It is now several years ago that Chimyo sama, well aware of my ignorance, gave to me, more in hope, I suspect, than expectation, two volumes containing a number of the most important Sutras.

Since then I have read and reread many of them, although, of course, I still remain profoundly ignorant of the vast range of Buddhist literature and thought.

One thing that I have, however, become increasingly aware of through my meetings with you and my conversations with Taira Sato and others, is the vital part which personal encounter plays in the Shin Buddhist tradition.

The effects of the encounters between Kenji Toda and Fred Adkins, and subsequently between the Eisai Pharmaceutical Company and University College London, and that between UCL and Shogyoji, still reverberate and will undoubtedly continue, both in subtle, subliminal ways, and in obvious public consequences, to reverberate into the future.

Under the leadership of Chimyo sama you have indeed, as Buddhists, enthusiastically embarked upon a great adventure and a whole new series of encounters in England and the Western world.

But there are other adventures, as well as those of travel and personal encounter, and of opening out to distant lands and different cultures.

These are the encounters, the adventures of the mind, and one of the most important and most exciting of them is the encounter with modern science, with science as it now is, and not as it once was.

I know that it has been said that the modern secular, scientific outlook is inimical to Buddhism, but I certainly think that, even if that is true, it would be a misunderstanding of the history of Buddhism from its earliest beginnings to think that the science of today has nothing at all in common with the Buddhism of the Sutras or of Shinran Shonin.

This is why I have have chosen to talk to you today, on the basis of the little that I know, of some of the things that have struck me, as a pure non-specialist, about the relationship between two so seemingly separate, even antagonistic, worlds.

It is true that, as far as can be seen, there will always be a gulf between science and faith, since science deals with things that are, at least in theory, subject to proof, even if the means of obtaining that proof may not be immediately available.

As a consequence of this fundamental position, scientists work within the strict limits of a logic which they themselves have devised and are continuously concerned to extend and perfect for their own particular purposes.

And yet, having said that, I am repeatedly, and perhaps naively, struck by the analogies between the findings of modern physics and the prescientific, Buddhist intuitions of the nature of reality.

One of the recurrent, fundamental themes in the early Indian Buddhist texts is that all of what we normally think of as reality, of the universe as we perceive it, and the world in which we live, together with everything in it, including ourselves, are nothing more than a passing illusion.

But that, if you look at it in one way, is a basic concept of modem science.

As is the case in the Buddhist world view, the solid floor on which you sit, the table before me, are real enough as we perceive them with our natural senses.

Yet we know, through the machinery of modern physics, that the underlying reality is of a world of minute, widely separated, spinning universes, each of them largely consisting of empty space.

It is a world of atomic nuclei, of whirling electrons, of photons and subatomic particles, that is anything but the world as we see it with our own eyes and feel it with our own hands.

It is a world of common elements that combine and recombine to form the varied world we sense; a world that is both real and yet, as we, as human beings, perceive it, an illusion; an illusion which, moreover, is very different from that perceived by many other living organisms.

It is also the case that, in modem psychological theory, the old idea that we are no more than objective recorders of an objective, external reality, has given way to the understanding that we, as human beings, are, in a real sense the subjective creators of what we think of as constituting external reality.

To take one easily accessible example from colour vision, long well known to painters; all colours appear to change when placed next door to other, different colours.

Even when we are fully aware that it is an illusion and that nothing in the pigments has actually changed at all, there is nothing that we can do about it, and the illusion persists.

Now, scientists are mapping in the brain the areas and the mechanisms which control the extraordinary fact that an area of white, from which not a single photon of coloured light is reflected, can be made to look red or blue as far as we are concerned, when closely surrounded by other suitable colours.

It is, of course, also the case, that other living organisms see the world in different colours or in none at all, and live successfully with their reality, and their illusion.

The separation between this and that, between I and it, denied from the start in the Sutras, is paralleled in modem physics, by the fact that, in the world of the sub-atomic particle, the observer inescapably changes the thing observed.

In short, the observer and the observed cease to be separate and independent entities.

Moreover, what we see in the world of sub-atomic particles is not a series of 'hard facts' in the manner of nineteenth century and earlier science, perhaps best illustrated by Isaac Newton's calculation of the orbits of the planets, allowing their positions at any given moment, present, past or future, to be to be precisely determined.

Twentieth century science has, indeed, moved a long way from the nineteenth century view of the atomic world as a mass of colliding billiard balls.

