Graduation of the First Cohort of Monastic Science Leaders

We are exceptionally pleased to announce the graduation of the first cohort of the Sager Science Leadership Institute for Monks! This is a significant historic achievement, and for the first time in the history of Tibetan Buddhism, Tibetan monastics, 30 of them, will be deployed as teachers and leaders of science education to several major monastic institutions that include; Sera, Gaden, Drepung, Sakya, and Bon (Tashi Menri) Monastery. These five institutions are home to approximately 15,000 monks, many eager to learn science! The graduation ceremony will be graced by the Minister for Education, CTA, Mr. Thupten Lungrik la at Deer Park, Bir, on May 14, 2010 at 2.30 p.m.

The new graduates will bring back to their home monasteries a variety of teaching strategies and educational materials, from cosmology to neuroscience, developed through support of the Sager Family Foundation that include; hands-on activities, translated articles, writing assignments, and fully translated and dubbed educational science videos. In addition to teaching other monks science, the science leaders will publish articles on Buddhism and science, conduct science exhibition, organize dialogues on the interface of science and spirituality, and help develop the vision and materials that grow opportunities for monastics to engage with science at their home monastic institutions.

Since 2001, the Sager Family Foundation has been working in partnership with the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives (LTWA) in Dharamshala, India, to provide opportunities for Tibetan Buddhist monks exiled in India to study science. Through the Science for Monks program, a critical mass of monks with sufficient knowledge and interest in sharing science, as well as substantial demand for science education, was created through annual intensive 4-week science education workshops, for 50 monks, organized from 2001 to 2007. A major outcome of this work was the launch of the Science Leadership Institute in 2008, through which, thirty of these monastics were trained to teach and lead science education. The Science Leadership Institute organized local monastic leadership groups supported through bi-annual 2-week workshops implemented by expert teachers from major education institutions, including the Exploratorium in San Francisco, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Arizona, Tucson.

In addition to continued support of the 1st cohort, a second cohort of 30 monastics will be recruited in 2011, expanding the study groups and science centers to new traditions of Tibetan Buddhism both in India and Nepal. The new cohort will also include a strong representation of nuns! There are hundreds of monastic institutions eager to engage with science, and the Sager Family Foundation is committed to partnering with this historic initiative for many years to come.

LTWA has also developed collaboration with many other educational institutes in the west including Emory University which is now supporting the creation of a comprehensive science curriculum for all the monasteries. The primary responsibility of the monastic science education is led by the science department at the LTWA headed by Director Geshe Lhakdor. The science department undertakes many of science educational programs including the organization of annual science workshops, scientific terminology translation seminars, popular science book translations, and short science courses. The department also publishes a quarterly science newsletter and bi-annual science journals in Tibetan.

Science Leadership Institute IV – Drepung

Science Leadership Institute – IV

The fourth meeting of the Science Leadership Institute at Drepung Monastery in India was a great success as result of lots of hard work and planning of the Science Department at LTWA, the excellent team of teachers assembled, and the dedication and focus of the monks – the true trailblazers in this adventure to introduce science education to the Tibetan monastic institutions.

During the two week intensive course, the monks conducted four strands of work that allowed them to: (1) assemble and test lessons in neuroscience and cosmology, (2) conduct inquiry and hands-on activities, (3) develop science leadership and writing skills, and (4) share science to the local monastic community through an exhibition and dialogue.

Venue:

Originally established in the 1400’s in Tibet, Drepung Monastery has continued in exile, in South India on land in Karnataka leased to the Tibetan community. The re-established monastery in Mundgod, houses over 5,000 monks, within the two colleges of Loseling and Gomang.

Instructors:

Richard Sterling is the Executive Director Emeritus of the National Writing Project (NWP) and currently Interim Associate Dean for Teacher Education and Adjunct Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Graduate School of Education. Since 2003, he has served as chair of the Advisory Panel to the College Board’s National Commission on Writing. Formerly he was the founder and director of the Institute for Literacy Studies at Lehman College, an Organized Research Unit at the City University of New York, and a member of the faculty at Lehman College. He was also founder and director of the New York City Writing Project and the New York City Mathematics Project, both of which are housed within the Institute for Literacy Studies.

