Audio recorded at Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Rather than dive into Buddhist doctrine, Kyabje Rinpoche opens a multi-part seminar by arguing that the apparent separation between physics and ethics is built on an outdated worldview. In this 53-minute first session, he traces the revolution from Newtonian determinism to quantum mechanics—showing how quantum non-locality opens intellectual space for karma—then uses biology and neuroscience to demonstrate why altruism undermines standard evolutionary theory. Evidence ranges from ants committing suicide to protect colonies to newborn infants showing innate ethical preference. He systematically builds the case that the Golden Rule, present in all traditions, is grounded in human nature itself, establishing intellectual groundwork before turning to specifically Buddhist karma teachings after a tea break. Pitched at educated Westerners who assume science precludes spirituality.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2013-06-29 – KR.mp3
Teacher: Kyabje Rinpoche
Collection: Unclassified
Date: 2029-06-13
Recorded at: Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide
Words: ~6,925
And several new faces. These seminars are a cycle of seminars I’ve been giving at TBI really since end two thousand eight, but they have taken their present form with audio visual support in the last two and a half years, and their goal is to present the Buddhist teachings systematically in a constant confrontation with reason and analysis, which I think is the only way forwards for a western audience. This is more demanding than a simple faith based approach, but I don’t believe a faith based approach was in keeping with the Buddha’s original intent, nor do I believe that it provides a solid foundation for Westerners who for whom the very concept of faith is quite alien. So today, we will be addressing what I personally feel is the central, the core, of Buddhist teachings, which is karma. It is a topic which is often profoundly misunderstood, and in my personal opinion, it is by far the most beneficial aspect of the teachings for us to understand.
For, it is open to question whether we can gain, in this lifetime any serious understanding of emptiness and therefore whether we can hope for liberation or full enlightenment, it is definitely possible to gain a sound understanding of karma and causality to change the way we live, we speak, and we think, and to take control not merely over this life, but over future lives. Then I shall not enter into the issue of the evidence in favor of the existence of future lives, of which I have talked very extensively at TBI, I shall just take Stevenson’s research for granted at present, and in this particular seminar we shall focus on causality in general, which includes non karmic physical causality, and karmic causality in particular, and then address the issue of how to change the way we live. Then as usual, you know I have a tendency to go way over time, so I’ve only been allotted I think until 04:00. If you have things to do after 04:00, please feel free to go. We shall end between 04:30 and five with questions.
The first issue I would like to address with you is general causality, and in this matter it is very helpful to project ourselves back in time in Western history to get a sense of where we come from. There was a fundamental revolution in Western history around the late sixteenth, early seventeenth century, which we all take for granted, but which has affected the way we think and the way we engage non western traditions such as Buddhism. Until the sixteenth or the seventeenth century, the concept of natural laws, which are mathematical, was unknown. If you dropped an object from a given height, it felt fell at whatever speed God considered it appropriate for the object to fall. The earth was flat, as far as one knew the sun revolved around the earth, the stars were little pinpricks in a celestial globe beyond which was the divine light.
All this came down to a resounding crash within a very short period of time. It is the work of a couple great thinkers of whom we are all the heirs which has led to this. Foremost perhaps, the founder of modern physics, Sir Isaac Newton. Newton’s core intuition is that the universe is mathematical, in other words, there are laws, and these laws are never abrogated. It’s not like the Australian political system.
It’s more like the German political system. You might wonder why this concerns us in what is, after all, a religious center, and I will explain quite soon why a universe ruled by strict deterministic laws poses major problems for religious traditions. But first we have to understand what causality is for Newton. Newton’s causality is quite simple to understand, it’s our common sense causality. Two phenomena in nature have a cause effect relation relation if one is before the other, which is known as anteriority, if one is somehow linked with the other, and if when the latter one occurs, the previous one has necessarily occurred.
