Buddha and Darwin.  Seen in the eye of the imagination, there can scarcely be two less similar figures:  Buddha softly glowing golden, erect but reposeful, enigmatic and benign; Darwin a wool-clad figure leaning on a stick, flinty eyes peering sharply from beneath shaggy brows, the square jaw hidden in a white tangle of beard. The one embodies mysterious wisdom; the other personifies scientific rationalism.  It seems they could not be more different.

 And yet, they share something profound, the most profound thing:  truth.  Both perceived that the essence of existence is change, which plays out through the unceasing operation and refinement of cause and effect.  Buddha referred to the unfolding of cause and effect as karma, while Darwin expressed the principle in terms of natural selection. Buddha gained his enlightenment during intense contemplation, and produced an unmatched philosophical system for the understanding of this cycle of life-and-death (samsara) that is existence.  Darwin gained his enlightenment from intense observation, and provided a brilliant explication of how life-and-death works, how it produces the world that we see and inhabit. 

 And these men also shared one of the great treasures of the human spirit: a profound appreciation for the beauty of life.  This beauty often stops me in my tracks, overwhelms me with the sensual curve of a lily petal, the intricate tessellations on a toad’s back, the galactic swirl of snow geese against a slate-blue sky.  I cannot imagine an adequate philosophy or science of life that is not steeped in gratitude for this incomparable gift, and I find that gratitude everywhere in the works of Buddha and Darwin.

To read their writings is to come to know two individuals with startlingly similar turns of mind. The Buddhist Sutras are full of lists and numerical sets of injunctions: the Eightfold Path, the Three Becomings, the Four Graspings, the Nine Abodes of Sentient Beings, and so forth.  Darwin was also a great accumulator of instructive examples, a great maker of lists.  He considered his monumental Origin of Species to be a mere “abstract,” which he reluctantly published after 15 years of work only at the insistence of his impatient colleagues. Both Buddha and Darwin understood that they had been burdened with a comprehensive insight, which they worked tirelessly to pass on to others, at great personal cost. Both were – and are – deeply subversive, in that they deny the permanence of any faith, of any law, of any thing; in that they reject the security of any success; in that they find value and attainment only in the journey, not in the destination.