Urgyen Dorje wrote:It's a western intellectual bias speaking in the view that subjects can be pinned like butterflies, and while we listen to their feelings and experiences, the scientist studies objectively what's really going on.
No, not at all. You forget that people from living traditions do the same thing with their own traditions. This is why here in Japan you have Buddhist clergy at Buddhist universities examining their Buddhist traditions from a basically secular methodology. The same can be seen in the Chinese and Theravadin Buddhist worlds (less so in the Tibetan world but their shedra programs are their scholastic institutions).
In the case of examining history and old texts, you cannot but be objective and scientific. The alternative is to project your own fantasies and opinions into a past you had nothing to do with. That makes for bad pseudo-scholarship.
It's also the case that what is "emic" and what is "etic" is not clearly defined.
That's also not true. The discussion about emic and etic is well-defined and understood by anthropologists and related scholars. You said you're in academia. You should know this.
This is the same with assertions about cosmology. It's entirely a structuralist need that there be one nonnegotiable representation of the physical world. This is based entirely in naive forms of materialism and a taboo of the subjective. Representations of the world can not be appreciate outside a whole constellation of values and symbols. I would challenge that an astronaut's photograph of the big blue marble is at all exchangable with a satellite photo with a map of the world, simply because they are related with different experiences and contexts. As Malcolm has pointed out, this is certainly the case with Buddhist cosmologies, they all have different contextual bases, and as such, are fundamantelly not relatable to modern science, whatever that is.
You're making things overly complicated.
It is really simple:
We know the earth is spherical. We know that in the past many people believed otherwise and formed their own logical theories about a flat earth based on the testimony of the Buddha in their sacred scriptures. It was a logical theory, but it was ultimately wrong and evidence and experience have completely disproved it.
Nevertheless, we can look at the texts and artwork and examine how these ideas changed and formed over time without getting emotionally wrapped up one way or another in them: that includes disappointment and/or resentment. When writing about the matter you remain objective and base your discussion on available evidence, which is normally limited to texts, artwork and archaeology. Testimonies from living traditions might have some utility. They might not.
The evidence based approach is not necessarily materialistic. You just can't necessarily accept mystic accounts at face value. It might work if someone showed up claiming to remember from a past life how to read the Indus Valley script and went ahead and deciphered it for you, but that never happens as far as I know. If someone claims to have met Padmasambhava in a past life and recalls his words, you have to remain skeptical, just as you would if a text appears claiming to likewise represent his words, otherwise you'll just end up with bad scholarship.
The way you evaluate texts and testimonies is to test them against available knowledge. So, if there's anachronisms in the text or the language is odd for whatever reason, you can usually judge it came later and work with it from there. Why does it make these claims? Who wrote it? Does it contain an earlier account but refurbished in another period? This is how philology works. It works surprisingly well. This is how you date texts like the Vedas: the mention of iron or loanwords from other languages indicates different time periods.
If you find such an approach unrewarding and boring, fine, but many people do enjoy it and find it enriching and worthwhile.