As a result, the Dalai Lama was inspired to embark upon a long journey of close conversations with some of the 20th century’s greatest scientific minds, including the physicists David Bohm and Von Weisacker as well as Sir Karl Popper and the Chilean neuroscientist Francisco Varela. From 1987 onwards, through the auspices of the Mind and Life dialogues, the Dalai Lama has held week-long bi-annual conversations with scientists on such diverse topics as quantum physics, astronomy, brain plasticity, human emotions, the origin of life, and consciousness.

What characterizes these exchanges between the Dalai Lama and the scientists is, first and foremost a spirit of openness on both sides, a sense of genuine humility that allows the possibility that legitimate sources of knowledge may lie in modes of knowing other than one’s own discipline. In addition, there is a deep ethical commitment where a guiding motivation remains the betterment of humanity as a whole. Finally, there is the acknowledgment of a need for and the willingness to change in the light of a deep engagement with the other. The Dalai Lama is well-known for his remark that if science conclusively disproves aspects of traditional Buddhist concepts, then Buddhists will need to modify their beliefs accordingly. The Dalai Lama is suggesting what is perhaps the most important benefit of such an interdisciplinary dialogue, namely that it can serve as a process whereby the other side becomes a point of reference for one’s own critical self-reflection. For this to happen, there needs to be a genuine respect for each other so that one side does not feel the need to reduce the other side into the framework of one’s own discipline.

For Buddhism, the spiritual tradition involved in these dialogues in the person of the Dalai Lama, clearly the benefits are obvious. From the amazing discoveries of the minutest aspects of matter to the origin of the cosmos and life itself, the insights of modern science can clearly enrich the classical Buddhist worldview. The critical question is what can science gain from such a close engagement? As someone who has been privileged to be present as a principal interpreter at many of these meetings, I see this question to be most critical, especially from the point of view of the wider question of the interface of science and spirituality. For one thing, such dialogues could help remind the scientists of the key objective that motivated the very enterprise of science in the first place. All too often, in the midst of their minute analysis of a specific field of science, scientists forget that, like religion, science too is a human enterprise whose primary goal is to serve humanity. This naturally raises the critical question of the place of ethics in science. Engaging with spirituality, science can, for example, bring a much deeper appreciation of the ethical challenges raised by new discoveries such as human genome and the attendant powers these new knowledge tend to bring to us humans.

Another important corrective function such dialogues could serve is to challenge what could be called the naïve tendency that often result in conflating scientific facts with reductionist, scientific materialistic assumptions. Equating “absence of evidence” with “evidence of absence,” proponents of scientific materialism promote a totalizing conception of scientific knowledge as embracing the entire spectrum of reality. The danger of this is, as the Dalai Lama writes in his recent book Universe in a Single Atom, “our conception of the world, including our own existence, will be limited to the facts adduced by science, leading to a deeply reductionist, materialist, even nihilistic worldview.” By engaging deeply with spirituality, scientists can appreciate that science represents a unique, but not by any means an exclusive, mode of knowing.

Perhaps one of the most concrete benefits to come out of the Dalai Lama’s engagement with scientists is to bring to the forefront of scientific inquiry the question of how conscious, deliberate mental training can effect observable change on the brain level. Today, this inquiry has led to a whole new area of scientific study sometimes referred to as “contemplative science.” The Dalai Lama’s hope is that, through serious engagement with spirituality, there could emerge eventually a form of science that constitutes, in his Buddhist language, a “union of wisdom and compassion.” This would be a form of science where “the full richness and the simple wholesomeness of human values” are brought to bear upon “the course of science and the direction of technology in human society.”

Thupten Jinpa has been a principal English translator to H.H. the Dalai Lama since 1985. He has translated and edited more than 10 books by the Dalai Lama including the New York Times bestseller "Ethics for the New Millennium." He is president of the Institute of Tibetan Classics in Montréal, Canada, and the editor-in-chief of the translation project The Library of Tibetan Classics, being developed by the Institute.