Buddhism and Science, Part 2

Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves
by Sharon Begley

(Page 5 of 5)

The discovery that mere thought can alter the very stuff of the brain is another natural point of connection between the science of neuroplasticity and Buddhism. Buddhism has taught for twenty-five hundred years that the mind is an independent force that can be harnessed by will and attention to bring about physical change. "The discovery that thinking something produces effects just as doing something does is a fascinating consonance with Buddhism," says Francisca Cho. "Buddhism challenges the traditional belief in an external, objective reality. Instead, it teaches that our reality is created by our own projections; it is thinking that creates the external world beyond us. The neuroscience findings harmonize with this Buddhist teaching."

Buddhist narratives have another consonance with the discoveries of neuroplasticity. They teach that by detaching ourselves from our thoughts, by observing our thinking dispassionately and with clarity, we have the ability to think thoughts that allow us to overcome afflictions such as being chronically angry. "You can undergo an emotional reeducation," Cho says. "By meditative exertion and other mental exercises, you can actively change your feelings, your attitudes, your mind-set."

Indeed, Buddhism believes that the mind has a formidable power of self-transformation. When thoughts come to the untrained mind, they can run wild, triggering destructive emotions such as craving and hatred. But mental training, a core of Buddhist practice, allows us "to identify and to control emotions and mental events as they arise," says Matthieu Ricard. Meditation, the most highly developed form of mental training, "is about coming to a new perception of reality and of the nature of mind, about nurturing new qualities until they become integral parts of our being. If we place all our hopes and fears in the outside world, we have quite a challenge, because our control of the outside world is weak, temporary, and even illusory. It is more within the scope of our faculties to change the way we translate the outside world into inner experience. We have a great deal of freedom in how we transform that experience, and that is the basis for mental training and transformation."

And why does the Dalai Lama hope to contribute to scientific understanding, whether by engaging in these dialogues with researchers or by encouraging Buddhist monks to lend their brains to science? "His Holiness believes that today's dominant worldview is the scientific one, and he wants to keep Buddhism growing and developing by engaging with science," says Thupten Jinpa, a Tibetan Buddhist scholar who earned a Ph.D. in religious studies from Cambridge University in 1989. The Dalai Lama's primary English translator and a collaborator on several of his books, Jinpa directs the Institute of Tibetan Classics, in Montreal, editing and translating Tibetan texts. "His Holiness," he says, "hopes to inspire a younger genera- tion of Buddhist scholars to engage with science. But also, he is personally curious."

Of Timepieces and Telescopes

That curiosity dates from his youth. The boy who would become the fourteenth Dalai Lama was born on July 6, 1935, the fifth of nine children in a family of subsistence farmers who used cattle to plow their barley fields on the high Tibetan plateau in the northeastern province of Amdo and to pound grains out of tough husks. At the age of two, Tenzin Gyatso was recognized, after a nationwide search, as the reincarnation of the thirteenth Dalai Lama, Thubten Gyatso, who had died in 1933. He was formally installed as the head of state of Tibet on February 22, 1940. Science was unknown in his world, and when he looked back on his youth seventy years later, the only technology he recalled was the rifles carried by local nomads.

Between lessons in reading, writing, rote memorization of Buddhist rituals and scriptures, and Buddhist philosophy, the young Dalai Lama amused himself by embarking on sporadic treasure hunts in the one thousand rooms of Potala Palace in the capital of Lhasa. The palace held what he termed "assorted oddities" belonging to his predecessors, especially the thirteenth Dalai Lama. In a poignant foreshadowing of the current Dalai Lama's own desperate escape from Tibet after the Chinese invasion, the thirteenth Dalai Lama had fled Tibet in 1900, when word came that the armies of the last Chinese emperor were poised to invade. He spent a brief time in India, long enough to awaken to how the world beyond Tibet was charging ahead into the new century. Upon his return to Tibet, he established several political and social reforms, including mail service and secular education, as well as technological ones: a telegraph system and Tibet's first electric lights, powered by a small generating plant. He also brought back to the palace a fascination with mechanical objects, including those given to him by a British political officer posted to nearby Sikkim, Sir Charles Bell.

So when the fourteenth Dalai Lama explored the palace's chambers, he came upon an old brass telescope, a mechanical clock, two film projectors, a simple pocket watch, and three automobiles-all of which had been carried across the mountains in pieces from India, on the backs of donkeys, mules, and porters, since there were no roads fit for cars across the Himalayas or, indeed, anywhere in Tibet beyond Lhasa. The clock especially intrigued him. It perched atop a sphere that made a complete rotation every twenty-four hours and was covered with mysterious patterns. One day, paging through his geography books, the Dalai Lama realized that the drawings on the sphere were a map of the world, and the globe's rotation showed the sun's apparent movement from east to west across the sky. Other tokens of technology came the Dalai Lama's way as gifts. In 1942, a group of Americans presented him with a gold pocket watch. British visitors gave him a train set and a pedal car.

"There was a time, I remember very clearly, when I would rather fiddle with these objects than study philosophy or memorize a text," the Dalai Lama wrote in his 2005 book The Universe in a Single Atom. "They hinted at a whole universe of experience and knowledge to which I had no access and whose existence was endlessly tantalizing."

Copyright © 2007 by Sharon Begley.

About the Author

Sharon Begley, science columnist for The Wall Street Journal, inaugurated the paper's "Science Journal" in 2002. She was previously the senior science writer at Newsweek, covering neuroscience, genetics, physics, astronomy, and anthropology. The co-author of The Mind and the Brain, she has won many awards for her articles She is a frequent guest on radio and television, including The Charlie Rose Show, Today Weekend, CBS's The Early Show, and Imus in the Morning. She lives in New Jersey.