Kalama Sutta and Scientific method

 In Buddhism, there is this Kalama Sutta (AN 3.65) in which the Buddha told the people of Kalama village that there are ten specific sources which knowledge should not be immediately viewed as truthful without further investigation to avoid fallacies:

1.       by revelations,

2.       by traditions,

3.       by rumour, gossip, hearsay,

4.       by scriptures,

5.       by logical conjecture (alone),

6.       by it is a point of view or common sense,

7.       by having considered the reasons (philosophical dogmatism),

8.       by agreement with one’s own theories,

9.       by experts,

10.    by the thought “this monk is our teacher” (authority).

but when you know for yourselves that,

•       these qualities are skillful,

•       these qualities are blameless,

•       these qualities are praised by the wise,

•       these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to welfare & to happiness,

then you should enter & remain in them.

In science, theories must be verified and vetted by the experimental or observational data.

The Kalama sutta can be roughly divided into two categories of sources which are not reliable on their own, each of them has their parallels in the scientific endeavour. 

By Literature: The parallel in science would be the scientific papers and the masses of scientific knowledge and literature which had been gathered, including textbooks, lecture notes etc.

Revelations

Traditions

Rumour, gossip, hearsay

Scriptures

Experts

“This monk is our teacher”

By Logic: The parallel in science would be the mathematical derivation in physics, thought experiments, theoretical chemistry calculations, the logic of anatomy and physiology, simulations.

Logical conjecture

It is a point of view or common sense

Having considered the reasons

Agreement with one’s own theories

By Experiments: In science, this means spending billions to built expensive lab and equipment to detect Higgs boson and gravitational waves, basically all the experiments in science, clinical trials, actual lab work in chemistry, etc…

In Buddhism the term knows for yourselves is the one which one uses mindfulness to collect data first.

Then followed by clear awareness or clear comprehension or clearly knowing, whether or not the teachings are skillful, blameless, praised by the wise when adopted and carried out, lead to the welfare and to happiness. 

And if they are then entered and remain in them, or else just discard them.

This fits in with the process of experiments, first collect data, then analyse the data, do they fit into the hypothesis? If they do, adopt the hypothesis to become a theory. If they do not, abandon the hypothesis. The hypothesis is akin to the teachings of various religious teachers. The data is data of real life, by which we can judge if the teachings are skillful, blameless, praised by the wise when adopted and carried out, lead to the welfare and to happiness or do they not. 

Although this does seem like a good opportunity to market Buddhism as a science of the mind, there is resistance from scientists on accepting Buddhism as science. Namely that Buddhism does have some statements on how the world works which is not able to be verified or disproved by science yet. Chief amongst these are:

1. The existence of deities and other realms of rebirth beyond humans and animals.

2. The claim of rebirth happening to all beings. Even though there is evidence for rebirth, the number of scientifically trained people who are willing to look at it, and vouch for it is too little. Also, at the most the evidence for rebirth can only assure us that some people get reborn, it does not prove that everyone had been reborn countless times as what Buddhism claims. 

3. The law of kamma exist. This would be very hard to scientifically verify even if one has the power to look through past lives as the commonly accepted way to verify this is via wisdom arising. Unless the scientific method one day recognises wisdom as part of scientific tools, we have no hope of saying that the theory of kamma is scientifically valid. 

4. Supernormal powers exist, like the divine eye, ear etc. Although there are paranormal research going on, it’s still not yet accepted in mainstream science. 

One day perhaps in the future, wisdom arising from mindfulness gathering data can be seen as the analysis of data gathering in the scientific analysis. The bias towards insisting on physical objective ways of gathering data even when investigating non-physical stuff like the mind can be eliminated in favour of using the mind to investigate the mind (mindfulness of mind). And all these superpowers from the development of the mind are accepted as tools of science much like the telescope and microscopes were, then it’s possible one day to present Buddhism as part of scientific findings. However, given the existence of many other religions, the fact that scientists are humans with bias and the realisation that Buddhism will one day disappear from human knowledge, this future is not guaranteed to happen. 

One crucial difference between Buddhism and Science now is that Science no longer accept verification as a valid process for determining scientific findings as truth. Falsification is the rule of the day for scientific theories. Buddhism does accept verification to determine the truth. An analogy in Buddhism would be that we are deluded, thinking that a rope is a snake, thus fear arises. However, if we light a lamp of wisdom, we can see that a rope is merely a rope. Thus, even if the room goes back to darkness, we no longer have any fear. This is the verification which Buddhism approves and makes use of. And it’s so basic that all reasonable humans should also be able to accept verification of this kind.