Paweł K:
without this afterlife garbage Buddhism would have been taken much more seriously in our modern world

it would so beautiful atheistic religion ...
http://www.byomakusuma.org/Teachings/TheUseOfSymbolsAndRitualsInVajrayanaMahayanaBuddhism.aspx
...Here, it is important to distinguish a very important point. Those who have tried to make Buddhism concord with Modernism have constantly harped on the point that the Buddha revolted against all rites and rituals. There are two things wrong with this view. Firstly, this is an attempt to fit the Buddha in a ‘modernist weltanschauung’ as if the Buddha’s view of the world was exactly like what came into existence in the cultures of the Western world after the 17th century due to scientific developments and the Industrial Revolution. Till about 1950, the whole of the Western culture was under the sway of Modernism. Modernism believed that only what was scientific or looked scientific was true, real, fact, un-superstitious; anything else that didn’t look scientific or similar to Physics and Chemistry was false, untrue, and superstitious. Needless to say, many Buddhist scholars and educated Buddhists of that time (especially those Buddhist monk scholars of the British colonial Ceylon) fell for this consensual hypnotic illusion and subscribed rather vociferously to this view. So anything within Buddhism that didn’t look scientific, was not analytically linear, didn’t fit the Cartesian Reductionist linear paradigm was thrown out the window and declared that the Buddha did not actually teach such a thing but rather was brought into Buddhism by latter-day decadent Buddhists.
Symbols and rites and rituals were among those most valuable psychotherapeutic elements which didn’t fit the Modernist paradigm. So they were declared as wholesale non-Buddhist; and they were actually things the Buddha himself actually taught against. However, after the Cognitive Revolution in the West in the 1950’s, Modernism has lost its stranglehold on Western cultural weltanschauung and is no longer considered as the whole and sole criteria to decide what is true and what is not. After the 1950’s, Post-Modernism began to fan out across the Western cultural horizon and Modernism gradually died out. Post-Modernism upholds the fact that the scientific view of life is only one mode of gauging reality and is by no means the whole and sole determinant of what is true or false; and there are alternate modes to experience / evaluate and interpret the world / reality etc. which are equally valid. Now, if we subscribe to these quaint ideas that the Buddha had the same view as the Modernists whose ideas began only after the 17th century and that too in the West; today we automatically make the Buddha outdated in this Post-Modernist world. It is also absurd to believe that the Buddha in the 6th century BC taught what the Modernists believed in the 17th century and refuted whatever these Modernists refuted or saw as false...
http://www.byomakusuma.org/Teachings/MarshlandFlowersPart2.aspx
Issue 35: 24 - 30 September 2007
…Science itself never claims what it cannot measure at the moment as superstitious.
It is through various types of Samatha practice that various Pratiharyas (miraculous powers) also called Siddhi – Riddhis develop as a matter of course; or if they do not easily develop, they can be developed by various specialised mental exercises geared to awaken these potentials in the human mind.
In this era of modernism when the physical science was considered the evaluating measuring rod for the validity of anything, Pratiharyas were suspect. And many Buddhists with modernistic leanings even thought that these were interpolated into the Buddhist scripture by overly naïve simple village folks. Needless to say this was a result of the so called scientific education spawned out by modernism. But the beauty of science is that it moves on and does not remain static.
From the 18th century to the mid 20th century, science progressed in leaps and bounds to such an unimaginable extent that man thought science alone was the answer to all its questions. So the milieu developed in which whatever was scientific was true/ real/valid/non-superstitious and whatever was not scientific was untrue/invalid/superstitious. The progress of physics and other physical sciences was so mind boggling, that its dazzle blinded all those who were part of the era of modernism. But there was a flaw in this thinking and not only Buddhist but also many Hindu Swamis and Yogis also failed to see it.
First of all only what can be measured can be studied by physics and such other physical sciences. Now there are many things which cannot and will never be measured like love/compassion/beauty, the splendour of the Himalayas and so on. We cannot possibly say that such things are unreal/untrue/superstitious. Secondly the physical sciences are limited by the type of instrument available.
That means even those things which could be measurable like the chemical correlates in the brain to love and feel compassion were out of reach of the sciences in the 18th and 19th century. Now are we to say that these brain chemicals like dopamine, serotonin etc were all untrue/unreal/superstitious till the mid 20th century, and then they suddenly became real/true/scientific? Such type of thinking is absurd to say the least.
