I was born into a simple peasant family. My parents used yaks to plow the fields, and later, when the grain was ripe, the same yaks threshed the ears with their hooves. Probably the only objects in the world of my early childhood that were related to technology were rifles, which local warlike nomads brought from British India, and perhaps even from Russia or China. At the age of six, I was enthroned as the fourteenth Dalai Lama in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa and began studying all aspects of Buddhism. I had personal tutors who gave me daily lessons in reading, writing and the basics of Buddhist philosophy; under their guidance, I memorized various texts and rituals. There were also several tsenshabs always near me , which literally translates as “philosophy assistant.” Their first priority was to hold debates with me on various topics of Buddhist philosophy. In addition, I had to take part in hours-long prayer rituals and learn meditative concentration. Under the guidance of my mentors, I went on long retreats and did two-hour meditations four times a day. This is how the training of a high reincarnation lama usually takes place in the Tibetan tradition. But I did not receive any knowledge in the field of mathematics, geology, chemistry, biology or physics and did not even know about the existence of these sciences.
My official residence was the Potala Palace. This is a huge building that occupies an entire mountainside. They say it has a thousand rooms, but I myself have never counted them. In my free moments, I amused myself by exploring the numerous rooms of the palace. It was like an endless treasure hunt. There one could find a wide variety of objects, many of which belonged to previous Dalai Lamas, in particular my immediate predecessor, or, for example, reliquary stupas containing the remains of Dalai Lamas, starting with the Great Fifth, who lived in the 17th century. and rebuilt the Potala to its present size. Among the various strange objects I came across mechanisms that belonged to the thirteenth Dalai Lama. The most remarkable of these was a folding brass telescope that could be attached to a tripod, as well as a hand-wound mechanical chronometer with a rotating globe on a stand, allowing one to read the time in different parts of the world. There were also books in English, for example, an illustrated history of the First World War.
Some of these items were gifts from Sir Charles Bell, who was an English political official in Sikkim and knew the Tibetan language. The Thirteenth Dalai Lama lived with him during the short period of his flight to British India during the invasion of Tibet by the troops of the last imperial government of China. It is very significant that flight to India and contact with scientific culture were, as it were, bequeathed to me by my immediate predecessor. I later learned that his stay in British India was a real discovery for him, making him realize the need for social and political reforms in Tibet. After returning to Lhasa, he installed a telegraph there, organized a postal service, built a small power plant that provided the city with electric lighting, and organized a mint, where they began to mint coins and print the first paper money. He also came to recognize the value of modern secular education and sent a group of Tibetan children to study at Rugby School in England. The Thirteenth Dalai Lama wrote a significant dying will, which predicted the coming political tragedy and which the subsequent government was unable to sufficiently understand or take into account.
The Thirteenth Dalai Lama also owned a pocket watch, a movie projector and three cars – two Baby Austins from 1927 and an American Dodge from 1931. Since there were no roads across the Himalayas, or even in Tibet itself, the cars had to be dismantled in India and transported across the mountains on the backs of porters, yaks and donkeys, after which they were reassembled for the Dalai Lama. For a long time these were the only cars in all of Tibet, and completely useless, since there were no roads outside Lhasa on which they could be driven. These so varied objects, harbingers of technological civilization, had an extraordinary attractive force for the naturally inquisitive and restless boy that I was at that time. I remember very well that it was much more interesting for me to spend time among them than to study philosophy or cram texts. Now I clearly understand that these things in themselves were nothing more than toys, but they beckoned me, promising a meeting with a whole world of completely new experience and knowledge, to which I had no access, but whose existence was so attractive. In some ways, this book is the story of my journey into this world and the wonderful things I discovered there.
I had no problems using the telescope. Somehow the purpose of this device was completely clear to me, and I was soon making full use of it to study the city life of Lhasa and especially the market square. I was terribly envious to look at children my age running carefree through the city streets, while I myself was supposed to be studying. Later I began to use a telescope to study the starry sky above the Potala. There, high in the mountains, the stars present an amazing picture, and I asked my mentors about the names of the stars and constellations.
