Joseph Needham

Joseph Needham, in his thorough study of Chinese science and civilization, discusses at great length how the Western concept of fundamental laws of nature, with its original implication of a divine lawgiver, has no counterpart in Chinese thought.

‘In the Chinese world view’, Needham writes, ‘the harmonious cooperation of all beings arose, not from the orders of a superior authority external to themselves, but from the fact that they were all parts in a hierarchy of wholes forming a cosmic pattern, and what they obeyed were the internal dictates of their own natures.‘5

According to Needham, the Chinese did not even have a word corresponding to the classical Western idea of a ‘law of nature’. The term which comes closest to it is Ii, which the Neo-Confucian philosopher Chu Hsi* describes as ‘the innumerable vein-like patterns included in the Tao’.6 Needham translates lias’principleoforganisation’andgivesthefollowingcomments: In its most ancient meaning, it signified the pattern in things, the markings of jade or fibres in muscle . . . It acquired the common dictionary meaning ‘principle’, but always conserved the undertone of ‘pattern’ . . . There

is ‘law’ implicit in it, but this law is the law to which parts of wholes have to conform by virtue of their very existence as parts of wholes . . . The most important thing about parts is that they have to fit precisely into place with the other parts in the whole organism which they compose.7

Such a view led the Chinese thinkers to the idea which has only recently been developed in modern physics, that self-consistency is the essence of all laws of nature. The following passage by Ch’en Shun, an immediate pupil of Chu Hsi who lived around A.D. 1200, gives a very clear account of this idea in words which could be taken as a perfect explanation of the notion of self-consistency in the bootstrap philosophy:

Li is a natural and unescapable law of affairs and things . . . The meaning of ‘natural and unescapable’ is that (human) affairs and (natural) things are made just exactly to fit into place. The meaning of ‘law’ is that the fitting into place occurs without the slightest excess or deficiency . . . The men of old, investigating things to the utmost, and searching out Ii, wanted to elucidate the natural unescapableness of (human) affairs and (natural) things, and this simply means that what they were looking for was all the exact places where things precisely fit together. Just that.8 In the Eastern view then, as in the view of modern physics, everything in the universe is connected to everything else and no part of it is fundamental.

The properties of any part are determined, not by some fundamental law, but by the properties of all the other parts. Both physicists and mystics realize the resulting impossibility of fully explaining any phenomenon, but then they take different attitudes. Physicists, as discussed before, are satisfied with an approximate understanding of nature. The Eastern mystics, on the other hand, are not interested in approximate, or ‘relative’ knowledge. They are concerned with ‘absolute’ knowledge involving an understanding of the totality of Life. Being well aware of the essential interrelationship of the universe, they realize that to explain something means, ulti- mately, to show how it is connected to everything else. As this is impossible, the Eastern mystics insist that no single pheno- menon can be explained. Thus Ashvaghosha:

All things in their fundamental nature are not namable or explicable. They cannot be adequately expresssed in any form of language.g

The Eastern sages, therefore, are generally not interested in explaining things, but rather in obtaining a direct non-intellectual experience of the unity of all things. This was the attitude of the Buddha who answered all questions about life’s meaning, the origin of the world, or the nature of nirvana, with a ‘noble silence’. The nonsensical answers of Zen masters, when asked to explain something, seem to have the same purpose; to make the student realize that everything is a consequence of all the rest; that ‘explaining’ nature just means to show its unity; that, ultimately, there is nothing to explain. When a monk asked Tozan, who was weighing some flax, What is Buddha? Tozan said, This flax weighs three pounds’;lO and when Joshu was asked why Bodhidharma came to China, he replied, ‘An oak tree in the garden.‘”

To free the human mind from words and explanations is one of the main aims of Eastern mysticism. Both Buddhists and Taoists speak of a ‘network of words’, or a ‘net of concepts’, thus extending the idea of the interconnected web to the realm of the intellect. As long as we try to explain things, we are bound by karma: trapped in our conceptual network. To transcend words and explanations means to break the bonds of karma and attain liberation.

