Какая философия может послужить мостом между наукой и буддизмом? Российский подход

Abstract

The present paper considers an intercultural philosophy as a possibility to bridge the gap between Buddhism and modern science. The bridge metaphor, which was common in many Buddhist texts, now becomes popular in the currently emerging philosophical language peculiar to our era of globalization and new possibilities of multicultural education. The author insists upon the fact that today to create both the identity of a person and identity of a group or even identity of a whole society means to be involved at large into different cultural experiences. The latter implies neither hierarchical relationship between them nor mutual exclusion but a genuine complementariness instead. The paper treats a number of such intercultural projects offered in the works of three eminent Russian Buddhist scholars: Theodor Stcherbatskoy (1866-1942), Otton Rosenberg (1888-1919), and Alexander Piatigorsky (1929-2009). In recent years Western neuroscientists and their Russian colleagues demonstrate a great interest in the study of Indian yoga techniques and Buddhist meditation with the methods of modern science. These studies accumulated some undeniable evidence that meditation and mindfulness training affect certain areas of the brain. Any study of meditative practices, the author believes, will be inefficient until Buddhist and Indian theories of consciousness have been taken into serious consideration. Their integration into the struc-ture of modern scientific knowledge in the West is significantly promoted by the cooperation between neuroscientists with philosophers-buddhologists (J. Dunn, G. Dreyfus, geshe Thupten Jinpa, E. Thompson, M. Bitbol, J. Garield and many others). The concepts of Russian philosophers-buddhologists, analyzed in this paper, can also contribute to the development of modern scientific research strategies regarding consciousness.