India Tibet Monastic Science
Dhramsala, India -- THE shouts of more than a dozen
Tibetan monks echo through the small classroom. Fingers are pointed.
Voices collide. When an important point is made, the men smack their
hands together and stomp the floor, their robes billowing around them.
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A Tibetan Buddhist monk answers a question during a class at an
educational complex in Sarah, India. (AP Photo/Altaf Qadri) Source: AP
It's the way Tibetan Buddhist scholars have traded ideas for
centuries. Among them, the debate-as-shouting match is a discipline and a
joy.
But this is something different.
Evolutionary theory is mentioned - loudly. One monk invokes
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Another shouts about the subatomic
nature of neutrinos.
In an educational complex perched on the edge of a small river
valley, in a place where the Himalayan foothills descend into the Indian
plains, a group of about 65 Tibetan monks and nuns are working with
American scientists to tie their ancient culture to the modern world.
"I'd like to go back to my monastery ... to pass on my knowledge to
other monks so that they might bring the (scientific) process to
others,'' said Tenzin Choegyal, a 29-year-old monk born in exile in
India.
If that seems a modest goal, it reflects an immense change in Tibetan
culture, where change has traditionally come at a glacial pace.
Isolated for centuries atop the high Himalayan plateau, and refusing
entry to nearly all outsiders, Tibet long saw little of value in
modernity.
Education was almost completely limited to monastic schools. Magic
and mysticism were - and are - important parts of life to many people.
New technologies were something to be feared: eyeglasses were largely
forbidden until well into the 20th century.
No longer. Pushed by the Dalai Lama, a fierce proponent of modern
schooling, a series of programs were created in exile to teach
scientific education to monks, the traditional core of Tibetan culture.
At the forefront is an intensive summer program, stretched over five
years, that brings professors from Emory University in Atlanta. For six
days a week, six hours a day, the professors teach everything from basic
math to advanced neuroscience.
``The Buddhist religion has a deep concept of the mind that goes back
thousands of years,'' said Larry Young, an Emory psychiatry professor
and prominent neuroscientist. ``Now they're learning something different
about the mind: the mind-body interface, how the brain controls the
body.''
The first group from the Emory program - 26 monks and two nuns - have
just finished their five years of summer classes. While they earned no
degrees, they are expected to help introduce a science curriculum into
the monastic academies, and will take with them Tibetan-language science
textbooks the program has developed.
The Dalai Lama realises that ``preservation of the culture will occur
through change,'' said Carol Worthman, a professor of anthropology in
Emory's Laboratory for Comparative Human Biology. ``You have to change
to stay in place.''
But change is a complicated thing. Particularly with a culture like this one.
The monks and nuns in the Emory program are ``the best and the
brightest,'' Worthman said, brought to the Sarah complex from
monasteries and convents across India and Nepal. While most are in their
20s or 30s, some are far older and long ago earned high-level degrees
in Buddhist philosophy.
Still, few learned anything but basic maths before the Emory program.
Because of the way they study - focusing on debates and the memorising
long written passages, but doing comparatively little writing - few are
able to take notes during classroom lectures. Many were raised to see
magic as an integral part of the world around them.?
To watch them in class, though, is astonishing.
No one yawns. No one dozes. Since almost no one takes notes, it's easy to think they're not paying attention.?
But then a monk or a nun in a red robe calls out a question about
brain chemistry - or cell biology or logic - that can leave their
teachers stunned.
Though most studied only religious subjects after eighth grade, they
regularly traverse highly complex concepts: ``They really understand how
neurocircuits work at a level that's comparable to what we see at an
undergraduate neuroscience classroom in the US,'' said Dr Young, the
neuroscientist.
For most of the monastics, though, the challenges are not in the
academic rigor. They see nothing astonishing about their ability to
process vast amounts of information without taking notes, or to remain
attentive for hours on end. It is how they have been trained.
For them, the challenges lie in weaving modern science with traditional beliefs.?
The science program ``was sort of like a culture shock for me,'' said
Choegyal, who is based at a monastery in southern India. While Tibetan
Buddhism puts a high value on scepticism, conclusions are reached
through philosophical analysis - not through clinical research and reams
of scientific data.
So it was difficult, at first, for many of the students. And the
questions ranged across science and philosophy: Are bacteria sentient
beings? How does science know that brain chemistry affects emotions? Are
Tibetan beliefs in mysticism provable through science?
At times, the program can seem incongruous, given the widespread
belief in magic. Such beliefs go all the way to the top: The Dalai Lama
still consults the official state oracle, a monk who divines the future
from a temple complex not far from here.
But after five years, Choegyal says he has managed to hold onto his core beliefs while delving deeply into science.?
"Buddhism basically talks about truth, or reality, and science really
supports that," he said. Questions that science cannot address, like
the belief in reincarnation, he brushes aside as "subtle issues."
Instead, he mostly finds echoes across the two cultures.?
He points to karma, the ancient Buddhist belief in a cycle of cause
and effect, and how it plays into reincarnation. Then he points to the
similarities with evolutionary theory.
"Everything evolves, or it changes," he said, whether in evolution or
in reincarnation. "So it's pretty similar, except some sort of
reasoning?