Why the Dalai Lama Matters - Robert Thurman

Buddhism is all about science. As Shantideva says, "Everything the Buddha ever taught comes down ultimately to a question of wisdom - it was all for the sake of wisdom." That is so simply because it is the attainment of wisdom that enables a being to attain liberation from suffering. Faith, love, and kindness are in fact the products of true wisdom; they are released and empowered by it. The wisdom that understands the visceral interrelatedness of self and other opens the heart to the feeling of natural compassion for the sufferings of those others. Faith, love, kindness are excellent, but none by itself can make liberation possible. Only wisdom can liberate us from suffering. Only when we know that the deepest nature of life is, itself, freedom, only then do we feel free, and feeling free, feel inexhaustible bliss. If science is the systematic pursuit of the accurate knowledge of reality, then science is Buddhism, Buddhism is science.

The analogy with modern science goes even further. The Buddhist theory of emptiness or voidness is not a theory about the essential nothingness of the universe. It is the original theory discovered millenia ago that proposes the relativity of the universe. Things are not empty of their own existence. They are empty of any nonrelational essence or isolated core reality, therefore possessing only the reality of their interrelatedness with other relational things. All things being relational, whenever anything is sought as an absolute by the kind of analytic inquiry that seeks the ultimate nature of that thing, that thing dissolves under analysis and disappears from view. It cannot be found as an absolute. This is obvious, in a way, because if it it found at all, the finder has related to it by finding it and so has voided its absoluteness. Therefore, the voidness theory means that all theories about all things are from a particular perspective, relational, valid, or invalid only in a certain context. All theory is hypothetical, awaiting further refinement by experimental or experiential discovery of further aspects of the realities in question.