Dalai Lama concludes editorial meeting on Buddhist science book

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DHARAMSHALA, India -- A three day meeting of around 25 Tibetan Buddhist scholars and His Holiness the Dalai Lama concluded today at the latter’s residence here.

The Tibetan leader who had just returned from a four nation Europe tour addressed the gathering which was made up of around 25 Tibetan Buddhist scholars from around the world. His Holiness expressed his pleasure over the work of the scholars in coming up with the draft of a two-volume book on Buddhist Science and Philosophy at the meeting that began on Monday.

The discussion was attended among others by the editorial board of the book, led by Thomtok Rinpoche, abbot of Namgyal monastery and invited guest Prof Samdhong Rinpoche, former Kalon Tripa and an academician.

Speaking to the Media, Thomtok Rinpoche, head of the editorial board said, “The meeting is finalizing the contents of two volume texts on Buddhist science excerpted from Kagyur and Tengyur texts with a hope that it could serve the human kind irrespective of religion and differences.”

The editors said the two-volume book on Buddhist Science can prove beneficial not just for all Buddhist followers but also scientists and researchers who are studying human mind.

“The book is not biased, it just tells what Buddha has preached,” added the editors. “It neither forces the readers to believe what Buddha had preached nor we have tried to give our own opinion.”

The editorial board also noted that the Dalai Lama was very pleased with the discussion and had appreciated their work.

In 2010, Dalai Lama gave a speech on the importance of Buddhist science and Buddhist philosophy, and expressed a wish how such a book could be helpful not only to Buddhist followers but also to non -Buddhists and non - believers.

The two books on Buddhist Science are expected to be published this year and will be translated into English, Hindi, Chinese and 17 other languages.

Kangyur is the Translation of the Buddha's Word and Tengyur 'Translation of Treatises'.

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A Marriage Between Buddhism and Science

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Amherst, MA (USA) -- B. Alan Wallace ’87 is not the typical Amherst alumnus. Author of more than 20 books on Buddhism and science and a practicing Buddhist monk for the entirety of his time at the College, he now goes on meditative retreats for months on end, performing psychological experiments in a lucid dream state to attempt to discover the true nature of reality, happiness and suffering.

Finding His Own Path

Wallace was born to a devoutly Christian family and spent his youth travelling the world with his Protestant theologian father. However, he was strongly interested in science from a young age and struggled to reconcile his passion for science with his deeply spiritual upbringing.

“I was looking for an integration of truth and meaning. Christianity offered meaning, but I couldn’t tell whether it was true; science offered truth, but I couldn’t see any meaning in it. I was looking for a true and meaningful life, and I didn’t see any real options or promising avenues,” Wallace said.

When he went to the Univ. of California-San Diego in 1968 to study ecology, he soon became disillusioned with both his classes and America in the turmoil of the Vietnam War. Seeking a change of scenery, he spent his junior year abroad, studying at the Univ. of Göttingen in Germany, where he first discovered Tibetan Buddhism. He quickly became engrossed by Tibetan culture and religion, discontinuing his university education and spending months in a local Buddhist monastery studying under the guidance of German monks. At last, he had found a belief system that united his love of science with his search for meaning.

“I found what I was looking for in Tibetan Buddhism. It’s very deeply experiential; it’s very sharp, very rational and intelligent — and it’s also profoundly meaningful. To my mind, it’s a true, comprehensive science of the mind that I haven’t found anywhere else. It’s both scientific and also deeply spiritual,” Wallace said.

During his time at the German monastery, a flier arrived announcing a year-long class on Tibetan Buddhism for Westerners taught in Dharamsala, India under the supervision of the Dalai Lama in exile. After meditating on the opportunity and seeking guidance from his lama at the monastery, Wallace decided to enroll in the course and traveled to India to begin perhaps the most transformative period of his life.
Staying in the home of the Dalai Lama’s personal physician, Wallace fell in love with the freedom and intellectual fulfillment offered by his studies. After three months in the program, at the age of 21, Wallace had his first personal meeting with the Dalai Lama, and instantly knew he had found his mentor.

