mind. No doubt one knew the world by way of a flurry of impressions and thoughts that were far faster than consciousness could track. Consciousness was just a small part of it.
He left the building, went out into the humid afternoon. The sight of the street somehow repelled him. He couldn’t drive right now. Instead he walked through the car-dominated, slightly junky commercial district surrounding Ballston, spinning with thoughts and with something more. It seemed to him that he was learning things as he walked that he couldn’t have said out loud at that moment, and yet they were real, they were felt; they were quite real.
An excess of reason. Well, but he had always tried to be reasonable. He had tried very hard. That attempt was his mode of being. It had seemed to help him. Dispassionate; sensible; calm; reasonable. A thinking machine. He had loved those stories when he was a boy. That was what a scientist was, and that was why he was such a good scientist. That was the thing that had bothered him about Anna, that she was undeniably a good scientist but she was a passionate scientist too, she threw herself into her work and her ideas, had preferences and took positions and was completely engaged emotionally in her work. She cared which theory was true. That was all wrong, but she was so smart that it worked, for her anyway. If it did. But it wasn’t science. To care that much was to introduce biases into the study. It wasn’t a matter of emotions. You did science simply because it was the best adaptation strategy in the environment into which they had been born. Science was the gene trying to pass itself along more successfully. Also it was the best way to pass the hours, or to make a living. Everything else was so trivial and grasping. Social primates, trapped in a technocosmos of their own devise; science was definitely the only way to see the terrain well enough to know which way to strike forward, to make something new for all the rest. No passion need be added to that reasoned way forward.
And yet, it occurred to him, why did things live? What got them through it, really? What made them make all these efforts, when death lay in wait at the end for every one of them? This was what these Buddhists had dared to ask.
He was walking toward the Potomac now, along Fairfax Drive, a huge commercial street rumbling with traffic, just a few cars away from gridlock. Long lines of vehicles, with most of the occupants in them talking on phones, talking to some other person somewhere else on the planet. A strange sight when you looked at it!
Reason had never explained the existence of life in this universe. Life was a mystery; reason had tried and failed to explain it, and science could not start it from scratch in a lab. Little localized eddies of antientropy, briefly popping into being and then spinning out, with bits of them carried elsewhere in long invisible chains of code that spun up yet more eddies. A succession of pattern dust devils. A mystery, a kind of miracle—a miracle struggling in harsh inimical conditions, succeeding only where it
found water, which gathered in droplets in the universe just as it did on a windowpane, and gave life sustenance. Water of life. A miracle.
He felt the sweat breaking out all over his skin. When hominids went bipedal they lost hair and gained sweat glands, so they could convey away the extra heat caused by all that walking. But it didn’t really work in a jungle. Tall trees, many species of trees and bushes; it could have been a botanical garden with a city laid into it, the plants a hundred shades of green. People walking by in small groups. Only runners were alone, and even they usually ran in pairs or larger groups. A social species, like bees or ants, with social rules that were invariant to the point of invisibility, people did not notice them. A species operating on pheromones, lucky in its adaptability, unstable in the environment. Knowledge of the existence of the future, awareness of the future as part of the calculations made in daily life, for daily living. Live for the future. A cosmic history read out of signs so subtle and mathematical that only the effort of a huge transtemporal group of powerful minds coThisThisuld ever have teased it out; but then those who came later could be given the whole story, with its unexplored edges there to take off into. This was the human project, this was science, this was what science was. This was what life was.
He stood there, thrumming with thought, queasy, anxious, frightened. He was a confused man. Free-floating anxiety, he thought anxiously; except it had clear causes. People said that paradigm shifts only occurred when the old scientists died, that people individually did not have them, they were too stubborn, too set in their ways, it was a more social process, a diachronic matter of successive generations.
Occasionally, however, it must be otherwise. Individual scientists, more open-minded or less certain than most, must have lived through one. Frank almost ran into a woman walking the other direction, almost said, “Sorry ma’am, I’m in the midst of a paradigm shift.” He was disoriented. He saw that moving from one paradigm to the next was not like moving from one skyscraper to another, as in the diagrams he had once seen in a philosophy of science book. It was more like being inside a kaleidoscope, where he had gotten used to the pattern, and now the tube was twisting and he was falling and every aspect of what he saw was clicking to something different, click after click: colors, patterns, everything awash. Like dying and being reborn. Altruism, compassion, simple goddamned foolishness, loyalty to people who were not loyal to you, playing the sap for the defectors to take advantage of, competition, adaptation, displaced self-interest—or else something real, a real force in the world, a kind of physical constant, like gravity, or a basic attribute of life, like the drive to propagate one’s DNA to subsequent generations. A reason for being. Something beyond DNA. A rage to live, an urge to goodness. Love. A green force, élan vital, that was a metaphysics, that was bad, but how else were you going to explain the data?
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