Today I read:
[I]t seems to me that antiquity's religion is a far better proxy for reality as we know it than many of the other religious fictions I've encountered. To be sure, I don't believe in the Greek gods, but it seems to me that belief in the Greek gods and all they entailed would be far more conducive to happiness than the alternatives.Today I read (xii):
Buddhist cosmology anticipated what contemporary science has recently discovered. The parallels are impressive. Astronomical time and space, which irrevocably smashed the West's previous worldview, slip into the folds of Buddhist cosmology without a ripple. If we turn from macrocosm to microcosm, from the infinite to the infinitesimal, we find the same uncanny prescience. While the Greeks were positing atoms that were eternal because not composite (a-tomas--indivisible, that which cannot be cut), Buddhists were teaching that everything corporeal is impermanent (anicca) because constituted of dharmas as minuscule in duration as they are in space--remarkably like the fleeting blips that particles register on the scientists' oscilloscopes.(And, just before that, somebody named Lynn White was quoted, saying: "It may well be that the publication of D. T. Suzuki's first Essays in Zen Buddhism in 1927 will seem in future generations as great an intellectual event as William of Moerbeke's Latin translations of Aristotle in the thirteenth century or Marsiglio Ficino's of Plato in the fifteenth.")