Electrons in their orbits, for example, can only be described in terms of probabilities, not of precise predictions, and it is with a shifting, interacting world of probabilities that much of today's science deals.

For modem science, indeed, the familiar, solid world is far less solid than earlier scientists ever thought it to be.

It is a fundamental concept in the modern theory of relativity that mass, that familiar aspect of the material world of which we all are part, is interchangeable with energy.

Einstein's by now famous equation, E = MC squared, or in plain language, energy is mass times the speed of light squared, can also, like all such equations, be transposed to read M = E over C squared; mass equals energy divided by the square of the speed of light.

Another striking feature of today's science is the amazingly large numbers that are everywhere involved in its mathematical underpinnings.

Modern parallel processing computers are already attaining speeds of millions and even billions of computations a second, and when we look at the number and distances of the galaxies in the universe, or measure the number of sub-atomic particles in a cubic centimetre of space, the figures come out as billions and billions of billions (throughout this talk, a billion is taken, in the British manner, to be a million millions).

When it comes to concepts of time, I find it fascinating, therefore, that among Christians in the West the creation of the earth was generally thought until the nineteenth century, from readings of the Bible, to have taken place about 4,500 years BC.

The contrast with the early Indian Buddhist texts and Sutras could hardly be more extreme.

In Indian Buddhist thought, the longest unit of time was a kalpa, which is, in other words, the time that it would take you to empty a one yojana, cubic container, with somewhere between eleven and fifteen kilometre sides, filled with mustard seeds, if one seed was removed every hundred years.

Although obviously no exact definition is possible, a kalpa has been estimated by some authorities to lie somewhere in the region of four thousand, three hundred and twenty million years (4,320,000,000).

There are other, smaller, but still large, numbers, such as the niyuta, which is one million, and the koti, which is ten million years.

Consequently, when we come to The Larger Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtra (Sect.2), with its description of the Land of Bliss, and a passage which reads:- "If the Tathagata wished, O Ananda, he could live for a whole kalpa on one alms-gift, or for a hundred kalpas, or for a thousand kalpas, or for a hundred thousand kalpas to a hundred thousand niyutas of kotis of kalpas, nay he could live beyond,” we are talking of forty three thousand, two hundred million billion years, and more (43,200,000,000,000,000,000,000).

Similarly, in the passage (Sect.3), which reads:- "At that time O Ananda, which was long ago in the past, in an innumerable and more than innumerable, and incomprehensible kalpa before now, — at that time, and that moment, there arose in the world a holy and fully enlightened Tathagata called I Dipankara", we are coming dose to the concept of what would now be called infinity.

Almost a thousand years later, in Section XIV of the Tannisho, which reflects the teaching of Shinran Shonin, we read that, according to the scriptures, transgressors can, by ten Nenbutsu, gain release from the consequences of sins committed during eighty billion kalpas of birth-and-death, or a matter of some three hundred and forty five thousand, six hundred million billions of years (345,600,000,000,000,000,000,000)!

If we then turn to concepts, not of time, but of space, we find, in The Smaller Sukhāvatīvyūha (Sect.2), such passages as that in which it is stated "Then Baghavad ……. said 'O Sāriputra after you have passed from here over a hundred thousand kotis ( one billion ) of Buddha countries, there is in the Western part a Buddha country called Sukhāvatī (the happy country), Then, in the Vagrakkhedikā or Diamond Cutter Sutra (Sect. VIII ) there are passages such as the following :- "Bhagavad said: 'What do you think, O Subhuti, if a son or a daughter of a good family filled this sphere of a million millions of worlds with the seven gems or treasures, ........."

Although such passages belong to the realms of mythology and faith, and not of science, I cannot, as an ignorant, non-scientist, help thinking of the parallels between them and our late twentieth century, scientific awareness of the billions of years, which the universe that we inhabit has existed; of the billions of stars in our own particular, not too important galaxy, and of the billions of galaxies which have formed, and are still forming in the almost unimaginable vastnesses of time and space.

Another striking feature of the Diamond Cutter Sutra is the reiterated and uncompromising statement of the absolute unity of all that is, which lies behind the fleeting illusions of individuality and separateness.

