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For at the top you can no longer see the mountain. And beyond, on the other side, there is perhaps just another valley like this. An old Indian aphorism says, “What is beyond is that which is also here.” And you mustn’t mistake this for a kind of blasé boredom, tiring of adventure.
It’s the startling recognition that in the place where we are now we have already arrived. This is it. What we are seeking is, if we are not totally blind, already here.
For if you must follow that trail up the mountainside to its bitter end, you will discover that it leads eventually right back to the suburbs, but only an exceedingly stupid person will think that that’s where the trail really goes. For the actual truth is that the trail goes to every single place that it crosses. It leads also to where you are standing, watching.
Watching it vanish into the hills, you are already in the true beyond to which it leads. Many a time I have had intense delight in listening to some hidden waterfall in a mountain canyon; a sound all the more wonderful since I have set aside the urge to ferret the thing out, clear up the mystery, and find out just where the stream comes from and where it goes. Every stream, every road—if followed persistently and meticulously to its end—leads nowhere at all.
And this is why the compulsively investigative mind is always landing up in what it believes to be the disillusion, the hard and bitter reality of the actual facts. Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping cats’ entrails with horse hair. The stars in heaven are, after all, only radioactive rocks and gas.
But this is the illusion that truth is to be found only by picking everything to pieces like a spoiled child. This is why the painters of the Far East so seldom tell all, why they avoid filling in every detail, and why they leave in their paintings great areas of emptiness and vagueness. These aren’t just unfilled backgrounds, they are integral parts of the whole composition, suggestive and pregnant voids and mists which leave something to our imagination—even though we don’t make the mistake of trying actually to fill them in with detail in the mind’s eye.
We let them remain suggested. But it isn’t by pushing relentlessly and aggressively beyond those hills that we discover this unknown and persuade nature to disclose her secrets. What is beyond, that is also here.
Any place where we are may be considered the center of the universe. Anywhere that we stand can be considered the destination of our journey. But we have to be receptive and open.
We have, in other words, to do what Lao Tzu advised when he said, “While being a man, yet one should also preserve a certain femininity. And thereby one will become a channel for the whole universe.” You know, that’s one of the things which I believe, in our culture of the West, is submerged. The feminine values are despised values.
And we find typically, among men, a strange kind of reluctance to be anything but a man; a kind of anxiety to be 100% male. And that’s a kind of monster. A man who is 100% male, 100% tough guy, is a sort of human mollusk who has no softness and no sensitivity.
And indeed, it’s a common psychological observation that people who are constantly anxious to prove their masculinity—who are scared to death of being sissy, of being weak, of being unaggressive—those are the very people who have doubts about their own masculinity; who are not really sure of it. And so there is a tremendous necessity for us to value alongside, as it were, the aggressive masculine element (symbolized by the sword) the receptive feminine element—symbolized, perhaps, by the open flower. For, after all, our human senses are not knives.
They’re not hooks. They are the soft ball of the eye, the delicate drum of the ear, the soft skin on the tips of the fingers and on the body. It is through these delicate receptive things that we basically receive our knowledge of the world.
And therefore it is through a kind of weakness and softness that it is possible for knowledge to come to us. So, putting it in another way: we have to come to terms with nature by wooing her rather than fighting her. Not just putting nature at the so-called distance of objectivity, as if she were an enemy to be shot, but something rather to be known by embrace, like a beloved wife.
For, you see, what does one really want to know about it? Does one rather want to manage the whole thing? Does one want to be a kind of omnipotent god in control of it all?
Or does one rather want to enjoy it? One cannot, after all, enjoy what you are all the time anxious about controlling. One of the nice things about one’s own body is that you don’t have to think about it all the time.
If you had—when you woke up in the morning—to think about every detail of your circulation, you would never get to the day. As was well said: the mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced. I’m going to show you an ancient Chinese method of divination.
Perhaps you know that divination is really a kind of fortune telling. But this particular kind of divination is based on what some people believe to be the very oldest of all the Chinese classics: the Book of Changes. I say divination is something like fortune-telling, but it’s a little bit more highbrow than ordinary fortune-telling.