Stephanie Norby is the director of the Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies. As the director of SCEMS, she oversees pan-institutional educational initiatives including publications, websites, events, and partnerships. Previously she was director of curriculum, professional development and assessment in the Kansas City, Missouri School District. She received her bachelor of science degree from the University of California at Davis and a master’s of history degree at the University of Missouri. She also attended graduate school at the University of California Long Beach in education at the University of Kansas in museum studies.

David Presti is a neuroscientist at the University of California in Berkeley, where he has taught in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology for nearly twenty years. For many years he also worked as a clinical psychologist in the treatment of addiction and of post-traumatic-stress disorder (PTSD) at the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in San Francisco, where he treated thousands of individuals for these conditions. His areas of expertise include the chemistry of the human nervous system, the effects of drugs on the brain and the mind, and the treatment of addiction..

Linda Shore is the director of the Teacher Institute at the San Francisco Exploratorium. She has co-authored The Science Explorer, a series of Exploratorium activity books for children and their parents. When not at the museum, she teaches graduate courses in educational technology at the University of San Francisco and writes science fiction short stories.

David Barker is a Senior Designer and Art Director of Exploratorium Institutional Media. Having studied physics at the University of California at San Diego, David turned an interest in the relationship between science and perception into a studio art degree from UC Santa Barbara. At the Exploratorium, he has created exhibits exploring visual perception and illusions. He also works with Exploratorium Exhibit Services to help other museums across the country and around the world with their exhibition conception and design and with the development of marketing materials.

First Science Exposition by Monastics

The 1st Science for Monks Exhibition is an undertaking of the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives (LTWA) and is part of several events this year commemorating 50 years of Tibetan Government and people in exile. The interactive exhibition focuses on topics of common interest to both Buddhism and science and are presented by monks that participate in both the Emory Tibet Science Initiative and the Sager Science Leadership for Monks.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE FIRST EXPOSITION HOME PAGE

How do we remember what we saw yesterday?
Presented by David’s Chronons at Sera Monastery
Lecture: 12:00-1:00 PM, June 22, 2009

We present a brief introduction to the brain, showing how different regions of the brain are responsible for various functions, such as vision, auditory, speech, hearing, emotion, and behavior. We focus our presentation on the visual system, and describe vision through the workings of the eye, to the region of the brain responsible for memory. From a Buddhist perspective, there are five direct sense perceptions, one of which is they eye consciousness that functions through the eye organ. From a Buddhist viewpoint, the eye consciousness depends on three factors, (1) an external physical object, (2) an internal sense organ, and (3) an immediately preceding mental consciousness that allows for the perception. We present both the scientific and Buddhist perspective to describe vision and memory.

How is sound made and heard?
Presented by Nargajuna’s Modern Science Group at Drepung Monastery
Lecture: 2:15-3:15 PM, June 22, 2009

We combine both Buddhist and scientific understandings to describe the chain of events from the production of sound to our experience of sound. We present the philosophical distinctions regarding the variety of sources of sound from a Buddhist perspective as well as the mental effect of the sound itself. According to Buddhist philosophy, even if a sound enters our ear, without being perceived by a mental consciousness, we will not hear it. We found that the scientific understanding is in good agreement with Buddhist texts, particularly the Abhidharmakosha (Treasury of Knowledge). However, the scientific understanding describes in great detail the process between the production of sound to the workings of the ear. We describe the scientific understanding of sound, starting with sound as a vibration and how sound travels as a wave. We also show the physiology of hearing from the outer ear that contacts the sound wave at the eardrum, to the hair cells in the inner ear that transforms the mechanical wave to a chemical signal sent to the brain.

How was our universe formed?
Presented by Monk Science Corner at Drepung Monastery
Lecture: 12:00-1:00 PM, June 23, 2009

We describe the history of our universe according to Buddhist philosophy and modern cosmology. From the scientific viewpoint this universe started from the rapid expansion of a quantum fluctuation, through a process that has been termed “the big bang”. The rapid expansion of the universe and effects of gravity, eventually led to the formation of our solar system, and our home here on earth, the third planet from the sun. According to Buddhist philosophy, individual universes can begin and end, but overall these universes are without a beginning or an end. The Kalachakra text challenges the prevailing assumption among many cosmologists that our big bang was the first of its kind. However, within cosmology, there are less established scientific theories of the multi-verse (multiple universes), that agrees well with the Kalachakra texts. The Kalachakra text, describes similar origins for a universe, from space-particles. Interestingly, the concept of space-particles have also been suggested by theoretical physicists.

