Dalai Lama - New Physics and Cosmology

p.7
For Buddhism, ignorance
is understood as the root cause of suffering because a mistaken view of the
world or of the self inevitably leads to attachments and destructive emotions.
Truth is thus essential to a Buddhist’s goal: the reduction of suffering.
The sciences also seek truth, not only as an end in itself but also to alleviate
illness and suffering through the ethical application of technology.


p.18
Anton’s position is the most circumspect
possible, namely, that the consciousness of the observer only inserts itself
into the experiment by choosing the arrangement of the apparatus. No human
observation per se has been made, nor—according to Anton—is one
required. Other physicists grant observation a more important role. The
Dalai Lama will return to this issue later to probe more deeply into the role
of consciousness in measurement. The role of the observer is central to
Buddhism’s philosophy and has a profound relationship to its view of the
intrinsically impermanent nature of reality.

p.19
From the above exchange we can draw an important conclusion. All wave
phenomena—be they sound or light—are also accompanied by particle effects,
and likewise all particles (electrons, atoms, molecules . . . ) show
wavelike effects. Moreover, this ambiguity is universal. As far as we know,
there is no size boundary beyond which wave-particle effects disappear...In other words,physicists now believe that the world is quantum mechanical through and
through.

p.24
Physicists describe this as nonlocality. The word implies that the
measurement obtained for the photon on one side depends not only on
the orientation of the polarizer on that side but also on the orientation
of the polarizer on the other side.

p.27
We have learned fromrelativity theory that any influence can move only with the speed oflight, not faster. We have confirmed that if causes exist, they cannot be
local and they do not explain

p.28
If you
accept the concept that there is no beginning, then the entire story is
consistent. The problem arises when you have to begin.

Entanglement is broken
when one of the two particles interacts with an outside system such
as a detector. In other words, once the detection is made, there is no entanglement
for future observations. The first observation breaks the entanglement. A caveat should probably be added here. Some people
say that the detector is a quantum system itself. Therefore, what takes
place is not disentanglement but an increasing entanglement of one
quantum system with a much more complex quantum system, that is,
with the detector.

p.32
Schroedinger had been a careful reader of the Bhagavad-Gita
and a student of Sanskrit.

p.32
After all, Buddhist philosophy
has struggled for centuries with the issues of ontology and epistemology
in ways that bear directly on the standing of the pictures we form
of reality. Where science has traditionally adopted a straightforward realism,
Buddhism has been far more circumspect about the ultimate nature of
reality. According to it, our experience of the world, including that given
through experimentation and scientific theory, concerns what it terms “conventional
reality.” According to Buddhism, a deep philosophical analysis
of reality reveals its ultimate emptiness. Buddhism adopts a more fluid and
phenomenological view of reality. Reality is considered to be a series of
momentary phenomenal events. Moreover, these phenomenal events do
not originate purely from the side of the external world alone but rather
are contingent on a complex causal nexus that includes the mind. This is
the venerable Buddhist doctrine of dependent arising.

p.46
dalai lama: If determinism only applies to this abstract level, but it
doesn’t have any real bearing on your experiment, then it’s meaningless.
arthur zajonc: It has a bearing on the experiment. Statistically it gives
you the general form to expect, but it doesn’t determine the individual
events.
dalai lama: This is fascinating. Buddhism has just this same problem,
the same headache. Imagine an individual is in a situation where he
can choose between different moral actions. If he chooses one, certain
karmic consequences would follow. If he chooses another, then different
consequences would follow. The Buddha would know these possibilities,
but what actually wound up being the case would depend on
what causes and conditions contributed to the situation. The Buddha
would see the possibilities, but you would have to wait and see what actually
happened.
thubten jinpa: But one of the epitaphs of the Buddha is the “simultaneous
knower of the three times.” If you simultaneously are the knower of
past, present, and future, you are not only at this point of possibility but
also you see that later this happened in reality, and therefore this happened
earlier.
alan wallace: It’s an issue for the Christians, as well as the Buddhists, as
soon as you have the notion of omniscience.
dalai lama: There may be special anomalous circumstances relating to
the omniscience of the Buddha. We should not take that as an absolute.