I knew perfectly well what a pocket watch was for, but I was terribly interested in how it worked. For a long time I was tormented by this mystery, but finally curiosity got the better of me, and I opened the case to look inside. Soon the clock was completely disassembled, and I was faced with the next task – putting it back together so that it would work. Disassembling and reassembling various mechanisms has become a real hobby for me. I soon achieved such mastery in this that I became the chief watchmaker for the few watch owners I knew in Lhasa. But later, in India, when my cuckoo clock was attacked by a cat, I was never able to fix it. When electronic watches came into use, I lost all interest in my favorite pastime: having disassembled them, it was impossible to detect any mechanism inside.
It was much more difficult to understand the structure of two hand-held film projectors that belonged to the thirteenth Dalai Lama. Finally one of my servants, a Chinese monk, figured out how they work. I asked him to show the few films we had. Later we received an electric projector for sixteen-millimeter film, but it quickly broke down due to a voltage mismatch in our electrical network. Around this time, I believe in 1945, the Austrians Heinrich Harrer and Peter Aufschnaiter, prisoners of war who had escaped from a British prison in northern India and made their way through the Himalayas to Tibet, arrived in Lhasa. Harrer became my friend, and when the film projector needed adjustment, I often turned to him for help. We couldn’t get hold of many films, but several documentaries came to us through India about significant events of the Second World War, in which history was presented from the point of view of the Allied coalition. We also had documentary footage of the coronation of King George VI of England, Laurence Olivier’s film based on Shakespeare’s play King Henry V, and several silent films by Charlie Chaplin.
My fascination with science began with exposure to the products of technology, and I didn’t really understand the difference between technology and science. Having met Heinrich, who understood mechanisms better than anyone in Lhasa, I decided that his knowledge of science was as great as his ability to handle instruments. Only many years later did I realize that he had no scientific education, but then every white man seemed to me a great expert in science.
Inspired by my success in assembling watches and setting up a film projector, I became bolder and decided to try to understand the workings of the machine. The man whose responsibility it was to maintain our fleet of vehicles was named Lhagpa Tsering; he was a bald guy whose irritability became the talk of the town. If, while working under a machine, he accidentally hit his head on some part, he would become so furious that he would hit it again. I became friends with him, and while fixing the engine, he allowed me to study it a little, and sometimes even taught me how to drive.
I once stole one of the Austins and went for a ride alone, but quickly got into an accident, breaking the left headlight. I was very scared, waiting to see what Babu Tashi, the second person in charge of the cars, would say. So I decided to replace the headlight, but the spare one was made of clear glass, and the broken one was frosted. After some thought, it occurred to me to coat the glass with melted sugar. I never had a chance to find out whether Babu Tashi discovered the breakdown. However, he never punished me.
One of the scientific areas in which Harrer has been of great help to me is geography. In my personal library there were several volumes of the history of the Second World War in English. They detailed the participation of many nations in the war, including the Japanese. My successes in running movie projectors, fixing watches, and driving a car showed me to some extent what science and technology were all about. Much more serious events that made a huge impression on me were the state visits to China in 1954 and to India in 1956, which took place after I began governing Tibet at the age of 16. By that time, the Chinese army had already invaded my country and long, very difficult negotiations began with the Chinese government to reach a compromise.
On my first trip abroad, before I was twenty, I went to Beijing and met with Chairman Mao, Zhou Enlai, and other leaders of the Chinese Communist regime. This state visit included visits to agricultural cooperatives and large public utilities such as hydroelectric power plants. On this trip, for the first time I saw not only modern cities with their cobbled streets, but also met real scientists.
In 1956, I visited India to take part in the celebration of the 2500th anniversary of Buddha’s Parinirvana in Delhi. Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru became my adviser and friend, and later hosted me in exile. Nehru was a great admirer of science, he saw the future of India as an industrially and technologically developed state. After the official part of the celebrations ended, I was given the opportunity to visit various parts of India – not only pilgrimage sites such as Bodhgaya, where the Buddha achieved final enlightenment, but also major cities, industrial complexes and universities.