What is light and where does colour come from?
Presented by monks from Zhang-Zhung Group at Menri Monastery
Lecture: 2:15-3:15 PM, June 23, 2009

We describe the nature and property of light from both the scientific and Bon traditions. Our activities demonstrate how the colors of the visible spectrum can be derived from white light through a prism, and how individual colors can be mixed to form white light. We also describe the difference between mixing light and pigment (paints), and how rainbows are formed through the defraction and reflection of sunlight through raindrops. According to the Dzogchen and tantric text within the Bon tradition, all materials come from the five elements, and the five elements all come from light. We present a debate concerning the color black, although it is not part of the visible spectrum, from a Buddhist philosophical viewpoint, it is indeed a color.

What are the elements?
Presented by Sakya Pandita Group at Sakya Dhongag Choeling Monastery
Lecture: 12:00-1:00 PM, June 24, 2009

This exhibit was inspired by the periodic table of elements and was driven by the interest to generate a table of the Buddhist elements, that include the psycho-physical elements and compositional factors. The Buddhist elements, according to the Abhidharmasamuchaya, are divided into five categories/aggregates, of which there are 25 forms, 12 feelings, 12 recognitions, 8 consciousnesses, and 2 types of compositional factors. After different attempts to organize the table, first in the shape of a mandala and later in the shape of a stupa, a shape resembling the periodic table of elements was created. The exhibit compares and contrasts the Buddhist table of the elements to the scientific table. From the Buddhist viewpoint all the elements can be reduced to subtle consciousness, whereas from the scientific viewpoint all the elements are reduced to quantum particles.

Why do we look the way we do?
Presented by monks from Gaden Science Leadership Group at Gaden Monastery
Lecture: 2:15 to 3:15 PM, June 24, 2009

We describe how physical traits are past from one generation to the next, from both the perspective of modern genetics and Buddhist philosophy. According to Buddhism there are five aggregates: (1) form, (2) feeling, (3) recognition, (4) compositional factors, and (5) consciousness. It is the form aggregate that determines why we look the way we do. From the Buddhist perspective there are substantial causes that generate similar features as well as substantial causes that do not necessarily generate similar features. This description has strong similarities to the understanding of dominant and recessive genes as described by modern genetics. We show how the contribution of chromosomes from the mother and father can lead to a dominant trait, such as eye color, that is found in the first generation. We also show how a trait can skip a generation, and lead to a trait that is found only in a 2nd generation.

Science Leadership Institute III – Solan

Science Leadership Institute – III

This meeting of the monk leaders in science education will emphasize study group learning and continue instruction on modern scientific cosmology. Activities and lectures on cosmology will be instructed by Chris Impey, Ph.D. (Distinguished Professor, University of Arizona).

The cosmology sessions will build on Chris’s teachings from last year with a focus on historical and conceptual models of the universe, scales of space and time, and the limits of cosmology.Writing workshops, learning biographies, and strategies for developing science exhibition will be taught by Stephanie Norby, Ph.D. (Educational Director, Smithsonian Institute) and Richard Sterling (Professor, University of California).

This institute will continue to emphasize shareable science and study group work at the monks home monasteries. Richard and Stephanie will be facilitating structured opportunities for monks to reflect on and share study group learning experiences, assess previous assignments, and plan for further study group work.

Venue:

Bon tradition is the oldest of all the Tibetan religion starting many years before the start of Buddhism in Tibet. It has its own strong legacy of education and training in philosophy, monastic discipline, ritual and meditation.The Menri monastery is located in the lap of Himalayas located at an altitude of 1450metres.

Access by road and air: Nearest airport is Chandigarh (48km), Shimla (68km) and Delhi (315km).

