Considering Mahayana Buddhism for Process Philosophy

Considering Mahayana Buddhism for Process Philosophy

"Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."

Karl Marx (1844)

"Science frees us in many ways… from the bodily terror which the savage feels. But she replaces that, in the minds of many, by a moral terror which is far more overwhelming".

Charles Kingsley (1866)

Classical sociological theory teaches that all social phenomena—be it intangible, like an idea or a belief; or tangible, like institutions or a nation’s rights engraved into a written constitution—are interrelated to some extent. Two domains of social life that exert a particularly strong influence on the lives of individuals are science and religion. As dominant forces, both have, throughout history, conflicted with each other in fascinating ways. This paper will consider how the two might be integrated into a single mode of thought. My broad aim is to demonstrate how Mahayana Buddhism can be used to satisfy the primary goal of process philosophy, which combines the otherwise conflicting spheres of science and religious life: "the integration of moral, aesthetic, and religious intuitions with the most general doctrines of the sciences into a self-consistent worldview." (I heretofore refer to this as a "single worldview.") Doing so will first require an examination of the core tenets of Buddhism and the debunking of a popular misconception of the faith—the idea that Buddhism is an atheistic tradition. Next, I will consider how the tenets of Buddhism—chief among them, the idea of "emptines...

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