It was then that I first met spiritual teachers who were looking for methods to integrate science and spirituality, such as the members of the Theosophical Society in Madras. Theosophy is an important spiritual movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries, whose followers sought to synthesize all human knowledge: Eastern and Western, religious and scientific. Its founders, Helena Blavatsky and Annie Besant, who lived in India for a long time, were representatives of Western civilization.
But even before this trip, I began to understand that technology is actually the fruit, or manifestation, of a special understanding of the world. And the basis of this understanding is formed by science, which, in turn, is a special way of studying the world; the knowledge resulting from this method of inquiry underlies this understanding. So, if at first I was most curious about various technological products, now the primary interest has become methods of scientific research, and not just mechanical toys.
While talking about science with various people, and especially with professional scientists, I discovered a striking similarity between the scientific approach and the methods of analysis that are used in Buddhism. According to the scientific method of research, as I understand it, we start from the observation of certain phenomena of the material world, then move on to theoretical generalizations, on the basis of which assumptions are made about what the results should be if we influence the phenomena in one way or another, and these assumptions are in turn tested in a scientific experiment. If an experiment has been correctly conducted and can later be repeated by other independent researchers, then the ideas underlying it become part of all scientific knowledge. If the data of a correctly conducted experiment contradict a certain theory, then such a theory is subject to revision, since the primary thing is the empirical observation of phenomena. Thus, science moves from primary empirical experience through conceptualization based on logical reasoning, and ends with new empirical experience, the purpose of which is to confirm the validity of the understanding achieved by reason. For a long time I was deeply impressed by the similarities I saw between this methodology of the scientific approach and what I studied in the process of my philosophical studies and meditative practice.
Although Buddhism developed as a religious system with its own specific scriptures and rituals, strictly speaking, the authority of sacred texts in Buddhism cannot prevail over understanding based on reasoning and experiment. After all, Buddha himself, in one of his famous statements, underestimates the authority of texts that even contain his own words, calling on his followers not to recognize their truth out of sheer respect for him. He advises his disciples to test for themselves the truth of his words and his teachings, just as a goldsmith uses various skillful methods to test the authenticity of a gold bar. Thus, in regard to the truth of a statement, Buddhism gives the greatest weight to experience, then to reasoning, and lastly to scripture. The great masters of Nalanda, the Buddhist university of India, the tradition of which was inherited by Tibetan Buddhism, guided by these words of the Buddha, for a long time strictly and carefully tested his teachings from their own experience.
But in one respect the methods of science and Buddhism are very different: the scientific researcher carries out experiments using various instruments to analyze external phenomena, while spiritual research begins with the development of refined attention, which is then applied in introspective study of the world of inner experience. Nevertheless, both approaches have a strong empirical basis: if scientific research shows that something exists or, on the contrary, does not exist (and showing the absence of something is not the same as simply not finding what we are looking for), we must accept the result such research as a fact. If a scientific hypothesis has been tested, confirmed and found to be true, we should accept it. In the same way, Buddhism must accept as reliable fact not only what is discovered through meditative experience, but also what is discovered through the methods of scientific research. If, while investigating a phenomenon, we find arguments and evidence confirming its existence, we should accept it as a reality, even if such an understanding goes against established opinion or authoritative scriptures. So, one of the fundamental approaches that makes Buddhism and science akin is an empirical approach to reality and the rejection of those, even traditional, views that are in conflict with empirical experience.
One of the specific features of the scientific approach, which fundamentally distinguishes it from religion, is the non-recognition of authorities as the only source of reliable knowledge. Every truth in science must either be proven in experiment or confirmed by mathematical reasoning. It is completely impossible for scientific thinking to think that something is true simply because Newton or Einstein said so. So, the condition for research is complete openness to both the question posed and the possible answer to it. I would characterize this approach as healthy skepticism. This openness makes a person receptive to new understanding and new discoveries, and in combination with the desire to understand the world around us, which is characteristic of every person, it can lead to a significant expansion of our horizons. This, of course, does not mean that all scientists fully meet this ideal. Some of them still prefer to live within the framework of generally accepted ideas.