Instructors:

Chris Impey is a Distinguished Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona. His research interests include active galaxies, gravitational lenses, and dark matter, and he finds his attention rarely held by anything closer than a billion light years away. He is involved in curriculum development and learning online and in virtual worlds. He joined the program in 2008 to teach the monks cosmology and to work with them on the profound mysteries of time and space.

Richard Sterling is the Executive Director Emeritus of the National Writing Project (NWP) and currently Interim Associate Dean for Teacher Education and Adjunct Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Graduate School of Education. Since 2003, he has served as chair of the Advisory Panel to the College Board’s National Commission on Writing. Formerly he was the founder and director of the Institute for Literacy Studies at Lehman College, an Organized Research Unit at the City University of New York, and a member of the faculty at Lehman College. He was also founder and director of the New York City Writing Project and the New York City Mathematics Project, both of which are housed within the Institute for Literacy Studies.

Stephanie L. Norby is the director of the Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies. As the director of SCEMS, she oversees pan-institutional educational initiatives including publications, websites, events, and partnerships. Previously she was director of curriculum, professional development and assessment in the Kansas City, Missouri School District. She received her bachelor of science degree from the University of California at Davis and a master’s of history degree at the University of Missouri. She also attended graduate school at the University of California Long Beach in education at the University of Kansas in museum studies.

DHARAMSALA, India — Tibetan monks and nuns spend their lives studying the inner world of the mind rather than the physical world of matter. Yet for one month this spring a group of 91 monastics devoted themselves to the corporeal realm of science.

Instead of delving into Buddhist texts on karma and emptiness, they learned about Galileo’s law of accelerated motion, chromosomes, neurons and the Big Bang, among other far-ranging topics.

Many in the group, whose ages ranged from the 20s to 40s, had never learned science and math. In Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and nunneries, the curriculum has remained unchanged for centuries.

To add to the challenge, some monastics have limited English and relied on Tibetan translators to absorb the four-week crash course in physics, biology, neuroscience and math and logic taught by teachers from Emory University in Atlanta.

But the monastics put morning-to-evening lectures into action. At a Buddhist college campus here in Dharamsala, the exile home of the Dalai Lama in northern India, red-robed monks and nuns experimented with pendulums, gathered plants in the foothills of the Himalayas that showed natural selection and bent their shaved heads over microscopes to view an unseen world.

Tibetan monks and nuns may spend 12 hours a day studying Buddhist philosophy and logic, reciting prayers and debating scriptures. But science has been given a special boost by the Dalai Lama, who has long advocated modern education in Tibetan monasteries and schools in exile, alongside Tibet’s traditions. India is home to at least 120,000 Tibetans, the largest population outside Tibet.

Science may seem at odds with Tibetan religious rituals. Reincarnations of high Tibetan monks are identified through dreams and auspicious signs. The Dalai Lama credits the state oracle with helping him decide to flee Tibet in 1959 as Chinese troops advanced on Lhasa.

Yet the Tibetan spiritual leader views science and Buddhism as complementary “investigative approaches with the same greater goal, of seeking the truth,” he wrote in “The Universe in a Single Atom,” his book on “how science and spirituality can serve our world.” He stresses that science is especially important for monastics who study the nature of the mind and the relationship between mind and brain.

Initial resistance from some senior monks and fears of diluting traditional studies in monasteries have gradually eased. Now the Dalai Lama hopes that, with help from Emory and other programs, science will become part of a new curriculum, with science textbooks in Tibetan and specialist translators, leading to a generation of monastic leaders that are scientifically literate.

There are other reasons for integrating science with Tibetan Buddhism. Tibetans marked the 50th anniversary of their exile this year, and a return to their homeland remains elusive. The need to keep Tibetan cultural identity alive, yet modern and relevant, has grown increasingly urgent as the 73-year-old Dalai Lama ages.

“If you remain isolated, you will disappear,” said Lhakdor, director of the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, in Dharamsala, who goes by one name. The Dalai Lama himself has often remarked that isolation from the world only aided Tibet’s fall to China.

Lhakdor also sees similarities rather than contradictions between science and Buddhism. Like Buddhism, “the approach of science is generally based on unbiased findings through observation, analysis and finding the truth,” he noted.

