Citations are collected by Dr. Hubert Koller.
Reproduced with permission by the private office of His Holiness. The copyright of this page remains with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama!

Prologue

I was never myself trained in science. My knowledge comes mainly from reading news coverage of important scientific stories in magazines like Newsweek, or hearing reports on the BBC World Service and later reading textbooks on astronomy. Over the last thirty years I have held many personal meetings and discussions with scientists. In these encounters, I have always attempted to grasp the underlying models and methods of scientific thought as well as the implications of particular theories or new discoveries. But I have nonetheless thought deeply about science - not just its implications for the understanding of what reality is but the still more important question of how it may influence ethics and human values.
...
I remember a disturbing conversation I had had only a few years earlier with an American lady who was married to a Tibetan. Having heard of my interest in science and my active engagement in dialogue with scientists, she warned me of the danger science poses to the survival of Buddhism. She told me that history attests to the fact that science is the 'killer' of religion and advised me that it was not wise for the Dalai Lama to pursue friendships with those who represent this profession. By taking this personal journey into science, I suppose I have stuck my neck out. My confidence in venturing into science lies in my basic belief that as in science so in Buddhism, understanding the nature of reality is pursued by means of critical investigation: if scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.
...
Regardless of different personal views about science, no credible understanding of the natural world or our human existence - what I am going to call in this book a world view - can ignore the basic insights of theories as key as evolution, relativity and quantum mechanics. It may be that science will learn from an engagement with spirituality, especially in its interface with wider human issues, from ethics to society, but certainly some specific aspects of Buddhist thought - such as its old cosmological theories and its rudimentary physics - will have to be modified in the light of new scientific insights.
...

Encounter with Science

Among the other items of mechanical interest acquired by the Thirteenth Dalai Lama were a pocket watch, two film projectors and three cars - two Baby Austins from 1927 and a 1931 American Dodge. ...

I knew what the pocket watch was for but was much more intrigued by how it worked. I puzzled over this for some time, until curiosity got the better of me and I opened up the case to look inside. Soon I had dismantled the entire item, and the challenge was to put it back together again so that it actually worked. This began what was to become a lifelong hobby of dismantling and reassembling mechanical objects. I mastered this process well enough to become the principal repairer for a number of the people I know who owned watches or clocks in Lhasa. In India later on, I did not have much luck with my cuckoo clock, whose poor cuckoo got attacked by my cat and never recovered. When the automatic battery watch became common, my hobby got much less interesting - if you open one of these, you find hardly any mechanism at all.
...
One day I sneaked one of the Austins out for a solo drive but had a small accident and broke the left headlight. I was terrified of what Babu Tashi, another man in charge of the cars, might say. I managed to find a replacement headlight, but it was of clear glass, whereas the original had been frosted. After some thought, I found a solution. I reproduced the light's frosted appearance by covering it with molten sugar. I never knew if Babu Tashi found out. If he did, at least he never punished me.
...
One of my first teachers of science - and one of my closest scientific friends - was the German physicist and philosopher Carl von Weizsäcker, the brother of the West German president. Though he would describe himself as a politically active professor of philosophy who had been trained as a physicist, in the 1930s von Weizsäcker was employed as an assistant to the quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg. I will never forget von Weizsäcker's infectious and inspiring example as a man who constantly worried about the effects - especially the ethical and political consequences - of science.
...
Science deals with that aspect of reality and human experience that lends itself to a particular method of inquiry susceptible to empirical observation, quantification and measurement, repeatability and intersubjective verification - more than one person has to be able to say, 'Yes, I saw the same thing. I got the same results.' So legitimate scientific study is limited to the physical world, including the human body, astronomical bodies, measurable energy and how structures work. The empirical findings generated in this way form the basis for further experimentation and for generalisations that can be incorporated into the wider body of scientific knowledge. This is effectively the current paradigm of what constitutes science. Clearly, this paradigm does not and cannot exhaust all aspects of reality, in particular the nature of human existence. In addition to the objective world of matter, which science is masterful at exploring, there exists the subjective world of feelings, emotions, thoughts and the values and spiritual aspirations based on them. If we treat this realm as though it had no constitutive role in our understanding of reality, we lose the richness of our own existence and our understanding cannot be comprehensive. Reality, including our own existence, is so much more complex than objective scientific materialism allows.
...

