Methodological pluralism through the lens of the buddhist doctrine of time kālacakra: an interview with dr. Jensine Andresen

Abstract

Modern dialogue between Western science and Buddhism raises an enormous range of cognitive issues that require interdisciplinary research. The idea of methodological pluralism (MP) arises here as an effective solution for such projects. Having immersed in the study of the background of its opponent, Western science touched the fairly old and specific way of reality cognition, which in certain aspects actually can be identified as a Tibetan-Buddhist version of the MP. In an interview with the professor from the United States, who for many decades has been engaged in research on the boundaries of various science disciplines, ethics, and religious studies, we tried to clarify the specifics of this so-called version of MP, which is set out in the Buddhist doctrine of time, K lacakra. Texts of this doctrine are included in the corpus of Buddhist canonical literature and form the basis for two classical Buddhist sciences: the science of stars (which is actually “social astronomy”); and the science of healing (which looks like a certain version of “psycho-medicine”). During the interview, we went directly to the possibility of using the Buddhist version of MP at least within the dialogue “Buddhism-Science”, to the need to understand the specifics of such an implementation, and to the mandatory combination of MP with an integrated approach. The interview was intended to raise the question that deals with transgressing the abovementioned dialogue from the “consumer” level (when we are looking for something that could be useful to the Western neuro-cognitivist) to the philosophical one, in order to formulate a criterion for recognizing a different way of thinking, and finally, to move on toward the semantic discussion, without which the integration phase of any kind of MP is impossible.