Hello. My name's Graham Priest and I'm
an Australian philosopher currently working
in the City University of New York, the Graduate Center.
And we are recording a number of short videos in the series on
science and religion and I'm going to be talking about the connection between Buddhism,
which is certainly a religion and science.
What I hope to do in these lectures is give you some sense
of what Buddhism is and its relationship to science.
So, I'm assuming that most people
watching these videos will have some idea of what science is.
But I'm also guessing that most people watching these videos won't have a lot
of knowledge of East Asian philosophy, religions, traditions.
So, the first thing I think I must do in order to talk about the connection between
science and Buddhism is to give you some sense of what Buddhism is.
Now, Buddhism is no more one thing than is Christianity.
Buddhism has long history,
or development through different philosophies,
different ideas and so you
shouldn't run away with the thought that there is something which is the Buddhism.
Buddhism has a long and distinguished history of
development in a number of different continents or subcontinents.
And what I want to do in this first lecture is to give you or try to give you
some sense of the historical development of Buddhism at least in its first,
let's say 1500 years.
So, Buddhism starts with the thought of Siddhartha Gautama.
Siddhartha is born in North East India or Nepal.
We don't know where exactly,
and he's called the Buddha.
Now, the Buddha is not his name,
his name is Siddhartha Gautama.
Buddha is an honorific, okay?
In exactly the same way that Christ is an honorific of Jesus Christ.
Buddha means the awakened one or the enlightened one,
essentially the person who's got it.
Okay? So, Siddhartha is active in the fifth or maybe sixth century B.C.E
(a lot of these dates are conjectural).
He attains enlightenment and then he starts to teach and after his death,
Buddhism takes off and many people engage with his thought and develop it,
and Buddhism develops a number of early schools.
These are usually called the Abhidharma schools.
Abhidharma just means higher learning,
higher teaching and that's the kind of philosophical wing of the early Buddhism.
So, between the Buddha's death and the turn of the Common Era,
then a number of these early schools emerge,
only one of them exists nowadays.
Most have faded out.
The one that still exists is Theravada Buddhism, the way of the elders.
And I'll tell you a little bit more about that in a second.
Now, something really important happens around the turn of the Common Era.
Because a whole new class of Sutras emerge.
These are called the Prajnaparamita Sutras.
Pranjnaparamita means perfection of wisdom.
So these Sutras inaugurate a whole new kind of Buddhism,
Mahayana, which means literally The Great Vehicle.
Mahayana is distinctive both ethically and metaphysically.
The central core of Mahayana Buddhism,
central ethical core of Mahayana Buddhism is compassion,
which becomes the central virtue.
The central metaphysical principle is emptiness,
and we'll talk more about emptiness in a later lecture.
But these characterize Mahayana Buddhism.
And Mahayana Buddhism develops in India between
about the turn of the Common Era and about 1100,
in the Common Era, and it develops in two forms.
The first of this is inaugurated by
perhaps the second most important Buddhist philosopher
after the Buddhist himself, Nagarjuna.
Nagarjuna is working in maybe the first or second century,
we don't know exactly, we don't know where exactly.
But he found something called the Madhyamaka school of Mahayana Buddhism, middle way.
A little later, legend has it,
a second wing of Indian Mahayana was
inaugurated by two philosophers, Asanga and Vasubandhu.
This was Yogacara, this means the practice of yoga,
note the name doesn't really help much.
It's often called Cittamatra,
mind only, and this tells you much more about it.
These were the idealists of Mahayana.
So, you had these two wings of Indian Mahayana Buddhism,
and later thinkers in that duration try to pull these two things together syncretically,
whether or not they were successful is a matter of dispute.
But certainly, Buddhist philosophy is very active in
India for the whole of the first Millennium of the Common Era.
In fact, there was a Buddhist university in Nalanda,
in Northeast India which at
its height was reputed to have held something like 10,000 scholars.
So, this was an enormously big institution.
If you go to India today, you will see precious little Buddhism.
And the reason is that Buddhism winds up in India around the 10th, 11th, 12th century.
A large part of the explanation for that is the waves of
Muslim invasion which are coming in at this time from Central Asia.
So, in the fighting between the Muslims and the Hindus,
Buddhism gets squeezed out,
and Nalanda itself was sacked sometime in the 11th or 12th century.
And like the Library of Alexandria,
legend says that when the Library of Nalanda was sacked and burned,
it burned for a month.
So, this gives you some sense of how big the University was.
So, this was the end of Buddhism in
India to all intents and purposes until the present time.
But by that time, Buddhism had spread.
So, Buddhism starts to go South East,
in the early years of the Common Era.
And it goes into Sri Lanka,
it goes into Myanmar,
it goes into Thailand and the kind of Buddhism that goes Southeast is the earlier form,
and in particular Theravada.
So, if you go to these Southeast Asian countries today,
this is the kind of Buddhism that you will meet.
Okay. Mahayana Buddhism by contrast goes North West up through Pakistan,
Afghanistan and the other stans,
Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and so on.
And it goes there just before the turn of the Common Era.
For all that it's Mahayana that eventually takes root
there and you have to remember that at this time,
Central Asia was a Greek Colony because of the Alexandrian conquests.
So, Mahayana Buddhism becomes established in Central Asia.
So, the information going backwards and forwards between
China and the Middle East across the Silk Road,
and one of the things that goes across Silk Route is Buddhism.
So, Buddhism starts to enter China around the turn of the Common Era,
and when it does that it meets
the two indigenous Chinese Philosophies, Confucianism and Daoism.
And of these two, it was Daoism which was to have the most development,
the most influence on the development of Buddhism in China.
In fact, when Buddhism goes into China,
most of the Chinese think that Buddhism is some exotic form of Daoism. It isn't.
But by the time they get it straight,
then the whole of the Daoist influence on Chinese Buddhism is so strong
that when the distinctively Chinese schools of Buddhism emerge,
these are all heavily influenced by Daoism.
So, what you get with the development of Chinese Buddhism is Mahayana Buddhism,
both Yogacara and Madhyamaka influenced by Daoism.
And a number of distinctively Chinese Buddhist schools
emerge around the Fifth, Sixth century.
One of this is Hua-Yen,
we will meet this briefly in one of the later lectures,
but my guess is that you've probably never heard of any of these
except maybe one, and this is Chan.
And you won't know it by that name.
Buddhism enters Japan through the Korean Peninsula around the Sixth century,
and the Chinese forms of Buddhism take hold in the Korean Peninsula and in Japan.
But they are often known by different names in these countries.
And when Chan Buddhism goes in to Japan, it's pronounced Zen.
Now, Zen you probably have heard of.
So, my guess is that if you've heard of any of these Chinese Buddhist schools,
you've heard of Chan by its Japanese name which is Zen.
So let me emphasize that all the Chinese Buddhisms are Mahayana.
But they are distinctive because of the influence of Daoism.
So, now you have a sense of a little of
the history and the geography of Buddhist thought.