Emptiness, Relativity and Quantum Physics

...
Regarding the conceptual implications of the results of the double-slit experiment, I think there is still considerable debate. Heisenberg's famous uncertainty principle states that the more precise one's measurement of an electron's position the more uncertain is one's knowledge of its momentum, and the more precise one's measurement of its momentum the more uncertain one is of its position. One can know at any one time where an electron is but not what it is doing, or what it is doing but not where it is. Again this shows that the observer is fundamental: in choosing to learn an electron's momentum, we exclude learning its position; in choosing to learn its position, we exclude learning its momentum. The observer, then, is effectively a participant in the reality being observed. I realise that this issue of the observer's role is one of the thorniest questions in quantum mechanics. Indeed, at the Mind and Life conference in 1997, the various scientific participants held differently nuanced views. Some would argue that the observer's role is limited to the choice of measuring apparatus, while others accord greater importance to the observer's role as a constitutive element in the reality being observed.

This issue has long been a focus of discussion in Buddhist thought. On one extreme are the Buddhist 'realists', who believe that the material world is composed of indivisible particles which have an objective reality independent of the mind. On the other extreme are the 'idealists', the so-called Mind-only school, who reject any degree of objective reality in the external world. They perceive the external material world to be, in the final analysis, an extension of the observing mind. There is, however, a third standpoint, which is the position of the Prasangika school, a perspective held in the highest esteem by the Tibetan tradition. In this view, although the reality of the external world is not denied, it is understood to be relative. It is contingent upon our language, social conventions and shared concepts. The notion of a pre-given, observer-independent reality is untenable. As in the new physics, matter cannot be objectively perceived or described apart from the observer - matter and mind are co-dependent.

...

The Big Bang and The Buddhist Beginningless Universe

...
Buddhism and science share a fundamental reluctance to postulate a transcendent being as the origin of all things. This is hardly surprising given that both these investigative traditions are essentially non-theistic in their philosophical orientations. However, if on the one hand, the big bang is taken to be the absolute beginning, which implies that the universe has an absolute moment of origin, unless one refuses to speculate beyond this cosmic explosion, cosmologists must accept willy-nilly some kind of transcendent principle as the cause of the universe. This may not be the same God that the theists postulate; nonetheless, in its primary role as the creator of the universe, this transcendent principle will be a kind of godhead.
On the other hand, if (as some scientists have suggested) the big bang is less a starting point than a point of thermodynamic instability, there is room for a more nuanced and complex understanding of this cosmic event. I am told that many scientists feel the jury is still out as to whether the big bang is the absolute beginning of everything. The only conclusive empirical evidence so far, I am told, is that our own cosmic environment seems to have evolved from an intensely hot, dense state. Until more convincing evidence can be found for the various aspects of the big bang theory, and the key insights of quantum physics and the theory of relativity are fully integrated, many of the cosmological questions raised here will remain in the realm of metaphysics, not empirical science.
...
Buddhist cosmology establishes the cycle of the universe in the following way: first there is a period of formation, next a period when the universe endures, then a period when it is destroyed, followed by a period of void before the formation of a new universe. During the fourth period, that of emptiness, the space particles subsist, and it is from these particles that all the matter within a new universe is formed. It is in these space particles that we find the fundamental cause of the entire physical world. If we wish to describe the formation of the universe and the physical bodies of beings, we need to analyse the way the different elements constituting that universe were able to take shape from these space particles.
...
There is a further challenge to the very enterprise of obtaining full knowledge of the original unfolding of our universe. At the fundamental level, quantum mechanics tells us that it is impossible to predict accurately how a particle might behave in a given situation. One can, therefore, make predictions about the behaviour of particles only on the basis of probability. If this is so, no matter how powerful one's mathematical formulas might be, since our knowledge of the initial conditions of a given phenomenon or an event will always be incomplete, we cannot fully understand how the rest of the story unfolds. At best, we can make approximate conjectures, but we can never arrive at a complete description even of a single atom, let alone the entire universe.
In the Buddhist world, there is an acknowledgement of the practical impossibility of gaining total knowwledge of the origin of the universe.
...
Even with all these profound scientific theories of the origin of the universe, I am left with questions, serious ones. What existed before the big bang? Where did the big bang come from? What caused it? Why has our planet evolved to support life? What is the relationship between the cosmos and the beings that have evolved within it? Scientists may dismiss these questions as nonsensical, or they may acknowledge their importance but deny that they belong to the domain of scientific inquiry. However, both these approaches will have the consequence of acknowledging definite limits to our scientific knowledge of the origin of our cosmos. I am not subject to the professional or ideological constraints of a radically materialistic world view. And in Buddhism the universe is seen as infinite and beginningless, so I am quite happy to venture beyond the big bang and speculate about possible states of affairs before it.

