Date: 01/06/2024 01/07/2024
Location: Star River Meditation Center
Teacher: Jason
Dharma Knowledge
Is There a Conflict Between the Dharma and Science
The question of whether the Dharma conflicts with science is often framed as a confrontation of positions: either the Dharma is dismissed as premodern thought incompatible with science, or it is exalted as a superior form of knowledge that transcends science. Both views arise from conceptual confusion. The issue is not allegiance, but whether the respective domains, methods, and limits of each are clearly understood.
Science is fundamentally a methodological system, not a comprehensive worldview. Its defining features include reliance on observable phenomena, hypothesis testing, reproducibility, and continuous revision. Science does not address questions such as the meaning of life or the nature of suffering. Its function is to describe causal relationships among phenomena and to construct predictive models. Its authority derives from methodological rigor, not from claims to ultimate truth.
The Dharma, likewise, is not a belief proclamation. It is an analytical framework concerned with experience, particularly with sensation, cognition, intention, attachment, and the arising of suffering. Its focus is not the structure of external matter, but the mechanisms through which subjective experience is constructed and distorted. Its method is disciplined observation, introspection, and behavioral refinement. Its criterion of validity is whether practice reduces ignorance and suffering, not whether it aligns with institutional authority.
From this perspective, the two address fundamentally different domains. Science investigates third-person, measurable phenomena; the Dharma examines first-person, lived experience. Because their objects of inquiry do not overlap, they are not competing explanatory systems. Apparent conflict usually arises when the Dharma is mistaken for a theory of natural phenomena, or when science is treated as a tool capable of resolving all existential questions.
At the level of method, however, the Dharma and science share notable similarities. Both reject blind belief and emphasize observation, verification, and repeatability. The Buddha insisted that teachings be tested through direct experience rather than accepted on the basis of scripture or authority. Science operates under the same principle: theories must withstand scrutiny and remain open to revision. In this epistemic attitude, the Dharma is closer to empirical inquiry than to dogmatic belief.
Conflict emerges primarily through category errors. When science is used to deny the legitimacy of subjective experience altogether, reducing consciousness and meaning to irrelevant byproducts, it exceeds its proper scope. Conversely, when the Dharma is employed to explain physical origins or replace natural science, it abandons its own domain. The tension does not lie in the disciplines themselves, but in their misapplication.
It is also important to note that the Dharma does not depend on science for its validity. Its analyses of suffering, impermanence, non-self, attachment, and liberation remain experientially coherent regardless of scientific development. Likewise, science does not require the Dharma to achieve its technical aims. Their relationship is not one of mutual validation, but of parallel relevance to different kinds of problems.
In contemporary contexts, dialogue between the Dharma and fields such as cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience is possible and potentially fruitful. The value of such dialogue lies not in proving that “the Dharma is science” or that science confirms the Dharma, but in clarifying how different methodologies illuminate different aspects of shared experience. Attempts to merge or rank them undermine serious inquiry.
The conclusion is clear. The Dharma and science are not in conflict because they do not compete for the same explanatory territory. The Dharma addresses how cognitive processes generate suffering and how that mechanism can cease. Science addresses how phenomena occur and how they can be predicted and applied. When their respective boundaries are respected, there is neither contradiction nor need for forced synthesis.
