Scientists love to categorize.
This is particularly true in my field of Systematics, in which a large part of our task is to name and classify biological organisms in a manner that expresses their evolutionary relationships.
Most humans find naming things hard to avoid. The labelling of something is deeply satisfying to the human psyche. It is a natural part of being human, and it gives us a handy way to share our ideas about the world with other humans.
Categories are certainly useful to scientists. Naming something by defining what we intend to be its boundaries and observable characteristics allows us to break our deeply interconnected universe into segments that act in a predictable manner.
For instance, what use is this largely unknown thing we call ‘gravity’ if we couldn’t categorize it in a way that allows us to predict what it does? Because of the way we label gravity, scientists have helped people realize their cold dusty holidays on the moon.
Categories get things done. In science, they are essential. But categories can, and often do, lead scientists astray. They tend to get us thinking that we know reality, which is a guaranteed way for us to make mistakes.
This is one reason why Zen questions all labels and categories. To better understand, I will illustrate with an example.
Let us imagine I am holding a stone in my hand and I am asking you, “What is it?” How would you respond? You might say, “A stone.” I might then ask you whether that sound from your mouth—‘a stone’—has absolutely described what I hold in my hand.
If you are a geologist, you will suspect my foolishness and be tempted to further categorize. There are a lot of labels for this type of thing: perhaps the stone is a metamorphic one, maybe a type of quartzite from the Permian era that could, with sufficient number and similar size, be described as cobbles.
But is—or isn’t—what I am holding in my hand ‘a stone’?
What if you think, “No, what you are holding in your hand is not just a sound from my mouth.” Then you might realize there is something more here. (Or less here. Stick with it, you are on the right track.)
What if I then ask the following:
Would the stone be ‘a stone’ if you had not named it a stone? Would it be a stone if you spoke Portuguese and called it ‘uma pedra’? Would it be a stone if you weren’t here to call it a stone? Does it exist when you are asleep?
At this point, Zen notably differs from western philosophy by also asking the following questions:
Does it matter to the universe that any of us call what is in my hand ‘a stone’? Are you ‘a human’, and is that different from ‘a stone’? Why is it ‘a stone’, and not ‘This’?
If you look deeply into these questions, you will eventually realize that the stone is not just ‘a stone’. It is what it is, independent of how you and I might think about it or describe it.
That goes for all 'things'. None of science’s labels are complete descriptions of what is being categorized. All things are interconnected, and all are functions of those connections. All things belong to a seamless gradation, not ‘black’ or ‘white’. No ‘things’outside of ideas are dependent on how we describe them.
This is why Zen stresses the important difference between the Relative and Absolute ways of looking at the world: the relative way is our label for something, our mental concept of it; the absolute way is the thing itself, which is utterly free of our label.
In the best circumstances, our scientific categories behave more or less predictably, but often they surprise us. Experiments can fail, or the object of our test displays unexpected properties, or we discover that the things we call ‘birds’ might be more accurately described as the living descendants of dinosaurs (which has happened).
Science is full of surprises, many of which are due to our categories. This will continue to happen because no category or label is ever a comprehensive description of its intended focus, and they are never a close description of This. Each category is subject to revision of our human-made term for it, and each category is incomplete and transitory by nature.
With Zen, we look deeply at what ‘a stone’ is and then begin to understand that we and the stone are not dissimilar. With practice, we stop trying to describe the stone and simply see it for what it is, completely. And then…kapow! Awakening.
At which point we might choose to abandon our attachment to categories and earnestly say, “The stone and I are not two things.” If we didn’t look weird in the beginning, we certainly do now.
I am neither right nor wrong about this. I am simply expressing something that, with our categories, we call ‘truth’.