So if you take the famous example which Hume gives of an antelope running across the passage followed shortly by a lion, you can clearly see that based on this causal framework, can say that the antelope’s running is the effect of the lions racing after the antelope. This is pretty straightforward. It’s on this basis that all physics, and more generally speaking, science, until pretty much 1890, is built. Now, in a mathematical universe, which is a universe all of us take for granted without thinking about it, when you drive a car, you’re functioning in a mathematical universe. This conference rests on a computer presentation which relies on a mathematical understanding of the universe.
Mathematical universes can be of two types: deterministic or probabilistic. Deterministic universes are universes ruled by rules in which the initial state of the universe determines completely the final state. Now in physics we have two broad theories, Newtonian mechanics and more recently Einstein’s two theories of relativity, which are strongly deterministic. And we have one theory which is non deterministic, which is quantum mechanics, which is of critical importance for religious studies as you shall soon see. Now if we try to enter a little bit deeper into causality, we can see that within the causality of phenomena, which I have called phenomenological causality, in other words the causality of things, we have philosophical accounts of causality, which have broadly speaking become irrelevant, and physical accounts of causality which have become dominant.
As we said, there is the Newtonian or classical account of causality, which is deterministic, and the quantum account of causality, which as we will see is non deterministic. In the religious accounts of causality, which were prevalent until very recently, we must distinguish between theistic and non theistic accounts of causality. The theistic accounts are those which consider that there is a God, a creator God, and the main instance of the non theistic account I will take to be karmic causality, which is not only Buddhist. There are certain non-Buddhist Indian religions, which are non theistic as well. Now, theistic causality until Newton’s revolution was basically one in which the universe rested in God’s hand, as I have put it.
In other words, everything which happened at every single moment was willed by God. This is broadly speaking the vision prevalent in large waves of Islam nowadays. Should God wish the universe to cease, it would instantaneously cease. The latter form of theistic causality is the one which succeeded basically to Newton’s revolution, the clockwork universe. In a world which is ruled by mathematical laws, God cannot slip between the elements of the formula.
What place is left for God? God becomes a creator of the great clock, the universe. The great architect. He creates the universe, and he gives the initial impetus, and after this withdraws from the world. This is basically the god of Voltaire and Rousseau.
And in between, you have the god of most people, I would say nowadays, which I’ve called the god of the gaps. It’s a god who lets physics function. You see this in American movies of an evangelical orientation, and periodically, he slips into the physical realm and starts performing miracles, and physical causality stops working. Frankly, from an intellectual standpoint, you can see this is the least satisfactory solution. Apart from these three theistic causalities, we have karmic causality.
Now what interests us in particular is karmic causality, and the reason I felt the need to talk to you about physical causality as a prelude is that in a Newtonian universe, a strict Newtonian universe, there is no place for karma whatsoever. The universe is ruled by mathematical laws, Newton’s first, second, and third principles, you can calculate the set of any physical set of quantities at any moment, then it is very, very difficult to see if you can calculate the situation of every external event and, for instance, the position and reactions of the human body at any time, what place there is left for karma which occurs at the level of psychophysical interaction. And this is why strict Newtonian causality evacuates religion from the world. It evacuates Buddhist and Hindu religions, as well as most of the aspects of Christianity. With the quantum revolution, things changed dramatically.
Because with the quantum revolution, at the microscopic level, generally speaking at the subatomic level, but we see it can extend quite high up, phenomena were non deterministic, and therefore there was a space either for divine intervention or for karmic intervention. This is a reason for which quantum physics is absolutely critical for those who have a religious mindset. It provides the intellectual space in which religious phenomena phenomena which are not totally determined can occur. And the question which arises is, is quantum mechanics provisional or definitive? In other words, is this an incomplete theory, which was basically Einstein’s viewpoint.