As far as the Buddhist research tradition is concerned, we Tibetans owe a great debt to India, the birthplace of Buddhist thought and teaching. Tibetans have always called India the land of saints. It is the birthplace of the Buddha, as well as a number of great masters whose writings have shaped the philosophical thought and spiritual tradition of the Tibetans. These include the 2nd century philosopher. Nagarjuna, luminary of the 4th century. Asanga, his brother Vasubandhu and the great teacher in the ethical teaching of Shantideva, who also lived in the 7th century. master of logic Dharmakirti.
After my flight from Tibet in March 1959, many Tibetan refugees and I myself were lucky enough to find a second home in India. During the early years of my exile, the President of India was Dr. Rajendra Prasad, a highly spiritual man and a respected legal scholar. Vice-President Dr. Sarveali Radhakrishnan, who later became President, was known for his deep personal and professional interest in philosophy. I remember very well the occasions when, during a philosophical discussion, Radhakrishnan quoted from memory lines from Nagarjuna’s classic work, The Root Verses on the Middle (Mulamadhyamaka-karika). I find it very significant that since independence in 1947, India has continued its noble tradition of appointing thinkers and scholars to the highest positions of government.
After a difficult decade of settling into a new place, full of worries about housing nearly eighty thousand Tibetan refugees in different parts of India, setting up schools for children and adolescents, and efforts to restore destroyed cultural institutions, I began trips abroad that continued until the late 1960s. In them, I tried to share my understanding of the importance of basic human values, maintain mutual understanding and harmony between religions, and defend the rights and freedoms of the Tibetan people. At the same time, on these travels, I had the opportunity to meet wonderful scientists and discuss with them issues that interested me, improve my knowledge and deepen my understanding of the essence of science and its methodology. Back in the 1960s, I discussed the interaction of religion and science with some of the visitors to my residence in Dharamsala in northern India. The most memorable encounters of this period were the arrival of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, who had a serious interest in Buddhism and in turn opened my eyes to Christianity, and the religious scholar Huston Smith.
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One of my first mentors in science and at the same time my closest scientist friend was the German physicist and philosopher, brother of the President of West Germany, Karl von Weizsäcker. He described himself as a politically active philosophy professor with a physics background, but in the 1930s von Weizsäcker worked as an assistant to nuclear physicist Werner Heisenberg. Von Weizsäcker provided me with an unforgettable and inspiring example of a man deeply concerned about the results of science, especially in the political and moral fields. He constantly looked for ways to apply strict philosophical thought to a comprehensive assessment of the results of scientific research.
In addition to long friendly conversations on various occasions, I had the good fortune to receive from von Weizsäcker a real lesson in the scientific field. This was done in a style not at all different from the way in which individual teachings are transmitted from teacher to student in the tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. Several times we had the opportunity to conduct full two-day retreats together, during which von Weizsäcker gave me an intensive course in quantum physics in its physical and philosophical aspects. I am deeply grateful to him for the selfless kindness with which he gave me his precious time, as well as for his deepest patience, especially when I had to struggle with difficult concepts, which I often found very difficult to accept.
Von Weizsäcker constantly asserted the importance of the method of empirical observation in science. He said that there are two ways of knowing an object: it can be given as a phenomenon or comprehended on the basis of inference. For example, we can see a brown spot on an apple with our own eyes; this is a phenomenon given to us. But we can obtain knowledge about the presence of a worm in this apple as a conclusion from this observation and from our general knowledge about apples and worms.
There is a principle in Buddhist philosophy that the means of testing any proposition about an object must be consistent with its nature. For example, if a proposition is made about some fact relating to the observable world, including our own existence, it can be confirmed or refuted by means of empirical experience. Here Buddhism puts the method of direct empirical observation first. If the assumption is made in the field of speculative generalizations arising from our consideration of the world (this applies, for example, to statements regarding the fragility of life or the interdependence of all elements of existence), it is deduced through reasoning and verified in the form of inference. Thus, Buddhism recognizes a method of inference by inference much like von Weizsäcker’s model.
