Forty signs of rain - Kim Stanley Robinson [93]
They tested the mikes, and the noise of talk dampened. The room was impressively full, Frank had to admit, wacky factor or not. These were people still interested enough in ideas to spend a lunch hour listening to a lecture on the philosophy of science. It would be like that in some departments at UCSD, perhaps even on most university campuses, despite the insane pace of life. Surplus time and energy, given over to curiosity: a fundamental hominid behavioral trait. The basic trait that got people into science, that made science in the first place, surviving despite the mind-numbing regimes of its modern-day expression. Here he was himself, after all, and no one could be more burnt out and disenchanted than he was. But still following a tropism helplessly, like a sunflower turning to look at the sun.
The old monk cut quite a figure up at the lectern. Incongruous at best. This might be an admirably curious audience, but it was also a skeptical gang of hardened old technocrats. A tough sell, one would think, for a wizened man in robes, now peering out at them as if from a distant century, looking in fact quite like an early hominid.
And yet there he stood, and here they sat. Something had brought them together, and it wasn’t just the air-conditioning. They sat in their chairs, attentive, courteous, open to suggestion. Frank felt a small glimmer of pride. This is how it had all begun, back in those Royal Society meetings in London in the 1660’s: polite listening to a lecture by some odd person who was necessarily an autodidact; polite questions; the matter considered reasonably by all in attendance. An agreement to look at things reasonably. This was the start of it.
The old man stared out with a benign gaze. He seemed to mirror their attention, to study them.
“Good morning!” he said, then made a gesture with his hand to indicate that he had exhausted his store of English, except for what followed: “Thank you.”
His young assistant then said, “Rimpoche Rudra Cakrin, Khembalung’s ambassador to the United States, thanks you for coming to listen to him.”
A bit redundant that, but then the old man began to speak in his own language—Tibetan, Anna had said—a low, guttural sequence of sounds. Then he stopped, and the young man, Anna’s friend Drepung, began to translate.
“The rimpoche says, Buddhism begins in personal experience. Observation of one’s surroundings and one’s reactions, and one’s thoughts. There is a scientific…foundation to the process. He adds, ‘If I truly understand what you mean in the West when you say science.’ He says, ‘I hope you will tell me if I am wrong about it. But science seems to me to be about what happens that we can all agree on.’”
Now Rudra Cakrin interrupted to ask a question of Drepung, who nodded, then added: “What can be asserted. That if you were to look into it, you would come to agree with the assertion. And everyone else would as well.”
A few people in the audience were nodding.
The old man spoke again.
Drepung said, “The things we can agree on are few, and general. And the closer to the time of the Buddha, the more general they are. Now, two thousand and five hundred years have passed, more or less, and we are in the age of the microscope, the telescope, and…the mathematical description of reality. These are realms we cannot experience directly with our senses. And yet we can still agree in what we say about these realms. Because they are linked in long chains of mathematical cause and effect, from what we can see.”
Rudra Cakrin smiled briefly, spoke. It began to seem to Frank that Drepung’s translated pronouncements were much longer than the old man’s utterances. Could Tibetan be so compact?
“This network is a very great accomplishment,” Drepung added.
Rudra Cakrin then sang in a low gravelly voice, like Louis Armstrong