Today, I would like to explore the relationships between modern science and the teachings of the Buddha, also called the Dhamma. Many people around the world might be aware of some of these Buddhist concepts. In the following articles, I will explain clearly, through simple examples and a series of thought experiments, the basic ideas and interrelationships between modern science and the Dhamma. Many people the world over draw great trust and amazement from the body of knowledge and principles that entail the modern scientific world and are curious about its relationship with the Dhamma. Anyone brought up in a Buddhist background might have heard about the stories of Arahants and the Buddha himself, stories of men and women who supposedly achieved salvation. One might be curious whether they knew something we, as modern people, don’t know or whether it is us who are “in the know” and that these stories might just be exaggerations or myths.

After studying Physics and Mathematics for over six years at prestigious and leading universities in Germany, where I come from, I had a pretty good idea of the state-of-the-art knowledge that modern physics has obtained about nature and the inexhaustible questions that remain unanswered. A few years later, my quest to seek answers to the crucial problems in my life brought me to my teachers here at the Jethavanarama Buddhist Monastery in Ingiriya, Sri Lanka. Today, I am delighted to share some of them with you.

As an interested layman, you don’t need any special knowledge or understanding of physics to comprehend the content of these articles. The only prerequisites are an open mind and a genuine interest in reflecting on these examples thoroughly. However, if you are a scientist, you are in for a treat. I hope the ideas in these articles will help improve our understanding of the world and promote greater harmony between human civilisation and nature. The purpose of science has always been to understand nature and utilise that knowledge to benefit all living beings. The ultimate purpose of Buddhist philosophy is to alleviate the mind of all suffering. I hope that by combining some of the most thought-provoking and complementary ideas from these two fields, these articles can contribute to this noble aim. 

Let us start with some simple examples that will immediately tell us a lot about some of the underlying principles that are at play even when it comes to the more profound questions (in later articles), such as time, decay, and concepts of chance and coincidence in Quantum Mechanics. 

The Buddha went into such detail to explain the workings of the mind, not because he was simply fascinated with its logic, but to make a profound point:

yad aniccam taṃ dukkhaṃ,
taṃ dukkhaṃ tad anattā

The Buddha had only one aim and reason that motivated him in his tireless effort: He wanted to show us all the path to unconditional happiness and the way to overcome all hardships once and for all. In his quest as a Bodhisatta to find the path to unconditional happiness, he realised that all suffering and, therefore, what prevents us from unconditional happiness is a problem with the mind and how we perceive the world. Consequently, he expounded on the mind and its intricacies only to the extent necessary for us to understand the Four Noble Truths and attain unconditional happiness and contentment. 

We will now go into more detail to understand the meaning of this verse. First, I want to use an analogy to help you understand how these three properties of anicca, dukkha and anatta relate to each other.

The example of the hourglass

Hourglasses are devices with two glass bulbs connected vertically by a narrow neck. Sand is captured inside the two bulbs such that when you turn the hourglass upside-down, the sand will flow steadily from the top to the bottom. For someone interested in sourcing one, I found that they come in a few time durations. Some were labelled as “30 minutes”, some “10 minutes”, and others “1 hour”. Therefore, the vendor promises that by buying an hourglass with the property “takes 10 minutes,” the sand will take precisely 10 minutes to flow from the top to the bottom, starting from when all of the sand is in the top bulb and ending until all of it has flown and accumulated at the bottom of the lower bulb. 

Pretty neat, don’t you think? We could simply use our phone or any other time-measuring device and start the timer when we turn the hourglass. Then, we can see whether it actually takes 10 minutes. Chances are that the claim is fairly accurate. 

In the following thought experiment, which might have some unrealistic elements but which still serves to teach us an important point, I want to delve a little into the nature of time. 
Imagine we bring a person from 1000 AD, roughly 1000 years ago, to today’s world. That person is unlikely to know anything about the laws of gravitation, the laws of physics and the nature of gravity as we understand them today. Ignorant of these phenomena, he would probably think: “This is an hourglass, and the flowing of the sand from the top to the bottom takes 10 minutes”. In other words, the states “sand in top cone” and “sand in bottom cone” are connected by time, and the amount of that time is 10 minutes. That person will undoubtedly perceive that the time the sand takes to fall is an intrinsic property of the hourglass.

Therefore, that person believes an hourglass possesses the property called “duration”. The duration of the flow becomes an objective property of the hourglass, just like its weight, size, temperature, etc. Armed with the knowledge Science has gifted mankind, we can immediately smell something wrong with this perception. This flawed perception extends itself as an analogy to what the Buddha called dukkha. In real terms, dukkha goes far beyond, but this analogy gives us a first idea. 

Imagine that the person in our analogy is an astronaut and travels to the moon while still ignorant about the modern ideas of gravity. The engineers from NASA asks this person to collect a sample of moonstone. The moon has a much lower gravitational attraction, around 1/6 that of the Earth. For his mission on the moon, he must use a spacesuit that can provide him with air for precisely 10 minutes, after which he must return to his base if he wishes to stay alive. If we were to measure with a digital watch how long the air supply would last on the moon, this duration would not change much because both the spacesuit as well as the internal workings of the phone are not very sensitive to the change in gravity. The air he uses to breathe is trapped in an insulating metal and subject to high pressure. For a volume of air in high pressure, the external gravitational field is not very relevant, so it is to be assumed that running out of air will take the same time on the moon as on Earth. But can the same be said about the hourglass? What would happen if that person considered the hourglass a time measurement device?