Finally, from a Buddhist point of view, there is another level of reality that the unenlightened mind cannot observe. Traditional examples of this kind of objects are the mechanism of manifestation of the subtlest laws of karma and the reasons for the presence in the world of a huge number of species of living beings. Only in relation to assumptions in such areas can reference be made to the scriptures as a reliable authoritative source of knowledge, since for Buddhists the sermons of the Buddha are reliable sources of knowledge regarding the facts they set forth about the nature of existence and the path to Liberation. This method of triple confirmation of results – based on experience, inference and the testimony of a trustworthy authority – existed even in the period of the earliest Buddhism; as a systematic philosophical methodology, it was formulated by the Indian logicians Dignaga (5th century) and Dharmakirti (7th century).
This example clearly shows the similarity between Buddhism and science, since science, at least in principle, does not recognize any “scripture” as an absolute authority, and in the first two areas – empirical experience and reasoning – there is complete similarity. Nevertheless, in our daily lives we constantly and out of habit use the third method of cognition. For example, we find out our date of birth based on the oral testimony of our relatives or the entry on our birth certificate. And even in science, we trust the evidence of experimenters published in scientific journals, rather than testing it ourselves through experiments.
My acquaintance with science gained special depth as a result of meeting the wonderful physicist David Bohm. He was a man of enormous intelligence and open mind. I met him in 1979 in England during my second visit to Europe, and a complete understanding was instantly established between us. Later I learned that Bom, like me, had been in exile; he was forced to leave America due to persecution during the McCarthy era. Thus began our long friendship, full of mutual intellectual discoveries. David Bohm led me to understand the subtle aspects of scientific thought, especially in the field of physics, and showed me the best aspects of the scientific worldview. Listening carefully to the detailed explanations of physicists such as Bohm and von Weizsäcker, I sometimes felt that I was able to fully grasp their argumentation, but, unfortunately, often at the end of the conversation little remained of my understanding. However, long conversations with Bohm over two decades have fueled my own reflections on how Buddhist research methods might relate to the methodology of modern science.
I was fascinated by Bohm’s extraordinary openness to the most diverse areas of human experience, not only in the area of his professional interests, but also to all subjective aspects, including questions of consciousness. In our conversations I felt the presence of a great scientific mind, preparing to recognize the value of observations and insights arising from areas other than the world of objective science familiar to him.
One special quality that characterized Bohm as a scientist was his remarkable and fundamentally philosophical method of conducting scientific research by means of a thought experiment. Simply put, this practice involves thinking through an imaginary scenario in which a scientific hypothesis is tested by considering the consequences it would have under various unquestionable assumptions. Through precisely this kind of thought experiments, Einstein made a significant part of the theoretical discoveries in the field of the theory of relativity and verified the correctness of his contemporary physical concepts. One of the most famous examples of such consideration is the so-called “twin paradox”, which considers the situation of two twin brothers, one of whom remained on Earth, and the other went on a journey in a spaceship flying at the speed of light. For the latter, time slows down. Returning to Earth, say, ten years later, he will find that his brother has become much older than himself. I must admit, however, that a full understanding of this paradox requires knowledge of complex mathematical formulas, and this, unfortunately, exceeds my abilities.
When I became acquainted with science, I always admired this method of analysis, which in its essence is very close to the methods used in Buddhist philosophy. Before our meeting, Bom was acquainted with the Indian spiritual thinker Jiddu Krishnamurti and had several conversations with him. Sometimes Bohm and I talked about how to relate objective scientific methods to the meditative practice of Buddhism, both approaches being equally empirical.
Thus, in Buddhism, as in science, the main emphasis is on empirical experience and reasoning, but the big difference between the two systems is what forms the basis for empirical consideration in them, as well as in the method of reasoning used to analyze the experience gained . Buddhism has a broader understanding of the scope of empirical experience, since here, in addition to these sense organs, it also includes various meditative states. Advances in technology over the past two hundred years have allowed science to expand the realm of sensory experience to previously unimaginable limits. The observer’s eye, enhanced by such powerful instruments as a microscope or telescope, can now view a wide range of objects – from cells and large molecules to the most distant star clusters of space. Based on this expansion of the horizons of science, scientists were able to significantly expand the boundaries of knowledge. By looking at the traces of elementary particles in bubble chambers, physicists are able to infer the existence and properties of parts of atoms, including even the constituent parts of neutrons, such as quarks and gluons.
