The Second Premise Shared by Science and Buddhism
In the previous discussion, I found the common foundation of science and Buddhism in dependent origination. In scientific terms, this means knowing causes: examining how something works and what results appear when certain causes and conditions come together. Science and Buddhism both take cause and effect as their basic premise. They are also alike in looking at a reality that we can observe and verify rather than endlessly elaborating metaphysical stories. If there is pain in my mind, I look for its cause and try to resolve it. If a phenomenon occurs in the world, I observe why it happened. I said that this is both a Buddhist and a scientific way of thinking.
This time, I want to discuss the second premise that must be placed on that common foundation. When we observe and seek causes, we come to know something. We gain knowledge. Yet neither science nor Buddhism immediately turns that knowledge into absolute truth. What I currently know may be a delusion. I may have understood it incorrectly, seen only a part rather than the whole, or guessed a completely irrelevant cause. Before anything else, I must accept that what I call a scientific fact, what I regard as a Buddhist truth, and the ideas, concepts, and views I have solidified through learning, experience, and hearsay may not be facts at all.
After observing, we use the reasoning of dependent origination to identify causes. But we cannot be certain that what we currently judge to be the cause is the actual truth. For example, the explanation that the dinosaurs of the Cretaceous period died out because a massive meteorite struck Earth and created the Chicxulub crater is now a widely accepted hypothesis. Even if many scientists accept it and call it a scientific fact, we cannot call it a complete and immutable truth. A scientific fact is the most persuasive hypothesis we can presently formulate from everything observed so far—what, for now, seems to be the case.
That is why scientific knowledge keeps changing. New observations are added, existing explanations are broken, revised, and expanded. This is also why we research, learn, formulate hypotheses, and test them. If the truth had already been completed, there would be no reason to investigate further. Science is alive precisely because scientific knowledge remains open to correction.
Liberation Is Not a One-Time Completion but a Daily Release
Buddhism is the same. Many people may imagine liberation as reaching some special level in one leap and bringing everything to an end. I do not see liberation that way. Just as science continually corrects its knowledge, liberation is the steady, daily work of discovering the delusions in which I have been trapped and releasing myself from them. Buddhism is not a status that stops moving once attained. It is an attitude toward life: continually reflecting and changing, becoming new again each day.
The second common foundation of science and Buddhism is therefore clear: I may be trapped in delusion. Liberation is being unbound and released from that delusion. Did the Buddha tell people to believe and follow his words? Or did he say, “This is what I observed; what do you see? Observe it for yourself”? I understand him to have taken the latter approach. The Buddha did not nail his words down as absolute truth because he himself was someone who became liberated anew each day.
Studying biology at Seoul National University or conducting research in astrophysics at Harvard does not allow anyone to know everything in the world. The range to which one person can give attention and which one person can observe during a short lifetime is extraordinarily limited. Nearly everyone carries a smartphone, yet almost no one understands every principle and technology inside it. Scholars and religious figures alike are bound by their time, place, learning, interests, and experience. We are all frogs in a well.
The moment I admit that I do not know, life begins to open instead. I can learn anew, escape once more from what I misunderstood, and observe again. Rather than hardening my thoughts, I become able to say, “I was wrong. The knowledge I learned was mistaken. There is a new explanation.” Awakening does not pour all the knowledge and wisdom of the world into a person in a single stroke. The Buddhist aim is not omniscience completed in one blow, but a wise attitude toward life that remains able to question and correct itself.
The First Words the Cave Chapter Speaks to Humanity
Let us confirm this point in a Buddhist text. The Sutta Nipāta, preserved in Pali in the Theravada canon, is, as its name suggests, a collection of discourses. Its fourth chapter, one of five, contains sixteen discourses. The second, third, fourth, and fifth of these four texts are composed in sets of eight verses. I argue that this Group of Eight preserves a very old form of Buddhism and is close to the Buddha’s original voice. A number of scholars also suggest that it may belong to the earliest layer of Buddhist literature. Yet even this statement is not established truth. It is a hypothesis and a claim.
The Group of Eight addresses greed, anger, ignorance, and conceit. I see its context as also connecting to the thought of emptiness later expressed in the Prajñāpāramitā texts, such as the Heart Sutra and the Diamond Sutra. The first of the Group of Eight is the Cave Chapter. It consists of eight verses, each with four lines, and the first two lines of its opening verse reveal the foundation of Buddhism with tremendous force.