“I knew I found my spiritual guide or guru or lama if you’d like. He’s been my teacher ever since,” Wallace said.

After a year and a half in India, Wallace decided to take ordination as a novice monk and received full ordination as a Buddhist monk in 1975, administered personally by the Dalai Lama himself. Following his ordination, Wallace joined the prestigious Buddhist thinker Geshe Rabten at the Tibet Institute in Switzerland, where he studied Buddhism, taught courses on Tibetan language and culture and translated for Tibetan Buddhist monks and scholars, including the Dalai Lama. In 1979, he returned to India at the invitation of the Dalai Lama to begin four years of meditative retreats in India, Sri Lanka and the United States, receiving direct guidance from the Dalai Lama on meditative practice and technique.

Consciousness as Reality

At the end of his meditative period, Wallace had been away from Western civilization for nearly fourteen years and decided to re-integrate himself into Western society. Coming to the Pioneer Valley to study with the renowned Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman, who was then a professor of religion at the College, Wallace decided to finish his college education, applying to Harvard Univ. and Univ. of California-Berkeley. However, Wallace quickly adapted to the bucolic scenery of the Happy Valley and chose to continue his education in the area. He applied to the Univ. of Massachusetts-Amherst, but was encouraged his friend and mentor Professor Arthur Zajonc to apply to the College instead. In 1984, Wallace was accepted to the College and began his studies that fall.

During his first semester, Wallace studied mathematics, physics and philosophy, and he excelled in all his classes. Seeking a more challenging program of study, Wallace became an Independent Scholar, an option chosen only by the most disciplined and mature students at the College, where he designed his own curriculum of study, focusing on physics, the philosophy of science and Sanskrit. Wallace used his academic independence to write a groundbreaking two-volume thesis on the relationship between Buddhism, the philosophical underpinnings of modern science and the nature of reality. The ideas he first explored in his thesis drove him to pursue the study of consciousness as a fundamental component of reality.

“The whole notion that the fundamental constituents of physical reality — the elementary particles — do not exist out there with their own definite position, momentum, mass and all that independent of measurement; that is a very strong conclusion of quantum mechanics, and it has very profound implications for our understanding of nature as a whole. It raises questions about what is the role of measurement, what is the role of consciousness and is there a universe without consciousness? You just go deeper and deeper into seeing consciousness as fundamental to our understanding of reality,” Wallace said.

After graduating summa cum laude in 1987, Wallace began leading meditative retreats and publishing books on consciousness, before attending Stanford Univ. and pursuing a Ph.D. in religious studies. Wallace published his dissertation “The Bridge of Quiescence: Experiencing Tibetan Buddhist Meditation” simultaneously with another book, “The Taboo of Subjectivity,” in 1995. Both books dealt with themes of introspection and self-knowledge, approaching them from both Buddhist and scientific perspectives. “The Taboo of Subjectivity” also criticized modern cognitive science for discounting subjective experience as a path to scientific knowledge, drawing on the writings of philosopher and psychologist William James for intellectual support.

“Modern science is stuck in kind of a rut. When scientists want to study the mind, instead of observing the one mind they can observe — their own mind — they forget about that and try to study the mind by studying other people’s behavior and by studying the brain. All of this is very indirect. Everybody knows the brain contributes to mental events, but nobody really knows the nature of the relationship,” Wallace said.

Contemplating Science

Wallace has continued exploring the importance of introspection, founding the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies, an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural research center emphasizing the integration of science with contemplation and self-discovery, in 2003. Wallace is also the director of the Thanyapura Mind Centre in Phuket, Thailand, where he leads intensive meditative retreats and trains people in contemplative techniques. In 2007, he collaborated with neuroscientists and psychologists from universities worldwide in the Shamatha Project, which studied the neurological and psychological effects of long-term meditation and received support from the Hershey Family Foundation and official approval from the Dalai Lama.