One day as a child, while experimenting with a telescope that belonged to the thirteenth Dalai Lama, I had a remarkable experience of the power of logical inference based on empirical observation. According to Tibetan folklore, a rabbit is believed to live on the moon; Europeans seem to see a man there instead of a rabbit. Anyway, one autumn full moon, when the Moon was especially clear, I decided to look at this rabbit through my telescope. To my great surprise, I saw what looked like shadows. This amazed me so much that I asked two of my mentors to also look through the telescope. The presence of shadows on the Moon, I argued, suggests that it is illuminated by the Sun in the same way as the Earth. The mentors looked puzzled, but had to agree with me: the perception of shadows on the Moon is an undoubted fact. When I later saw a photograph of lunar craters in a magazine, I discovered the same effect: inside the crater there was a shadow on only one side. From this I concluded that there is a light source that causes shadows to appear, just as it does on Earth. I came to the conclusion that the Sun was such a source, and was very pleased when I later learned that this was so.
Strictly speaking, this process of reasoning is not specifically Buddhist or exclusively scientific, but is a manifestation of the fundamental activity of the human mind that we constantly use in our daily lives. A classic example of reliable inference as the basis of logic, which is given when teaching novice monks, is to explain that we can judge the presence of fire at a distance from us by a column of rising smoke, and this, in turn, indicates the presence of human habitation there. You can easily imagine a traveler, cold after a long journey and in need of a cup of hot tea. He sees smoke, concludes there is fire and moves in that direction, hoping for a warm overnight stay. Based on such a correct conclusion, the traveler can fulfill his desire to drink hot tea. From observing a phenomenon perceived by the senses, one can learn about things hidden from direct perception. This way of reasoning is common to Buddhism and science.
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On my first visit to Europe in 1973, I had the good fortune to meet another remarkable thinker of the 20th century, the philosopher Karl Popper. Popper, like me, was once forced into exile; he had to flee his hometown of Vienna during the Nazi rule. Subsequently, Popper became one of the most prominent critics of totalitarianism. We soon discovered that we had a lot in common. By the time we met, Popper was already quite an old man (about 70 years old), but retained a radiant look and a clear mind. I could only guess how energetic he was in his younger years from the passion with which he discussed totalitarian regimes. In our conversations, he was ready to talk more about the growing danger of communism, about the threats from totalitarian political systems to personal freedoms and about the openness of society, than about the relationship between science and religion. But I was also able to discuss with him problems concerning scientific methods.
My English at that time was not as good as it is now, and the translator accompanying me was not experienced enough for this kind of conversation. In contrast to empirical science itself, issues of its philosophy and methodology are much more difficult to discuss. Therefore, in this matter, my meetings with Popper turned out to be less fruitful for me than conversations with David Bohm and Karl von Weizsäcker. But we developed a most sincere friendship, and I saw him whenever I visited England, including a memorable visit in 1987 to his home in Kenley, Surrey. I have a great love for flowers and gardening; I especially love orchids and Karl was proud to give me a tour of his wonderful garden and greenhouse. During this meeting I discovered how great an influence Popper had on the philosophy of science, especially in matters of scientific methodology.
One of his main contributions to the development of these disciplines was to clarify the role of inductive and deductive methods of thinking in constructing and proving scientific hypotheses. Induction refers to making generalizations based on a series of empirical observations. Most of our everyday knowledge about cause and effect is obtained inductively: for example, based on repeated observation of the correlation between fire and smoke, we generalize that where there is smoke, there is fire. Deduction is the opposite process, when from knowledge of certain general truths we come to understand the result of a particular observation. For example, if we know that all cars made in Europe after 1995 use unleaded gasoline, and your friend’s car is a 2000 model, you can infer from this that he puts unleaded gasoline in it. Of course, in science, reasoning of this kind, especially when carried out using the deductive method, is much more complex, since it often uses the methods of higher mathematics.