A person bound to a cave, covered by countless things, and hardened is lost in delusion.
These words do not flatter human beings by saying, “You already know.” They say the exact opposite. You are bound to a cave, covered by countless things, hardened, and lost in delusion. Buddha means “one who has opened his eyes.” Thus the first thing Buddhism says to those of us whose eyes are not yet open is a warning: “Your eyes may be closed right now. What you take to be fact may be a delusion.” Its next request is to escape—to become liberated.
Without this foundation, Buddhism cannot even begin. Yet among those who speak loudly in Korean Buddhism, far too many talk as if they know everything. On broadcasts and YouTube, they present their own interpretations as truth itself. Scientists do not describe their explanations as immutable truth. They call them the current consensus or the strongest available explanation. Buddhism must do the same. Humility must come first: “I may not know. What I have guessed may not be true.”
I may be covered by countless things, lost in delusion, and hardened like an obstinate old man. I may shout, “What I know is fact and truth, and I am right,” while I am the one who is wrong. Accepting that possibility is where Buddhism begins.
Why Bacon Warned Against Completed Knowledge
Now let us look at the same problem in the history of science. Francis Bacon published the Novum Organum in 1620. It is commonly rendered in Korean as “New Instrument,” but I believe “New Tool” is closer to its meaning. The tool here is a method for acquiring knowledge. Instead of letting everyone manufacture beliefs however they please, Bacon asks us to examine together the method by which we observe and judge.
In the first paragraph of his preface, Bacon criticizes those who treated the laws of nature as if they had already been fully investigated and understood. He says they inflicted great harm on philosophy and science. Through certainty and dogmatic pretension, they drew others into belief and then used that success to suppress and stop further inquiry. The damage they caused by ruining the efforts of others exceeded what they achieved through their own work.
Once someone declares, “This is the truth. The world has already been explained,” there is no need to listen to anything else. There is no reason to observe or question any further. Religion characteristically adopts this attitude: God has spoken, it is written in the Bible, the world has already been explained, and this is the truth. But is it really so? The moment that question is forbidden, inquiry stops.
Copernicus’s Revolution and Luther’s “Scripture Alone”
In 1543, Copernicus published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. The Latin word revolutionibus in the title was then closer to “rotation.” Today we often use revolution to mean social upheaval, but the word originally carried the sense of turning, like the cylinder of a revolver rotating around a single axis. The celestial sphere discussed by Copernicus was likewise imagined as a heavenly globe revolving around Earth.
People once thought Earth stood at the center of the universe and that stars were fixed at roughly the same distance in a celestial sphere that rotated as a whole. Aristotle’s cosmology mixed with the biblical creation story and hardened into a geocentric worldview. Copernicus then exchanged the places of Earth and the sun. Earth was pushed out of its starring role in the universe and became one planet among several orbiting the sun. Copernicus himself did not eliminate the outer celestial sphere, but this change alone was an enormous shift in thought. Through the Copernican revolution, revolution expanded from the meaning of rotation toward the meaning of social revolution. Language, too, is not fixed; it changes.
When the heliocentric theory became known even before the book appeared, people steeped in the Christian worldview began criticizing Copernicus. Interestingly, the opposition from Protestants was even stronger than that from Catholics. Catholicism had a history of interpreting the Bible in its own way to preserve tradition and papal authority. Protestantism, by contrast, arose against that authority and arbitrary interpretation by proclaiming “scripture alone.” As a result, statements that differed from the Bible became even harder to tolerate.
In 1539, Martin Luther denounced Copernicus as an upstart astrologer who claimed that Earth moved rather than the heavens and sun, and as a fool trying to turn all astronomy upside down. His evidence was the Bible.
In sacred scripture, Joshua commanded the sun, not the Earth, to stand still.
The logic was that since Joshua told the sun to stop, the sun must move around Earth. But did the sun truly stop? This is a story, a work of fiction that describes the sun as stopping. The problem is an attitude that cannot read fiction as fiction and instead accepts every word as infallible truth. Once “scripture alone” becomes the absolute standard, anyone who says something different from scripture becomes an intolerable enemy.
Buddhist Fundamentalism Is the Same Kind of Cave
This is not only a Christian problem. Some people who practice Buddhism call their own version “root Buddhism” and declare the texts they have selected to be “root scriptures.” I believe such definitive labels are themselves mistaken. I, too, infer and argue that the Group of Eight may be close to the Buddha’s teaching. But I did not live in the Buddha’s time, and I cannot verify every stage of the record’s transmission. How could I establish it as the Buddha’s direct speech and an absolute foundation? The moment I do that, I fall into delusion as well.
