Okay, I admit to being a great fan of the Dalai Lama, who is considered by Tibetan Buddhists “to be the 74th manifestation of Avalokiteshvara, the enlightened Buddha of compassion”; and it’s not only because of my attraction to Zen Buddhism. (After all, there are very significant differences between Zen and Tibetan Buddhism.)

Anyone who’s seen him in action knows what I mean. I once saw him interviewed by John McLaughlin — the shouting talk-show host, not the guitar player (that would be an interesting interview) — who, as it happens, is a former Jesuit priest. McLaughlin spent most of the thirty minutes trying to wring a condemnation of the Chinese government out of the Dalai Lama. To his increasing frustration, he never came close. Despite all the horrible things the Chinese government has done to the Tibetan Buddhists, the Buddha of compassion never budged.

Another source of amusement has been the movement, obviously inspired by doctrinaire Chinese, to keep the Dalai Lama from speaking at the annual convention of the Society for Neuroscience.

A petition drive, begun primarily by Chinese American researchers, seeks to have the Dalai Lama’s appearance canceled. The protesters, who argue that a religious leader should not be given such a prominent role at an important scientific conference, say they have gathered at least 600 signatures. There have also been competing letters and an editorial in the journal Nature.

“The presentation of a religious symbol with a controversial political agenda may cause unnecessary controversies, unwanted press, and significant divisions among SFN members from multiple geographic locations, and with conflicting religious beliefs and political leanings,” reads the petition, which was signed by several hundred non-Chinese researchers and academics as well.

The Dalai Lama’s speech is part of a series called “Dialogues Between Neuroscience and Society”. Next year’s speaker is scheduled to be architect Frank Gehry. So what’s the big deal? Neuroscience is not allowed to interface with meditators?

His recent book, The Universe in an Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality, tries to make the case that modern science and Buddhist thought have surprisingly similar aims, methods and sometimes conclusions — though he resists efforts to see the world in purely material terms. (Some of his thoughts about limits to the theory of evolution when it comes to how life and consciousness began earned him a rather harsh book review in the New York Times, including a suggestion that he was proposing a Buddhist version of intelligent design.)

The similarities between Eastern religions and modern physics have produced some fascinating writing. The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav had a tremendous affect on my view of the world — it convinced me that there is no such thing as an objective reality (a view I think many physicists would disagree with). Another book along the same lines is Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics.

During yesterday’s session, some of those parallels between Buddhist thought and cutting-edge science were on display.

Wolf Singer, director of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, explained how his research has found that neuronal coordination within the brain is key to human understanding and performance — a conclusion that Buddhist thought intuited long ago.

Here’s why the Dalai Lama kicks ass on the Kansas Board of Education and the losers from the Dover, PA, school board:

While politics and religion are always important to the Dalai Lama, aides say, his involvement with science is especially significant to him. Given the frequent hostility between religious and scientific thought in the United States, many find the Dalai Lama’s explorations into such subjects as quantum physics, or the neuroscience of consciousness, or evolution and the physical nature of emotions to be remarkable.

And he has been known to back that up: He often says — and affirmed again in front of yesterday’s audience — that when science proves that Buddhist scriptures are incorrect, then the scriptures should be rejected.

Posted by Chuck Dupree at November 09, 2005 04:30 AM

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