Dear CiteFriends,
Read this article yesterday, and thought I should share it with all, especially those who are interested in the Dalai Lama talk as mentioned by DrJi.
Source: The Washington Post
http://washingtonpost.com <link updated to site home>
AR2005111201080_pf.html
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; 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Dalai Lama's invitation be withdrawn.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."
Smiles and Peace