The Knowledge and Vision of Things as They Are
On London’s Daily Mail website, there is an article by Brian Cox on the LHC, the Large Hadron Collider, which is due to come on line in late August or early September. Cox does a fine job of clarifying the science behind the Collider—the puzzles it’s intended to solve and the questions it’s designed to answer, along with the theories that have generated those puzzles and questions.
In the sequence of accomplishments leading to Enlightenment, the final step before the last one is “the knowledge and vision of things as they are”. The Buddha spent his life striving diligently to acquire that knowledge and vision, to perfect it, to apply it to each new situation he encountered, and to clarify it and communicate it so that others could, by their own energetic striving, come to the same awareness and prepare themselves to become arahants, enlighted beings. In a very real sense, the sangha of science comprises the most faithful inheritors of the Buddha’s diligence and questing nature, and their striving has brought humankind to the brink of acquiring a knowledge and vision of things as they are that is orders of magnitude more complete and more fruitful than what we have acquired to this point.
The particles at the foundation of the scientist’s understanding of the world are profoundly analogous to the dhammas, the fundamental constituents of existence in the Buddha’s vision. And the samsaric world that those dhammas combine to generate is characterized, as the Buddha knew it must be, by impermanence. “Look at your hand in front of you,” Brian Cox requests.
“These in turn are made of billions of living cells, each of which is made of billions of molecules; proteins, water and countless others.
“If you heated these molecules up to the temperatures of the first fleeting moments of creation, you’d see them break up into atoms, the atoms break up into protons, neutrons and electrons, and the protons and neutrons eventually dissolve away into a primordial soup of exotic particles called quarks.
“In fact, at the limits of our current understanding, you would see just three particles of matter: the up quark, the down quark and the electron.
“Your hand is nothing more than a complex, temporary arrangement of these three particles. The particles themselves have been around for the entire life of the universe. They are spending the blink of a cosmic eye in the pattern known as ‘you’.”
