Science and Buddhism on craving and suffering
The magazine Utne has a series of articles in its June 2006 issue relating to topics such as neuroethics and neural implants. The one of interest to us, Saffron Robes and Lab Coats, discusses a recent Stanford forum entitled Craving, Suffering and Choice: Spiritual and Scientific Explorations of Human Experience , attended by the Dalai Lama, and presents some useful insights on the science and religion debate, specifically on the approach to craving and suffering. Quotes:
“The scientists and the Buddhists agreed that the type of craving that leads to an unhealthy life is a misapprehension of reality—desire taken to a destructive level. Buddhist practice holds that the correct view of reality comes through contemplation, while neurosicence focuses on localizing the brain activity associated with craving…”
“While their approaches to suffering may sound different, Mobley [William Mobley, director of Stanford’s Neuroscience Institute] said, neuroscience and Buddhism both acknowledge the Four Noble Truths regarding suffering. There is the fact of suffering, the cause of suffering, the end of suffering, and the path to end suffering.”
May 15th, 2006 at 10:22
I’ve always liked the simple truth in the Buddhist approach that suffering is due to attachments and delusions. My disagreement with Buddhism starts with where one goes from there. To sever all one’s attachments is to throw the baby out with the bath water. Which attachments are the baby and which are better severed? Good question. I don’t think either Buddhism or science, much as I love science, is up to answering that.
Life helps. My greatest physical suffering right now is a torn rotator cuff. I can manage. I think of how people must have just lived with this until recent years – maybe they drank heavily. Instead I can look forward to surgery soon. For now I know why it hurts so much when I turn my shoulder to tuck my shirt into my pants. It used to be so effortless.
Suffering is because of craving? Sometimes, but not that often, espscially for physical suffering. To tuck my shirt in like I used to is a craving. Maybe if I had to live like this for the rest of my life, I’d dress differently. But I don’t have to. So I endure it with less suffering knowing that. An empirical approach to medicine has made it possible for this to be fixed, not a direction Buddhism takes.
I think it’s the differences between Buddhism and empiricism that are more instructive than whatever parallels one chooses to draw.
June 26th, 2006 at 19:44
Looking at the brain waves or looking at it experientially – both seem like a good thing to me.
David D: As someone living with an incurable illness chiefly characterized by widespread muscle, bone, and nerve pain – it’s progressive, terribly rare to the point of being beyond diagnosis, and I’m starting my thirteenth year – I can say that one can become far less attached even to one’s physical body than I would have dreamed.
Otherwise, I’d frankly have put a bullet through my head some time ago.
At the same time, at the level of physiology, pain is painful. There’s no totally getting around that. I’ve found myself wondering at times what Buddhism would have looked like had the Buddha suffered from high level intractable physical pain.
July 2nd, 2006 at 13:18
This is why I find Buddhism so interesting – it seems to concede with science rather than compete with it. It actually encourages you to push to envelope, to question authority and think for yourself.
I’m not some grand master, or even an accomplished meditator, but from my understanding the aim of Buddhism is to be happy – to end suffering. Physical pain does not necesarily imply ‘suffering’. Suffering is only a state of mind.. If you were to allow that pain to interfere with your life and change you as a person, maybe then you would consider it suffering.
Physical pain and physical pleasure are fundamentally the same thing. How about the people who percieve physical pain as enjoyable? Or, what if you had only felt physical pain throughout your life? Would it really be pain if you had no pleasureable feeling to compare it to? Pain and pleasure are both attachments – our beliefs that these things are either ‘good’ or ‘bad’. But what is ‘good’? What is ‘bad’? What if your body did not function in such a way that it would not tell you when it was breaking down, or malfunctioning? So, in this sense, isn’t pain a good thing?
October 11th, 2006 at 15:51
Interesting what david said about thowing a baby to a water and darius buddas reaction to pain. I must say guys you got some thinking to do. Remember Your body , environment everything around you is respect to you. The reality you experience is yours. The baby you see is yours. The pain you experience is yours. Both of you guys used the word i. So you guy’s agree eveything around you is respect to you. But if you see what he said you will realise there is no longer i involved.
October 11th, 2006 at 16:19
I met a guy with MS. He has been in great pain for ten years. He is not a buddhist, but a christian. He says he is happy none the less, because he accepts the pain, rather than fight with it. This is exactly the principle outlined in Buddhism. Physical pain is difficult to accept, but for some of us there is no alternative.
Acceptance is peace.
