It is very interesting to me that one can almost always boil down a long discourse to one cornerstone statement. This is what I think it is:


"the source of Buddhism is the awareness of suffering, and the origin of suffering is ignorance of the Law of Nature"


Let's consider this deliberately out of context.

It really makes a perfect fit to science. The technological strides made as a result of scientific investigation coming to understand how nature works have been marvelous. Most of the really bad suffering in the world is physical. And science is the proven way to develop wisdom about the physical.

Through science and the scientific approach to other areas like finance, we are on the verge of eliminating most of the suffering described in the bible, particularly Revelations.

So why are not all Buddhists scientists or vice versa? Well reading on in the above treatise, I find that understanding physical law is given low priority in Buddhism. That's one reason. But a perhaps more important one is that there is the notion that the Buddha revealed all the truth that needs to be known. That is a recipe for stagnation. In the search for human knowledge we must look forwards, not backwards.