p. 58
David is emphasizing to the Dalai Lama the importance of the
shift away from conceiving of the world in terms of underlying states or
properties, and he suggests that instead we think of the primary underlying
reality as action, as operations.
(sorta like native lang using only verbs)

p.68
This suggests
that the field theory we have is a degenerate version of a discrete theory,
in which the discreteness is so fine that we have to approximate it by a
continuum.
alan wallace: And a discrete theory pertains to points?
david finkelstein: A point with finite separations, as opposed to points
with directions. This suggests that underlying the continuum of spacetime,
there is something made up of discrete space-time units. In order
to incorporate the continuous symmetry that space-time exhibits, we
should imagine these units as quantum entities rather than classical.

p.75
My first shock in this research
was to discover that the things that happen to a cube when you
bring it around are practically the things that can happen to a quark in
physics when you bring it around a closed loop. There seems to be an
intimate relation between what are called the internal degrees of freedom
of the quark and the space-time structure.
This model may be totally wrong, but within this model I can show
you which kind of defect results in light, which kind of defect results in
the strong gluons or any of the known forces, like gravity. All the forces
turn out to be modeled rather well within this discrete model. That does
not mean it’s correct, but it encourages me to carry it further.
These results are very robust. They do not depend on the detailed
structure of the crystal, only on its resemblance to a chessboard.

p.76
Under Anton’s guidance, we had
already encountered problems with the idea of a classical world whose objects
possessed objective properties. Here David was invoking a similar
claim for space-time itself. Points in space-time do not exist; rather they
and the whole world with them are to be understood as a pattern of transitions
or actions. These actions move us from system to metasystem, from
knower to known. David sees the knower as being at the level of the metasystem,
and he was passionate about the inclusion of this lost feature of the
world, the knower. Classical physics had left the knower out of its account
and so never rose to the metalevel.

p.91
dalai lama: Just as you see quantum space-time as the source from which
all other things are derived, so in Buddhism there is a definite sequence
in the cosmogony for the emergence of each of the elements. From space
(and this is conditioned space), air emerges as motility; from air, fire
emerges as thermal energy or heat; from fire emerges fluidity, liquids of
all sorts, represented by the element of water; from water emerges earth,
or solids of all sorts. In this way, you could say that the latter four elements
are all derivative of space, which is the fundamental one. This is
accepted by all schools of Buddhism and not just limited to one esoteric
doctrine. [Turning to Weiming]: What is the Chinese theory concerning
the five elements?
tu weiming: It would be better to render them as phases rather than elements.
They are dynamic, transformative moments rather than simply
discrete elements. They also emerge out of a notion called the Tao,
which is ineffable, cannot be fully comprehended, and yet it seems to
have an inexhaustible supply of potential and authentic possibilities.
dalai lama: That is closely related to the Dharma, the spiritual path, is
it not?
tu weiming: Absolutely.
dalai lama: Whereas the Chinese theory is deeply related to spiritual
practice and a spiritual view of the universe, the Buddhist theory of
space and the derivative elements is purely a physical description. It’s
Buddhist physics and not Buddhist soteriology, or spiritual practice.
tu weiming: The understanding comes from the meditative, and intersubjectively
confirmed, understanding of ultimate reality. That view of
physics is closely linked to many, many forms of spiritual exercise.

p.94
dalai lama: The question is answered within the Buddhist framework:
Space particles are the ground from which the universe arises, catalyzed
by karma.
At this point Alan Wallace broke in to explain that the Dalai Lama has
said in other contexts that the space particles are catalyzed by the karma
of sentient beings, which brings them into the realm of cognitive events.
His Holiness then turned to Anton and questioned him.
dalai lama: If you don’t even have space before the big bang, then what
catalyzes the big bang and out of what does it come?

p.95
dalai lama: If you were able to see that there are no more galaxies after
a certain point, that would imply a finiteness to the universe, however
big. If that were the case, the Buddhists would have a problem. Buddhism
asserts a literally limitless universe. When Buddhists speak of an
oscillating cosmogony, of something comparable to a big bang, a development, a big collapse, a return into empty space, then the whole cycle
repeating again, this does not refer to the universe as a whole. It does
not refer to everything but rather to a world system. Perhaps a comparable
notion would be a galaxy or perhaps a galaxy cluster, but only one
certain area of the universe. So even as one world system is dissolving,
somewhere on the other side of the universe another world system is
emerging at the same time. It continues infinitely, with no synchronicity
among them.
I mentioned galaxies rather than a star or solar system because
the term used in Buddhism means a thousand, thousand, thousandfold
world, or a billionfold world system. A world system is one
with a sun, so a reasonable interpretation would be a billion solar systems,
something comparable to a galaxy. In a billionfold world system,
the billion systems within it arise together. Generally speaking, they arise
together, develop together, and dissolve together, though not with exact
synchronicity. In the meantime, there are an infinite number of other
billionfold world systems, and they are evolving not synchronously.
If
they happen to be in phase, it’s purely coincidental. In the esoteric Buddhism
of Vajrayana, they speak not only of the billionfold world systems
but of clusters of them—a billion billionfold worlds, and then billions
of those. So in Buddhism, you have not only galaxies but also galaxy
clusters and mega–galaxy clusters.
george greenstein: And they themselves are in this endless process of
evolution? There is no overall beginning?
dalai lama: Exactly.
anton zeilinger: Where does one of these billionfold world systems
emerge from?
dalai lama: Space particles.