One wouldn’t, I think, presume to ask so hoary a book of wisdom as the I Ching what to bet on the stock market. Rather, one asks questions about one’s spiritual, psychological state, or very great momentous decisions of life. The very old and orthodox way of consulting the Book of Changes is to use the stalks of the yarrow plant.
A number of stalks are taken and divided at random, and so calculations are made. But this is a rather long and elaborate way of doing it, and a not so ancient but equally respectable way is to use Chinese coins—you know, the kind of coins that have a hole through the middle, so that you can carry them on a string around your neck. So if I were to ask the Book of Changes, “What is the best thing for me in my present state?”—that is the sort of question that would be appropriate under circumstances like this.
So we take the coins and we shake them and drop them. And according to the way they fall—heads or tails—we get a positive or a negative reading. In this particular case we get a negative reading; the symbol which records the negative reading being the drawing of a broken line.
That line is called a yin, or negative, line. We do it again. And this time the reading is again negative, and we record it.
We shake them again. And this time the reading is positive, and we record that by an unbroken line, or a yang line, representing the positive principle. Again, and once more the line is negative.
Again, and the line is once more negative. And then a final sixth time, and the line is positive. And so we get this figure.
And in order to know what it means we have to take a look at a very, very ancient diagram which may be familiar to you. Perhaps you’ve seen this diagram on Chinese bowls, or jewelry sometimes, or carving in jade. This is called bagua, or “the eight trigrams.” In the center of the design you see this figure which may be familiar to some of you as the trademark of the Northern Pacific Railroad.
But actually, its meaning in China is the symbol of these two fundamental principles, the negative and the positive, the yang and the yin, which are held to lie at the root of all phenomena in the world. The word yang, which is represented by this comma, or fish, that is white, means the south (or bright) side of a mountain. And then yin means the shady (or dark) side of a mountain.
And thus, respectively, they’re called the male and the female principles. Now, you’ll obviously notice that with the symbolism of a light and dark side of a mountain that you can’t have a mountain with only one side. The two sides must always go together.
And so, in the same way, the Chinese feel that the positive and the negative, the light and the dark, the male and the female, the auspicious and the inauspicious always go together in human life, because one cannot be distinguished without the other. In the second chapter of his book, the old philosopher Lao Tzu—whom I have mentioned many times in these programs—says: And you can say that “to be” is the principle yang, and “not to be” the principle yin; respectively, the positive and the negative. And now, outside the rotating figure of the positive and negative principles, you will find these eight trigrams—trigrams meaning symbols of three lines.
And here you will see the broken and the unbroken lines such as I drew when I was consulting the oracle—the broken being the yin line, and the unbroken the yang, or positive, lines. And these trigrams represent the eight fundamental principles or elements which, according to this Book of Changes, are involved in every life situation. For example, the one at the top means heaven or sky, the one below means earth.
This is the father, this is the mother. Over this side, for example, this one means fire, and over here, that one means water. And as you will see, we derived two of these trigrams.
The point of the oracle being that every situation in life is a combination of two of these principles in preponderance. And the one that we have here is this one, repeated twice. And this one has the meaning of a mountain.
A mountain over a mountain. Now, there are 64 possible combinations of these eight trigrams, which makes the meaning of each combination pretty difficult to remember. So we’d better go and look at the Book of Changes itself and see what it has to say about this particular one; what advice the oracle would want to give me in answer to my question about my present situation.
The mountain over the mountain happens to be—let’s see, that’s number 52. The figure of the mountain, of course, has a symbolism, and it means the idea of quietness or keeping still. And so when we have keeping still, quietness above quietness, we get a whole emblem whose meaning is profound calm.
And so the oracle says: Now, you can see that that’s pretty generalized advice. And it’s appropriate, in a way, to the question, because the question was vague and the answer is vague. But the symbolism of this answer is simply that, sitting so as to keep one’s back still, so that one’s back is not noticed, is self-forgetfulness.
And keeping one’s thoughts to the immediate situation means the practice of meditation or calmness or quietness, and that’s what I’m advised to do. It’s good advice. Now you may say: well this is a thoroughly crazy way at coming at decisions—especially if I were to ask something more specific than this.
