Relational versus Holistic theories in quantum mechanics and Buddhist philosophy: a convergence of the interconnectedness of reality?

In the last decade, the study of science and Buddhism seems to have substantially decreased in the scholarly world. The steadily growing interest that scientifically minded Buddhists and scientists showed for the field in the 1980s/1990s and at the turn of the current millennium, is indeed now met with sporadic publications devoted to specific issues within science and Buddhism, like quantum physics and Mādhyamaka philosophy (see Kohl 2007). Interestingly, while such refined and more theme-oriented approaches have successfully circumvented the initial monolithic reading of science and Buddhism, there still seem to be an enduring attitude of parallelism in recent publications (e.g., Leong 2023).

Parallelism can be broadly traced to the peculiar discourse of New Agers in the 1970s/1980s, which asserted the existence of parallels between Western science and Asian religions, the latter usually qualified under the problematic umbrella term ‘Eastern mysticism’ (see Fritjof Capra’s famous book The Tao of Physics, 1975). While the inherent issues ascribed to the early parallelist literature have since been resolved thanks to a more serious and robust scholarly analysis, the mindset of juxtaposing particular scientific theories and concepts with Buddhist tenets and practices remains (Leong 2023 makes direct reference to “the intriguing parallels between Buddhism, consciousness and the principles of quantum physics”). In part, this is imputable to a one-to-one correspondence between concepts extracted from each side without sufficient reflection over the dynamical evolution of the meaning of such concepts in each field. This is not to say that the contemporary scholarship of Buddhism and science lacks depth or rigor in understanding the respective disciplines, but simply that if one wants to assess the extent to which Buddhism and science are compatible, even perhaps converging on a similar worldview, one needs a diachronic and multi-layered analysis.

In this context, this paper proposes to investigate the object of an ongoing doctoral research focusing on theories of interconnectedness in quantum metaphysics and Buddhist philosophy, specifically between relational and holistic approaches. The fundamental interconnectedness of reality in these two fields is often argued from the concepts of ‘entanglement’ and ‘interdependence’ in the scholarship. The first one designates a characteristic quantum phenomenon in which elementary particles are nonlocally related irrespective of the distance between them, because they share a similar wave function ascribed to the whole system (Bohm and Hiley 1975). The second refers to the idea that because all dharmas are empty of intrinsic existence and properties, they are causally dependent (pratītyasamutpāda) (Williams 2009). These concepts evidently share a commonality of the whole as ubiquitous and primary, but they also have been addressed in many different ways on both sides.

On the one hand, one need not rely solely on entanglement to foster interconnectedness in quantum mechanics, for alternative interpretations of the so-called ‘measurement problem’ (i.e., invariable disturbance of the state of a physical system due to observation, from which only probabilities of particular outcomes can be obtained) have advanced other means to do so. For instance, physicist Carlo Rovelli’s ‘relational’ interpretation sees nature as a collection of facts realised through interaction between physical systems, so that each fact is relative to the system with which it interacts (Rovelli 2022). Another proposal is that of physicist David Bohm, for whom nature is inherently holistic, represented by one wave function in higher-dimensional space which is implicated in everything through nonlocality (a model he calls the Implicate Order) (Bohm 1980). On the other hand, interdependence is not understood equally in different Buddhist philosophical schools, even within the same tradition. Nāgārjuna, to whom the Mādhyamaka school is attached, explained in his treatise of logic that things are empty and interdependent insofar as they cannot be thought of as existing in and of themselves (Williams 2009). A latter school of Buddhism in China, Hua-yen, proposed instead (although following in the footsteps of Mādhyamika philosophy) that the ultimate truth is that of ‘interpenetration’. The Hua-yen patriarchs therefore elevated interdependence as the ultimate reality, and conceptually furthered inter-causality as the interpenetration of dharmas, one containing the many and the many reflecting the one (as is depicted in the metaphor of Indra’s Net in the Avatamsaka Sūtra) (Liu 2022).

Hence, where parallelists observe an unequivocal direct convergence between entanglement and interdependence, there are in fact at least two sets of theories emphasising contrasting aspects of interconnectedness: relationalism and holism, each respectively typified by the dyads Rovelli and Nāgārjuna, and Bohm and Hua-yen. The multi-layered analysis necessary to assess the convergence of quantum mechanics and Buddhist philosophy would resultantly take place at two levels: between the exempla of each field (i.e., Rovelli versus Bohm, and Nāgārjuna versus Hua-yen) and between the two dyads themselves (that is relationalism versus holism).