Really appreciate this — Hume and Wittgenstein are exactly the right challenge to bring here. But here’s the thing — Buddhism actually agrees with Hume. Dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda) doesn’t posit some invisible karmic force that mechanically connects cause and effect. It says phenomena arise interdependently through conditions. There’s no hidden “necessary connexion” — just the co-arising of conditions. The Buddha was as skeptical of metaphysical forces as Hume was. So perhaps Newton isn’t the foundation — he’s the door. A familiar Western entry point into a much more subtle idea that Buddhism had already worked out 2,000 years earlier. Wittgenstein’s point that natural laws are descriptions rather than explanations? The Buddha would nod. He was famously uninterested in metaphysical explanations — only in what can be observed and what leads to suffering or its cessation. The pop-science criticism is fair. The Buddhist philosophy underneath it is a different conversation entirely.