Evolution, Karma and The World of Sentience

...
Darwinian evolution is the conceptual underpinning of modern biology. The theory of evolution, and in particular the notion of natural selection, provides the big picture of the origin of diverse life-forms. As I understand it, the theories of evolution and natural selection are attempts to account for the miraculous variety of living things. The spectacular richness of life and the huge differences among the many species are explained by the scientific idea that new forms are created by the alteration of prce or between living organisms and inanimate matter - has significant ramifications, among them a difference in how the two investigative traditions may regard consciousness. For biology, consciousness is a secondary issue, since it is a characteristic of a subset of living organisms rather than of all of life. In Buddhism, since the definition of 'living' refers to sentient beings, consciousness is the primary characteristic of 'life'.
One implicit assumption I have sometimes found in Western thought is that, in the story of evolution, human beings enjoy a unique existential status. This uniqueness is often understood in terms of some kind of 'soul' or 'self-consciousness', which only humans are thought to possess. Many people appear to assume implicitly three incremental stages in the development of life: inanimate matter, living organisms and human beings. Behind this view may lie an idea that human beings occupy a distinctly different category from animals and plants. Strictly speaking, this is not a scientific concept.
In contrast, if one examines the history of Buddhist philosophical thinking, there is an understanding that animals are closer to humans (in that both are sentient beings) than they are to plants. This understanding is based on the notion that, insofar as their sentience is concerned, there is no difference between humans and animals. Just as we humans wish to eseape suffering and to seek happiness, so do animals. Similarly, just as we humans have the capacity to experience pain and pleasure, so do animals. Philosophically speaking, from the Buddhist point of view, both human beings and animals possess what in Tibetan is called shepa, which can be roughly translated as 'consciousness', albeit to different degrees of complexity. In Buddhism, there is no recognition of the presence of something like the 'soul' that is unique to humans. From the perspective of consciousness, the difference between humans and animals is a matter of degree and not of kind.
... The theory of karma is of signal importance in Buddhist thought but is easily misrepresented. Literally, karma means 'action' and refers to the intentional acts of sentient beings. Such acts may be physical, verbal er mental - even just thoughts or feelings - all of which have impacts upon the psyche of an individual, no matter how minute. Intentions result in acts, which result in effects that condition the mind towards certain traits and propensities, all of which may give rise to further intentions and actions. The entire process is seen as an endless self-perpetuating dynamic. The chain reaction of interlocking causes and effects operates not only in individuals but also for groups and societies, not just in one lifetime but across many lifetimes.
When we use the term karma, we may refer both to specific and individual acts and to the whole principle of such causation. In Buddhism, this karmic causality is seen as a fundamental natural process and not as any kind of divine mechanism or working out of a preordained design. Apart from the karma of individual sentient beings, whether it is collective or personal, it is entirely erroneous to think of karma as some transcendental unitary entity that acts like a god in a theistic system or adeterminist law by which a person's life is fated. From the scientific view, the theory of karma may be a metaphysical assumption - but it is no more so than the assumption that all of life is material and originated out of pure chance.
...
Regardless of how persuasive the Darwinian account of the origins of life may be, as a Buddhist, I find it leaves one crucial area unexamined. This is the origin of sentience - the evolution of conscious beings who have the capacity to experience pain and pleasure. After all, from the Buddhist perspective, the human quest for knowledge and understanding of one's existence stems from a profound aspiration to seek happiness and overcome suffering. Until there is a credible understanding of the nature and origin of consciousness, the scientific story of the origins of life and the cosmos will not be complete.
...

Consciousness

...
All this work can illuminate one side of the picture of consciousness. But unlike the study of a three-dimensional material object in space, the study of consciousness, including the entire range of its phenomena and everything that falls under the rubric of subjective experience, has two components. One is what happens to the brain and to the behaviour of the individual (what brain science and behavioural psychology are equipped to explore), but the other is the phenomenological experience of the cognitive, emotional and psychological states themselves. lt is for this latter element that the application of a first-person method is essential. To put it another way, although the experience of happiness may coincide with certain chemical reactions in the brain, such as an increase in serotonin, no amount of biochemical and neurobiological description of this brain change can explain what happiness is.
...
In the study of perception and cognition, I can envision a fruitful collaboration between Buddhism and modern neuroscience. Buddhism has much to learn about the brain mechanisms related to mental events - neurological and chemical processes, the formation of synaptic connections, the correlation between specific cognitive states and specific areas of the brain. In addition, there is much value in the medical and biopharmacological knowledge currently being generated about how brains function when parts have been damaged and how certain substances induce particular states.
At one of the Mind and Life conferences, Francisco Varela showed me aseries of MRI images, horizontal crosssections of a single brain with parts lit up in different colours to indicate relative neural and chemical activity associated with various sensory experiences. These images were the results of experiments in which the subject was exposed to different sensory stimuli (such as music or visual objects) and then recorded in different responses (such as with the eyes open or dosed). It was very convincing to see the dose correlation between the measurable, visible changes in the brain and the occurrence of specific sensory perceptions. It is this level of technical precision and the possibilities that arise from the use of such instruments that mark the marvellous potential of scientific work. When rigorous third-person investigation is combined with rigorous first-person investigation, we can hope to have a more comprehensive method of studying consciousness.
...
From an experiential point of view, one difference between the afflictive emotions, such as hate, and wholesome states, such as compassion, is that the afflictions tend to fixate the mind on a concrete target - a person to whom we become attached, a smell or sound we want to push away. The wholesome emotions, by contrast, can be more diffuse, so the focus is not confined to one person or one object. There is therefore in Buddhist psychology a notion that the more wholesome mental states have a higher cognitive component than the negative afflictions. Again, this might prove an interesting area of research and camparisan with Western science.
...