p.96
dalai lama: Space particles can also be seen as the remnants of previous
galactic systems. When Buddhists use the term universe, they are not referring
to any particular galaxy system but to the infinite totality. The
Tibetan technical term for universe means “that which goes through
change and transformation,” or “a reality that is subject to dissolution.”
That is the etymology of the term.

p.97
The point is, the Buddha
himself, as well as his later followers, did not give priority to
mapping the physical universe. They would only do that marginally or
peripherally, and generally when they did so, they would do it in accordance
with the views that were current at the time. Their priority was to
understand the nature of the truth of suffering, the source of suffering,
the cessation of suffering, and the path to the cessation—the Four Noble
Truths.

p.98
dalai lama: According to Eastern thought, shared by both Hindus and
Buddhists, in addition to physical beings that live within the so-called
desire realm or sensual realm, there is also a whole range of sentient beings
living in a subtle form realm, which is not grossly physical. They
are born, they live, they die, but they don’t have gross physical bodies.
Beyond that there is also a formless realm, and there are likewise even
formless sentient beings that are born, live, and die but don’t have physical
form at all. Moreover, there is an interpenetration of these realms.
Even in the physical world here on planet Earth, there are said to be beings
of the form realm, and quite conceivably the formless realm as well.
Within Eastern thought, these three dimensions of existence are widely
accepted: the sensual realm that we can see, the form realm, and the
formless realm...The methods of theoretical astrophysics, therefore, are reminiscent
of those used by the Buddhists, in that both place great reliance on careful
and consistent analysis, which often leads far beyond what is apparent
in observation. Nowhere is this similarity more striking than in the story
of the early universe now widely accepted within the astrophysical community.

p.122
The primary concern of virtually all spiritual traditions, Eastern and
Western, and in particular the Buddhist tradition, is self-knowledge: understanding
and realization of the self through the science of spiritual
exercises and the art of self-cultivation. In this sense, philosophy is a
way of life, consisting of spiritual exercises to explore the inner landscape.
Your Holiness mentioned the neglect of the inner landscape of the
human condition.

p.123
This integrated vision of the knower demands a beneficial interaction
between the two kinds of enlightenment—the Western enlightenment,
focusing on instrumental rationality, exploring the external landscape,
and the Asian, particularly the Buddhist, enlightenment. Many of the
terms and ideas that were considered suspect before—dialogue, communication,
mutual interaction, intersubjectivity, relationality, interconnectedness—
all are absolutely critical for the training of the new
knower. The knower is no longer simply a limited notion of the rational
animal. In context, the knower would need to mobilize not only mental
resources but also bodily resources, not simply the cognitive functions
of the mind but also the affective dimensions of the heart and even
the body.

Personal knowledge is not subjectivistic. It is not private.
Profoundly felt or even embodied, personal knowledge can be publicly
accountable. It can be debated and argued interpersonally.

p.132
In the Buddhist version of atomic theory, which may be much more gross than the concept of the atom in physics, even the tiniest particle or atom must be composed of eight constituents. These are said to be the four elemental particles—earth, water, fire, and air—and four other derivatives: visual form, tactile form, smell, and taste...I suspect that these elementary particles that form the Buddhist
notion of atoms are in fact potentialities. The terms refer to the potentiality or the energy that has the capacity to produce smell, taste, and so forth. Not the smell itself. If each of those elementary particles didn’t have that capacity, then the conglomeration of them would also not have it. It is in fact one of the conglomeration of eight elementary particles making up one unit, one atom. One of those eight is the tactile component, the atom’s “tactile object.” And there are in turn eight types of tactile objects, among which rough and smooth are two.

