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Lama's invitation be withdrawn.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."
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