Phenomenology Meets Buddhism
Michel Bitbol’s Dialogue with Buddhist Philosophy
After spending decades researching and writing about the intersection of quantum physics and phenomenology, Bitbol did something unusual for a philosopher of science: he studied Sanskrit, the classical language of India, in order to better understand Buddhist philosophy. His interest grew out of conversations with the Chilean biologist and philosopher Francisco Varela (1946–2001)¹. Varela was a co-founder of The Mind and Life Institute², established in 1987 to explore the interface between modern science and Buddhist wisdom.
Bitbol’s engagement with Buddhism grew from these conversations. He recognized that Buddhist philosophy had independently arrived at insights which paralleled those he was exploring through phenomenology — and that Buddhism possessed a rigorous philosophical framework within which such insights could be situated.
So let us start with a point where both phenomenology and Buddhism converge on a central insight.
Epochē and Emptiness
Let’s recall the definition of epochē. The phenomenological epochē — or “bracketing” — consists in suspending the natural attitude: our habitual assumption that the world exists independently and objectively, just as we ordinarily take it to. In this attitude, we move through a familiar, ready-made world without reflection, treating its existence as self-evident. The aim of epochē is to suspend precisely this taken-for-grantedness.
To practice epochē is not to doubt the existence of the world, but rather to bracket our unquestioned acceptance of it as simply “there”, with all of the meanings we impute to it. What comes into view instead is the manner in which the world appears to consciousness at all — the structures and processes through which experience becomes meaningful. In this suspension, experience can regain a quality of freshness and astonishment, as though the world were being encountered for the first time, not as a given reality but as constituted in and through conscious experience.
It was here that Michel Bitbol noticed a parallel with a central understanding in Buddhist philosophy. It concerns the Buddhist insight of śūnyatā, usually translated as “emptiness.” The English word, however, carries misleading connotations — as when one might say “life is empty,” suggesting meaninglessness or anomie. Emptiness in Buddhist philosophy is nothing like that.
As the scholar-monk Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu expresses it:
“Emptiness is a mode of perception, a way of looking at experience. It adds nothing to, and takes nothing away from, the raw data of physical and mental events. You look at events in the mind and the senses with no thought of whether there’s anything lying behind them. This mode is called emptiness because it is empty of the presuppositions we usually add to experience to make sense of it: the stories and world-views we fashion to explain who we are and to define the world we live in.” Thanissaro Bhikkhu “What is Emptiness?”³
Here, emptiness is better understood as seeing what presents itself — paying attention to our situation without reading something into it or searching for something hidden behind appearances.
The parallel between epochē and śūnyatā is clear. Both involve a suspension of habitual interpretation of our experience, rather than entertaining a theory about it. This may be described as a form of scepticism, but not the confrontational or performative scepticism of “prove it if you can.” Instead, this requires a disciplined suspension of judgement about what is not given in experience.
No Thing =/= Nothing
It is important to understand that neither the phenomenological epochē nor the Buddhist śūnyatā say that nothing is real. Rather they are antidotes to the tendency towards reification. To reify is to ‘make into a thing’ — something that can be seized, grasped, or used to anchor our sense of what is real amidst the flux of experience. This happens at such a deep level of awareness that we’re typically unaware of it. So we seize upon these appearances and imbue them with a sense of solidity that they don’t possess.
Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu goes on:
Say for instance, that you’re meditating, and a feeling of anger toward your mother appears. Immediately, the mind’s reaction is to identify the anger as “my” anger, or to say that “I” am angry. It then elaborates on the feeling, either working it into the story of your relationship to your mother, or to your general views about when and where anger toward one’s mother can be justified ~ ‘What is Emptiness?’
This is how emotional knots and conundrums arise. The amelioration does not require developing an elaborate theory of mind, but rather the clear seeing of what is — observing how thoughts, reactions, memories, and emotions build upon one another to generate suffering. What first appears as a simple feeling becomes, through this process of reification and narrative elaboration, a dense tangle of identity, justification, and anxiety.
The Cost of Abstraction
This tendency toward reification reflects a broader pattern — the attempt to reduce lived experience to abstract objects or things. We reveal this bias in our language: when someone has grasped an abstract problem, we say they have “put their finger on it.” Such objectification has been spectacularly successful in science, technology, and engineering. But it comes at a cost. By treating what appears as if it were simply an object among objects, we risk losing sight of the lived nature of experience. We forget that we are subjects of experience — reducible neither to component parts nor to the objective mode of analysis that characterises scientific thought.
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But developing this mode of insight is no simple undertaking. Ṭhānissaro observes:
To master the emptiness mode of perception requires training in firm virtue, concentration, and discernment. Without this training, the mind tends to stay in the mode that keeps creating stories and world views. And from the perspective of that mode, the teaching of emptiness sounds simply like another story or world view with new ground rules ~ ‘What is Emptiness?’
