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Dalai Lama Gives Talk On Science
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 text for his speech to the Society for Neuroscience at the Washington Convention Center, the Dalai Lama said moral thinking "has not been able to keep pace with such rapid progress in our acquisition of knowledge and power." (Photos By Kevin Wolf -- Associated Press) |
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."