Understanding the role of deduction in reasoning greatly distinguishes the Buddhist approach to viewing the world from the scientific one. In science, unlike Buddhism, the use of complex mathematical constructs in reasoning plays a large role. In Buddhism, as in all other systems of classical Indian philosophy, there has historically been such an application of logic in which reasoning is never separated from a specific context. In contrast, mathematical argumentation in science involves a significant degree of abstraction, and therefore the reliability or unreliability of the argumentation in it directly depends on the degree of correctness of the composition of mathematical formulas. In this sense, the generalization achieved through the use of mathematics is much higher than that which is possible using the methods of traditional logic. And given the successes of the mathematical sciences, it is not difficult to understand why many people believe in the absoluteness of mathematical laws and in the fact that mathematics is the true language of reality, originally inherent in nature itself.
According to my understanding, another difference between science and Buddhism lies in the area of assessing the validity of a hypothesis. And here Popper strictly delineated the area that should be considered the sphere of scientific consideration. I mean his falsifiability thesis, according to which every scientific theory must contain provisions that make it possible to show its falsity. For example, the theory of the existence of God the Creator can never be recognized as scientific, since it does not contain conditions according to which it can be refuted. If we take this position seriously, it turns out that many issues related to the sphere of human existence, such as morality, aesthetics and spirituality, are beyond the scope of scientific consideration. In contrast to this approach, Buddhism is not limited to considering the objective world alone. Its scope also includes the world of subjective experience as well as spiritual matters. In other words, science deals exclusively with empirical facts and not with metaphysics and morals, while for Buddhism the study of all three areas is essential.
Popper’s thesis about falsifiability is consonant with one of the main methodological principles of my own tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, which can be called the “principle of the domain of negation.” According to him, there is a fundamental difference between that which is simply “not discovered” and that which is “discovered to not exist.” For example, if I search for something and don’t find what I’m looking for, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Not discovering a thing does not mean discovering its non-existence. In order to accept the non-detection of a thing as evidence of its non-existence, it is necessary that the search method and the sought-after phenomenon be proportionate. For example, if you don’t see a scorpion on the page of a book in front of you, that is sufficient evidence that there really isn’t a scorpion there. After all, if there was one, you could see it with the naked eye. But just because you can’t see the acid in the paper is not proof that the book is printed on acid-free paper, since detecting acid in paper requires methods other than simple observation with the naked eye. Tibetan philosopher of the 14th century. Tsongkhapa pointed out a similar distinction between what is refuted and what is not proven, and between what does not stand up to critical analysis and what is refuted by such analysis.
Such methodological differences may seem difficult to understand, but they are important in establishing the boundaries of scientific analysis. For example, the fact that science cannot discover the existence of God does not mean that He does not exist from the point of view of followers of the theistic tradition. In the same way, the fact that science considers the fact of repeated births of living beings doubtful does not yet prove the impossibility of rebirths. From the point of view of science, if we have not discovered life on other planets, this does not mean that there is no life anywhere except Earth.
So, in the mid-80s, during a number of my trips, I had both public and private conversations with many Western scientists and philosophers. Some of these meetings, especially at first, were not very fruitful. For example, once in Moscow at the height of the Cold War, I met with a group of scientists, and my attempt to discuss the problems of consciousness was immediately rebuffed because they saw in my words religious propaganda for the idea of the existence of the soul. In Australia, one scientist opened a meeting with a rather strong statement that he intended to defend science from attacks from religion. Nevertheless, 1987 marked an important stage in my entry into the world of science. This year, the first conference entitled “Life and Consciousness” was held at my residence in Dharamsala.
The meeting was organized by Chilean neurophysiologist Francesco Valeri, who taught in Paris, and businessman Adam Ingle. Valery and Ingle approached me with a proposal to gather a group of scientists open to dialogue, specialists in various fields of knowledge, for a week-long informal discussion. I supported their idea. For me it was a wonderful opportunity to become better acquainted with science, learn about the results of the latest research and the progress of scientific thought. Everyone at that first meeting was so enthusiastic that we continue to hold weekly meetings every two years.