Einstein subscribed to the clockwork universe, or does it reflect something fundamental about the way we understand nature, which is Niels Bohr, the great Danish physicist understanding. This, as you can see, is very far reaching. If the universe is a clockwork, much of what we do here becomes completely irrelevant and intellectually impossible to substantiate. If, on the other hand, which is what is basically a certain important physics, the universe is a clockwork from basically the level of the galaxies down to some of the larger molecules like ammonia, The moment you start hitting the atomic level, you can no longer speak of a clockwork, but you are speaking of probability distributions, you can see that at that level you have a space for great flexibility, nondeterminacy. This might be the level of karmic operation, this might be for the religious believer the level of God’s will.
Einstein tried to counter very powerfully the quantum viewpoint. As you know, Einstein famously said, God does not play dice. Einstein’s God was a great clockworker. The clock was made and the clock had to run as a good Swiss clock does. He did this in a famous paradox which is still discussed about in physics, the so called Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen theorem, in which he attempts to demonstrate that quantum mechanics is incomplete.
In other words, that there are some elements of a physical system which are not being considered by quantum mechanics, which are ignored. For this reason, one describes particles in probabilistic terms, but if one knew all the variables and parameters, this would not be necessary. Einstein Podolsky Rosen theorem was of historical interest in physics, until recently, until the late 1960s. It’s an Irish physicist, John Bell, who drew on Einstein’s research to demonstrate that every deterministic system had to satisfy certain inequalities, which are known as the Bell inequalities. Deterministic system, as we said, is basically a rational or logical system, in which state A determines the subsequent state B.
So, again, you might wonder why does this concern us in a Buddhist center. It concerns us because once Bell demonstrated that every deterministic system had to satisfy these inequalities, a series of physicists including the French physicist Alain Aspect came along and demonstrated that there were numerous quantum systems which never would satisfy these inequalities. Therefore, that we were dealing at a fundamental level with non deterministic systems. And this is perhaps the biggest revolution in human thought in the last fifty years. So Bell basically stated his inequalities and said that they had to be verified for systems which were realistic, in other words, the system is separate from the mind considering it, for systems which were determined, we talked a fair bit about determinism, and for systems which were local.
Now, we take for granted that the world we live in satisfies these three criteria, that it’s realistic, determined, and local. All of us in this room take for granted that this wall is out there and our mind is in here, And that between this wall and us, there is a gigantic difference. That’s a realistic viewpoint. If we didn’t take this for granted, we would find driving very difficult. Likewise, all of us are strong determinists.
If you were told by your banker that if you deposited a $100 in your account today, next week there might be a $100, or you might have a deficit of a thousand dollars, and he couldn’t tell you which situation it would be, you would be quite rightly very irritated because you would feel you were dealing with a non deterministic bank. You put a $100 and you cannot know the result. You may be in credit or massively in debit. So we consider the world we live in is deterministic. And finally, we consider that the world we live in is local.
In other words, that phenomena interact when they are close to each other. We can speak be because we are in the same room, but when you leave this room, what I do now should have no difference to you on your behavior, let us say, twenty years from now, when you have chosen to move to Auckland. It’s taken for granted. None of these positions which is taken for granted is confirmed at the quantum level. This was demonstrated by a series of experiments, the latest of which is very strong, and Aspect’s experiment used two polarized photons, so I won’t enter into technical details here.
But what is of concern to us is that if Bell’s inequalities are not verified, and now there is a massive amount of evidence that one can set up experiments in which they are not verified. Either realism or determinism or locality or all three are falsified at the subatomic level. And the problem is just how far up does this falseness go. So until recently, it was considered that they were forced at the subatomic level at the level of some small molecules, the molecule of ammonia. There’s been some recent research just a couple days ago, I haven’t read the research itself, I just read an account on the BBC, that quantum phenomena are involved in photosynthesis in plants.
Then we have jumped to the cellular level. So, how far up we go is an open question, but what the violation of Bell’s inequality demonstrates in addition to what we talked about previously, is that against Einstein, quantum mechanics is not an incomplete theory, where we are just looking at a part of reality and describe it statistically because we lack some data, quantum mechanics is complete, and this seems to be the way the world actually functions. And this is why the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, no physical theory which is realistic and also local can agree with all the statistical implications of quantum mechanics. In other words, our common sense view of the world is wrong. Fundamentally wrong.