Others are more frank about the need to learn science. “The 21st century is here. Everybody is influenced by science. We want to know what it is,” said Tenzin Lhadron, a forthright 34-year-old nun enrolled in this summer’s science program.

She does not have formal schooling in spite of 19 years studying at a nunnery in Dharamsala. Math is difficult for her; fractions and percentages are completely new. “But I will try,” she promised.

The Emory Tibet Science Initiative, of which this session was part, is now in its second year. It was preceded by the “Science for Monks” program, which started in 2001 with support from Bobby Sager, a Boston philanthropist. At the behest of the Dalai Lama, the earlier program brought science teachers from various American universities to teach Tibetan monks in India.

That program has matured into the Emory-backed plan to introduce modern science into Tibetan monasteries in India within the next few years with help from the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives.

The Emory initiative has led to a science textbook in Tibetan and English, produced by Emory professors and translators from the library. Translation conferences yielded a science glossary that introduces words like electromagnetism, climate change and cloning into the Tibetan lexicon.

The original Science for Monks program has morphed into an annual two-week Science Leadership summer program for advanced students who are all geshes, the monastic equivalent of a Ph.D. This year it culminated in a first-ever “science fair” here from June 22 to June 24. There, monks gave presentations on sound waves, the origins of the universe and how the brain works.

Emory envisions the summer course as a five-year program with lessons becoming more advanced in successive years for the returning students.

A third program, called Science Meets Dharma, has since 2002 sent European college graduates to teach basic science courses in Tibetan monasteries in India. When some monks enroll in the intensive science programs they have already had a few years of science instruction.

Just how science will be taught in the monasteries is still in the works. Western faculty will teach to monastics for extended periods, but local Tibetan lay teachers will eventually be recruited to teach in monasteries year round. Science education already exists in the Tibetan exile school system that instructs 28,000 children and young adults in India, Nepal and Bhutan.

For the time being, university professors are needed for the summer science course. Monks and nuns may lack basic science education, but they are highly trained in other disciplines, like philosophy.

“They are sophisticated adult learners,” said Mark Risjord, professor of philosophy at Emory who taught math and logic this summer. During his weeklong unit, inquisitive monks pressed him for a method to “make deductively valid rules” and asked if different arguments can lead to the same conclusion.

Although Buddhist scriptures have their own explanations of nature, the mind and the physical world, students were unfazed about seeming contradictions between Buddhism and western science.

“There are contradictions within Buddhist philosophy itself,” pointed out Lobsang Gompo, a 27-year-old monk from Drepung monastery in south India. Tibetan Buddhists are already accustomed to analyzing multiple viewpoints, he said.

The Dalai Lama’s confidence in “critical investigation” means that “if scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims,” he wrote in “The Universe in a Single Atom.”

Lhadron, the nun, added, “Buddhists believe whatever reality is there, not just what such and such a text says.”

While the Tibetan monastics come away from the program enriched, so do the Westerners. There is growing interest from the West about the relationship between the mind and body — for instance, the physical effects of meditation.

A new Emory program for undergraduates brought 14 students, mostly premed students, to Dharamsala this summer to study Buddhist thought and Tibetan medicine.

The science initiative also paves the way for Tibetan monastics to engage in future dialogue with Western scientists, another project fostered by the Dalai Lama in the form of annual conferences of the Mind and Life Institute that bring together Western researchers and monks in the United States and Dharamsala. “If monastics are not aware of scientific concepts, they can’t communicate and collaborate,” said Lobsang Negi, director of the Emory Tibet Science Initiative.

The program broadens the horizons of the Western science teachers, too, whether by teaching across cultures or thinking about science through the lens of ethics and human values as emphasized in Buddhism.

For Arri Eisen, a biology professor at Emory, teaching the monks and nuns helped him consider “how to nurture positive thinking. Western education doesn’t nurture empathy.”

Science may be far advanced in the West, but a moral vacuum exists, said Bryce Johnson, an environmental engineer who coordinates the Science for Monks program. “There’s something lost in the West,” Dr. Johnson said. The meeting of science and Buddhism is “a healthy exchange that is as much for the scientists.”

