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BUDDHISM AND SCIENCE: BREAKING NEW GROUND. Edited by B. Alan Wallace. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. 444+ xvi pp.
Increasingly, the world's religious traditions are making their presence felt in the science and religion dialogue that has been dominated for a long time by Christian voices. The essays collected in this volume not only provide an introductory overview of Buddhist engagements with the natural sciences during the last century, but also leave no doubts about ways in which Buddhist perspectives will be crucial to the future of the science-religion conversation. Wallace, founder and director of the Santa Barbara Institute for the Study of Consciousness (<http://www.sbinstitute .com/>), has astutely pulled together fifteen quality essays (by sixteen authors) under three headings-"Historical Context" (three essays), "Buddhism and the Cognitive Sciences" (six essays), and "Buddhism and the Physical Sciences" (six essays)-and has added his own introductory essay to the volume as a whole and prefatory summaries to each of the articles.
As in any collection of essays, reviewers find themselves in a catch-22: either mention each author and essay so as not to leave any out, leaving little space to interact critically with any of the material, or single out a handful of essay(ist)s to engage in more detail, risking the impression that there is a hidden agenda at work censoring the others. I have chosen to divide my impressions under four broad categories within which I hope to mention all of the contributors and their main ideas, even while apologizing up front for focusing on a few more than the rest. My only excuse is that in a book of this much breadth and depth, my limited expertise cannot hope to engage each of the essays to the same degree. Others more competent than I will need to critically interact with the wide range of issues covered in this volume.
My first observation regarding the essays under review is how far the Buddhist relationship with the sciences has come during the last century. The first three essays -by editor Wallace, José Cabezón (a scholar of Tibetan Buddhism with background in physics), and Thupten Jinpa (a scholar-practitioner of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition)-provide both historical overviews of the Buddhist engagement with science and models of the Buddhism-science encounter....