I gave this talk at the Blooming Heart Sangha on June 19, 2025
The Buddha is a Biologist June 19, 2025
I think of myself as a biologist.
- I think I am a biologist.
- I think the Buddha is a biologist too.
I have the academic training of a biologist.
- Also, I have a deep relationship with many plants in my garden
- I have an understanding how many living and inanimate beings act and relate to one another.
- I read a lot about current biological thinking and in all this I’m seeing a pattern that the Buddha would easily recognize.
- My bookshelves have books with lots of highlighting and underlining: “An Immense World, Entangled Life, Becoming Earth, When the Earth was Green, The Possibility of Life, Being Nature,” and so on.
- There is a pattern in all of them very similar to what I hear from that biologist we call the Buddha.
Buddhist meditation practices and scientific exploration have different ways of knowing.
- With the scientific method, we largely look outside ourselves to find the truth hiding in reality.
- With meditation we direct our attention inward, relying on our experiential knowing.
- With mindfulness, we seek to resolve the same questions as science, but in the direct experience of non-duality and the mystery of consciousness.
- What I have noticed: The two ways of knowing have arrived at so
many similar conclusions.
- This is true in three areas: Physics, biology and neuroscience
Physics
Physics is where I first noticed that science and meditation have found agreement.
- Mindfulness, like physics, can reveal that there is no solidity anywhere,
- ….that the observer cannot be separated from what is observed, …..that phenomena seem to appear out of emptiness
- …..and that everything affects everything else in a co-emergent system.
- Meditators can discover these same insights by simply focusing their attention inward.
- We casually speak of interbeing.
- Modern science, like meditation, has found that oneness is right there in reality’s core.
- Scientists attempt to express this mystical oneness in concepts such as wave-particle, space-time, matter-energy.
- Cosmologists like Jude Currivan write of a universal intelligence and she sounds much like a meditator engaged in samadhi, deep concentration.
- I understand her better because I meditate.
Biology
However, it is in other ways that the Buddha reveals himself most clearly as a biologist.
- Buddhist and scientific maps of mind and cognition are strikingly similar.
- Mindfulness as taught by the Buddha, explores and uncovers what it means to be alive.
- Through mindfulness, I learn daily that everything I touch is alive with the vibrancy of life.
- Even what we call suffering offers an opportunity to know what it means to be alive.
- This is deep biology.
This deep biology is taught by biologist Buddha in the four noble truths.
- As a biologist, the Buddha studied the human condition thoroughly.
- He announced his findings in four truths:
- The first noble truth, life is inherently unsatisfactory
- Dukkha, suffering, is part of the deal when we get a human body and nervous system.
- With mindfulness, Biologist Buddha was simply making a scientific observation.
- It is not easy having a body: we fight gravity constantly, we need food, warmth and shelter, we are driven by an urge to procreate.
- Biologist Buddha saw and taught that we need to come to a deep understandingand acceptance of these biological conditions. Ie. The First Noble Truth.
In The Second Noble Truth, he taught that our evolutionary inheritance keeps us continually dissatisfied and off-balance.
- The world creates pleasant and unpleasant sensations, just by coming into contact with it.
- We automatically have reactions of attraction or aversion. Ie. The Second Noble Truth
Biologist Buddha’s Third Noble Truth is perhaps his most significant biological insight.
- He taught that Nature has given us the ability to train our minds to bring us to new levels, to end suffering, and to attain freedom and satisfaction.
- Evolution has gifted us with the potential for high degrees of self-awareness, to take part in our own evolution.
- In some recognition of this, we have given ourselves the labels of “conscious one”or Homo sapiens sapiens. ….humans who know that they know and how to know. Ie. The Third Noble Truth.
In The Fourth Noble Truth, Biologist Buddha gives the basic instructions for developing the vital human skills of concentration and mindfulness.
- He explains how to apply these skills in meditation and our daily lives in order to realize, to recognize, to understand our true nature.
- This is the 8-fold path leading to the cessation of suffering, ie. The Fourth Noble Truth.
Neuroscience
Biologist Buddha offers more: It has taken about 2500 years for neuroscience to catch up with the understanding handed to us by the biological Buddha
- Biologist Buddha gives us the gift of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness
- These are the four fundamental components of the human condition; they all parallel modern views of brain function:
- One: the physical elements that make up our body, especially the process of breathing.
- Two: The nervous system that gives us sentience;
- Three: The emotional life and psychic states that color our experience;
- Four: the ideas, concepts, beliefs and consciousness that together we call the mind.
Much like contemporary neuro-science tries, the biologist Buddha guides us through thisfour-fold lens of mindfulness, showing us the basic, neurological aspects of our being. ….what it means to be human,
- These four foundations of mindfulness are deep-ecology practices, ways of exploring our nature as nature, and they have many manifestations:. Examples:
- Through mindfulness, we can explore who we are, how we are connected with each other, and how we are connected with all other forms of life on earth, with the living earth itself.
- Through mindfulness, we see that our body grows out of the life that has preceded us.
- Mindfulness allows us to experience how with every breath we feed the plants and are fed by them.
- Thru mindfulness, we can see how we are part of an evolving level of consciousness that began 13.5 billion years ago,
- In Biological Buddha’s teaching on mindfulness, we see that the cognitive mind is mentioned as a sixth sense organ
- Through mindfulness, we are able to extract ourselves from the content of what we think and explore how we think and feel.
- Meditation becomes a relaxed form of consciousness with no content.
Finally, I notice that 2500 years ago, the biologist Buddha already dispelled the myth of survival of the fittest.
- Scientists are finally questioning the wrongful interpretation of Darwin for decades and acknowledging that evolution moves forward through cooperation.
- Modern biologists like Ed Yong are acknowledging the connection between living and inanimate beings. ….as Thay says, interbeing.
- Some point out that all living beings are connected, even to the point of being part of a living earth (Ferris Jaber) and a universal intelligence ( Jude Currivan).
Summary: It is a bit of a stretch to call me a Buddhist.
- But it is clear to me that I am becoming a different kind of biologist because of Biologist Buddha.
- Biologist Buddha guides me through the science books that I read.
- He guides me through the living presence of plants in my garden.
- He provides the deep biological guidance I sometimes need to understand thestrange behavior of some of my fellow human beings.
- And biologist Buddha gives me guidance in understanding my own body, my mind and myself.
How do mindfulness and science, art, psychology, writing, etc. blend?