Day 5 Afternoon Discussion - Mind & Life Institute

Dialogue 6|Session 10

Overview

In this concluding session, Eiko Ikegami reflects on the value of bringing scientific inquiry, spiritual experience, and Asian and Western traditions into genuine critical dialogue, while Piet Hut argues that science offers a powerful but incomplete view because it has not yet fully incorporated meaning, values, beauty, and subjective experience. The discussion examines whether logic develops from experience or exists independently of it, comparing Western logic and quantum logic with Buddhist syllogisms, consequential reasoning, Dharmakirti’s epistemology, and Nagarjuna’s fourfold analysis. Robert Livingston and Tu Weiming return to the importance of embodied experience and the interaction between analytical knowledge and inner cultivation, while audience questions address divination, unfiltered awareness, the Buddha’s refusal to answer certain cosmological questions, and whether science could eventually investigate or simulate enlightenment. The dialogue closes with the Dalai Lama expressing gratitude for the scientists’ openness and emphasizing that knowledge should ultimately be guided by compassion, responsibility, and the shared effort to benefit humanity.

Dialogue 6
10 sessions
October 31, 1997
Dharamsala, India
ML6-day5-06311997-Hut_Discussion |docx|
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Speakers

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Arthur Zajonc, PhD, was professor of physics at Amherst College from 1978 to 2012, when he became President of the Mind & Life Institute. His research has included studies in electron-atom physics, parity violation in atoms, quantum optics, the experimental foundations of quantum physics, and the relationship between science, the humanities and the contemplative traditions. He has also written extensively on Goethe’s science work. He is author of the book: Catching the Light, co-author of The Quantum Challenge, and co-editor of Goethe’s Way of Science. In 1997, he served as scientific coordinator for the Mind and Life dialogue published as The New Physics and Cosmology: Dialogues with the Dalai Lama. He organized the 2002 dialogue with the Dalai Lama, “The Nature of Matter, the Nature of Life,” and acted as moderator at MIT for the “Investigating the Mind” Mind and Life dialogue in 2003, the proceedings of which were published under the title The Dalai Lama at MIT. While directing the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, Arthur fostered the use of contemplative practice in college and university classrooms, and he continues to speak around the world on the importance of contemplative pedagogy. Out of this work and his long-standing meditative practice, Zajonc has most recently authored Meditation as Contemplative Inquiry: When Knowing Becomes Love. He has also been General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in America, a co-founder of the Kira Institute, president of the Lindisfarne Association, and a senior program director at the Fetzer Institute.

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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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Robert Livingston is Professor of Neurosciences Emeritus at UCSD. He received his undergraduate and medical degrees from Stanford University. Prior to founding the world's first Department of Neurosciences, the first department in the new School of Medicine at UCSD in 1965; he taught Neuropathology at Stanford, Neurophysiology at Yale, Psychiatry at Harvard, and Physiology and Anatomy at the UCLA Medical School. He also served as Executive Assistant to the President of the National Academy of Sciences and Chairman of the National Research Council; and as Scientific Director for both the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Blindness. Livingston has held research and teaching fellowships at the Université de Genève, Collège de France, Oxford University, Göteborg University, University of Hawaii, and University ofZürich. He is active in Physicians for Social Responsibility, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, and Beyond War. He participated in the founding of the Council for a Livable World, the Institute for Policy Studies and the Elmwood Institute.

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