Eleventh Volume of “Hualin Series on Buddhist Studies”

Buddhism and Science represent two drastically different spheres that differ in their goals, the approaches to achieving the goals, and their impacts on the world. In its early form, Buddhism sought, above all, liberation from the cycle of existences and the attainment of the ultimate truth. Later in Mahāyāna Buddhism, the goals extended to cultivating compassion and benefiting all sentient beings. In contrast, science develops by inquiring objectively about the world and by advancing technologies. Its central tenets are empiricism and a kind of epistemology firmly rooted in logics. Its goal is to explain the unknown world and to bring material advancement to human societies. It is marked by its ‘verifiability’ and it evolves by constantly verifying hypotheses through trials and errors.

In history, however, the relationship between science, technology and Buddhism has in fact been a symbiotic one. For instance, in Indian Buddhism, Buddhist monastics played not only the role of the ‘healer’ of the mind, but also that of the body. Likewise, in medieval Chinese Buddhism, Buddhist medicine contributed to the treatment of tropical disease. Moreover, as Buddhism spread to China, it carried with it the knowledge of Indian mathematics, astrology, calendrical calculation, surgery, and chemistry, all of which expanded the horizon of Chinese science. The Tang-Dynasty Buddhist Yixing 一行 (683-727), for instance, is not only a Buddhist master but also a calendrical mathematician. Similarly, the invention of gun powder was also contributed by Buddhists, while the advent of woodblock printing was likewise facilitated by the need of Buddhists to widely distribute Buddhist texts. At the same time, Chinese Buddhism spread abroad through the efforts of Buddhist missionaries such as Jianzhen 鑑真 (688-763) who notably not only brought Vinaya but also Chinese culture and technologies to Japan. These imports would then exercise indelible influences in Japanese civilization.

Buddhism and science both emphasize observation and empirical verification as the way of deriving knowledge. Science does so through experimentation, while Buddhists seek truths through meditation and mindfulness. Despite their different approaches, both Buddhism and science aim to solve questions of existential import, with some scientific research even affirming, to certain extent, Buddhist answers to these questions.

To deeply explore the symbiotic relationship between Buddhism and science, the partner universities of the Glorisun Global Network for the Studies of Buddhism—the University of Hong Kong, the Research Center for Buddhist Texts and Art at Peking University, and the University of British Columbia (UBC)—jointly organised the international conference, ‘Buddhism, Science and Technology: Challenges to Religions from a Digitalized World’ (佛教與科技：人工智能時代傳統宗教的現代化挑戰) from August 9 to 12, 2023.