Wallace, now perhaps the pre-eminent Western scholar of Buddhism, has transformed the academic careers of many of his students, inspiring them to pursue contemplation and introspection as a path to knowledge. James Elliot, a colleague of Wallace at the Santa Barbara Institute says that discovering Wallace’s ideas was central to his intellectual development.

“Alan has really provided me with a sense of direction. When I first started reading Alan’s work, before I started volunteering with the Santa Barbara Institute, I felt as though I’d finally found something I can dedicate my life to: the interaction and relationship between Buddhism and Science, in my case Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience. As I’ve continued to work and study with Alan, this conviction has only grown,” Elliot said.

Although he has faced resistance from many in the scientific community who feel that subjective modes of inquiry such as introspection are less accurate than third-person approaches, Wallace believes that introspection is more in line with scientific values of empirical observation.

“If we look at any other branch of the sciences or even the social sciences, we find that the primary mode of inquiry rests on sophisticated, precise and direct observation of the phenomenon they are seeking to understand. Introspection is the only way we can observe states of consciousness and mental events — thoughts, images, dreams and so forth. Neuroscience ignores this fact. Introspection plays very little role in the modern cognitive sciences, much to their discredit,” Wallace said.

In December, Wallace will enter a six month-long solitary meditative retreat, where he will seek to explore the mind in ways unavailable to traditional psychology and neuroscience, using lucid dreams — dream states in which the dreamer is aware that he or she is dreaming — to perform psychological experiences in ‘dream reality.’ Wallace also hopes to explore subjects often ignored by mainstream cognitive science, such as clairvoyance and astral projection, arguing that dismissing them out-of-hand is no better than accepting them out of faith.

“If [these subjects] are fiction, then let us know that they are fiction. If not, let’s find out what we can discover,” Wallace said. “In meditation, I will be making further discoveries about the true causes of happiness, the true causes of suffering — and of course, without reliance on psychedelic drugs, in which I don’t have any interest. I want to explore alternate states of consciousness. What is dream reality? It opens up some very interesting experiments in consciousness. When you alter your dream reality, you’re working in the perfect laboratory. Nothing is physical; no aspect of your dream is composed of molecules or atoms.”

Source: http://amherststudent.amherst.edu/?q=article/2012/11/12/marriage-between-buddhism-and-science

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His Holiness The Dalai Lama Embraces The Addition Of Western Science To The Core Curriculum At Tibet

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Boston, MA (USA) -- During his visit to Boston last week, His Holiness the Dalai Lama addressed attendees at a private benefit hosted by Boston philanthropist Bobby Sager to support the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT.

The Dalai Lama discussed the impact of the "Science for Monks" program, designed to incorporate Western science into the core monastic curriculum taught at the major Tibetan Buddhism institutions in India.

"Now at these monastic institutions, science as a subject has been incorporated into the monastic curriculum, not just for selected individual students," the Dalai Lama said. He described the addition of Western science as the most important change in the monastic curriculum in centuries. Topics like neurobiology, cosmology and quantum physics will now be taught alongside traditional topics of monastic study, such as Buddhist philosophy.

With the support of the Sager Family Foundation, the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, and the Dalai Lama, the 12-year "Science for Monks" program has laid the groundwork for historic change. In 2000, "Science for Monks" started as a pilot program, sending professors from U.S. universities to India to teach science to a group of 40 monks and nuns at two-week workshops outside of their traditional monastic studies.

"Initially, some senior monks and abbots were hesitant to study science," the Dalai Lama said. "But then eventually, after we explained the importance of learning science, they supported it."

"12 years ago, we started this renegade program called 'Science for Monks' outside the required monastic curriculum," Bobby Sager, founder of Sager Family Foundation, said at the event. "Now studying science has gone into the bloodstream of Tibetan Buddhism."