Without disciplined practice, both śūnyatā and epochē risk being misunderstood as metaphysics — assertions about what does or doesn’t exist — rather than as modes of attending to experience. Like Buddhist mindfulness, the phenomenological epochē demands a certain discipline, though this practical dimension was perhaps never as systematically articulated in Western phenomenology as it has been in Buddhism. Where Buddhism developed rigorous contemplative practices over millennia — detailed instructions for meditation, ethical conduct, and the cultivation of awareness — phenomenology remained primarily a philosophical method, one that gestures toward a transformed way of seeing but offers less guidance on how to sustain it.
This is where Bitbol’s dialogue between the two traditions becomes most fruitful: Buddhism supplies what phenomenology often lacked — a lived discipline — while phenomenology allows these insights to be articulated in direct dialogue with contemporary science and continental philosophy.
“A Second Buddha”
To get a better picture of Michel Bitbol’s particular interest in Buddhist philosophy, the Buddhist sage Nāgārjuna must be introduced. Sometimes called “the Second Buddha” due to the profundity of his insight, Nāgārjuna is associated with the Madhyamaka (Middle Way) school of Buddhism that arose around the first century C.E. in Northern India and later assumed central importance in Tibetan and East Asian Buddhism⁵. It is Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka that most stresses the centrality of śūnyatā through his famous and highly succinct series of “Verses on the Middle Way” (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā).
In his talks on Nāgārjuna, Bitbol often stresses that the Madhyamaka project is not the replacement of one metaphysical view with another, but the systematic dissolution of the very impulse to take any view as ultimately grounding. Nāgārjuna’s dialectic shows that every attempt to posit an intrinsic nature (svabhāva) collapses under analysis, not into nihilism, but into relational dependence. What remains is not a new “theory of reality,” but a release from the need to anchor reality in conceptual constructions — a kind of openness or a “clearing.” In this respect, śūnyatā functions less as a doctrine than as a discipline of de-reification — a practical undoing of the mind’s tendency to freeze the flux of experience into conceptual proliferation (prapañca). Far from offering a metaphysical picture of reality, Bitbol argues that this amounts instead to a “critique of views”.
Likewise, Bitbol has often described quantum physics as a “theory without a view of the world” — a formal discipline that constrains what can be said about observational data, without underwriting any hidden ontology behind appearances. As Bitbol points out, in this sense, and only in this sense, modern physics unexpectedly converges with the Madhyamaka refusal to treat any conceptual framework as a final account of what is.
Conclusion: Seeing without Grasping
What emerges from Bitbol’s dialogue with Buddhism is not a hybrid metaphysics, nor an attempt to translate one tradition into the language of the other. It is, rather, a shared discipline of restraint: a refusal to convert the immediacy of experience into explanatory objects, hidden substrates, or final theories. The phenomenological epochē suspends the natural attitude; śūnyatā dissolves the compulsion to posit intrinsically–existing entities. In both cases, what is relinquished is not the world as such, but our habitual urge to read things into it.
This convergence also clarifies why both traditions are so often misunderstood. When treated as theories about what ultimately exists, they appear evasive, paradoxical, or even nihilistic. But understood as practices of attention — ways of loosening the grip of reification and abstraction — they disclose a different kind of intelligibility: one grounded in lived presence rather than representational certainty. Bitbol’s insistence that quantum physics itself offers “no view of the world” reinforces this point from within modern science, exposing the limits of any framework that claims to stand outside experience and describe reality as it is in itself.
What remains is not a new doctrine, but a change in orientation: a way of seeing without grasping, of allowing phenomena to show themselves without being absorbed into conceptual thought–forms. In this sense, the encounter between phenomenology and Buddhism does not culminate in a synthesis of ideas, but in a quiet recalibration of how we inhabit the world — attentive, provisional, and awake to the transparency of our own constructions.
Bibliography and References
- The work of Francisco Varela with compatriot Humberto Maturana (1928–2021) remains highly influential in philosophy of biology, systems science and cybernetics.
- Mind & Life Institute. See
https://www.mindandlife.org (Accessed 29 January 2026) - “What is Emptiness?” Bhikkhu Thanissaro, (retrieved 13 December 2025).
- Quantum Mechanics: A Theory with No View of the World (YouTube presentation, retrieved 26 January 2026).
- Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s characterization of emptiness as a “mode of perception” reflects a modern Theravāda articulation aimed at practical phenomenological clarity. This usage does not map directly onto the Madhyamaka analysis of emptiness as the absence of inherent nature (svabhāva-śūnyatā) developed by Nāgārjuna. For the classical Madhyamaka account, see Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā and Jay Garfield’s commentary in Garfield, Jay L., trans. and commentary. Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā: The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