Furthermore, science itself never claims what it cannot measure at the moment as superstitious. It is the half baked ultra-modernist types whose knowledge of science is limited to vague ideas and the enjoyment of consumerist goods produced by science that have these kinds of quaint notions.
As early as 1950 Einstein declared that science cannot and will not answer all the questions and problems of mankind. This is true because rational linear thinking, on which science is based, is only one mode of thinking and knowing available to man. The world view made available through science is only one possible view amongst many other views. And this materialistic reductionist view of science is not only an artificial view extracted out of reality but also it is not more real than any other view.
Using the empirical reductionist positivism (reducing all things to empirically measurable things etc) modus operandi itself, we can question this style of absurd thinking that only what is empirically measurable is true/real/valid/non-superstitious. The million dollar question is, "Is this hypothesis empirically measurable?" Since it is not, by its own logic falls apart.
The central point of Werner Heisenberg in his various books like Physics and Beyond, Across the Frontiers etc is that physics can make only statements about strictly limited relations that are only valid within the framework of those limitations. He also says, "Science tries to give its concepts an objective meaning. But religious language must avoid this very cleavage of the world into its objective and its subjective sides: for who would dare claim the objective side to be more real than the subjective? (To be continued.)
Issue 36: 1 - 7 October 2007
…but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source.
Heisenberg warns that spirituality/religious experiences and science/mathematical knowledge are two different modes of thinking and should not be confused. He warns, "many modern creeds which claim that they are, in fact, are not dealing with questions of faith, but are based on scientific knowledge that contain inner contradictions and rest on self-deception." Heinrick Hertz, in his introduction to the Principles of Mechanics says, "a natural science is one whose proposition on limited domains of nature can have only a correspondingly limited validity; that science is not a philosophy developing a world view of nature as a whole or about the essence of things."
Erwin Schroedinger, the Nobel Laureate of Physics in 1933 in his various books like My View of the World, Mind and Matter, Science and Humanism etc says, "I do not think I am prejudiced against the importance that science has from the purely human point of view. But with all that, I cannot believe that (for example) the deep philosophical enquiry into the relation between subject and object and into the true meaning of the distinction between them depends on the quantitative results of physical and chemical measurements with weighing scales, spectroscopes, microscopes, telescopes, with Geiger-Muller counters, Wilson chambers, photographic plates, arrangements for measuring the radio-active decay, and what not……
Further Schroedinger says, "The scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experiences in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight, it knows nothing about beautiful and ugly, good or bad,…Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously…….Whence come I and wither go I? That is the great unfathomable question, the same for every one of us. Science has no answer to it.”
The well known Nobel Laureate of Physics in 1921, Einstein perhaps the most well known scientist of the 20th century says in his Ideas and Opinions: Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source.
Ken Wilber, a distinguished scientist in his own right and a prolific writer says in his Quantum Questions: “Modern science, in its beginning, was characterised by a conscious modesty; it made statements about strictly limited relations that are only valid within the framework of these limitations…..This modesty was largely lost during the nineteenth century. Physical knowledge was considered to make assertions about nature as a whole. Physics wished to turn philosopher and the demand was voiced from many quarters that all true philosophers must be scientific.”
This was the era named modernism, and we can see that the influence of modernism is found in almost all writing on religion, be it Buddhism or Hinduism or philosophy; during this period. Many Buddhist scholars of that period like Rahula Sankrityayana, Dr. Ambedkar are stalwarts of modernistic interpretation of Buddhism. Modernism lasted in the West till about the mid twentieth century when the cognitive revolution, threw modernism overboard and a new era of post modernism began in the west.
Many writers like Ken Wilber are of the opinion that post modernism is also on its death throes in the West and it is looking for another world view. But alas Nepal, as usual always behind time compared to the rest of the world is still in the throttling grasp of modernism, although a smattering of writers talk about post-modernism, the brunt of the Nepalese weltanschauung (worldview) is still pretty much coloured by modernism, which was itself blinded by the view that the one and only truth/fact/reality were what was compatible with the empirical, reductionist positivism that believed that only what could be measured by scientific instruments was real. (To be continued.)