If I had asked advice on some momentous decision I had to make, we would naturally say from our modern scientific point of view that flipping coins to come to the great decisions of life is the stupidest thing we could possibly do. After all, it neglects all rational cogitation about our situations. We would say: well, it takes no account of the data in the situation.
It makes no intelligent assessment of the probabilities. And we, before we make any important decision, we think over all the factors involved, we balance the pros against the cons, we balance assets against deficit, and so on. We go into the situation and think it out thoroughly.
And therefore, what could be more superstitious than relying upon some oracle that has entirely to do with the purely chance falling of the coins that have no relation to the problem whatsoever? That’s our contemporary point of view about all methods of fortune-telling, divination, and so on and so forth. But now, look: someone who believed in this system—an old-fashioned Chinese—might say to us, “But listen.
First of all, when you estimate the data, when you consider the facts that are involved in any particular decision, how do you know exactly what facts are involved?” After all, you’re going to sign a contract, and the facts you think about that are relevant to this contract are the state of your own business, the state of the other fellow’s business, the prospects, the market, and so on and so forth. But something that you may never have considered at all may enter into the situation and change it utterly. The man with whom you’re going to make the contract may slip on a banana skin, and so hurt his head and become inefficient in business.
How would anyone ever think of such an eventuality in taking a sane and rational view of the situation? Or he might say to us: how do you know when you got in enough data? After all, the data, the causes, the problems involved in any particular situation are virtually infinite.
And, as a matter of fact, you stop getting in data, stop getting in information as to how to solve a problem, either when you’re tired of it, or when the time comes to act and you haven’t time to collect any more data. And he would say that is just as irrational as flipping coins, because you decide when to stop investigating in a very arbitrary way. So are you really very much more ahead of us?
Well, we would say: what about probabilities? After all, we rely a great deal upon statistics in order to make decisions. And he would say again about statistics: yes, statistics are all very well when you want to know what a lot of people are going to do.
For example, if you flip a coin, you know that if you flip a coin a hundred times, there is going to be quite a probability that you will toss half of the time heads, half of the time tails. A thousand tosses and you will get nearer to an exact half and half. But each individual toss, the chance is 50–50 whether it will be heads or tails.
In other words, you may have tossed 999 times, and you may have had 400 tails tosses, you may have had the rest heads tosses. So the probability will be on the thousandth that it will go to tails, because that’s had the lesser number of tosses—but actually, your chance on it coming up heads or tails at that particular moment is again 50–50, and the probability really tells you nothing. And so, in the same way, with the actuarial tables of insurance companies.
They will say the average lifespan of an adult man is 65 years. But on any individual case these tables do not tell us when I am going to die. And so our Chinese critic might say: well, so you see, I myself am of a somewhat skeptical temperament, and I very much doubt in fact whether this way of coming at decisions really worked.
Or let us put it this way: we can never really prove whether any method of coming to decisions really works. I mean, I may make a foolish decision, and I call it foolish because as a result of it I get killed. But there’s absolutely no way of showing that my getting killed at that moment didn’t preserve me from a worse fate, from making mistakes that involved the lives of many other people.
If I so-called succeed by making a right decision and I earn a million dollars, there’s no way of showing that this isn’t so bad for my character that it’s the worst thing that could possibly happen. So we never really know whether the outcome of a decision is a failure or a success—not in the long run. Because only the unknown what comes next will show whether it was good or bad, and the unknown stretches infinitely into the future.
But it seems to me that the importance of this old Chinese book of divination is twofold. First of all, there’s a bad side to it; a distinct disadvantage in Chinese culture. The Chinese came so much to rely on the book of changes, and to use its system of symbols—those trigrams I showed you—to use these for classifying all natural phenomena that, in the course of time, it became a very rigid thing and it excluded the perception of novelty.
Now, the warning and the advantage to us in that is: we can do the same thing with the scientific method. There are certain kinds of personality who become very rigid in their scientific ideas, and simply automatically exclude certain possibilities because they don’t conform with alleged scientific dogma. Take, for example, what we call ESP or extrasensory perception.
