Sunday, November 13, 2005
Dalai Lama Gives Talk On Science
Monk's D.C. Lecture Links Mind, Matter
By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 13, 2005; Page C01
In an unusual marrying of science and spirituality, the Dalai Lama
addressed thousands of the world's top neuroscientists yesterday,
telling them that society is falling behind in its efforts to make
sense of their groundbreaking research.
Speaking sometimes in Tibetan and sometimes in halting English to a
receptive audience at the 35th annual meeting of the Society for
Neuroscience, the Tibetan spiritual and political leader said
scientists and moral leaders need each other.
"It is all too evident that our moral thinking simply has not been
able to keep pace with such rapid progress in our acquisition of
knowledge and power," he said in a prepared text.
The speech at the Washington Convention Center had been opposed by
some members of the society who objected to a religious leader
addressing neuroscientists, who research the brain, emotions and
human behavior. Nearly 800 people had signed an online petition
demanding that the Dalai Lama's invitation be withdrawn.
Many of the petition signers were Chinese Americans, leading to
countercharges that they opposed him on political grounds. Relations
between China and once-independent Tibet have been badly strained
for a half-century, and the Dalai Lama is at the center of the
dispute.
But except for minor protests yesterday -- one woman held a sign
that read "Dalai Lama not qualified to speak here" -- that conflict
was barely visible at the conference. Some attendees stayed away
from his talk, and others left early in what a few described as a
protest of sorts.
For most of the 14,000 conference participants who watched in the
lecture hall or from overflow rooms, the Dalai Lama's enthusiastic
embrace of science and promotion of meditation were warmly received.
His 10-day visit to Washington, which included a meeting with
President Bush last week, will continue today at MCI Center, where
he is scheduled to give a public talk on "Global Peace Through
Compassion."
The author of a new book on the convergence of Buddhism and science,
the Dalai Lama has met with prominent scientists around the world
for almost 20 years and has encouraged an increasingly fruitful
collaboration between brain researchers and Tibetan monks.
Because of the controversy over his speech to the neuroscientists in
Washington, his aides said he would keep to a prepared text,
something quite unusual for him. But he often diverged from the
text, despite saying with a smile that he was feeling
unusual "stress."
His talk focused on how he developed his interest in science as a
boy in Tibet, within a closed and isolated society, and on his view
that morality and compassion are central to science. He pointed out
in his prepared text, for instance, that although the atom bomb was
great science, it created great moral problems.
"It is no longer adequate to adopt the view that our responsibility
as a society is to simply further scientific knowledge and enhance
technological power and that the choice of what to do with this
knowledge and power should be left in the hands of the individual,"
he said.
"By invoking fundamental ethical principles, I am not advocating a
fusion of religious ethics and scientific inquiry. Rather, I am
speaking of what I call 'secular ethics' that embrace the key
ethical principles, such as compassion, tolerance, a sense of
caring, consideration of others, and the responsible use of
knowledge and power -- principles that transcend the barriers
between religious believers and nonbelievers, and followers of this
religion or that religion," he said.
He acknowledged that some might wonder why a Buddhist monk is taking
such an interest in science.
"What relation could there be between Buddhism, an ancient Indian
philosophical and spiritual tradition, and modern science?" he said.
His answer was that the scientific empirical approach and the
Buddhist exploration of the mind and world have many similarities.
In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, however, the Dalai Lama is known
as the reincarnation of a major force for compassion, and his
strongest words yesterday were directed at religious people who
might lack that trait.
"People who call themselves religious without basic human values
like compassion, they are not really religious people," he told the
audience, offering no names. "They are hypocrites." The words were
unusually critical for a speaker who likes to emphasize the positive
and productive.
The single protester outside his follow-up news conference at the
convention center was Pei Wang, a neuroscience graduate student at
the State University of New York at Buffalo. "This is supposed to be
a scientific talk," she said. "If he is not presenting data, he
should not speak. This should be about research, not about some
politician giving a speech."
The Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, which will continue
through Thursday and has attracted 31,000 people, features scores of
papers on research into human behavior.
In keeping with the Dalai Lama's involvement with meditation and the
physical and mental implications of the contemplative life, one of
the higher-profile papers reports on how regular meditation appears
to produce structural changes in areas of the brain associated with
attention and sensory processing. An imaging study led by
Massachusetts General Hospital researchers showed that particular
areas of the cerebral cortex, the outer layer of the brain, were
thicker in participants who were experienced practitioners of a type
of meditation commonly practiced in the United States.
"Our results suggest that meditation can produce experience-based
structural alterations in the brain," said Sara Lazar of the
hospital's Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program and lead author
of the study, which will appear in the journal NeuroReport. "We also
found evidence that mediation may slow down the aging-related
atrophy of certain areas of the brain."