Sager's new book "Beyond the Robe," published by powerHouse Books, tells the story of the "Science for Monks" program over this 12-year period and what it reveals about the larger role Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns can play in their monasteries, in their communities, and in the world at large. "Beyond the Robe" is a collection of essays and Sager's photographs illustrating the first insights and observations that have come out of that historic effort, including an insider's look at the monks and nuns involved in the program.

An excellent example of the potential for Tibetan monks and nuns to play a larger role is "Science, Monks and Technology," a new program by Sager Family Foundation and The Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT announced at the October 16 event in Boston. The initiative creates a platform for Tibetan monks and nuns to collaborate with engineering and business students at MIT in designing and implementing technologies that can impact communities in the Tibetan diaspora, such as solar power or clean water.

"Monks have long served as leaders and community organizers in the Tibetan diaspora in India and Nepal; Science, Monks and Technology will enable them to add an additional dimension to their societal contribution," said the Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi, director of the Dalai Lama Center at MIT.

For information about Sager Family Foundation, visit www.teamsager.org, become a fan on Facebook, or join the conversation on Twitter at @SagerFoundation. For information about The Dalai Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT, go to thecenter.mit.edu.

To purchase "Beyond the Robe," go to www.beyondtherobe.org. A preview is available at www.powerhousebooks.com/preview/beyondtherobepreview.pdf. All of Sager Family Foundation's proceeds from this book are going to support programs that promote teaching Western science to Tibetan monks and nuns.

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Buddhist wisdom and questions of science

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Tokyo, Japan -- This book is a stirring attack on the hubris and blind spots of the scientific establishment, combined with an engaging presentation of Buddhist wisdom as the antidote.

The author spent 14 years as a monk, ordained by the Dalai Lama, before acquiring degrees in physics and religious studies, so he is superbly equipped for his task. We sometimes hear that Buddhism — unlike Christianity — does not have a problem with the scientific worldview, since it is a radically empirical religion, skeptical about any claims that go beyond what can be experienced. But this science-friendly Buddhism often turns out to be a modernized version, shorn of traditional doctrines.

B. Alan Wallace upholds the full panoply of classical Buddhist teachings, as taught in Tibet, and does not shy away from a frontal conflict with the dogmatic presuppositions of contemporary science.

He shows that materialist dogma keeps scientists from any understanding of human consciousness and freedom, and leads them into absurdities such as the claim that "the precise condition of the universe shortly after the Big Bang necessitated the assassination of John F. Kennedy" (p. 113), or that Stephen Hawking's view that "the brain is essentially a computer and consciousness is like a computer program. It will cease to run when the computer it turned off" (p. 91).

Hawking tries to explain minds, which he cannot understand, by reducing them to computers, which he can. This erasure of spiritual phenomena is sustained by Orwellian "crimestop": "the faculty of stopping short, as if by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought" (p. 9).

Coming to his positive proposals, Wallace first confronts us with the unpleasant doctrine of reincarnation: Death is not the end of our woes, but it consigns us to a new chapter in the endless round of painful rebirths, perhaps as animals — unless we are so privileged as to attain nirvana. This, he thinks, can be scientifically established: Young children remember their previous existence, and the Buddha had clear recall of all his past lives.

Just as Christian apologists find room for a "God of the gaps" in the evolutionary world picture, so scientists rely on "matter-of-the-gaps" thinking, when they assume that the "dark matter" and "dark energy" they postulate must be physical rather than spiritual. Here Wallace himself seems to fall into god-of-the-gaps thinking, too eager to secure a place in scientific cosmology for the spiritual substrate of reality.

Wallace makes the claim that Buddhism can found a new science of consciousness and of the physical universe. The International Shamatha Project, newly launched with the blessing of the Dalai Lama (www.shamatha.org), lays the basis for this scientific revolution by having people meditate in retreat centers for six hours a day, so as to attain the state of quiescence known as shamatha and thence proceed to clear insight into the fabric of existence. Discouragingly, Wallace tells us that, even in Sri Lanka, the number of people who had attained shamatha could be counted on the fingers of one hand and that things are not much better in Tibet (p. 148).