p.139
To obtain the experimental
result of the stripes, it’s absolutely essential that you cannot tell
which path the photon took. If you have a way of measuring the path
by observing which of the two slits it came through, then you will not
see the striped pattern on the screen. If you set up the experiment in such
a way that it is impossible to know, then an interference phenomenon
arises, in which single quanta can create the stripes of the interference
pattern. This is the measurement paradox: If you determine which path
the photon takes, then the interference pattern disappears.

p.144
What we often don’t recognize is that all the
nerves that come in from sense organs are matched by nerves that go out
to the sense organs. The number of nerves that go out to the sense organs
varies from 10 to 50 percent of the bundle. There is a conspicuous contribution
from the central nervous system to the sense organ. The nerves coming out from the central nervous system to the retina
can affect the impact of light on the sense receptors and can particularly
affect the relay within the retina of events excited by the photon bombardment.
They can also affect the message that goes back to the central
nervous system. Similarly, in the central nervous system, each of the
relay projections can be modified from central projections outward.
These outward-projecting impulses act in accordance with our past experiences,
our expectations, and our purposes. Our past experiences dictate
a great deal about what we perceive from our retina, from our auditory
apparatus, and so on and make an idiosyncratic experience for
us, unique to the individual.

Evolution has given us access to the world and has also given us the
power to modify that world experience in accordance with our past experiences
and our expectations and our purposes. If we change or have
different past experiences, we see things, feel things, experience things
differently.

p.156
To obtain the experimental result of the stripes, it’s absolutely essential that you cannot tell which path the photon took. If you have a way of measuring the path by observing which of the two slits it came through, then you will not see the striped pattern on the screen. If you set up the experiment in such a way that it is impossible to know, then an interference phenomenon arises, in which single quanta can create the stripes of the interference pattern. This is the measurement paradox: If you determine which path the photon takes, then the interference pattern disappears. 

p.158
The normal objects of this world exist in the classical domain of experience, and it is easy to see how they affect us. Their qualities, their qualia, are part of everyday life. There is also another level, of causal mechanisms that are in some ways hidden. We think of these as having no secondary qualities, only primary attributes such as mass and position. Then there is an even more subtle level, where these primary qualities themselves disappear, and new concepts are needed.

p.161
We think ordinarily of our having sensory nerves, which carry information about visual objects, tastes, olfaction, or other experience into our brains, and we make models of the world in which we survive, design, expand, and elaborate. What we often don’t recognize is that all the nerves that come in from sense organs are matched by nerves that go out to the sense organs. The number of nerves that go out to the sense organs varies from 10 to 50 percent of the bundle. There is a conspicuous contribution from the central nervous system to the sense organ.

p.163
The sciences of the mind—psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience—are relatively young, and often they neglect the subjective experience of the individual in favor of third-person research methods and theoretical accounts similar to those of the physical sciences. By contrast, Buddhist monk-scholars have searched for the inner reasons of human suffering through close attention to human experience itself. They have long recognized the dangers of delusion and distraction, and they have developed an exacting contemplative discipline that allows them reasonable certainty about the results of research into this interior territory. Their motivation has been to alleviate human suffering not so much by technical innovation but by psychological and spiritual practices that work directly on the mind.

p.150
It has only been recently, in this century, that we have discovered things for which the observer is relevant and that are now pressing us into these considerations. But until this happened, there was no reason for scientists to care about their spiritual nature or about themselves as observers.

p.151
The conversation took a very different turn after this. Two closely related themes were interwoven. One concerned the possibility of training the mind to broaden and enrich that which humans can experience, and the second concerned the ultimate emptiness of inherent existence. How far can experience take us? And when we try to reach beyond experience to the thing-in-itself, what do we find?

p.152
But you may not be content with the mere appearances, with the conventional status of a phenomenon. What about its actual nature? What is it really? When you start probing beyond the appearances, trying to understand the real nature of the existence of the imputed or the designated entity, this is called an ultimate analysis, seeking the nature of ultimate reality. When you start seeking that, you don’t find anything at all. In fact, you find that there is nothing to be found. The very “not finding” of a phenomenon, when you seek it through ultimate analysis, is what is meant by emptiness.

p.154
You analyze this and you come to a conviction, a belief, sense of a confidence, but you do not yet ascertain it as an actual inferential cognition. How does your awareness of that reality shift? I can believe that George is from the United States without knowing it, and I may happen to be right. But that’s not the same as knowing it. So you keep probing your conviction experientially, as well as rationally, familiarizing your-self with it and going deeper and deeper into it. Eventually you move by means of inference beyond this conceptual realization to a purely perceptual or purely experiential realization. And that is really the goal. So, the strategy is to move from belief, to inferential valid cognition, to perceptual or purely experiential valid cognition.