Teaching the Dalai Lama’s Monks: Better Religion Through Science

A scientist/professor in an experimental program teaching science to the Dalai Lama’s monks explains why this project is so much bigger than this one program, bigger even than working to reconcile religion and science. Think: globalization.

“Do bacteria require light?” Tashi, one of my best students, wants to know. He sits there in Dharamsala, India, like his Buddhist monk colleagues, cross-legged on the floor in maroon robes, six hours a day learning science from a tall white Jewish guy from North Carolina.

Religion often has a hard time of it, especially among academics, and especially among scientists. Of course academics have no problem studying religion and raising big money to establish endowed chairs, centers, and institutes devoted to just that. But actually being religious or even discussing personal beliefs or spirituality at all, is rare and, if anything, discouraged. To me this is an odd and disturbing social conundrum: let’s take our best thinkers and idea-people, theorizers, and policy developers and eradicate any discussion of personal belief, religion, or spirituality from their official discourse. Brilliant.

So, it’s refreshing to be part of a project, an experiment really, in which academics are actively engaging religious tradition and belief. Even better, and ironically, this engagement is driven by scientists; the very folks many blame for hammering personal belief out of intellectual conversation in the West in the first place.

Several years ago, His Holiness the Dalai Lama requested that Emory University educators develop a modern science curriculum to eventually become part of the regular centuries-old curriculum of all Tibetan Buddhist monks in India. Since the Dalai Lama was forced from China in 1959, India has graciously hosted him, the Tibetan government in exile, and thousands of Tibetans, including many monastics in new monasteries and nunneries. Unlike for Westerners, it is relatively common for Tibetans to become monks (even today, 1 in 10 Tibetans do).

We just completed our second year of a five-year pilot with 91 monks and nuns. The project is designed for monks and nuns to learn science and for us to learn Buddhism and Tibetan culture, but also for us to simultaneously build the capacity for the Tibetans eventually to take over the science teaching and learning.

If you’re like many of my administrators and colleagues, you might be asking, “What?! Beyond the coolness factor, what in the world is the point of teaching science to a bunch of monks halfway around the world?”

Can you say ‘globalization,’ ‘religion,’ ‘science and technology’?

Whether we like it or not, the world is becoming flatter by the day. This could be a disaster or, if we aggressively develop models to address the world’s complex problems—environmental degradation, racism, poverty—through profound cultural exchange and integration, this could be a boon. A vast majority of this globalizing world (including 100 million Americans) is deeply grounded in religious belief, and many of them have worldviews lacking any stark separation of spirituality from science.

How do we integrate, and not reject, belittle, or ignore religion and the religious, moving toward developing approaches and potential solutions to our most profound problems? And, finally then, as all of us are participants in this grand and inexorable globalization experiment, there is that most challenging and central question for all educators and learners: how do we most effectively teach and learn across cultural and intellectual gaps?

In its own small way, our project is a model and provides a laboratory for addressing these big questions. The components are there for a good experiment: a religious leader and a religion, Tibetan Buddhism, unusually open to discussion and integration (see my other RD column on this), science educators eager to teach and learn, and all open to the opportunity for new ideas and knowledge to emerge.

Take Tashi’s question about bacteria and light. We’d spent the whole week teaching the monks and nuns cellular and molecular biology around the question: Can bacteria sense? The question is unresolved and not trivial among Buddhists, because if bacteria are sentient beings, they should not be killed and would be reincarnated beings. So, you see the implications.

“Yes,” I answered, “Some bacteria require light and use it to make energy via photosynthesis.” Tashi’s was a typically insightful question from the monks, and also typical in its ‘double-meaning’ nature: I was thinking this was a great science question, integrating much of our discussion; but when I asked Tashi why he asked the question, he said it was because in the Buddhist view, consciousness requires light. So, if bacteria are sentient and therefore conscious, they would require light. See what I mean by double meaning and cultural interchange?

Religion is rich and valuable; science also has much to offer. Being human constructs, both of course have their failings and limitations, but both have given much and can give more. Dhondup, another of the monk students, had this pearl to offer when I asked him why he was participating in our science project, a statement that turned my worldview on its head and sums up how such cultural exchanges might just make a difference: “I am studying modern science because I believe it can help me understand my Buddhism better.”