So wrong that if we subscribe to it seriously, everything in this room would stop to function. This computer, this projector, your quartz watches, my quartz watch, telephones and so forth. So this, as we said, is of great importance for us, because it shows that quantum mechanics, which is a very esoteric discipline in physics with a very odd set of principles, is foundational to the universe. That the universe is not deterministic, it is not local, and it is not realistic. And that there is a fundamental space in the universe for, and since we’re not at university, I can say use the term for spirituality.
If we are a university setting, would have to qualify this very heavily. I would now like to address with you very briefly causality in ancient Indian thought. This is a picture of Elora, the magnificent Hindu site close to Ajanta in Southeastern India Southwestern India, my apologies. And after covering Indian causality in general, we will then start addressing the question of causality and ethics, which is what concerns us today. The great Indian philosophers put considerable effort in trying to understand what the relation between a cause and an effect was.
Basically, Indian schools of philosophy can be subdivided into two: those for which cause and effect are of one nature, and those for which cause and effect are of different natures. All the Buddhist schools without exception consider cause and effect to be of different natures. This is critical because it means for the Buddhist school that there is true change. Every cause is followed by an effect which is different from it. This means there is not only true change but true impermanence.
All the Hindu schools consider cause and effect to be of one nature. In other words, change is an illusion. Hidden behind change is unity. This is the fundamental philosophical bias of the Hindu schools. Where the fundamental Buddhist bias is behind change is diversity.
And then the Hindu schools are subdivided into two, we won’t enter into it here, we spoke about it last year. For one, the effect is merely another aspect of the cause, this is mainly the Sankhya school, and for the other, the effect is an imaginary construct. This is basically the position of Advaita Vedanta, of Gaudapada, of Shankara, and so forth. So you can see that the Indian schools of philosophy cover the gamut in this field. And now we have to address the question which concerns us specifically today.
We talked of causality in general, physical causality mainly, the various types of causality understood in physics, we focused more on quantum interaction, you can’t really speak of quantum causality, and then gave a brief background regarding different Indian understandings of causality. The question now is, is there a relationship between our behavior and the world? In other words, ethics and the world, between ethics and our experience. This is the question of karma. Or for the Judeo Christian, the question of divine judgment.
The dominant viewpoint nowadays is that there is no relation. The world is seen as random, and the ethics which, rules our interaction with others is as the old Latin proverb put it, that of man being a wolf unto man. This is, I would say, the dominant market economy ethics. A famous British writer Somerset Maugham, summarized it when he said, my philosophy is to do what I want with new regards for the policemen around the corner. I think probably the ethics of most people nowadays is pretty much that.
What one does has no impact on one’s future experiences whatsoever, And as long as one acts within the law, or even more bluntly, long as one doesn’t get caught, one can do anything one wants. And this is very far reaching effects for society. So it is interesting to see whether this is true or whether it is a prejudice. And what is very striking is that much of this vision of ethics has been rooted in the theory of evolution, which I do not intend to reject, but which I would very much like to qualify. Well, there is a lot of data which undeniably confirms the evolution of species, or should one say the mutation of species and the selection of those mutations which are better adapted.
The form the theory of evolution has taken with the standard theory is not supported by the data from the standpoint of some very eminent scientists. For those of you with a scientific background, I encourage you to look a little bit into their critique, which is quite striking. I have quoted two of the leading figures in late twentieth century science. Ludwig von Bertalanffy is the founder of system theory, which is basically at the root of all computer science, and Karl Popper, as you know, is perhaps the most eminent philosopher of science of all time. Von Bertalanffy put it rather bluntly, I think that the fact that the theory is so vague, so insufficiently verifiable, and so far from the criteria otherwise applied in hard science has become a dogma, is what it is nowadays, can only be explained on sociological grounds.