I rather call it extraordinary sensory perception. But still, there is reason to believe that there is extremely strong evidence for something of this kind occurring, and yet many scientific people will ignore that evidence because they say things like: that simply can’t happen. And that is to fall into the same rut that the Chinese fell into when they relied too meticulously upon the classification of the world and of events found in the Book of Changes.
But there’s a positive side to the picture. For this Book of Changes is founded on a view of life which is very suggestive to us, which is in accord with certain points of view that now develop in our own science. A way of life, a way of looking at life, which sees not so much the causal relationship between events, as the pattern of events.
Let me try and show that difference. When we think of causality we think chiefly of the way events are determined by their past. It’s as if events were a lot of marbles, and they’re thrown together and they knock each other around.
And therefore, in tracing the movement of any particular marble, we try to find out which other marbles knocked it and so trace it back and back and back. And until quite recent times the whole view of Western science was based on the idea of causality: how things are influenced by past things. But the point of view that underlies the Book of Changes—and the Chinese never really applied to their science; they applied it rather to their art, and perhaps their philosophy of law—but the point of view here is different.
It is instead of understanding events by relation to past causes, it understands events by relation to their present pattern. And, in other words, it comprehends them by taking a total view instead of what we might call a linear view. If, for example, we can find a suitable analogy for the Western way of looking at things, we might say it is understanding events in accordance with the order of words.
For example, I can say “This dog has no bark,” and then “this tree has no bark.” Now, the meaning of “bark” in these two sentences is determined by what went before them. I make sounds before I say the sound “bark.” Before I say “bark” I say “this dog has no.” Now, if I want to know what “bark” means, I have to go back to what happened in the past. But if you take the order, not of words, but what I would rather call the order of design, we get a rather different situation.
Supposing I draw two small circles, and these correspond to the two words “bark.” They’re both the same. But now, supposing a design arises around those two circles, and then at once we see that in their context those two original circles have quite different meaning. But you see their relationship to their meaning all at once.
I mean, imagine: supposing these designs had not been drawn by a brush, line after line after line, but had appeared altogether at once as you see the image appear when you’re developing a photographic plate. Then you would see that the meaning of each part of the design is relative to the rest of it as you see it now at this moment. And so, in the same way, the fundamental philosophy of the Book of Changes and of the Chinese idea of the relationship between events is to understand every event in its present context.
Not understanding it so much as we do by what went before it, but rather understanding it in terms of what goes with it.Thus the idea of the Book of Changes is to reveal through its symbols the total pattern of the moment when the question is asked, on the supposition that the pattern of this moment governs even the tossing of the coins. Now then, the interesting comparison that arises out of this is that because we in the West have tended to understand events in accordance with the order of words, in accordance with the order of causality, we have evolved a conception of nature as based on law. In other words, when we ask for the explanation of any natural phenomenon, we look for that explanation in words, in a formulation, that will describe a law.
On the other hand, the Chinese have not evolved the idea of a law of nature, but something quite different but equally valid and equally useful. There is indeed a word in Chinese for “law,” in very much our sense of law. It’s a rather interesting word, because as it was originally written, it was a picture like this.
That’s a picture of an iron cauldron, and beside it a figure holding a knife. This is the Chinese word for “law,” tse, which most corresponds to our idea of law. And the reason for this symbol is that, in ancient times, some of the old emperors commanded the laws to be written on the iron sacrificial cauldrons.
And when the people came to offer sacrifice and put their offerings into the cauldrons, they could read the laws written upon the cauldrons. But at the time, when those ancient emperors ordered the laws to be written in this way, there were certain sages and scholars who said: no, you shouldn’t write the laws down. Because if you write the laws down, the people will develop a litigious spirit—that is to say, they will start quibbling.
And therefore, the property of the order of nature is sometimes called in Chinese not this; the expression wu-tse. Wu meaning “not.” Wu-tze is used, meaning “apparently lawless.” But it doesn’t really mean lawless. For example, if we go for a moment to Chinese ideas of civil law, a good judge does not base his decisions on this kind of law—written down law—because he knows that no written law can apply to all the complex multiplicity of circumstances that may arise.
