fundamental level of existence in Buddhism After long time and back to BSE. My question is; according to science all the existence are sequenced as matter made of alchemy (chemistry) , molecules , atoms, sub particles then energy. I think base of science is depend on this sequencing and it is considered as a reality. However science possesses its own controversies as unable to provide proper explanations as result of limitations of five senses and their extensions.(e.g...eye and hi tech microscopes)
i think science stuck at &quot;energy&quot; in sequencing the subtle level of existence. but it is so clear what have found up this level of scientific finding.science came across massive breakthroughs such as finding of atom, artificial memory, artificial intelligence , MRI etc...and science based on proofs. at the subtle level science manipulate energy at best level becomes it can do everything as &quot;energy is everything&quot; including our mind. Think I've made concise explanation of what science can do if i am not mistaken.
Now we turn towards the Buddhism as a great philosophy. Can Buddhism provide concrete explanations on above questions?
what is the absolute, final, subtle level of existence?
how is energy defined in Buddhism?
Is there anything beyond energy?
If there are, what is the proof?
Well, lets try to see how much suffering there's to get this mental view &quot;molecules, atoms, sub particles then energy.&quot;, how much suffering it costs to keep it, how much far you can go with it, how you can prove it to yourself the usefulness of it, what's the life span is (i.e., when this view dies). The only reason for this answer is to reduce suffering. Every word I write has this goal in mind. For this it is important to pay attention and analyze the issue. A few useful concepts pop out, interestingly enough the same stuff what Buddha was telling us. Does it make him a sort of a God who knows, and us sort of ghosts injured and hurt wondering around without a goal? I’d say yes. But let’s the question is not about ghosts, so lets focus on the question.
Having molecules, atoms (sub particles to some extend) are useful. On a practical level this creates all kinds of machines from agriculture to iphones. Those machines increase efficiency substantially, one can gather and preprocess more food, transport and reach more people, allowed more and more people be less and less concerned how to fill their stomachs with food. Do we have less suffering in the world? Definitely. Our problems got a lot more complicated though. Now you’ve got at least 4 hours a day (typically we work 8 hours per day compared to 12 hours a century ago) for anything we want. What do we do with it? Take drugs, alcohol, do sports to shut up all the annoying voices in our heads and hide our misery.
Getting this (wrong) view is essential to keep improving our technology and make even better agricultural machines as well as iphones. The way our society does it is through suffering as well: if one learns it at school then this is through force, repetitive memorization, and addictive presentation of the content in discovery, natural geographic channels. How long did you celebrate your high school diploma? How long did you celebrate your college/university degree? Once you got your diploma did you have an inner happiness for a day or two, or did it involve drinking lots of alcohol to “forget” the stress of “fundamentals” you’ve received, that allegedly will help you repay your depts and give some financial stability?
Buddha talks about light in many sutras, e.g. sn56.11 (https://suttacentral.net/sn56.11/en/bodhi). I have a feeling however that this is something different to your concept of “energy”. I have a feeling that what you mean by energy is the famous equation from Einstein E=mc2. If you’ll talk to scientists thought, they’ll tell you that they see this “theory” more like a material that evolves over time, with some ideas taking a birth, enjoying some sort of development (maturing, bringing us to additional knowledge) and eventually dying out. Those scientists will also tell that with every “fundamental knowledge” they introduce “fundamental problems” as well. Examples are indefinability of key mathematical objects like sets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_paradox) and what we can compute and we cannot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem) We tried to patch those theories the way we tried to this all the time. This created even more complex theories and problems that require even more suffering to understand and learn.
Advances in other sciences are not helping much to reduce suffering as well. Looking at medical sciences, we have no clue why taking any bitter pill (placebo) is better than well designed drug. Even in covid-19 test studies we give 50% of test people a placebo pill, i.e., a pill that should have no effect whatsoever. Impressive enough, this has quite an impressive effect.
The fundamental level of existence is that there’s suffering, there’s an origin of suffering, there’s the cessation of suffering, and there’s a path leading towards cessation of suffering.