Thinking, “This hourglass takes exactly 10 minutes”, he would turn it at the beginning of the mission and observe the sand flowing down. On the moon the sand in the hourglass is subject to a lesser force of gravity, so it would flow much slower than on Earth. Let us imagine that it takes 2.5 times longer to flow down since the gravity on the moon is six times less than that on Earth (the falling time scales with the square root of gravitational attraction - these details are irrelevant here, so we shall conveniently ignore them). So, while the air in the cylinder on the moon would empty at the same rate as it would on Earth, the hourglass takes much longer, around 2.5 times longer than on Earth. If the astronaut, however, considers that the sand in the hourglass taking 10 minutes to flow is an intrinsic property of the hourglass and relies on it to work out when his air would run out, he would most likely die of suffocation, as the air would run out before the hourglass drains the sand from the top bulb to the lower bulb.

If one perceives that ‘time duration’ is an intrinsic property of the hourglass, that would be someone unaware of the underlying reality. Which reality do I mean? The reality that its ‘duration’ is not an intrinsic property of the hourglass but rather a manifestation of cause and effect, where the Earth and the moon, amongst countless other causes also contribute to that effect. The sand in the hourglass drains down not because it belongs to an hourglass and that is what it is supposed to do or because it is an intrinsic property of the hourglass but because of the causes acting on it: in simple terms, the pull of gravity. Therefore, it would be wrong to say that this hourglass is a “10-minute hourglass” because that is only the time it takes to run on Earth. It is only a conventional truth. Suppose we travel to a different environment, such as the moon, Jupiter, the Sun, or the ISS (International Space Station). In that case, it might take longer or shorter, or it might not fall at all (such as in the ISS - where the sand would float just like the astronauts). Therefore, can you answer the question: “How long does the sand in that hourglass take to drain from the top cone to the bottom cone”?

An extension to this idea: Imagine you have a song on your phone that takes 10 minutes to listen to when you are on Earth - the same time it takes for the hourglass to run from top to bottom. Now, when you are on the moon, and you play the same song just as you turn the hourglass, the hourglass will take longer than the song will. However, when you are on Jupiter, it is the other way around. So therefore, is it a valid question to ask: “What takes longer, one run of the hourglass or one time listening to the song on your phone?” 
Moreover, can one genuinely answer the question: “How long does the hourglass take to run from top to bottom?” Generally, when we attempt to answer these questions, we assume that the time duration of one run on the hourglass is a fixed property of that object rather than a manifestation due to causes.

How can we use this simple analogy to understand the logic the Buddha wanted to convey?
If you understand that the reason the sand in the hourglass falls is due to causes and that ‘falling’ is the effect, this is analogous to the reality of the world (anicca).  However, for someone to believe that “this hourglass actually takes 10 minutes” and that “duration is an intrinsic property of the hourglass” would be misunderstanding the nature of anicca, resulting in dukkha. That means what we refer to as a “10-minute hourglass” is only a conventional name we use for convenience; it is not an ultimate reality. This nature is encompassed in the property of anatta. Therefore, when objects in nature, living or non-living exhibit various qualities and characteristics, we must strive to perceive them merely as effects which manifest due to the causes present in that instance, rather than attribute them as inherent qualities of the object or entity. It is when we fail to do this, we suffer internally by ascribing abstract qualities to persons or animals - living or dead, or even physical objects and then attaching ourselves mentally to the said entities. So, if you can develop the ability to comprehend and perceive natural qualities which exist in this world as just that, instead of qualities which belong to someone or something, that itself would be a giant leap forward for someone who is serious with their practice towards Nibbana.

Returning to our analogy, if someone were ignorant about the nature of anicca and anatta, he would perceive and misinterpret the world; his perception would be: “This is an hourglass, and for the sand to move from top to bottom, it needs time, namely 10 minutes”. However, it is a misinterpretation based on a false view and would lead him to act foolishly. He would run into many problems (in the above example, he would die) due to his ignorance of the nature of anicca. 

In our modern times, we understand gravity, and therefore, we would not make such a mistake as our imaginary astronaut did in the above example. But when it comes to modern man’s understanding of beauty, for example, or the deeper layers of anicca, he is still very much in the dark. Therefore, by realising and reflecting upon the anicca nature, the universal phenomenon of cause & effect as the Buddha expounded it, we can free ourselves from the eleven great fires of suffering, viz grief, sorrow, fear, lamentation, and so on, and attain the unconditional happiness of Nibbana.

I have summarised the idea presented above in this table. 

If it were nicca…

 Beauty seems to exist as a property of external objects.
 The world is not cause & effect driven (and therefore, events seem connected through a dimension called time). As it is anicca…

 Beauty is not a property of external objects.
 The world is cause & effect driven (and therefore, the effect is a manifestation of causes).

it would have been… sukha

 therefore, surrounding oneself with seemingly pleasurable objects to attain happiness makes sense.
 The perception of beauty in our mind is genuine and honest. It is dukkha…

 what we perceive as beauty is not out there and is only a perception in our mind. Incomprehension of this leads to suffering.
And therefore… atta

 The essence we perceive in external things is genuine, i.e. worldly things have essence and happiness within them.
 And therefore… anatta

 worldly things are essenceless and void of the essence we seek within them (happiness).
To the ignorant mind, these 3-fold characteristics are
perceived as true. To the ignorant mind, these 3-fold characteristics are…
perceived as false.
To the wise, these 3-fold characteristics are
perceived as false. To the wise, these 3-fold characteristics are perceived as true.
 
In the subsequent articles, we will also address the question: What is this world made of? What is the smallest particle of nature? What is the phenomenon of cause & effect that the Buddha discovered but that Science is still unaware of? In the meantime, I leave you with some questions for your own musing. 

How long does it take for the sea to go from flow to ebb? Is it 6 hours? (Are you sure?)
How long does it take from sunrise until sunset? (Are you sure?)