Monk's D.C. Lecture Links Mind, Matter
By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 13, 2005; Page C01
In an unusual marrying of science and spirituality, the Dalai Lama
addressed thousands of the world's top neuroscientists yesterday,
telling them that society is falling behind in its efforts to make
sense of their groundbreaking research.
Speaking sometimes in Tibetan and sometimes in halting English to a
receptive audience at the 35th annual meeting of the Society for
Neuroscience, the Tibetan spiritual and political leader said
scientists and moral leaders need each other.
"It is all too evident that our moral thinking simply has not been
able to keep pace with such rapid progress in our acquisition of
knowledge and power," he said in a prepared text.
The speech at the Washington Convention Center had been opposed by
some members of the society who objected to a religious leader
addressing neuroscientists, who research the brain, emotions and
human behavior. Nearly 800 people had signed an online petition
demanding that the Dalai Lama's invitation be withdrawn.
Many of the petition signers were Chinese Americans, leading to
countercharges that they opposed him on political grounds. Relations
between China and once-independent Tibet have been badly strained
for a half-century, and the Dalai Lama is at the center of the
dispute.
But except for minor protests yesterday -- one woman held a sign
that read "Dalai Lama not qualified to speak here" -- that conflict
was barely visible at the conference. Some attendees stayed away
from his talk, and others left early in what a few described as a
protest of sorts.
For most of the 14,000 conference participants who watched in the
lecture hall or from overflow rooms, the Dalai Lama's enthusiastic
embrace of science and promotion of meditation were warmly received.
His 10-day visit to Washington, which included a meeting with
President Bush last week, will continue today at MCI Center, where
he is scheduled to give a public talk on "Global Peace Through
Compassion."
The author of a new book on the convergence of Buddhism and science,
the Dalai Lama has met with prominent scientists around the world
for almost 20 years and has encouraged an increasingly fruitful
collaboration between brain researchers and Tibetan monks.
Because of the controversy over his speech to the neuroscientists in
Washington, his aides said he would keep to a prepared text,
something quite unusual for him. But he often diverged from the
text, despite saying with a smile that he was feeling
unusual "stress."
His talk focused on how he developed his interest in science as a
boy in Tibet, within a closed and isolated society, and on his view
that morality and compassion are central to science. He pointed out
in his prepared text, for instance, that although the atom bomb was
great science, it created great moral problems.
"It is no longer adequate to adopt the view that our responsibility
as a society is to simply further scientific knowledge and enhance
technological power and that the choice of what to do with this
knowledge and power should be left in the hands of the individual,"
he said.
"By invoking fundamental ethical principles, I am not advocating a
fusion of religious ethics and scientific inquiry. Rather, I am
speaking of what I call 'secular ethics' that embrace the key
ethical principles, such as compassion, tolerance, a sense of
caring, consideration of others, and the responsible use of
knowledge and power -- principles that transcend the barriers
between religious believers and nonbelievers, and followers of this
religion or that religion," he said.
He acknowledged that some might wonder why a Buddhist monk is taking
such an interest in science.
"What relation could there be between Buddhism, an ancient Indian
philosophical and spiritual tradition, and modern science?" he said.
His answer was that the scientific empirical approach and the
Buddhist exploration of the mind and world have many similarities.
In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, however, the Dalai Lama is known
as the reincarnation of a major force for compassion, and his
strongest words yesterday were directed at religious people who
might lack that trait.
"People who call themselves religious without basic human values
like compassion, they are not really religious people," he told the
audience, offering no names. "They are hypocrites." The words were
unusually critical for a speaker who likes to emphasize the positive
and productive.
The single protester outside his follow-up news conference at the
convention center was Pei Wang, a neuroscience graduate student at
the State University of New York at Buffalo. "This is supposed to be
a scientific talk," she said. "If he is not presenting data, he
should not speak. This should be about research, not about some
politician giving a speech."
The Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, which will continue
through Thursday and has attracted 31,000 people, features scores of
papers on research into human behavior.
In keeping with the Dalai Lama's involvement with meditation and the
physical and mental implications of the contemplative life, one of
the higher-profile papers reports on how regular meditation appears
to produce structural changes in areas of the brain associated with
attention and sensory processing. An imaging study led by
Massachusetts General Hospital researchers showed that particular
areas of the cerebral cortex, the outer layer of the brain, were
thicker in participants who were experienced practitioners of a type
of meditation commonly practiced in the United States.
"Our results suggest that meditation can produce experience-based
structural alterations in the brain," said Sara Lazar of the
hospital's Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program and lead author
of the study, which will appear in the journal NeuroReport. "We also
found evidence that mediation may slow down the aging-related
atrophy of certain areas of the brain."
// posted by Linda Weissinger Lupowitz @ 6:38 PM 