I first saw Valery at a conference in Austria. That same year, I was given the opportunity to meet him one-on-one and we immediately became friends. Valery is a thin man with glasses and very soft speech. He combines a keen logical mind with extraordinary clarity of presentation, making him an exceptional teacher. He takes Buddhist philosophy and methods of contemplation very seriously, but expresses his own thoughts in a scientific style, dryly and impartially. I cannot fully express the full extent of my gratitude to Valerie and Ingle, as well as to Berry Hershe, who takes care of organizing the visit of scientists to Dharamsala. I am usually assisted in these conversations by two wonderful translators – American Buddhist scholar Alan Wahls and my personal translator Thubten Jinpa.
It was during the first of these conferences that I first became truly acquainted with the history of the development of scientific thought in the West. In this regard, I was especially interested in the issue of changing the scientific paradigm, that is, the fundamental changes in the picture of the world taking place in culture and the impact they have on all aspects of scientific thought. A classic example of such a paradigm shift is the transition from Newtonian physics to relativistic quantum mechanics that took place at the beginning of the 20th century. At first, the idea of changing scientific paradigms caused me a deep shock. I used to think that science was a constant quest for absolute truth in understanding the nature of reality, in which new research represented successive steps in the gradual increase in the volume of human knowledge about the world. The goal of such a process should be to achieve the end point – complete and perfect knowledge of the world. Now I have learned that the emergence of every new scientific paradigm includes a subjective element, and therefore we should be careful about talking about the objective status of the reality that science describes.
When I talk with open-minded scientists and philosophers, it becomes abundantly clear to me that they have a detailed understanding of the intricacies of science and are fully aware of the limits of scientific knowledge. At the same time, there are many people, both among scientists and among those who are far from science, who sincerely believe that absolutely all aspects of reality are within the limits of scientific knowledge. It is sometimes even suggested that at some point in the development of society, science will finally prove the falsity of all our beliefs – and especially religious faith – and that ultimately there will only be an enlightened, completely secularized, secular society. This was the view promoted by Marxist dialectical materialism, which I became familiar with in conversations with the leaders of Communist China in the 1950s and during my introduction to Marxism while I was still in Tibet. According to such views, science is believed to have completely refuted many of the religious beliefs, such as the idea of the existence of God, grace and an eternal soul. Within these beliefs, anything that is not proven or supported by science is either false or not worthy of attention. These views, in essence, represent a philosophical expression of certain fundamentally metaphysical premises. Just as we avoid dogmatism in science, we should consider spirituality to be free from such restrictions.
Science deals with those aspects of reality and human existence that are accessible to various research methods based on empirical observation, quantitative analysis, experimental repeatability and independent confirmation in which several independent researchers can say: “Yes, I saw the same effect and got same result.” Therefore, the scope of scientific study is limited to the physical world, including the human body, astronomical objects that can be measured by energy, and the functioning of various structures. Empirical observations made on this basis form the field for further experimentation and generalizations that can be included in the larger picture of scientific knowledge. All this together represents the current paradigm of science. It is absolutely clear that it cannot cover all aspects of reality, especially in the sphere of human existence. In addition to the objective world of matter, in the study of which science has achieved great skill, there is a subjective world of feelings, emotions and thoughts, as well as human values and the inspiration that flows from them. If we decide that this area does not play any decisive role in our understanding of reality, we thereby lose touch with the richness and diversity of our own being, and our understanding of the world can never become comprehensive. Reality, which includes the entirety of human experience, is much more complex than it seems to scientific materialism.
Read online. The book “The Universe in One Atom: Science and Spirituality in the Service of the World.” Tenzin Gyatso
Content
Preface. Introduction
1. Meditation
2. My encounter with science
3. Emptiness, relativity and quantum physics
4. The Big Bang Theory and the Buddhist Beginningless Cosmos
5. Evolution, karma and the world of living beings
6. The problem of the emergence of consciousness
7. Towards a science of consciousness
8. Factors of consciousness
9. Ethical problems of modern genetics
Conclusion. Science, Spirituality and Humanity