This one would no doubt be well attended.
Anna’s door opened; she was leaving for the lecture.
“Are you going to come?” she asked.
“Yeah, sure.”
That pleased her. He accompanied her to the elevators, shaking his head at her, at himself. Up to the tenth floor, into the conference room. It held about two hundred people. When the Khembalis arrived, every seat was occupied.
Frank sat down near the back, pretending to work on his pad. Air-conditioned air fell on him like a blessing. People were sitting down in groups, talking about this and that. The Khembalis stood by the lectern. The old ambassador, Rudra Cakrin, wore his maroon robes, while the rest of the Khembali contingent were in off-white cotton pants and shirts, as if in India. Rudra Cakrin needed his mike lowered. His young assistant helped him, then adjusted his own. Translation; what a pain. Frank groaned soundlessly.
They tested the mikes, and the noise of talk dampened. The room was impressively full, Frank had to admit, wacky factor or not. These were people still interested enough in ideas to spend a lunch hour listening to a lecture on the philosophy of science. Surplus time and energy, given over to curiosity: a fundamental hominid behavioral trait. Also the basic trait that got people into science, surviving despite the mind-numbing regimes. Here he was himself, after all, and no one could be more burnt out than he was. Still following a tropism helplessly, like a sunflower turning to look at the sun.
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.
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 new ideas. Frank felt a small glimmer of pride. This is how it had all begun, back in those Royal Society meetings in London in the 1660s: 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 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 now, if I truly understand what you mean in the West when you say science. He says now, 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 2,500 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