Ethics and The New Genetics
...
The most urgent questions that arise have to do more with ethics than with science per se, with correctly applying our knowledge and power in relation to the new possibilities opened by cloning, by unlocking the genetic code and other advances. These issues relate to the possibilities for genetic manipulation not only of human beings and animals but also of plants and the environment of which we are all part. At he art the issue is the relationship between our knowledge and power on the one hand and our responsibility on the other.
...
When I think about the various new ways of manipulating human genetics, I can't help but feel that there is something profoundly lacking in our appreciation of what it is to cherish humanity. In my native Tibet, the value of a person rests not on physical appearance, not on intellectual or athletic achievement, but on the basic, innate capacity for compassion in all human beings. Even modern medical science has demonstrated how crucial affection is for human beings, especially during the first few weeks of life. The simple power of touch is critical for the basic development of the brain. In regard to his or her value as a human being, it is entirely irrelevant whether an individual has some kind of disability - for instance, Down syndrome - or a genetic disposition to develop a particular disease, such as sickle-cell anemia, Huntington's chorea or Alzheimer's. All human beings have an equal value and an equal potential for goodness. To ground our appreciation of the value of a human being in genetic make-up is bound to impoverish humanity, because there is so much more to human beings than their genomes.
...
I feel the time is ripe to engage with the ethical side of the genetic revolution in a manner that transcends the doctrinal standpoints of individual religions. We must rise to the ethical challenge as members of one human family, not as a Buddhist, a Jew, a Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim. Nor is it adequate to address these ethical challenges from the perspective of purely secular, liberal political ideals, such as individual freedom, choice and fairness. We need to examine the questions from the perspective of a global ethics that is grounded in the recognition of fundamental human values that transcend religion and science.

Conclusion
...
What is the place of science in the totality ot human endeavour? It has investigated everything from the smallest amoeba to the complex neurobiological system of human beings, from the creation of the universe and the emergence of life on earth to the very nature of matter and energy. Science has been spectacular in exploring reality. It has not only revolutionised our knowledge but opened new avenues of knowing. It has begun to make inroads into the complex question of consciousness - the key characteristic that makes us sentient. The question is whether science can provide a comprehensive understanding of the entire spectrum of reality and human existence.
From the Buddhist perspective, a full human understanding must not only offer a coherent account of reality, our means of apprehending it and the place of consciousness but also include a clear awareness of how we should act. In the current paradigm of science, only knowledge derived through a strictly empirical method underpinned by observation, inference and experimental verification can be considered valid. This method involves the use of quantification and measurement, repeatability and confirmation by others. Many aspects of reality as weIl as some key elements of human existence, such as the ability to distinguish between good and evil, spirituality, artistic creativity - some of ihe things we most value about human beings - inevitably fall outside the scope of the method. Scientific knowledge, as it stands today, is not complete. Recognising this fact, and clearly recognising the limits of scientific knowledge, I believe, is essential. Only by such recognition can we genuinely appreciate the need to integrate science within the totality of human knowledge. Otherwise our conception of the world, including our own existence, will be limited to the facts adduced by science, leading to a deeply reductionist, materialistic, even nihilistic world view.
My difficulty is not with reductionism as such. Indeed, many of our great advances have been made by applying the reductionist approach that characterises so much scientific experimentation and analysis. The problem arises when reductionism, which is essentially a method, is turned into a metaphysical standpoint. Understandably this reflects a common tendency to conflate the means with the end, especially when a specific method is highly effective. In a powerful image, a Buddhist text reminds us that when someone points his finger at the moon, we should direct our gaze not at the tip of the finger but at the moon to which it is pointing. ...