FromHis Holiness the Dalai Lama; Science and Buddhism ; Tibet and India

The Visit to India in 1956

In 1956 I went to India to take partin the 2500^th anniversary of Buddha’s death, whose main event took place in Delhi. Later the Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru became something of a counsellor to me and a friend as well as my host in exile. Nehru was scientifically minded; he saw India’s future in terms of technological and industrial development and had a profound vision of progress. After the final celebration of Buddha’s passing away, I saw many parts of India-not only the pilgrimage sites like Bodhgaya where Buddha attained full awakening, but also major cities, industrial complexes and universities.

It was then that I had my first encounters with spiritual teachers who were seeking the integration of science and spirituality, such as the members of the Theosophical Society in Madras. Theosophy was an important spiritual movement in nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries that sought to develop a synthesis of human knowledge, Eastern and Western, religious and scientific. Its founders including  Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant, were westerners but spent much time in India.

I noticed certain similarities between science and Buddhist thought which I still find striking. The scientific method proceeds from the observation of certain phenomena of  in the material world, leads to a theoretical generalization which predicts the event and the results that arise if one treats the phenomena in a particular way, and then tests the prediction with an experiment. The result is accepted as part of the body of wider scientific knowledge if the experiment is correctly conducted and may be repeated. However, if the experiment contradicts the theory, then it is the theory that needs to be adapted-since the empirical observation of phenomena has priority. Effectively science moves from empirical experience via a conceptual thought process that includes application of reason and culminates in further empirical experience to verify the understanding offered by reason. I have long been gripped by a fascination with the parallels between this form of investigation and those I had learnt in my Buddhist philosophical training and contemplative practice.

Although Buddhism has evolved as a religion with a characteristic body of scriptures and rituals, strictly speaking, in Buddhism scriptural authority cannot outweigh an understanding based on reason and experience. In fact, the Buddha himself, in a famous statement, undermines the scriptural authority of his own words when he exhorts his followers not to accept the validity of his teachings simply on the basis of reverence to him. Just as a seasoned goldsmith would test the purity of his gold through a meticulous process of examination, the Buddha advises that people should test the truth of what he has said through reasoned examination and personal experiment. Therefore when it comes to validating the truth of a claim, Buddhism accords greatest authority to experience , with reason second and scripture last. The great masters of the Nalanda school of Indian Buddhism, from which Tibetan Buddhism sprang, continued to apply the spirit of the Buddha’s advice in their rigorous and critical examination of the Buddha’s own teachings.

In one sense the method of science and Buddhism are different: scientific investigation proceeds by experiment, using instruments that analyse external phenomena, whereas contemplative investigation proceeds by the development of refined attention, which is then used in the introspective examination of inner experience. But both share a strong empirical basis: if science shows something to exist or to be non-existent (which is not the same as not finding it), then we must acknowledge that as a fact. If a hypothesis is tested and found to be true, we must accept it. Likewise, Buddhism must accept the facts-whether found by science or found by contemplative insights. If when we investigate something, we find there is reason and proof for it, we must acknowledge that as reality – even if it is in contradiction with a literal scriptural explanation that has held sway for many centuries or with a deeply held opinion or view. So one fundamental attitude shared by Buddhism and science is the commitment to keep searching for reality by empirical means and to be willing to discard accepted or long-held positions if our search finds that the truth is different.

With regard to Buddhist investigative traditions, we Tibetans owe a tremendous debt to classical India, the birthplace of Buddhist philosophical thinking and spiritual teaching. Tibetans have always referred to India as ‘The Land of the Noble Ones’. This the country that gave birth to the Buddha, and to a series of great Indian masters whose writings have fundamentally shaped the philosophical thinking and the spiritual tradition of the Tibetan people- the second century philosopher Nagarjuna, the fourth century luminaries Asanga and his brother Vasubandhu, the great ethical teacher Shantideva and the seventh century logician Dharmakirti.      

From 'His Holiness: The Dalai Lama'--An Autobiography

From ‘His holiness: The Dalai Lama

I was born into  a family  of simple farmers who used cattle to plough their field and, when the barley was harvested, used cattle to trample the grain out of the husk. Perhaps the only objects that could be described as   technological in the world of my early childhood were the rifles that local warrior nomads had probably acquired from British India, Russia and China. At the age of six I was enthroned as the fourteenth Dalai Lama in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa and embarked upon an education in all aspects of Buddhism. I had personal tutors who gave me daily classes in reading, writing, basic Buddhist philosophy and memorization of scriptures and rituals. I was also given several tsenshap, which literally means ‘philosophical assistants.’ The primary job was to engage me in debate on issues Buddhist thought. In addition, I would participate in long hours of prayers and meditative contemplation. I spent periods in retreat with my tutos and sat regularly for two hours at a time four times a day in a meditation session.This is a fairly typical training for a high lama in the Tibetan tradition. But I was not educated in maths , geology, chemistry, biology and physics. I did not even know they existed.