Society and science have been so steeped in the ideas of mechanism, utilitarianism, and the economic concept of free competition that instead of God, selection was enthroned as ultimate reality. You can see how once you adopt the framework of the Newtonian universe, which is deterministic, and you have evacuated any trace of spirituality from this universe, it is very tempting to erect something else in the place of the god you have kicked out. And von Bertalanffy’s contention is that what was erected in its place is natural selection. Then Karl Popper got into gigantic trouble by stating that Darwinism was not a scientific theory but a metaphysical program. He got into so much trouble when he wrote this in 1976 that he actually had to recant his position a couple years later and said, I still believe that natural works in this way as a research program, nevertheless I have changed my mind about the testability and logical status of the theory of natural selection.
I’m not quite sure what happened if some scientific version of the Godfather crept into a proper study with perhaps not a gun but a test tube and said, you can choose. But this is pretty much what it sounds like. Now what is striking throughout is that the theory of evolution has been taken far out of its framework, where it produces very solid accounts of the change within species and has been extended throughout society, I talked about this last year, with disciplines such as sociobiology, which account for much of social behavior through the change in socially acquired evolutionary traits. Much of this discipline is considered by eminent scientists such as the late Stephen Jay Gould to be pseudoscience at best. Yet, it is dominant in popular culture.
And you who come here to attend this conference are probably, I wouldn’t say brainwashed, but heavily influenced about this. How many of you have read on Yahoo that since nightingales are naturally polygamous and the male nightingale is naturally deceptive in its polygamy, such behavior can be understood in human beings. I’m just making this up, but there’s another category of bird concern. You read this every single day, and there are a series of implicit hypotheses you have to be aware of in these presentations. The first is that the transmission of behavior is an overt fact, it is not.
Some forms of behavior can be transmitted and others cannot. The second is that behavior which is attested in one species can then be extended to all species as legitimate behavior to for that species. Again, this is something you might want to think rather carefully about. So this led to some very sharp critiques, not of, I would say, the core of the theory of evolution, Darwin’s theory of natural selection, but of the degree to which the theory of evolution, the standard theory especially, had become what we call in French, in which you can stuff anything. And Stephen J.
Gould, who was after all professor of paleontology at Harvard, points out one of the biggest problems of the theory of evolution, The vexatious problem of altruism. Until we could explain apparent acts of self sacrifice as potentially beneficial to the genetic fitness of the sacrificers themselves, altruism blocked any Darwinian theory of social behavior. Now this is not a minor point. Darwin himself was aware of it when he wrote the origin of species, and it has become or he has remained the sword of Damocles which hangs over the neck of evolutionary theorists for the last one hundred and forty or so years. Altruism is prevalent not just among human beings, but as we shall see a bit later in this presentation, huge swathes of the animal realm.
And from the standpoint of the theory of evolution, this is nonsensical behavior. You are sacrificing your life, therefore your capacity to transmit your genetic material for the community. Then attempts have been made to try to rationalize this. Some are more convincing than others in a community in which there is, for instance, a high degree of genetic similarity, you can construct a case for altruism. By the time you reach the human species, it becomes impossible.
Now you can see that a nature which is red in tooth and claw, a nature of savage bestiality, each struggling to impose his will on the other and transmit his own genetic material, and a nature of kindness, lead us to two very different metaphysical programs, and two very different visions of the world. And we have all basically been brainwashed into thinking that nature is red in tooth and claw, and by extension, so should we be. As they say in The States, take care of number one. Right? Now if you’re in business, this is a mantra.
I’m told in academia it’s even more of a mantra. Then in society at large, I do not know. But this has led a figure which I hesitated to quote in the context of secular ethics, but he is the main proponent of secular ethics nowadays, to address the issue of is it possible to create or not a secular ethics. His Holiness the Dalai Lama. That’s a paradox that a fully ordained Buddhist monk, a Geshe, a holder of Bodhisattva and Tantric vows, should be the main proponent of secular ethics in the early twenty first century.