p.155
dalai lama: Perhaps it may be useful to look at another Buddhist classification of the three realms of knowledge. One is the domain of manifest, or evident, phenomena, which includes all objects that can be empirically experienced and perceptually known. The second realm is described as obscured or hidden phenomena, which you cannot directly experience or know perceptually but which you infer on the basis of empirical evidence. There is a third realm of knowledge known as extremely hidden phenomena. They are said to be beyond the capacity of both inference and direct experience for an ordinary person. Perhaps the only avenue to this knowledge that we have is a third person’s testimony. This classification is presented from the perspective of an ordinary, untrained human being. With training, one may be able to perceptually
engage with realms beyond manifest phenomena, but not as a beginner.

p.160
anton zeilinger: Yes. It is a negation of the existence of something that I posed as a question.
dalai lama: It’s ironic that analysis approached purely from a physicist’s point of view, and confined to physical phenomena, seems to reach a point where it may just be opening the door to Buddhist emptiness. The irony is that there seems to be a total negligence or nonacceptance of negative phenomena in the process of your analysis, a view of physical reality that seems to address only the affirmative, only what it is. And yet through that process you end up at a point of negation.

p.161
piet hut: ...Sometimes experiment leads, and sometimes theory leads, but in both cases, you make sure you are correct by using the other approach to verify your conclusion. I’m very curious whether in Madhyamika and in other forms of Buddhist meditation there are also two distinct modes and what the relation is between them.
dalai lama: There are, in fact, two different approaches that are comparable to what you have suggested. In one, you establish a structure of theoretical insight and then use that as the platform for entering into the meditative experience. The experience emerges from the prior view. Another strategy starts with the experience. You enter into the meditative experience, and out of your experience you articulate a view.

p.161
dalai lama: In Dzog Chen practice, in what is called the trekchö, or breakthrough phase, there is a breakthrough to the nature of the pristine, primordial nature of awareness, the essential nature of the mind. In order to be able to make that breakthrough, one needs a preliminary practice. The preliminary practice entails a very careful empirical investigation into the nature of the origins of mental states, mental phenomena, and consciousness itself. It is an investigation into the manner in which they originate, the manner in which they are present—their
location—and also the manner in which they dissipate and vanish. There’s a very careful ontological scrutiny of these three phases of mental processes.

p.162
Conventional reality allows for the existence of even the most subtle and hidden domains. And the potential range of human capacities is—in the Buddhist view—able in principle to extend to reach them. Whatever we can validly infer about conventional reality can also become part of our
experience if we suitably school our human sensibilities.

p.190
I see that, roughly speaking, the East began about 1,000 years ahead of the West in this race. For example, the relativity of position, or the plurality of worlds, was first recognized in the West in the time of Bruno, around 1600, and it was already over 1,000 years old in the East. We began to catch up a little bit with the relativity of velocity, which I think was understood first in the West, and the relativity of time associated with Einstein. With quantum theory, the East was again far ahead of the West in an important sense.

p.192
There are many forms of ancient wisdom in the major spiritual traditions, and Buddhism is outstanding here. But even many of the indigenous religious traditions, such as the Hawaiian, Maori, and Native American, seem to hold some enduring values for us. Particularly significant for us is the shared concern for the knower, the observer—in other words, the person, and especially the person’s self-knowledge and self-cultivation through many different forms of spiritual exercises. What does this mean?

p.193
In this context, the human claim to be a cocreator rests in the belief that the secret code of the universe is implanted in the very nature of being human. The attempt to decode this particular secret message is, in principle, humanly possible through self-knowledge, rigorous self-cultivation, contemplation, and meditation. It can take many lifetimes. But some systems say, beautifully:  Don’t worry, there are many lifetimes to count. In the West, we’re very nervous if we don’t make it in this life. I think it’s a limitation, that there is no possibility beyond this.

p.195
David’s beautiful closing remarks about the narrowness of our attention in physics can remind us of the larger issues that circle our scientific investigations and which were an integral part of our conversations with the Dalai Lama. Our scientific attentions focus on one small aspect of a vast universe in which we live out our lives. One can hold out the hope of enlarging our circle of relationships to include in our considerations the features not under the microscope: love and meaning. Earlier in this session, Weiming Tu invoked the image of a partnership between humanity and nature, or of a “joint venture with reality.”

