To the Editor:.

 

In a Single Atom

 

To the Editor:

In his review of ''The Universe in a Single Atom,'' by Tenzin Gyatso, the Dalai Lama (Sept. 18), George Johnson misconstrues Buddhist notions of causality and human consciousness.

 

By describing the unseen nature of cause and effect as ''Eastern religion's version of intelligent design,'' Johnson fails to heed the author's own caveat that ''karma is . . . easily misrepresented'' and that ''karmic causality is seen as a fundamental natural process and not as any kind of divine mechanism or working out of preordained design.''

 

Johnson's characterization of the Dalai Lama as a ''would-be man of science '' who ''professes to accept evolutionary theory'' is condescending. It disregards Tenzin Gyatso's careful articulation of the differences between Buddhism and science, and metaphysical conclusions and empirical data. After tacitly challenging his authority, Johnson exaggerates Gyatso's opposition to physical explanations for consciousness, which makes the Dalai Lama's position sound more polemical than it actually is. In fact, Gyatso accepts functional descriptions of consciousness but rejects the hypothesis that mind is ''reducible to matter,'' since it leaves out the ''subjective experience of the individual'' — a stance not uncommon in contemporary philosophy of mind. Rather than attempting to explain the Dalai Lama's more provocative statements that ''matter and mind are 'codependent''' with ''no absolute division,'' Johnson portrays Buddhists as unreasonable and superstitious. In so doing, he undermines the Dalai Lama's reasoned and balanced approach to the explanatory gap in consciousness studies.

 

CHRISTOPHER D. KELLEY

Brooklyn, New York