“Arya Nagarjuna’s text describing the theory of emptiness and dependent origination has a lot of similar concepts that might find parallels with the quantum mechanical ideas.”
In this debut interview for Tibetan Scientific Society’s new website, Tenzin Choephel* caught up with Dr. Tenzin Rabga to discuss the relationship between Physics and Buddhist philosophy. Rabga is currently a post-doctoral researcher in Physics at Seoul National University. Besides Physics, he is deeply interested in Buddhist philosophy, especially in those aspects that offer valuable insights into the nature of reality.
Choephel: Good to catch up with you Rabga! Can you tell us a bit about how you got into Physics?
Rabga: Sure. It wasn’t until I was in my ninth grade that I really began thinking about Physics a lot. As I was introduced to the wonderful equations of motion as laid down by Newton, I remember spending a lot of my free time discussing and talking with some of my fellow classmates about what they meant, and how we could apply them in order to understand how the world actually works. That we can capture very interesting and relevant features of our world with these few simple equations was very captivating to me.
Choephel: I have also known you as a fan of philosophy. How did you get into Buddhist philosophy specifically and decide to delve into it?
Rabga: It all began in high school as well. I was fortunate enough to attend a school that had the type of teachers who constantly fostered within us an appreciation for learning, and who took special care in order to nurture the students desire to learn. My then Tibetan language teacher, who also introduced us to important concepts in Buddhist philosophy, played a huge role in creating within me an interest for these topics. I was also very lucky to witness, at first hand, the interactions between Buddhist monks and western scientists as they gathered for what was then called, the Science for Monks workshop. Although I did not quite understand what they were saying most of the times; I was nevertheless stuck by the fervor surrounding such discussions between these two disciplines. Later on, I watched and closely followed some of the mind and life meetings between His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Buddhist scholars, and western scholars and scientists, and could not help but be drawn into such dialogues and what they entailed. Since then, my college education has further fueled my interest and deepened my understanding of such dialogues. Also, the continued exposure to Buddhism and the invaluable texts by the Indian and Tibetan masters have helped develop a strong sense of gratitude towards these individuals for their immense contribution to our human society.
Choephel: Physics and Buddhism represent two different intellectual traditions with different methodological approaches yet they seem to have quite in common. Can you first tell us how they differ in their approach towards unravelling the nature of reality?
Rabga: From my very limited understanding of the Buddhist methodology, the difference lies more so in the metaphysical/ontological assertions than in the actual epistemological methods. In other words, Buddhism has a well-defined categorization of the world and the phenomena that lie therein. There are physical phenomena as well as non-physical, mental phenomena. Buddhist psychology provides a very detailed account of what the mental world is like. Western science, in particular neuroscience and psychology, approaches the mind through the physical correlates of what we call mental events. The Buddhist approach is to simply study the mind itself. Such, first person, contemplative investigation into the mind and the mental events, is something that is not common, if such a thing even exists in the first place, in science. However, concerning the study of the physical world, the two traditions have much in common. Physics for instance is an empirical science; it draws its knowledge of the world from empirical data. From these data, we create models or theories that explain why the data has a certain pattern or trend. In other words, Physics places at the heart of its worldview, the raw empirical data it collects from experimentations. From these, it draws inferences as to what is actually happening “behind the scenes”. The reliance on direct and inferential cognition has strong parallels with Buddhist epistemology, although the details might differ here and there.
Choephel: What are some of the areas where physics and Buddhist philosophy converge?
Rabga: As mentioned above, there are strong similarities in the epistemological approaches to developing a correct view of the world. From a Physics stand-point, I have to bring up what seems to draw some of the most renowned physicists to such discussions. At the heart of the modern physical understanding of our Universe lies the theory of quantum mechanics. It is a beautiful and elegant mathematical theory that, to most people’s astonishment, happens to describe our world very well. It is astonishing for the crucial reason that, the description of the microscopic world by such a theory is nothing like how we experience phenomena at the macroscopic level.