p.202
dalai lama: Historically in Buddhism, it is as if physics were to come first and a formulation of logic were to come later. Buddhist logic was strictly formulated in the fifth century by Dignaga and then reformulated in the seventh century by Dharmakirti, and Buddhism was long established before that. It’s interesting to consider what the basis of logic is. The law of the excluded middle, for example, is based on a kind of experience. As we look around and see how things happen, on the basis of that experience we start to formulate logic. The logic wasn’t made in a vacuum. It was an embodied logic to start with, which we draw out from experience. Then the logic comes around and defines and clarifies further experience.

p.202
thubten jinpa: I was arguing that logical principles, such as identity, contradiction,or the law of the excluded middle, have a lot to do with the way human thought functions. They are based simply on the tools with which thought operates, and they are fundamental assumptions without which we just can’t make sense. His Holiness took the opposite position, saying that these are principles abstracted from the physical world. For example, the quantum phenomenon of superposition suggests that there may be a need to modify the Buddhist logical position that the law of the excluded middle applies in all instances.
dalai lama: If logic really isn’t coming simply from an a priori position, disengaged from nature, but is based upon nature, then you have to modify your logic as new information comes in. Buddhism must modify its logical principles based upon the new empirical evidence coming in.

p.206
The reason for the confusion about the rest mass and moving mass of a photon is this: If an object moves, some of its energy is the energy of motion. Much of its energy is mass, locked up in the material, which could, in principle, be released in a nuclear explosion. If I want to find out how much mass, it’s hard to know if the object is in motion. I have to stop it and carefully weigh or analyze it. The problem is, if you stop light, it disappears. You cannot stop light. In a photon, all of the energy is in the motion. There is no energy locked up. A photon is manifest energy. A physical object has hidden energy.

p.209
piet hut: Already I think science has found a high degree of freedom from identification. The question is, Where are we going in future? I can only see that we are moving from a science of objectivity to a science that includes subjectivity, as well as objectivity. The next relativity theory or the next transformation theory will include a relativity between the object and the subject, between the physical and the mental.
dalai lama: It’s getting more encompassing and vaster. For a long time my intuition has been that up until now the domain of science has been rather confined in being limited to the physical world, focusing only on what can be quantified. Gradually science will have to expand its horizons so that it can bring into its domain of analysis phenomena that may not be subject to quantification like physical objects. From what you have shown us, I feel you may share the same hope.

piet hut: I have the feeling I am climbing down from science’s side into the canyon, and the deeper I go the more I can see the other side. I cannot jump yet. I am a little bit too scared to make such a big jump, but from here I can see the Tibetan notion of the sameness of outer and inner space—that they are not really something different. I recognize the language from the other side, and I see in it something very similar to what I expect to happen in the language of science in the next hundred years or so. The search for a wider view, a wider context, a wider space —that is what science will soon investigate in much greater depth. It would be very nice to look at Buddhism and see whether we can get some help. In the beginning it was very difficult to help each other. We were too far away, at the top of the canyon, but now we are getting closer. It is more and more possible to learn from each other at the level of the underlying logic and processes.

p.213
Piet maintained that at its root, experience is nondual, that the apparent dualism of subject and object is itself due to a filter or modification imposed on experience. Dualism is derivative, not essential. In response, the Dalai Lama quite naturally underscored the Buddhist view that we can change the factors that affect our experience, that we can modify the filters, for example, through disciplined contemplative practice. Thus, through an appropriate schooling, one can move from raw cognition to increasingly refined and disciplined forms of cognition until one ends up with a valid form of direct cognitive experience. The confluence of opinion expressed here resonates with other parts of our conversation, especially the comments made by Tu Weiming. In the following final session, several strands of our week-long conversation are pulled together.

p.214
The scientists here are tough students, but debate and critical discourse are also part of the tradition of Buddhism— a very valuable part that shows us that appreciating experiential knowledge does not mean we have to drop rational discourse. That has been most valuable to learn, not only because it furthers the dialogue between religion and science, between East and West, but it also furthers the social dimension of knowledge.

p.215
would like to replace the word religion with religiosity because it is not the specific discipline that matters here but an experience which is more general than any one religion.

p.219
You very carefully give a thick description of the local knowledge that you have, all the positive and negative areas. But if you dig deep enough, into deepening subjectivity, you will reach a common spring. Your digging and David’s digging and Anton’s diggings and all the others’ will meet somewhere. That communication is intersubjectively confirmed; it’s rich and it’s contextualized. It’s not generalizable in terms of universality, but it is generalizable in terms of communication, in terms of dialogue and mutual understanding.