Page 48 - The International Journal of the Royal Society of Thailand Vol.XIII-2021

The International Journal of the Royal Society of Thailand
Volume XIII – 2021

Such a way of viewing the world brought us tremendous benefits, as we all
know; however, it also led to some insurmountable problems that science cannot
solve because of its very constitution. For example, when things are divorced from

their “natural places,” they are in effect divorced from their “meanings.” Of course,
modern science would say that there is essentially no teleological meanings in
nature, but this belief is a logical result of its own methodology which is justified
ultimately through some other concepts such as efficiency and accuracy in prediction,
but not truth, since in science truth is defined in terms of accordance with the
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methodology any way. Hence, when science comes up against some intractable
problem such as how to explain consciousness, it faces tremendous difficulty because

its own methodological system prohibits any treatment of consciousness as it
really is. Instead, when it studies consciousness it does so in a roundabout manner
where effects of consciousness are studied instead of consciousness itself.

This preclusion of what happens at the first-person level then represent a
lacuna in science which science itself, left to its own traditional devices, cannot
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fill. It is here then that the Buddhist way of contemplative and meditative science
comes in. The idea, briefly speaking, is that investigation into one’s own mental
episodes and inner lives can yield something profound, the details of which are

explicated in the Buddhist canonical literature; this, however, is something that is
not explicable in science because of its methodological constitution. For example,
the Buddhist literature talks about insights into the interdependence of all things
and into the nature of things itself, in fact the very idea of “thingness” such that it
is only an imputed concept with no real foundation in nature. This can be demonstrated
only through the meditative method because in order directly to perceive inter-
dependence and lack of subsisting thingness of all things, one has to be able to
perceive things absolutely directly without any intervention of conceptual
thoughts. This is totally impossible in scientific method, and the traditional

10 Or perhaps truth is defined in such a way that science does not arrive at it totally, but only approximates
it or getting closer and closer to it. In this case truth functions, in Pierce’s terms, as a regulatory goal of the
functioning of science. This is the crux of the debate in philosophy of science between the realists, who
believe that there is such a thing as truth which is not dependent on conceptual schemes, and anti-realists
or instrumentalists, who believe that the notion of truth functions only as a regulative means. The point
being made in this paper, however, does not imply either of these positions.
11 See: Francisco Varela and Jonathan Shear, eds., 1999. The View from Within: First-Person Approaches to
the Study of Consciousness. Bowling Green, OH: Imprint Academic.

A Reflection on Nalanda Monastery as an Inspiration for Promoting Scientific and Technological Capabilities in
38 Thailand