Buddhist Mathematics

We’re all in it together.
  April 29, 2005

A friend and I were talking math the other evening.  He is an enlightened Buddhist, or so he claims.  His shirts cluster at the saffron end of the spectrum although the color of his pants swings from infrared to ultraviolet.  Perhaps he belongs to the Order of Liberated Trousers.  I should ask him sometime, in another life.

“Just think how little we know,” I remember saying that night.  A tome by an English philosopher served as my coaster. “Think about numbers.  Do they really exist?  What the hell are they?  Fish or fowl?  If they exist then they exist eternally, because a hundred is always a hundred, right?  Time makes no sense for numbers.  Some might say they are the thoughts of god.”

“Numbers aren't real,” he informed me placidly.  Transcendence burned in his eyes and made me nervous.

“How can you say such things?  There's a real difference between one apple and two apples.”

“There is no difference because there are no apples,” he replied.  “The apples are an illusion and therefore the numbers used to count them are an illusion.  In fact, counting is meaningless because separateness is an illusion as well.  We are waves who dream of having minds and forget that we really are an ocean.”

“You mean to tell me that Buddhist math is numberless?”

“Precisely,” he said.

“But what does is do, then?  Lie on the beach with a margarita and contemplate infinity?”

“On the contrary, it takes the appearance of serving a figment of a very useful function.  In a world of illusions, it counts illusory objects using illusory concepts.  It manipulates fictitious propositions through dreamed-up rules, applies mirages of logic to achieve phantoms of insight.  In the end, in this non-existent system, everything seems to work out fine.”

“Wait a minute,” I said.  “So the imaginary nature of the whole enterprise notwithstanding, it's still useful for solving the dreamed-up problems it treats.”

“Yes.  Of course, this usefulness itself is strictly hallucinatory.  For the purposes of its hallucinating beneficiaries, however, that hardly matters.”

“The supposed wisdom of this ostensible setup is purportedly undeniable,” I started to say—and then the silent trap of the world had finally closed, or perhaps opened, or went to lunch.  The Meld occurred yet again; minds, bodies and souls mashed into the universal jam.  I felt my dreams exit my head as if the cosmic string that connected them got suddenly, noiselessly yanked away.

“Thanks for explaining this,” I had the time to say to my friend, and “Don't mention it,” I had the time to respond.

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