| NUCASE is pleased to bring Bhikkhu P.A. Payutto's book Toward Sustainable Science to the online community. In this book, Venerable Payutto, a Buddhist monk and scholar, describes why science and allied fields that trivialize a critical aspect of the natural world -- the world of human values of researchers -- are by definition incomplete and inadequate forms of human inquiry. He notes that this neglect invariably leads to very harmful consequences (sometimes delayed) for all the intended beneficiaries of science -- the scientists, technologists, and medical personnel as well as the research participants, patients, and the general public. A complete or valid science, Venerable Payutto observes, reduces or eliminates this human cost by encouraging attention to the moral concerns/issues in routine scientific activities and by responding to them in skillful and practical ways.
This book is an important contribution to the NUCASE library because the author's insights underscore NUCASE's goal of helping science students to acknowledge, clarify, and respond to their ethical concerns and issues. Like Venerable Payutto, we believe that unless scientific disciplines are practiced in this "complete" way, they will not live up to even the most modest of human aspirations.
In addition to clarifying the connection between values and science, this book also provides food for reflection about the relationships between science and spiritual traditions. His discussion of "faith" in science and religion is particularly instructive. Fortunately, one does not need to be a Buddhist monk or scholar to appreciate and benefit from Venerable Payutto's depth of understanding. We thank Venerable Payutto for his permission to publish his manuscript on this website and Sasiya Paewskul for her assistance in obtaining that permission.
In creating the online version of the book, we attempted to remain true to the original text as printed, with two exceptions. First, because there is as yet no standardized means of rendering the diacritic marks of the Pali language on the Web, we chose to present the Pali passages in the book without the diacritics (as a result, the Guide to Pali Pronunciation has also been omitted from the online version of the book. For a good online reference to the Pali language, click here). Second, for stylistic reasons, the footnotes and the endnote references of the original text have been placed together as footnotes at the end of each chapter.
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