Buddhism and Science brings together distinguished philosophers, Buddhist scholars, physicists, and cognitive scientists to examine the contrasts and connections between the worlds of Western science and Eastern spirituality. This compilation was inspired by a suggestion made by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, himself one of the contributors, after one of a series of cross-cultural scientific dialogues in Dharamsala, India, sponsored by the Mind and Life Institute. Other contributors such as William L. Ames, Matthieu Ricard, and Stephen LaBerge assess not only the fruits of inquiry from East and West but also shed light on the underlying assumptions of these disparate worldviews. Their essays creatively address a broad range of topics: from quantum theory?s surprising affinities with the Buddhist concept of emptiness, to the increasing need in the West for a more contemplative science attuned to the first-person investigation of the mind, to the important ways in which the psychological study of "lucid dreaming" maps similar terrain to the cultivation of the Tibetan Buddhist discipline of dream yoga.

Reflecting its wide variety of topics, Buddhism and Science is comprised of three sections. The first presents two historical overviews of the engagements between Buddhism and modern science or, rather, how Buddhism and modern science have defined, rivaled, or complemented one another. The second describes the ways Buddhism and the cognitive sciences inform each other; the third addresses points of intersection between Buddhism and the physical sciences. On the broadest level this work illuminates how different ways of exploring the nature of human identity, the mind, and the universe at large can enrich and enlighten one another.

Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground, Alan Wallace, Columbia University Press, Paperback, 2003, 432pp, $34.50

Born in Pasadena, California in 1950, Alan Wallace was raised and educated in the United States, Scotland, and Switzerland. In 1968, he enrolled in the University of California at San Diego, where for two years he prepared for a career in ecology, with a secondary interest in philosophy and religion. However, during his third year of undergraduate studies at the University of G�ttingen in West Germany, his interests shifted more towards philosophy and religion; and he began to study Tibetan Buddhism and the Tibetan language.

In 1971, he discontinued his formal Western education to go to Dharamsala, India, where he studied Tibetan Buddhism, medicine, and language for four years. During his first year in Dharamsala, he lived in the home of the Dr. Yeshi Dhonden, personal physician of H. H. the Dalai Lama. Throughout his stay in Dharamsala, he frequently served as interpreter for Dr. Dhonden, and under his guidance he completed a translation of a classic Tibetan medical text. In 1973, he began training in the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics, in which all instruction, study, and debate were conducted in Tibetan.

In 1975, at the request of the Dalai Lama, he joined the eminent Tibetan Buddhist scholar Geshe Rabten, in Switzerland, first at the Tibet Institute in Rikon, and later at the Center for Higher Tibetan Studies in Mt. P�lerin. Over the next four years, he continued his own studies and monastic training, translated Tibetan texts, interpreted for Geshe Rabten and many other Tibetan Lamas, including the Dalai Lama, and taught Buddhist philosophy and meditation in Switzerland, Italy, Germany, France, and England.

At the end of 1979, he left Switzerland to begin a four-year series of contemplative retreats, first in India, under the guidance of the Dalai Lama, and later in Sri Lanka and the United States.

In 1984, after a thirteen-year absence from Western academia, he enrolled at Amherst College to complete his undergraduate education. There he studied physics, Sanskrit, and the philosophical foundations of modern physics, and in 1987 he graduated summa cum laude and phi beta kappa. His honors thesis was subsequently published in two volumes: Choosing Reality: A Buddhist View of Physics and the Mind (Snow Lion: 1996) and Transcendent Wisdom: A Commentary on the Ninth Chapter of Shantideva's Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life (Snow Lion, 1988).

Following his sojourn at Amherst, he spent nine months in contemplative retreat in the high desert of California. Then in 1988, he joined the Tibetan contemplative Gen Lamrimpa to assist in leading a one-year group contemplative retreat near Castle Rock, Washington, during which ways were explored for refining and stabilizing the attention.

In the autumn of 1989, he entered the graduate program in religious studies at Stanford University, where he pursued research in the interface between Buddhism and Western science and philosophy. These studies are closely related to his role as an interpreter and organizer for the "Mind and Life" conferences with the Dalai Lama and Western scientists beginning in 1987 and continuing to the present. In 1992, sponsored by the Mind and Life Institute, which he helped to found, he traveled widely in Tibet, conducting a preliminary survey of living Buddhist contemplatives. In 1995, he completed his doctoral dissertation on attentional training in Tibetan Buddhism and its relation to modern psychological and philosophical theories of attention and consciousness. A modified version of his dissertation has been published under the title The Bridge of Quiescence: Experiencing Tibetan Buddhist Meditation (Open Court Press, 1998).

During the period 1992-1997, he served as the principal interpreter for the Venerable Gyatrul Rinpoche, a senior Lama of the Nyingma Order of Tibetan Buddhism. During this time, he translated five classic Tibetan treatises on contemplative methods for exploring the nature of consciousness. From 1995-1997, he was a Visiting Scholar in the departments of religious studies and psychology at Stanford University. During this time, he and his wife, Dr. Vesna A. Wallace, produced a new translation from the Sanskrit and Tibetan of the classic text A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life (Snow Lion, 1997), and he also conducted research for his primary academic work thus far, The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness.

From 1997-2001, Alan Wallace taught in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he held classes on Tibetan Buddhist studies and the interface between science and religion. His most recent academic books are The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness (Oxford University Press, 2000) and Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground (Columbia University Press, 2003), and his latest popular book is Buddhism with an Attitude: The Tibetan Seven-Point Mind-Training (Snow Lion 2001). After leaving UCSB in June 2001, he spent six months in a solitary contemplative retreat in the high desert of California. He now lives in Santa Barbara, where he is creating an Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of Consciousness, and he teaches Buddhist philosophy and meditation throughout Europe and North America.

Contents

Introduction: Buddhism and Science--Breaking Down the Barriers, by B. Alan Wallace

Part 1 Historical Context
Buddhism and Science: On the Nature of the Dialogue, by Josc Ignacio Cabezon
Science As an Ally or a Rival Philosophy? Tibetan Buddhist Thinkers' Engagement with Modern Science, by Thupten Jinpa

Part 2 Buddhism and the Cognitive Sciences
Understanding and Transforming the Mind, by His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama
The Concepts "Self", "Person'', and "I'' in Western Psychology and in Buddhism, by David Galin
Common Ground, Common Cause: Buddhism and Science on the Afflictions of Identity, by William S. Waldron
Imagining: Embodiment, Phenomenology, and Transformation, by Francisco J. Varela and Natalie Depraz
Lucid Dreaming and the Yoga of the Dream State: A Psychophysiological Perspective, by Stephen LaBerge
On the Relevance of a Contemplative Science, by Matthieu Ricard

Part 3 Buddhism and the Physical Sciences
Emptiness and Quantum Theory, by William L. Ames
Time and Impermanence in Middle Way Buddhism and Modern Physics, by Victor Mansfield
A Cure for Metaphysical Illusions: Kant Quantum Mechanics and Madhyamaka, by Michel Bitbol
Emptiness and Relativity, by David Ritz Finkelstein
Encounters Between Buddhist and Quantum Epistemologies, by Anton Zeilinger

Conclusion: Life As a Laboratory, by Piet Hut

Appendix: A History of the Mind and Life Institute