Textual fundamentalists try to accept even talking birds and speaking heavenly beings in scriptures as literal facts. That is non-Buddhist. Buddhism begins by telling us not to believe but to doubt. Without accepting that I may be deluded, I cannot become a Buddha or attain liberation. This applies not only to the Bible and Buddhist scriptures. We should not simply believe what is written in scientific books or textbooks, or what any famous person says. Doing so is neither scientific nor Buddhist.
Buddhism is not a religion that can be practiced after abandoning reason. If someone says, “I do not want to understand. I do not want to think. I do not want to awaken for myself,” that person cannot practice Buddhism. We must reason for ourselves, think rationally, doubt, and observe. Unless I do it myself, I cannot break through the shell around me.
How Each Person Leaves a Different Cave
Each person is trapped in a different cave. One person is trapped by money, another by eternal life or the afterlife, another by rebirth, heaven and hell, Avalokiteśvara, success, or love. What people have learned and experienced, and what feels familiar to them, also differs. I can tell someone about the delusions in which I was once trapped and how I escaped them. But how could I know everything that binds a person in Australia who has lived a completely different life?
Even Śākyamuni Buddha, Gautama Siddhārtha, could not turn another person into a Buddha. At most he could say, “This is what I observed, and this is how I escaped my delusion. Observe what you see for yourself.” You must open your own eyes within your own cave, attachment, and delusion.
This is why observing oneself in daily life is so important in Buddhism. I must examine what covers me, how I act, what thoughts and emotions arise, and what judgments I make. But simply watching blankly is not enough. What changes if I see myself getting angry and merely note, “I am angry now”? I need to ask why I became angry and why those thoughts and feelings arose. Buddhist observation means questioning causes and conditions, identifying what binds me, and releasing myself from it.
The Certainty That Burned Bruno and the Religion That Burns Questions
Let us return to the history of science. On February 17, 1600, the Roman Catholic Church burned Giordano Bruno at the stake. It did so after imprisoning him for about eight years and demanding that he recant his ideas. The standard was their own interpretation of the Bible and their own claims. As the Reformation shook its authority, Catholicism hardened further. Protestantism likewise cried, “faith alone, scripture alone, God alone.” If speech differing from scripture were permitted, religious authority would be shaken.
Copernicus made Earth one planet among several orbiting the sun, but left the outer celestial sphere in place. Bruno pushed the thought further. He held that each star in the sky was a sun-like star, that planets orbited them as well, and that the universe was nearly infinite. Just as the title On the Infinite Universe and Worlds suggests, he made Earth an infinitesimal part of an infinite universe.
Of course, he was not burned solely for this cosmology. Bruno was influenced by many currents, including ancient Greek and Roman texts recirculated during the Renaissance, mysticism, Gnosticism, and materialist thought. His cosmology was also an inference produced by expanding those ideas rather than a scientific fact established through direct observation. He interpreted not only nature but also the Bible differently from the Catholic Church. Because his thinking differed, the Church forced him to recant and ultimately burned him after piercing and immobilizing his tongue so that he could not even speak.
This scene shows how far textual fundamentalism and the ideology of proclaimed truth can go. Such an attitude is both unscientific and non-Buddhist. Certainty that one possesses the truth stops questions and eventually seals the mouth of the person who asks them.
Buddhism Begins Only When You Doubt Even My Words
Practicing Buddhism does not mean believing that words written in a book are automatically true. It means opening a book and asking, “Is this really true? Why?” If I must doubt even my own thoughts, how could I simply believe another person’s thoughts written in a book?
Just as Christian scripture was not written directly by God, Buddhist scriptures were written by people. If a god had written them personally, could they contain incorrect information and contradictions? Some small parts of Buddhist scripture may have begun with very old teachings. Yet texts revised and transmitted by people over long centuries contain a mixture of someone’s claims, fiction, intentions, lies, and mutually contradictory material. We must not believe that jumble exactly as it stands.
Do not believe my thoughts without question; doubt them. Doubt scientific facts. Doubt what is written in books and textbooks. And doubt my words as well. Buddhism is never a teaching founded on belief. If you merely believe, you cannot awaken. You must question and observe, and every time you discover an error, you must free yourself again. That is the second foundation taught in common by science and Buddhism.
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