[Buddha-l] The Universe Story

[Richard Hayes]

Luc Tartar's recent claim that the big-bang theory has a good deal of brainwashing in it came just as I am about to embark on a rather wild experiment in brainwashing my students. For thirty years or so I have been teaching Indian (mostly Buddhist) texts written one or two thousand years ago. I'm doing so again this year, but for a change of pace I thought I'd end the semester with some literature written more recently. So I'm ending my course in Indian philosophy by having the students read a book written by Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme. Berry wrote a book on religions of Indian long ago, and by chance it was one of the first books I read on that topic, and in fact it played a role in my getting interested in taking a course or two in religions of India as a change of pace from all the courses I was taking in Anglo-American philosophy. Decades later, in the mid-1990s, Berry happened to come to McGill and gave a talk at a mini-conference on religion and environmental issues. There he talked about his book, co-authored with Brian Swimme, called The Universe Story.

The motivation behind Swimme and Berry's book was to write a creation myth for our times. Their view was that traditional religious creation stories are so prescientific that no one with a scientific background can  relate to them as stories, but science is so deliberately amoral that scientific accounts serve as poor vehicles for conveying a sense of value. As the world faces both ecological crises and a multiplicity of political crises, it could use a science-based mythology packed with a way of looking at the world that might be the basis of living in a way that does less to destroy the planet. I found the idea intriguing and bought a copy of The Universe Story and quite enjoyed it. As we Quakers are wont to say, it spoke to my condition. This year I thought: "What the hell, I'm getting old and senile and am thinking of retiring soon. One of the advantages of being in that condition is that I don't have to give a damn about what either my students or my colleagues think about my teaching. So I'm going to teach something I have enjoyed and found inspiring." So my course in Indian philosophy is ending with a book that has nothing whatsoever to do with either India or philosophy in any direct way and yet is filled with just exactly the kinds of insights that seem to me to have permeated all the great religious literature of the world.

The Universe Story begins with the Big Bang and ends with the destruction of the earth's environment and most human societies by unregulated transnational corporations run by greedy capitalists who have forgotten that we are all made from the same materials that originally came from the Sun, which in turn came along as an inevitable consequence of the Big Bang. It's a whopping good story. It will be interesting to see what the students make of it. (I'll warn them, of course, that they are being brainwashed.) I am hoping it makes them just a little uncomfortable. As Swami Vivekananda observed (in last week's reading), if people want a religion that makes them feel comfortable, they want something that leaves them as they are rather than something that helps them be what they could be.

Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico