Opening Remarks with the Dalai Lama - Mind & Life Institute

Dialogue 15|Session 1

Overview

Mind & Life Institute president Adam Engle shares opening remarks followed by Emory University president James W. Wagner who announces that the Dalai Lama’s installation as an Emory Presidential Distinguished Professor. The Dalai Lama follows with remarks highlighting two core commitments: promoting human values, especially compassion, through secular ethics, and fostering religious harmony. He emphasizes the importance of integrating modern science with Buddhist insights on the mind, arguing that collaboration enriches understanding. He praises scientific engagement in monastic education and commends Emory’s serious efforts and the conference’s value in advancing knowledge and human well-being.

Dialogue 15
8 sessions
October 20, 2007
Dharamsala, Himachal Pradesh, India
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Speakers

Tenzin Gyatso, the14th Dalai Lama, is the leader of Tibetan Buddhism and a spiritual leader revered worldwide. He was born on July 6, 1935, in a small village called Taktser in northeastern Tibet. Born to a peasant family, he was recognized at the age of two, in accordance with Tibetan tradition, as the reincarnation of his predecessor, the 13th Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lamas are manifestations of the Buddha of Compassion, who choose to reincarnate for the purpose of serving human beings. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1989, he is universally respected as a spokesman for the compassionate and peaceful resolution of human conflict. He has traveled extensively, speaking on subjects including universal responsibility, love, compassion and kindness. Less well known is his intense personal interest in the sciences; he has said that if he were not a monk, he would have liked to be an engineer. As a youth in Lhasa it was he who was called on to fix broken machinery in the Potala Palace, be it a clock or a car. He has a vigorous interest in learning the newest developments in science, and brings to bear both a voice for the humanistic implications of the findings, and a high degree of intuitive methodological sophistication.

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