It is however very much the case. I could have put the picture of Peter Singer, but I think he is perhaps of a lesser ethical caliber. Why does His Holiness to Dalai Lama address the issue of secular ethics? Precisely because we live in a society where, due to the extreme determinism and reductionism of our world view, and the prevalence of very, very coarse and simplified presentations of the theory of evolution, we see the world as unethical. Unethical in an extreme sense.
What we do has no relevance as long as we do not get caught by the police. Then clearly, if this is true, all of us should live very differently from the way we live today. Those of you who have assembled here, if such a world is true, you’re wasting your time. On the other hand, if it is true that our behavior has an impact on our own future and on the world, then we have to find out how this is the case. And the first step towards this is to see, is it possible for a totally non religious person, starting just from biological principles, to have an ethical stance or not?
This is important because as historian has pointed out, I think it was in Sydney and again in Adelaide, in excess of 1,000,000,000 people in the world are completely unreligious. The way the trend is going in the West, the number of irreligious persons will probably increase. It is far from clear that the great religious traditions, Buddhism included, have any long-term future, at least in the West. Then, if we are sincere Buddhists, which I’d like to think is my case, and we believe that what we do has consequences, we have to find a way to convince people who are totally unreligious that there are some basic natural ethical principles and these can be demonstrated in nature and of benefit to society. This is secular His Holiness points out, and I think it is in his work I would highly recommend to all of you, beyond religion.
As you know, the title is a misnomer, it was chosen by the editor, His Holiness did not want this title, but the book is remarkable. His Holiness points out that it is very much independent on how we view human nature that we will opt for one or another ethical system. If we view man as a beast, we will be politically conservative, and we will opt for an ethics and a judiciary system of retribution and control. If we view man on the other hand as a fallen angel, shall I say, we will be politically liberal, and we will opt for an ethics which tries to draw out the good in man. These are fundamental human viewpoints, perhaps tightly linked to our personality more than anything else.
So you can see already that our viewpoint of human nature has a tremendous impact on how our societies are going to be ruled. The pessimist will be inclined towards authoritarian societies and the optimist towards liberal societies. This is rooted in a vision of human nature. And the question we have to address, and it is not a minor question, is what is human and animal nature? It’s not an irrelevant philosophical question.
It affects immediately the societies we live in. So his holiness proposes as pillars of a secular ethics two, I think, easily acceptable positions. Our shared humanity, which I would extend personally to our shared sentience. Since not only are human beings equal in not wishing to experience pain and wishing for happiness, but so are all living beings. And our interdependence.
These are both self evident to every thinking person. If we take the case of this country Australia, and how shall I call this so as not to get into trouble? Your main foreign partner, China, you can see that the Australians and the Chinese are equal in their wish for happiness, and equal in their wish for being free of suffering. And they are also highly interdependent. China is dependent on Australian coal, iron ore, copper, uranium.
Australia is dependent on exports to China. I don’t know how many of you are on benefits in this world. I would assume easily 50%. All of you on benefits are receiving money money which comes from China. Much of the funding for the benefits comes indirectly through the taxation system from Australia’s mining benefits.
You are therefore interdependent. The Chinese industry depends on Australia’s count. Australia’s living standard depends on China. We can see Australia and China have a lot to to share. So shared humanity is something all of us can understand.
Whether we are rich or poor, all of us are fundamentally equal equal in this sense, irrespective of culture and religion. But what his holiness points out, and I think it is a very profound, point, is that mammals in particular are predisposed towards empathy because of the very long gestation period of mammals. In human beings, it’s nine months, in elephants, I believe it’s quite a bit longer than this. Young mammal, the infant, depends on his mother’s kindness for an extremely long period of time. He or she would be unable to survive without the kindness of the mother, and this sows the seeds for empathy, the capacity to feel with another, which is what empathy is.