And so he bases his decisions on what the Chinese call, not law, but justice: 義. This word is pronounced i. And justice in this sense corresponds rather to our idea of equity.
It is the sensibility for order and reasonableness that is embodied in an individual. He hasn’t got it clearly written down, but he is the sort of person who is able to judge in any particular circumstance whether a certain decision is fair or not fair. And they much rather trust a man who has i in him than a man who has a thorough knowledge of the rules.
And so we come, thus, to a conception of the order of nature that is one of the most important words in the Chinese language, and that is a word which originally meant “the markings in jade,” “the grain in wood,” or “the fiber in muscle,” and it’s pronounced lǐ. This is a character, then, meaning really “the basic, fundamental pattern of things.” But such an image is used as the markings in jade or the grain in wood because this is an extremely subtle, complex pattern; a huge area of events all happening together at once, which has to be taken in at a glance in the same way as we take design in at a glance, understood at a glance, and therefore is not capable of formulation in the order of words.And so lǐ—meaning, perhaps, “organic pattern”—is the fundamental Chinese idea of the order of nature. In other words, when we think of beauty, we know very clearly what is beautiful and what isn’t.
But it’s absolutely impossible to write down a set of laws and rules as to how one will create beautiful objects. In mathematics, for example, mathematicians often feel that certain equations, certain expressions, are peculiarly beautiful. And mathematicians, because they are meticulous people, try to think out exactly: why is this beautiful?
Could we make up a rule for beauty? And yet they come to the conclusion that if we could make up a rule and apply it in mathematics, and always by the use of this rule get a beautiful result, eventually those results would cease to impress us as being beautiful. They would become sterile and dry.
And so, in the same way, the order of nature, the order of justice, the order of beauty are things which we can know in ourselves, but we cannot write down in black and white. And therefore, the superior man is one who has the sensibility for these things in himself. In talking about Buddhism and science, I’m not going to try to prove that Buddhism is in some way scientific, but rather compare the two as different forms of knowledge.
I think one has to be very careful of making claims for forms of ancient philosophy that some are more in accord with the spirit of science than others. For, in so many ways, science is such a new thing in the world, and I often find that people who make claims for various religions or philosophies of the ancient world as being scientific actually don’t know very much about science. So I think we should start in—in this sort of discussion—asking: what is science?
First of all, science is a method of description. If we have a form of this kind, a rather wiggly form—as I’ve sometimes said, the natural world is full of wiggly forms, and science (in dealing with the natural world) is an attempt to describe them exactly—if we describe this particular form poetically as distinct from exactly, we might say, “Well, it’s like a flame. A flame dancing above the fire, burning gas,” or something of that kind.
But the interest of science is to describe these forms very precisely indeed. And to do so it employs a method which is fundamentally like this: to superimpose over the form some very simple, regular pattern in terms of which the form can be described. And what we see here is a system of squares which can be described accurately because they can be numbered up and down.
And if we were, for example, to fill in, in the light grey area, the squares over which the form passes, we should get a rather rough but still approximate formal equivalent of the original figure. But you notice in the top left-hand corner of the screen that where the squares are drawn much more finely, you get a greater approximation to the original figure. In other words, the whole method of scientific description is one of, shall we say, putting things in boxes.
Basically, this is the act of classification; of representing the complex forms of the world in terms of simpler, regular forms that we can understand. Regular forms that we can count, measure, classify, and so on. And in this way we get a well-controlled description of physical reality.
So you could say that, in a way, science is the art of definition, of getting things down (as we say) in black and white, of assimilating the unknown, the irregular, and the wayward to patterns that are known, regular, and controlled. And, basically, this is really the whole operation of that distinctively human activity that we call thought. Because thought is fundamentally classification.
And so, also, science is classification. If you read older works of science—works of, say, natural history and zoology—you will see that the primary concern of the scientist was to classify the various species of nature: the various types of butterflies and insects, the various forms of rocks, the various varieties of plants, and to get them all into classes like animal, vegetable, mineral, and all their innumerable subdivisions. And so thought fundamentally asks of classes: is a given natural phenomenon in that class or is it not in it?