The world view of the Eastern mystics shares with the bootstrap philosophy of modern physics not only an emphasis on the mutual interrelation and self-consistency of all phenomena, but also the denial of fundamental constituents of matter. In a universe which is an inseparable whole and where all forms are fluid and ever-changing, there is no room for any fixed fundamental entity. The notion of ‘basic building blocks’ of matter is therefore generally not encountered in Eastern thought. Atomic theories of matter have never been developed in Chinese thought, and although they have arisen in some schools of Indian philosophy, they are rather peripheral to Indian mysticism. In Hinduism, the notion of atoms is prominent in the Jaina system (which is regarded as unorthodox since it does not accept the authority of the Vedas). In Buddhist philo-

sophy, atomic theories have arisen in two schools of Hinayana Buddhism, but are treated as illusory products of avidya by the more important Mahayana branch. Thus Ashvaghosha states: When we divide some gross (or composite) matter, we can reduce it to atoms. But as the atom will also be subject to further division, all forms of material existence, whether gross or fine, are nothing but the shadow of particularisation and we cannot ascribe any degree of (absolute or inde- pendent) reality to them.‘* The principal schools of Eastern mysticism thus agree with the view of the bootstrap philosophy that the universe is an interconnected whole in which no part is any more fundamental than the other, so that the properties of any one part are determined by those of all the others. In that sense, one might say that every part ‘contains’ all the others and, indeed, a vision of mutual embodiment seems to be characteristic of the mystical experience of nature. In the words of Sri Aurobindo, Nothing to the supramental sense is really finite; it is founded on a feeling of all in each and of each in all.‘3 This notion of ‘all in each and each in all’ has found its most extensive elaboration in the Avatamsaka school of Mahayana Buddhism* which is often considered to be the final culmination of Buddhist thought. It is based on the Avatamsaka Sutra, traditionally believed to have been delivered by the Buddha while he was in deep meditation after his Awakening. This voluminous sutra, which has so far not been translated into any Western language, describes in great detail how the world is perceived in the enlightened state of consciousness, when ‘the solid outlines of individuality melt away and the feeling of finiteness no longer oppresses us.‘14 In its last part, called the Candavyuha, it tells the story of a young pilgrim, Sudhana, and gives the most vivid account of his mystical experience of the universe, which appears to him as a perfect network of mutual relations, where all things and events interact with each other in such a way that each of them contains, in itself,

all the others. The following passage from the sum, paraphrased by D. T. Suzuki, uses the image of a magnificently decorated tower to convey Sudhana’s experience: The Tower is as wide and spacious as the sky itself. The ground is paved with (innumerable) precious stones of all kinds, and there are within theTower Iinnumerable) palaces, porches, windows, staircases, railings, and passages, all of which are made of the seven kinds of precious gems . . . And within this Tower, spacious and exquisitely orna- mented, there are also hundreds of thousands . . . of towers, each one of which is as exquisitely ornamented as the main Tower itself and as spacious as the sky. And all these towers, beyond calculation in number, stand not at all in one another’s way; each preserves its individual existence in perfect harmony with all the rest; there is nothing here that bars one tower being fused with all the others in- dividually and collectively; there is a state of perfect intermingling and yet of perfect orderliness. Sudhana, the young pilgrim, sees himself in all the towers as well as in each single tower, where all is contained in one and each contains all.15 The Tower in this passage is, of course, a metaphor for the universe itself, and the perfect mutual interfusion of its parts is known in Mahayana Buddhism as ‘interpenetration’. The Avatamsaka makes it clear that this interpenetration is an essentially dynamic interrelation which takes place not only spatially but also temporally. As mentioned previously,* space and time are also seen as interpenetrating. The experience of interpenetration in the state of enlighten- ment can be seen as a mystical vision of the complete ‘boot- strap’ situation, where all phenomena in the universe are harmoniously interrelated. In such a state of consciousness, the realm of the intellect is transcended and causal explanations become unnecessary, being replaced by the direct experience of the mutual interdependence of all things and events. The Buddhist concept of interpenetration thus goes far beyond any

scientific bootstrap theory. Nevertheless, there are models of subatomic particles in modern physics, based on the bootstrap hypothesis, which show the most striking parallels to the views of Mahayana Buddhism.