The Buddha declares in Section XXV "What do you think then, O Subhuti, does a Tathagata think in this wise: Beings have been delivered by me? You should not think so, O Subhuti. And why? Because there is no being O Subhuti, that has been delivered by the Tathagata. And, if there were a being, O Subhuti, that has been delivered by the Tathagata, then the Tathagata would believe in self, believe in a being, believe in a living being, and believe in a person. And what is called a belief in self, O Subhuti, is preached as no-belief by the Tathagata.

Then, in Section XXX, we read that, in reply to the Buddha, "Subhuti said ……. 'And what was preached by the Tathagata as the sphere of a million millions of worlds, that was preached by the Tathagata as no sphere of worlds; ……… And why? Because, O Baghavat, if there were a sphere of worlds, there would exist a belief in matter; and what was preached as a belief in matter by the Tathagata, that was preached as no-belief by the Tathagata', then “Bhagavat said 'And a belief in matter itself, O Subhuti, is unmentionable and inexpressible; it is neither a thing nor no-thing, and this is known by children and ignorant persons'."

In short, the illusion of the world, with its perceptions of self and not self, of individual, separate entities, though real enough, is not the underlying reality of the indivisible unity of all that is and is not. It is fascinating to find, therefore, that there are analogies to this age-old way of thinking in the most recent theories in contemporary physics - and I must stress here that they are no more than theories - which envisage the universe as possessing a unity so extreme as to have been unthinkable even fifty years ago.

This unity lies, once more, in the world of atomic and subatomic particles from which the universe is formed and which is the realm of quantum theory.

We are now familiar, if that is the right word, with Einstein's theory of relativity in which no signal, no item of information, can pass from one part of the universe to another, however near or far, at a speed which exceeds the speed of Light.

It has very recently been shown, however, that, in the subatomic quantum world, when any particle, such as an electron or a photon, interacts with another particle, the two become what is known, in the everyday language of science, as ‘entangled'.

They cease, in a sense, to be independent entities and can only ever be described in relation to each other.

Electrons, for example, largely exist in what are known as 'up' and 'down' states, but, for a separated pair of particles in an entangled state, the observation of an up state at one end ensures that that there will be a down state at the other, and vice versa.

These outcomes are, however, completely uncontrollable.

No matter which particle you observe, you will find up or down states randomly in equal measure.

There is therefore no way in which the phenomenon involved can be used to send a message either by some outside observer or, indeed, by one of the entangled particles to the other.

Since, as is not the case in chains of causality, the outcome is essentially nonlocal, there is, furthermore, no limit to the distances across the whole vast universe which may subsequently separate entangled particles; wherever they may be, and for as long as they exist, they will remain entangled.

Where relativity, therefore, preserves a degree of separateness and individuality for the various elements of the universe, and protects the laws of cause and effect, quantum entanglement, through its inherent randomness, paradoxically keeps the universe as a whole coherently connected. Such unity is virtually incredible to the non-scientific, lay mind, unversed in the experiments and equations from which the theory of its existence has been formed; yet surely here is science, in its reasoned logic, coming close to the intuitive, pre-scientific concepts recorded in the Sutras.

When, in The Large Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya Sūtra, I read that "Form is emptiness and emptiness indeed is form. Emptiness is not different from form, form is not different from emptiness. What is form that is emptiness, what is emptiness that is form", I cannot help being reminded of the modern scientific awareness of the way in which, in the vacuum of space, particles are ceaselessly coming into being and vanishing again.

Finally, in a world where energy and matter are an interchangeable unity within the three terms of a single, simple-seeming, yet unimaginably profound equation, the unity of mind and matter seems no longer to be inconceivable and becomes instead a powerful hypothesis.

The unity between I and not I, the observer and the observed, to which I earlier referred, is surely matched by the unity between the matter and the energy of the atoms and the subatomic particles that are my brain and the thoughts which have emerged out of their interactions.

If all the universe is one, both for the writers of the Sutras and for many of the most advanced experimental and theoretical physicists and mathematicians of today, I find it even harder than I ever did to think that I too am not one in mind and matter, as are all of you.

It is out of that inseparable unity of mind and matter that our perceptions of each other and ourselves and our resulting actions come, so I will end by reading you a poem which I wrote and showed to Taira earlier this year, and which will tell you something of my perception of the illusion which is me.

It goes like this:-

I have lived

in so many ways

a despicable
life,

and when
I have done,

or tried to do,

what seemed
to be right,

there was
no merit,

nothing to praise.

I did it
because,

by my nature

it pleased me.

*

But life
is unjust,

and I
am a happy man.