In one curious way many Buddhists seem more individualistic than Whitehead. As one writer puts it, for Buddhism persons are self-created, their careers being largely determined at each stage by decisions or actions of their own in previous stages. For Whitehead, only momentary actualities have literal creativity, persons being "personally ordered" (linear) "societies" (sequences) of actualities, each influenced by past members of the society according to the very same principle, though not necessarily to the same degree, as by past members of other societies. Buddhists seem to say some such things too, but they cannot consistently say them and also say that what happens to a person is uniquely, or according to some strict scheme of desert, determined by "one's own" actions at previous times or in previous lives. Surely Buddhists are not Leibnizian monadologists, holding that substances have no influence upon one another! But there seems some ambiguity here from which Whitehead is free.

　　 Whitehead is one of the few philosophers of all time who not only grants

 

 

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that there is a perfectly real aspect of chance in personal careers but who generalizes this aspect, as Peirce did for his "Tychism," so that it applies to all happenings whatever. For Whitehead there is no strict natural or moral causal law which holds absolutely of any part of reality. "Disorder is as real as order." Thus his theism does not make deity responsible for the details of history, hence not for the particular evils or goods we or the other animals experience. No more than Buddhism does Whitehead have any use for the pseudoconcept of "omnipotence," if the word means a providence determining all things precisely as they are, leaving nothing for the creatures to determine, whether for themselves or for each other. My father, an Episcopal clergyman, did not accept this doctrine, and I have never accepted it. On this negative point also I am pleased to find Whitehead and Buddhism in concord. "Omnipotent" degraded rather than exalted deity, since, as Lequier said a century ago, it denied to him the capacity to create and know genuinely free creatures, that is, nondivine or lesser creators. Freedom is self-creation or nothing.

　　 Perhaps it is of some significance that the Buddhist avoidance of theism was decided upon at a time when a process theology comparable to Whitehead's, or even to Lequier's or Fechner's, did not exist and was, so far as I know, scarcely dreamt of in any clear conceptual form. If Whiteheadian theology can become a challenge to Buddhism, it will at least be one that does far more than merely reiterate some ancient challenge to that tradition.

　　 The provincialism of metaphysicians is nearing its end. Let linguistic analysts ignore the wider world if they wish, the select group of practicing metaphysicians should from now on pay attention to the two great international, highly developed traditions in their subject, the Western (Semitic in religious origins, Greek in scientific inspiration) and the Buddhist (Indian, Chinese, and Japanese). As Whitehead well said, these two traditions should no longer be protected from each other.

 

　

NOTES
1. The Secret Oral Teachings in Thibetan Buddhist Sects. By Alexandra David-Neel and Lama Yongden. Trans. H. N. M. Hardy. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1967.

2. See Chapter X of my Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method (London: SCM Press; La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1970).