February 15th, 2008 at 20:01
“The scientists and the Buddhists agreed that the type of craving that leads to an unhealthy life is a misapprehension of reality…”
This is a bit misleading though, don’t you think? It gives the impression that the problem of suffering is essentially some sort of intellectual problem. The following sentence also confirms this:
“Buddhist practice holds that the correct view of reality comes through contemplation…”
Of course, wrong views are part of the problem. Ignorance is, after all, the root of the whole she-bang we call samsara. Correcting this ignorance, however, is not the same as correcting an intellectual mistake though. On the one hand, we can almost talk of the problem of suffering like this; the Buddha certainly does. On the other hand, a long tradition in Western thought to separate thought and activity, mind and body, reason and desire, makes talking like this unskillful, because the straight-forward understanding of ignorance and knowledge and those other binary concepts does not match up with the Indian or Sino-Japanese formations.
Since Georg Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, there has been a profoundly influential tradition of intellectual and social movements that either aim to or embody a break-down of these sorts of dualities. The important one for the snippet quoted in this blog-post, however, is the one between knowledge and activity.
Marx somewhat defined ideology according to his notion of false-consciousness, where “they do not know that they are doing it, and they still do it,” which plays into the idea that very practical problems can be reduced to intellectual or epistemological mistakes. Slavoj Zizek, borrowing from Peter Sloterdijk, offers a different account of the way ideology and its attendent dis-satisfactions operates. Rather than locate the problem in knowledge as we in the West have been brought to think of it, which is to say knowledge as “what is meant” as opposed to “what is said,” he locates ideology in action. This makes announcing the problem more like, “they know perfectly well {such and such], and they *act* as if they didn’t.”
Is this not one of the most common frustrations we have too, where we catch ourselves acting almost beyond our will, despite our own explicit beliefs or feelings, though we also recognize something deeply familiar our acting on a desire otherwise alien to us? In the same way, what the Buddha taught as to do with this practical aspect of our experience we normally associate with a kind of mindlessness.
It is as if what do doesn’t matter as much as what we think, or more to the point that these two can be approached as separate in our practice. To this end, much is obscured in approaching what the Buddha taught as simply a sort of mental exercise. Of course, depending on whose describing it, this is not exactly an incorrect thing to say either. Those who say it with such fullness though are not talking about just intellectual knowledge or practical knowledge, or intellectual knowledge and practical knowledge, but that spiritual wisdom that over-flows such shallow conceptions.
The way of approaching the buddha-dharma suggested in that original quote, however, is like saying that the Buddha taught us to follow (or create and then follow) a map as opposed to a path. A map, unlike a path, does not take us anywhere. That is not to say that where we have to go is anywhere apart from where we are right now. However, the map does not even locate us where we are, while being on the path we can know at least that we are on the path.
November 4th, 2009 at 20:11
[…] Science and Buddhism on craving and suffering Sunday, May 7th, 2006 The magazine Utne has a series of articles in its June 2006 issue relating to topics such as neuroethics and neural implants. The one of interest to us, Saffron Robes and Lab Coats, discusses a recent Stanford forum entitled Craving, Suffering and Choice: Spiritual and Scientific Explorations of Human Experience, attended by the Dalai Lama, and presents some useful insights on the science and religion debate, specifically on the approach to craving and suffering. Quotes: “The scientists and the Buddhists agreed that the type of craving that leads to an unhealthy life is a misapprehension of reality—desire taken to a destructive level. Buddhist practice holds that the correct view of reality comes through contemplation, while neurosicence focuses on localizing the brain activity associated with craving…” “While their approaches to suffering may sound different, Mobley [William Mobley, director of Stanford’s Neuroscience Institute] said, neuroscience and Buddhism both acknowledge the Four Noble Truths regarding suffering. There is the fact of suffering, the cause of suffering, the end of suffering, and the path to end suffering.” and what would be neurotheology without the famous : Quote: […]
November 30th, 2009 at 18:13
[…] comments included those on the article Science and Buddhism on craving and suffering and The End of Faith. On my post on Bill O’Reilly: unlikely neurotheology […]
July 31st, 2012 at 04:30
To me it sounds like the craving and suffering are one and the same thing. More you crave, more you suffer. Less you crave, less you suffer. So the suffering is created by craving, but regardless of how much you actually have. This is the point.
Some people have a lots of things, but they crave even more, so they have to suffer. And those who don’t have much, crave it even more, because they want life with a lots of things. So they crave and suffer.
Not to crave means not to want anything different than you have or that you are. To be satisfied with what one has is to be rich. But it’s easy to say it, but hard to actually achieve it. And even if you give up a couple of things, there are things piled up in your subconscious that you want. It’s lot of them, and it takes years to get rid of all of them.
But once you make it, and you stop craving anything, you should stop suffering as well. That’s the essential message of buddhists – the ones who got there, or at least are on the way. I hope it make sense.