Then with reptiles, or fish, it’s hard to know Where the such capacities are present? Probably a lot less. But as you know, or may know, there is now very strong neurobiological data confirming that the human brain is an empathetic brain. There’s a section of the human brain known as the insula, which is actually in the center moving downwards, whose exact function was not really understood. There’s professor Davidson at the University of Wisconsin, when he did experiments on Mathieu Ricard and a couple other monks training in compassion, saw that the insula was heavily activated whenever they meditated on love and compassion.
The function of the insula seems to enable the individual to replicate in his or her own body the experiences of another. This is extraordinary, To the point where one can shudder in sympathy with another, one can cry in sympathy with another, this is empathy. One can laugh in sympathy with another, one might even develop a fever in sympathy with another. Moreover, what is very striking, and I think this is of great relevance to our societies nowadays, is that any society which adopts a religious ethic, not merely a secular ethic, tends to be a more forgiving society, simply because it is a society which considers that there is some type of retribution after life. And the urge for retribution, for better or for worse, is a profound human urge.
So perhaps, as we have moved away from religious ethics and away from secular ethics, we have in reality become much harsher, less forgiving societies. So the issue I would like to address at present is that of the existence or non existence of altruism among the various lower orders. Among human beings, I think we can take it for granted. What is striking is that just in the last five years, there has been some very strong data demonstrating that ants are altruistic. To a degree which is striking, a particular category of Brazilian ant, Forelius pusillus, will actually commit preemptive suicide to protect the ant nest.
What it will do is it will seal the entry of the ant nest with its own body at night to prevent marauders, meaning termites, from penetrating the ant nest, and it will be devoured alive in the process. There’s no genetic benefit for the worker ant who does this. This is published in the American Naturalist. Tofilski was the main author. I strongly encourage you to read it, preemptive defensive self sacrifice by ant workers.
It’s the first case known in the animal kingdom, to my knowledge. Among insects, keep in mind, insects from the standpoint of modern entomology don’t have enough nervous material to be conscious. They have a couple nervous ganglia. So there’s really a question here, what is going on? It’s very difficult to give an account for such behavior from the standpoint of Darwin’s theory of natural selection.
You go into a lot of intellectual acrobatics. There are very clear instances of altruism and empathy among the mammals, and I must apologize for presenting the material I will present, these are the only studies made. They must have been made by a very not a very good person, let’s put it that way. Professor Church, who studied the reaction of albino rats to the suffering of other rats, which did not affect them in terms of their own survival. He found albino rats systematically did whatever they could to reduce the suffering of other albino rats by, for instance, pressing a lever to lower them from the ground when they were lifted from the ground.
And when they were unable to do this, and of course for particular mindset to make these experiments, when the other, victim was electrocuted for long periods of time, the rat observing this would enter into a state of shock. This is a clear demonstration that rats, which we have no regards for whatsoever, have high levels of empathy, perhaps comparable to those of human beings. Finally, a recent experiment which is extremely interesting among infants who were pre verbal, in other words, before the acquisition of language, demonstrates that pre verbal infants have a clear sense of ethics. They prefer those who help each other to those who harm each other, and this is not learned. This is present.
The first study covered infants of the six to ten months age group. The second study, infants of three months of age. It’s very difficult to see how such a clear bias in favor of ethics ethics in a newborn baby can be accounted for by education. Very difficult. Then from a Buddhist standpoint, we would clearly see a correlation with past life experiences here.
So what would be the main values a secular ethics, which could be taught in schools, in a non denominational, non religious setting would emphasize. Secular virtues, forbearance, in other words, patience in the broad sense of the term, putting up with difficulty. Contentment, accepting that things do not always go as we would like them to go. Self discipline, the capacity to say no to oneself and to others. It’s one of the most underrated capacities nowadays.