The meditator sees the ultimate emptiness of everything that claims to have stable, substantial identity, and discovers the role of subjective fabrication in the creation of what appears as an objective, physical world. Many scientists would agree that their discourse is a set of conventions, not a direct transcription of the way things really are. Quantum physics, which Wallace plays off against barren scientific materialism, shows that at the subatomic level it is impossible to separate the roles of observer and observed.

Extending this to the whole universe, he claims that "the past has no existence except as it is recorded in the present," and our decisions about what to observe determine "what kind of a universe emerges in our experience as being objectively real" (p. 85). Can Buddhist wisdom, even with the alleged support of quantum physics, shake the security of scientific fact and logic? Science, at its canniest, goes part of the way to meet Buddhist awareness of conventionality, relativism and mind-based interpretation of reality, but it cannot go the whole way.

Wallace might do well to differentiate more subtly between what is powerful and undeniable in the achievement of science and the blind spots he discerns. Likewise, he should expose his Buddhist orthodoxy to a more critical sifting between what is archaic and culture-bound and what could be developed into a viable mode of thinking for today. A mutually critical interaction between science and Buddhism would be a tremendous achievement, but as the present valiant effort shows, they are still talking past one another.

Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic: A Manifesto for the Mind Sciences and Contemplative Practice, by B. Alan Wallace. Columbia University Press, 2011, 304 pp., $27.95 (hardcover)

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Joseph S. O'Leary, professor of English literature at Sophia University, is an Irish theologian. His 2011 Etienne Gilson lectures on Western philosophy and Buddhist concepts have been published by Presses Universitaires de France.

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Buddhism expert wants science to rethink meditation claims

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Sydney, Australia -- SCIENTIFIC studies purporting to show the ancient Buddhist practice of meditation leads to permanent beneficial changes in the brain rest on shaky foundations, a world authority on Buddhism has warned.

<< Mind matters … Venerable Thubten Chokyi, centre, and other nuns and practitioners meditate at the Vajrayana Institute. Photo: Nick Moir

Bernard Faure, a visiting professor of Buddhist studies at the University of Sydney, said in a recent Sydney Ideas talk that little was known about the impact of meditation on the brain, and the interpretation of research results had ''a lot of wishful thinking".

Neuroscientific studies since 2004 have claimed the minds of Buddhist meditators are more stable, capable of greater compassion and have higher levels of activity in the part of the brain associated with wellbeing.

''The mutual validation of Tibetan Buddhism and neuroscience has generated a lot of funding on both sides," Professor Faure said.

But Professor Faure, who is also the Kao chair in Japanese religion at Columbia University, in the US, said the desire for quick results had "pre-empted robust critical questions".

For one thing, the use of rectal thermometers and electrodes on the body was likely to interrupt the meditator's concentration during experiments, he said.

Moreover, the study sizes were unreliably small, and despite the likely relevance to the results of the culturally specific origins and meanings of the mental states under study, neuroscientists had demonstrated little attempt to understand them.

The president of the Buddhist Council of NSW, Brian White, said interest in meditation was "generally increasing because of the scientific aspects becoming better known".

Venerable Thubten Chokyi, a Tibetan Buddhist nun and spiritual program co-ordinator at the Vajrayana Institute in Ashfield, said the mental pliancy and reduction of stress and anxiety that were byproducts of meditation were beneficial whether it was practised in a spiritual context or not. "Both have their place," she said.

The director of the Sydney Meditation Centre, Kevin Hume, who leads meditation classes for "highly educated professional people" said that while his clients were aware of scientific research on the benefits of meditation, the global financial crisis had been "far more significant in terms of the spike in numbers".

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