Emory University has received a grant of $1 million from the Dalai Lama Trust to continue to support the endowment fund of The Robert A. Paul Emory-Tibet Science Initiative. This allowance will help fund a six-year science curriculum, that includes video libraries and dozens of textbooks taught by Emory.
Buddhist monks have been going to study science at Western universities in order to create a curriculum including science education. This is the first change in Tibetan monastery and scholastic curriculum in 600 years.
Recently, there was an interview with the Dalai Lama where he stated he doesn’t view Buddhist efforts to reach out to Western scientists as part of a dialogue between a religion and modern science or trying to bring spirituality and science together.
Instead, he said he views Buddhist attempts, through practice and rigorous philosophical debate among its traditions, to understand the nature of the mind and to deal with its pathologies over a couple of thousand years to have produce a body of knowledge that’s something of a science in itself. In his view, these dialogues allow Buddhists to contribute to the current scientific research on psychology while learning about other aspects of science that Buddhists previously neglected.
If scientific research reaches an unassailable consensus on some issue that contradicts with the Buddhist view on it, then the scientific research has to take precedence over Buddhist doctrine. Because Buddhisms is non-thesitic and rejects the claim that the universe was created by a diety, there’s a whole host of issues it avoids that theistic religions have to deal with in reconciling themselves to the progress and findings of the scientific project.