The question is always, as we say slangily, “is we is or is we ain’t?” And this method of classification is not only basic to thought, but in a way it’s basic to the operation to the human nervous system. For of each one of the neurons that compose our nervous system it can be said that it only has two states. A state corresponding to “yes” and a state corresponding to “no,” like an electric current is either on or off.
And in the same way that, for example, the television camera scans a given scene such as my face, and sends impulses along a wire to the transmitter and then to your set, these impulses are fundamentally of a yes-or-no character. And the structure of the screen at which you are looking is something like that grid structure which I showed you a moment ago spread over the black flame, and it reinterprets the picture in terms of ever so many little units of “on” or “off,” “yes” or “no.” So, in the same way, the great computer machines—which scientists have built to give mechanical equivalence of the human mind—use in most cases what we call binary arithmetic; that is to say, a number system in which there are simply two numbers, one and two, corresponding approximately to this same duality of “yes” and “no” upon which all thought is based and which is also the basis of classification. When we put, in other words, phenomena into mental boxes, when we class them, the fundamental question is: is it in this box or is it not in this box?
And this is the basic principle of science which it elaborates in the most marvelously complex ways. And I think we might think about some of these more complex forms. The scientist, as I said, does not simply consider the world in terms of such very simple patterns as the grid or the set of squares drawn over a form which he wants to describe accurately.
To go to an opposite extreme, the task of the mathematician (who is fundamental to all science) is really to think up complex patterns. And the pure mathematician doesn’t bother his head particularly as to whether the patterns in algebra or geometry or arithmetic (which which he’s concerned) bear any resemblance to events in the real world. For example, we would say that, in the real world, we live in a physical space in which there are only three dimensions.
There’s the dimension of height, of width, and then, in perspective, we can represent the dimension of depth. And we feel that, in the real world, in the physical space with which we are familiar, we can only have three right angles drawn about a point: the right angle between height and width, the right angle between depth and height, and the right angle between depth and width. But of course the mathematician can, in theory, think of an infinite number of right angles ’round this point, in a kind of imaginary space that we cannot visualize with our senses.
And he can say, for instance, that a line drawn this way is also at right angles to all the other dimensions, and go on and on and on inventing an apparently fantastic space which has infinitely many dimensions. Now, it may so turn out that this speculation, this construction of a fantastic pattern, does have some actual application to nature. And the mathematical equations which are concerned with spaces of infinitely many dimensions are actually applicable to fluctuations in prices and things of that kind.
But this was an entirely unexpected applications. So the fundamental task of science is to invent patterns and see, in applied science, whether these patterns enable us to comprehend the behavior of the physical world. There’s another sense in which patterns may be used to explain things.
Supposing I draw such a figure as this and ask the question: what is it? Now, there are various ways of explaining this figure and making what appears to be at the moment a sort of nonsensical abstraction—the very sort of thing we run across in the natural world—of making some sense of it. Now, supposing I say that is a drawing of a tree trunk with lopped of branches on it.
This (immediately, in your mind) makes sense of the picture because it has related it to something with which you are familiar. In another sense, it has classified it. It has given an intelligible pattern to these lines which I scratched out on the board.
But supposing we offer another explanation of it and say: it’s a bear climbing a tree. Of course, the bear is hidden behind the tree. This gives you an entirely different picture of the same original drawing.
And so, in the same way, when the scientist explains various natural phenomena—let’s say we see a partial eclipse of the sun. Now, if you are a member of a culture which firmly believes that eclipses of the sun are the result of the sun being eaten up by a dragon, you will see something here corresponding to what you see in this drawing when you say, “Oh, it’s a bear climbing a tree from behind.” You will have in your mind’s eye a highly complex and elaborate version of what’s going on here—something, in fact, like this. There will be the dragon, eating up the sun.
Now, you won’t perhaps actually visualize that dragon in the same way that when I tell you that this is a bear climbing a tree, you will almost, you know, see the bear behind it. You know? There he is.
Almost, in your mind’s eye, you see that bear. And almost, in your mind’s eye (if you really believe that a partial eclipse of the sun is caused by a dragon), you will believe that you see the dragon. But, on the other hand, if the scientist explains it more simply and says: a partial eclipse of the sun is simply caused by the moon crossing the sun, you will have a simple picture like that in your mind’s eye.
