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Whitehead has profound points of agreement with Buddhism. It is almost harder to state the important differences than the aspects of agreement. This is the more remarkable in that evidences of actual influence of Buddhist works upon him are slight. For the Western thinker, as for the great Asiatic tradition, concrete entities are momentary, and change is successive creation of new entities, rather than successive changes in identical ones. On both sides the attenuation of the idea of genetic or personal identity is accompanied by a corresponding attenuation of the idea of nonidentity between persons or things. One is internally related to one's own past, but also to the past of others. For both doctrines, the point is relevant to the question of motivation and the relations of self-interest and altruism. Regard for self and regard for those who are normally viewed as others turn out to be special cases of a universalized altruism for which one's past or future states are as genuinely "other" as the states of another person. For both doctrines also the entire cosmos is, in principle, embraced in this generalized altruism or love, and the ultimate value of "peace" (which almost seems a Whiteheadian equivalent for nirvaa.na) is realized by embodying this attitude in one's entire being. Whitehead's rejection of materialism and dualism, finally, is compatible with Buddhism, which has often leaned toward some form of idealism, as in the mystical saying, "all things are capable of Buddhahood."

　　 With so much in common, what are the differences? There is, perhaps above all, Whitehead's much more definite and clear acknowledgment of the asymmetry between relations to predecessors and relations to successors. For Whitehead, but apparently not for Naagaarjuna, for example, events asymmetrically include their predecessors as prehended or objectified data, these relations being constitutive of the prehending but not of the prehended events. Buddhist writers seem often to imply symmetry, as if the present equally definitely implied earlier and later events. "Time's arrow" is much more sharply apparent in Whitehead's scheme. The world hangs together for him through the one-way or nonmutual relation of inheritance through objectification.

　　 The Buddhist phrase "dependent origination" seems somewhat ambiguous. It at least suggests mutual dependence among the originating items. For Whitehead, as for relativity physics, contemporary events are mutually independent and are connected only insofar as they share, inherit from, a partly common past and insofar as a partly common future must inherit from them. For Whitehead also there is no converse relation to that of inheriting -- say the relation of "being inherited" -- which is similarly internal to its subject. On the contrary, a present event or experience is quite independent of the particular events coming after and prehending it. I have not been able to find a clear statement of this asymmetry in Buddhism, though "origination" seems to imply it.

　　 It is important, however, to qualify the above, so far as Whitehead is concerned. If experience a is followed by experience b, then b prehends and depends

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upon a, but a does not prehend or depend upon b. However, it is of the essence of a that it will be prehended by later experiences, some experiences or other. "To be is to be potentially (subsequently) prehended." Whitehead uses other words, but this is the meaning. What it amounts to is this, the class of "subsequent prehenders of a" cannot remain empty; though it is nothing to a just what members of the class actually occur. By contrast, b required not merely some predecessors or other as data for its prehensions, but it also required the very prior experiences which actually took place, including a. If we abstract from this distinction between particular and generic requirement, then there is a partial symmetry even in Whitehead's view, so that the disagreement with Buddhism, so far as there is such, is partial only.

　　 There is even greater subtlety about another important difference. Whitehead is a theist, and Buddhism, at least often, seems not to be -- though Suzuki once declared that he was not sure of this. Here we need to introduce a third difference, that Whitehead leans toward rationalism and Buddhism seems to reject rational thought as incapable of attaining the highest truth. Yet at times Whitehead goes rather far toward a similar mysticism, and Mahaayaana Buddhism has sometimes gone fairly far toward a rational cosmology. Perhaps the two sides can be made to approach each other by some such statement as this: if we could formulate ultimate truth (what is possessed in achieving Peace or nirvaa.na) theoretically, it would have to be in some sort of theistic language, but perhaps such formulation is not really possible.

　　 It is necessary, I believe, to connect the differences regarding God and the asymmetry of time with the Western bias toward a positive valuation of normal human living, as contrasted to the Asiatic tendency to disvalue it -- shown, for instance, in the fact that weddings are not usually performed by Buddhist priests (at least in Japan). Buddha was oppressed by the universal truth that all definite things and relations are ephemeral. Whitehead agrees that the persistence of persons and things through change is in the end temporary and is only an abstract way of looking at what, concretely, is a succession of ever-new realities, each displacing its predecessors -- except (for Whitehead a crucial qualification) insofar as this displacing consists in a more or less inadequate prehending ("abstractly," or by partly "negative prehensions") of predecessors, and except, further, that all actualities are prehended adequately, or in their full truth, by divine actuality. Only in this way does Whitehead think it possible to avoid the conclusion that "all experience is but a passing whiff of insignificance." To save the passing moment from everlasting nihilation, he sees no alternative to the ideal appropriation of the moment as imperishable datum in the divine experience. Such objectification as the nondivine subjects achieve is severely limited, incapable of preserving anything like the full richness and value of the data, and the objectification of an event by successive nondivine experiences tends to get fainter and fainter. Moreover, for Whitehead there is