The Potala palace was my official winter residence. It is a huge edifice, occupying the entire side of a mountain, and is supposed to have a thousand rooms—I never counted them myself. In my spare moments as a boy, I amused myself by exploring some of its chambers. It was like being on a perpetual treasure hunt. There were all kinds of things, mainly belonging the belongings of the former Dalai Lamas and especially of my immediate predecessor, preserved there. Among the most striking of the palace’s contents were the reliquary stupas containing the remains of the previous Dalai Lamas, reaching back to the Fifth, who lived in the seventeenth century and enlarged the Potala to its present form. Amid the assorted oddities I found lying about were mechanical objects which belonged to the thirteenth Dalai Lama. Most notable were a collapsible telescope made from brass, which could be attached to a tripod, and a hand-wound mechanical time-piece with a rotating globe on a stand that gave the time in different time-zones. There was also a stash of illustrated books in English telling the story of  the First World War.

Some of these were the gifts to the thirteenth Dalai Lama from his friend Sir Charles bell. Bell was the Tibetan-speaking  British political officer in Sikkim. He had been the Thirteenth Dalai Lama’s host during his brief sojourn in British India when he fled in 1910 at the threat of invasion by armies of the last imperial government of China. It is curious that the exile in India and the discovery of scientific culture are things bequeathed to me by my most immediate predecessor. For the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, as I later found out, this stay in British India was an eye-opening experience, which led to a recognition of the need for major social and political reforms in Tibet. On his return to Lhasa, he introduced the telegraph, set up a postal service, built a small generating plant to power Tibet’s first electric lights and established a mint for the national coinage and the printing of paper currency. He also came to appreciate the importance of a modern, secular education and sent a select group of Tibetan children to study at Rugby school in England. The thirteenth Dalai Lama left a remarkable death-bed testament, which predicted much of the political tragedy to come and which the government that succeeded him failed to understand fully or to heed.     

Randomly chosen from Memory and Its Nature : Papers by Annie Besant and H. P. Blavatsky

"We must think, then,of a conscious self dwelling in vehicles that vibrate. The vibrations of these vehicles  correspond, on the side of matter, with the changes in consciousness in the side of the self . We cannot accurately speak of vibrations of consciousness, because vibrations can only belong to the material side of the things, the form side, and only loosely can we speak of a vibrating consciousness corresponding with vibrations in sheaths.
The question of the vehicles, or bodies, in whichconsciousness, the self is working, is all important as regards memory. The whole process of recovering more or less remote events is a question of picturing them in the sheath-of shaping part of the matter of the sheath into their likeness-in which consciousness is working at the same time. In the Self, as a fragment of the Universal Self-which for our purpose we can take to be the Logos, although in verity the Logos is but a portion of the Universal Self-is present in everything; for in the Universal Self is present all which has taken place, is taking place, and will take place in the universe; all this, and an illimitable more is present in the Universal Consciousness. Let us think only of a universe and its Logos. We speak of Him as omnipresent, omniscient. Now, fundamentally, that omnipresence and the omniscience are in the individualized Self, as being one with the Logos, but we must put in here a but-with a difference; the difference consisting in this, that while in the separated Self as Self, apart from all vehicles, that omniscience reside by virtue of his unity with the one Self, the vehicles in which he dwells have have not yet learned to vibrate in answer to his change of consciousness, as he turns his attention to one or another part  of his contents. Hence we say tht all exists in him potentially, and not as in Logos actually: all the changes which go on in the consciousness of the Logos are reproducible in this separated Self, which is an indivisible part of His life, but the vehicles are not yet ready as media of manifestation. Because of the separation of form, because of this closing in of the separate, or individualized Self, these possibilities which are within it as part of the Universal Self are latent, not manifest, are possibilities, not actualities. As in every atom which goes to the making up of a vehicle, there are illimitable possibilities of vibration, so in every separated Self there are illimitable possibilities of changes of consciousness.
To be continued.