So these are the ways in which the scientist is giving an account of the world. He is assimilating things that we don’t know, patterns that we don’t understand, to patterns that we do understand. And so the question arises further, in exploring what is the function of science, to ask: why do we want to do that?
Why do we want to be able to describe the world in terms and in patterns that we can understand? And surely the answer is that if we can interpret the unknown in terms of the known, if we can describe what is going on in the world in regular patterns, we can predict what things are going to do next. In other words, if a pattern is regular, it is regular not only in shape, say, it will also be regular in rhythm.
We time the apparent rising of the sun and we find that it rises daily in a regular rhythm. And so every new day we feel we can bet on the sun following the same rhythm, since it has done so for so long. And so, then, further: what is the point of predicting future events?
Obviously, the point of predicting what is going to happen is that it enables us to control what is going to happen. To adapt our own actions accordingly, and therefore to establish what we call technical control over our physical environment. And in this way, then, you could say that the purpose of science is to control both our own nature and physical nature in order that the human race may survive as comfortably as possible in its natural surroundings.
And you will see that that involves, in other words, a constant superimposition of human ideas of order upon the apparent disorder which we first find when we look at the natural world. In other words, when a baby is born, or when a blind person first acquires the gift of sight through a surgical operation, what they see with their eyes is a chaos. A mature blind person who has never seen but is enabled to see by an operation first of all finds the experience of sight extremely confusing.
He can’t make any sense out of it at all. And he has to learn it. In other words, he has to interpret what he doesn’t know (the objects of vision) in terms of what he does know (the sense of touch).
He has to realize, for example, that the four corners of a table which he sees out there are related in a square pattern. And he has to understand how what he sees (the unknown) is related to what he has felt with his eyes closed through his fingertips (the known). And in this way, then, the whole task of applied science is, as it were, to assimilate the world of knowledge to the patterns of human order in rather the same way that, when we eat, we assimilate dead bulls and dead vegetables and eggs and all that kind of thing—we absorb them in and we assimilate them to the physical organization of the human body.
Knowledge is, in other words, a form of eating, for the two processes are equally of assimilation. And therefore, the extension of man’s control over nature might metaphorically be described as a mental eating up of the universe. And as a result of this process, the organization of human life, its systems of communication and systems of control, are extended more and more and more in just the same way, for example, that by assimilating the minerals out of the soil and the rays out of the sunlight, a plant like a fern grows and grows and grows and extends its form.
And in this way its organization prevails. Now then, you see, if you take this task of what we call the conquest of nature—the task of making order victorious over chaos or randomness—if you take this seriously, you will look upon it as warfare and you will firmly believe that the most urgent thing that there possibly can be is to make order prevail over randomness, to make good prevail over evil, to make life prevail over death. And we find that when we are in a contest of this kind, a serious warfare game of this kind—and we take it seriously.
We are involved in it in a very deep and bitter sense. Now, the difference of Buddhism from science as a form of knowledge is that, in Buddhism, it would be said that this view of things—this view of the task of life as making order triumph over disorder—leaves something out. You remember right at the beginning I made some importance of a Sanskrit word which is fundamental in Buddhism: avidyā.
Which meant—a means “non,” vidyā “knowing.” “Non-knowing,” or “ignorance,” or better: “ignore-ance.” Ignorance. In other words, leaving something out of account. And I want to use a familiar illustration to show in what way we ignore.
You see here a figure which is apparently, as you look at it, two faces in profile about to kiss each other. Now, if we draw back a little from those two faces, we can see on the white area in between them the form of a cup. But the interesting thing about this is that, as you look at it, you will either be able to see the form of the cup or the form of the two faces in profile, as it were, about to kiss each other.
You can alternate between them very rapidly, but you will not be able to see them both that way at the same time. In other words, either the white must be the background and the black the figure on the ground, or else the black must be the background and the white cup showing up on it. And so, in this way, we are unable to see, really—we can think it; after a while we can get accustomed to the idea—that the figure and the ground, the black and the white, are mutually necessary to each other.