And generosity, the capacity to say yes. And perhaps the wisdom to know when to do the one and when to do the other. Such a secular ethics is non religious. It can be rooted in a presentation of biology, of the necessity for societies to cooperate, and in a presentation of human nature, not based on philosophy, but on the data available. The historian has pointed out, and I think it is really true, this is critical for our specie in this twenty first century.
Then this secular ethics forms a foundation for all the great religious ethical systems. Whether one chooses to take that step or not is up to oneself, but this foundation is known as the golden rule. Do not do unto unto another what you would not have him or her do unto you. You find this in all of the great religious traditions. You find this in the Semitic Semitic monotheisms, Judaism, Islam and Christianity.
In Judaism, it is said in the Talmud, That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. This is the whole Torah, the rest is the explanation. Go forth and study. One finds exactly the same thing in Islam, in which a passerby approaches the prophet Muhammad and asks him for a teaching to go to heaven, and the prophet says, As you will have people do to you, do to them, and what you dislike to be done to you, don’t do to them. Now let the stirrup go.
And one finds this in the teachings of the great teacher Jesus, All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them. For this is the law and the prophets, in other words, totality of the Old Testament. And this famous injunction, Love your neighbor as you love yourself. One finds exact equivalence of the golden rule in the great Asian religions. For instance in Confucius’ Analects, I read these when I was quite young, a child really, and I find it very impressive.
Confucius answers to his disciple, How about Shu reciprocity? Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself. And when we speak of a secular ethics, we are really speaking of what the Chinese would call a Confucian ethics. Since Confucianism is broadly speaking secular ethics to which is attached in modicum of the cult of ancestors. Then in Hinduism, one should never do to another what one regards as injurious to one’s own self.
This in brief is the rule of Dharma, the Mahabharata. And finally, the very same injunction in Buddha Śākyamūni’s teachings comparing oneself to others in such terms as just as I am, so are they. Just as they are, so am I. He should neither kill nor cause others to kill. In the Sutanipata.
And in Bodhicaryāvatāra, when fear and suffering are hateful to myself as well as to my fellow beings, what justification is there that I should protect my own self and others? So you can see that if we have the courage to confront the biases and the prejudices of our culture, in our society, which are rooted in an outdated vision of the universe, a Newtonian deterministic vision of the universe, and opt for a more freewheeling, if you forgive me the term vision of things, which leaves the door open to some types of spirituality, we can then ask the questions, which his holiness the Dalai Lama asked, regarding the validity of a secular ethics. And if we choose to stop at that secular ethics, that is more than good enough. But if we choose, we can take the next step and try to enter deeper in the ethical understanding of the great religious systems. They are, however, all rooted in the golden rule, which is the fundamental understanding of man’s relation to man, a relation rooted in empathy and interdependence.
And having laid the groundwork at present, I would like to start the specifically Buddhist aspect of this presentation. A Buddhist presentation of ethical causality karma. Then I think this might be a very good point to have a tea break, and I apologize if the first part of the presentation was very heavy going. I have a policy, as Khensur Rinpoche told me, of stunning you in the first part and letting you breathe in the second part. So, the first part of our present of this presentation was mainly designed to show you that it is possible in 2013 to be an educated westerner with a scientific bent, and at the same time to be a religious person.
And should you not choose to be religious, it is possible to be an educated person with a scientific bent and to be a very good human being and to have principles which guide us in this matter. Then, we shall take ten fifteen minutes and return around 03:15. Thank you very much.
Key terms in this teaching
- bodhisattva jang chub sem pa (Tib)
- One who possesses bodhicitta. LYWA
- mantra ngag (Tib)
- Literally, mind protection. Mantras are Sanskrit syllables usually recited in conjunction with the practice of a particular meditational deity and embody the qualities of that deity. LYWA
- tantric vows sang ngag kyi dom pa (Tib)
- Vows taken by tantric practitioners. LYWA
Definitions adapted from the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive glossary, as taught in the Gelug tradition.