Often times, it is difficult to even conceptualize the mathematical equations. The reason incoming physics students find quantum mechanics difficult is not so much because the mathematics is challenging, but because, it is very hard to develop an intuitive understanding of the phenomena described by such mathematics. I find that this is mostly caused by the language that we use in order to form our concepts. Our language and the words are tailored for describing the predictable, intuitive workings of the Universe we experience. However, at the quantum level they fail us quite miserably. Buddhism, through centuries of investigation and debates, has developed a systematic way of understanding phenomena beyond the realm of the “conventional”. Arya Nagarjuna’s text describing the theory of emptiness and dependent origination has a lot of similar concepts that might find parallels with the quantum mechanical ideas. For instance, that an electron does not inherently exists, is a statement that can be easily made by a Madhyamika philosopher and a modern-day quantum physicist. Of course, what they mean by to exist inherently, needs to be investigated. Nevertheless, the parallels, even at a seemingly superficial level, is quite striking.
Choephel: What are some areas where they diverge?
Rabga: Again, the key difference probably lies in the assertion that a non-physical mind exists beyond the confines of what we call the nervous system, a physical collection of cells, tissues and organs, that work together to create the experience of a consciousness. Buddhism not only posits such a mind, but has a theory of karmic causality and rebirths that extends to a physical body beyond this one. Such theories seem to lie beyond what Science can currently investigate. Regarding the study of the physical world, there is a key difference that I want to mention here. The Buddhist view of the world, although dependent on direct observation and similar to the way in which science operates, is also inherently quite different in a crucial way. A Buddhist scholar has probably never seen the direct evidences for the existence of an atom or validations of the quantum mechanical theories that describe the atomic world, but he/she nevertheless has a theory of what such a world is like. Such knowledge is derived purely from logical arguments that rely mostly on reason and not on direct empirical observation. A scientist’s understanding of the atomic world is derived from empirical data that points towards theories that best explain the trend in the data. However, ultimately, without these data, no physicist would have taken quantum mechanics seriously. In fact, without these data, there would have been no quantum mechanics in the first place. It was only the failure of the classical theories in explaining these observations at the atomic scale that led to the development of quantum mechanics. This is an important point that deserves a more careful analysis.
Choephel: Can a monastic scholar solely trained in Buddhist philosophy grasp the full intricacies of physics without the knowledge of mathematics?
Rabga: I think the answer would be, very unlikely, just like a physicist without any training in Buddhist philosophy would find the arguments in Acharya Dharmakirti’s Pramanavartikka almost impossible to understand. Each discipline takes many years to study let alone master. For a physicist, much of the formative years are spent learning and developing the mathematical tools and concepts that are invaluable in presenting the physical concepts in a coherent manner. Can physics be explained fully in words? In principle yes, but in practice, it would border on the impossible. Mathematics provides a concise way of encapsulating the key features of a phenomenon that is invaluable to a physicist. We then try to express these ideas in words, which works most of the time. However, in the case of quantum mechanics, it proves almost impossible to say anything sensible without resorting to a mathematical concept that underlies the equations describing the phenomenon. Is it a failure of our language as I alluded to above, or is it just a lack of clear understanding? Another question worth posing is, can Buddhist terminologies and concepts provide the framework for articulating quantum mechanical ideas in a form that does not rely on mathematical equations as much? I think this is an interesting question worth pondering over and something I am quite interested in myself.
Choephel: For someone interested in the subject of the relationship between Buddhism and physics can you point to some relevant resources they can explore?
Rabga: Depending on what you prefer, there are various resources available for learning more about such dialogues between science and Buddhism. I encourage the interested folks to watch the recordings of the mind and life meetings on YouTube if they haven’t done so already. The discussions are lively as they are engaging. For the people more inclined towards reading, there are wonderful books written collaboratively by His Holiness and other participants of the mind and life conferences that provide a wonderful insight into what such discussions entail. Personally, I really enjoyed reading ‘The New Physics and Cosmology: Dialogues with the Dalai Lama’, a written account of the discussions between His Holiness and several renowned physicists on the intricacies of quantum mechanics and its parallels and differences with Buddhist philosophies. ‘A Universe in a Single Atom’ is also a very popular book within this genre. At the end of the day, these only provide an introduction to such dialogues. Ultimately, one has to seriously study these subjects in detail in order to develop any genuine intuition about these questions.
Choephel: Thanks a lot for your time Rabga!
Rabga: Thanks for allowing me to share my thoughts, it has been a great pleasure!
*Tenzin Choephel is an aerospace engineer and a board member of Tibetan Scientific Society
