Yesterday's Shunryu Suzuki lecture excerpt implied that seeing things in a scientific way was to see a flower as static, not something always changing like Buddhism. I'm confident to say Suzuki was wrong and didn't understand that science for a long time has seen phenomena as ever changing too.
I was in a class on the scientific method and the professor pointed out that from a scientific point of view "this chair isn't a chair" and explained how it's made up of atoms etc. always moving and it would be more accurate to call it - I forget what he said - something like chairness or chairing. At that point I said, "Oh - like Buddhism." "No!" he exploded and said a bunch of ignorant stuff about Buddhism. I got him together with Reb and they got along quite well and he changed his mind about Buddhism as Suzuki would have about science if someone had talked to him about it at that time which might have happened at a later date. He wasn't attached to his views so it wouldn't have been hard for him to see his error. Or he might have known better at the time but used the word science carelessly. - DC
Yesterday's post:
You think “there is a flower.” But the actual flower is changing. But you see the flower— “there is a flower, and this flower is always like this.” This is, perhaps, your understanding of the flower. But actually, the flower is changing. When you see something in a scientific way, actually, you do not see “things as it is.”
