The teachings of Charles Darwin and Gautama Buddha are worlds apart. Yet their descriptions of life bear similarities to each other and even interlock in ways that expand my view of each.  I’ll focus this comparison on  On the Origin of Species and the Dhammapada, a widely read collection of the Buddha’s sayings.

The differences are straightforward enough. Darwin’s eye was mainly on the past as evidence of change. In Origins, he observed the characteristics of successive generations of plants and animals—except for humans, whose evolution he discussed in other books—to show how natural selection and fertility served as the sources of the evolution of species.

The Buddha, on the other hand, focused on humans, on the pain of our disappointments and the ease that disciplined renunciations could bring. And in contrast to Darwin’s focus on ancestry, the Buddha’s eye was on the open future, on each person’s potential path forward out of suffering. Finally, while Darwinian evolution moved on inexorably, the Buddha convinced his followers that their future was in their own hands, that if they turned inward to grasp the nature of change and expectation, they could calm their cravings.

Yet beneath these differences, both thinkers followed a logic built from the same pieces.

First, for both Darwin and the Buddha, the struggles of ordinary life make up the starting point for the consequences and possibilities that followed. As different as their two works are, taken together they rest on the premise that for humans, animals, and plants alike, life is stressful, sometimes dangerous, and usually unpredictable. Whether in a plant stunted by inadequate sunlight or a woman worried about feeding her family, it is everyday obstacles and dangers that drive the changes that the thinkers explored.

Such changes consisted of a series of steps, the other important commonality between their views. For Darwin, the steps were those small, random variations which, if they benefited an organism consistently, would take their place among its inherited traits. Though each step was small, the end result could be a new, better-adapted species. For the Buddha, the steps consisted of a discipline in correct understanding, the reduction of selfish desires, and future rebirths. As they were in Darwinian evolution, the steps towards enlightenment took time but led to relief from pain.

Combined, these variations on the themes of struggle, gradual change, and final resolution offer a rich vision: living things experience conditions that are not easily or perfectly satisfied, but the future offers steps from pain towards peace, though often not within an individual’s lifetime. In place of a deity to oversee the fate of living things, both men saw a reality in which ordinary life and an organism’s response to it were sufficient to drive changes sooner or later.

I and most people and animals tend to fix our gaze on those needs and satisfactions that we see a relatively short distance ahead—the state of our income, our health, our children, our security, predictable weather, signs of disaster. I wonder what it was like to have the mindset of Darwin or the Buddha, tuned to long spans of steady transition in which a being’s every moment is also a step elsewhere.

 

My thanks to Elaine Smith for her assistance.