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-This summer, as they have the past several years, professors from across the United States and elsewhere are traveling to three major Tibetan monastic universities in Southern India to train monastics in the philosophy of science, physics, biology, and neuroscience.
-Students in the program say they have come to view science as a useful tool to investigate human emotion and the nature of consciousness.
-Buddhism “isn’t just a philosophical, feel good, different way of looking at things,” said Eisen. “It shifts the way that you address the question you’re asking … and therefore it shifts your hypothesis and it shifts your experiments.”
-Eisen credits the success of the program to how teachers and monks have navigated tensions between science and religion.
-Logic is what they are sharpest in,” Eisen said. “They can beat you at a debate on pretty much anything in a matter of seconds.”
-Monastics, despite their intellect, often had no exposure to math — most had never seen an equal sign. And because they learned through memorization, monks and nuns were not used to taking notes and writing laboratory reports.
-In the United States, you find “a bunch of hotshot [medical and graduate] students trying to advance their career,” said Wilkie. The monks, by contrast, are “really trying to understand how the scientific approach can be used in the context of Tibetan Buddhism to understand their world.”
Monks at Drepung monastery studying bacteria
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