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Oct. 20th, 2010 10:27 amI am still trying to process three days of the visit of the Dalai Lama to Emory University.
Having to show up at my job at least occasionally, I skipped the creative journey with Richard Gere and Alice Walker. (I heard at second hand that since Tibetan has no word that means "creativity," the Dalai Lama never quite understood what Gere and Walker were talking about.) I also missed the second half of the day-long conference with research psychologists and primatologists.
I was there for the presentation of the next four Emory-developed textbooks intended to teach Tibetan monks and nuns the rudiments of evolutionary biology, genetics, brain physiology, and the other complex of investigational insights that compose contemporary science. The Dalai Lama has requested that all 20,000 contemplatives in the Tibetan meditational tradition be made scientifically literate, and an immense translation enterprise is producing textbooks to accomplish this goal.
The Dalai Lama is also seeing to it that the most promising candidates pursue advanced scientific study at Emory University under the auspices of the Emory-Tibet Partnership in general and the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative in particular.
They follow in the footsteps of Geshe Lobsang Tenzin Negi, who twenty years ago arrived in Atlanta to pursue a Ph.D. in psychology to match his comparably advanced degree in Tibet’s comparable academic disciplines. (Tibet’s study programs are rather more interdisciplinary in nature, recognizing that the analytical disciplines overlap.)
Geshe Lobsang has developed a—I’ll quote the literature so as not to distort—“secularized meditation protocol” based on the basic techniques of loyong (mind training) found in Tibetan meditational practice. Researchers at Stanford, Wisconsin, and elsewhere have been conducting experiments to determine whether the techniques of visualization it employs can produce lasting changes in brain physiology and changes in the personal behavior that follow from those physical changes.
The researchers are often singularly tin-eared, except for Geshe Lobsang, whose Cognitive-Based Compassion Training is nomenclature that grates less on the sensibilities than some of the misleadingly simple terminology developed by other researchers. As I remarked in the parallel essay I have posted on my Blogspot weblog Counterforces, an audience member suggested that the panel discussion could have used an evolutionary biologist when it came to exploring the incidence of empathy in non-mammalian species. They could also have used an anthropologist specializing in contemporary language and literature to point out the automatic negative reactions that terms such as Compassion Cultivation Theory arouse in typical readers of the TLS or the New York Review of Books—the sorts of persons who could do with some compassion cultivation, snark being their stock in trade.
So anything I summarize here about the conference will most likely meet with negativity on the part of my longsuffering readership. I’ll just say that the research on the doings of the amygdala and the vagus nerve go far towards providing tentative answers to the question posed by Frans de Waal from the perspective of primatology and the psychologists from their separate perspectives: “Is empathy a biological given, or can it be cultivated, or both?” The answer, clearly, is both, and one of the more interesting exchanges between the Dalai Lama and Frans de Waal is worth reporting:
( if you really care, that is. )
Having to show up at my job at least occasionally, I skipped the creative journey with Richard Gere and Alice Walker. (I heard at second hand that since Tibetan has no word that means "creativity," the Dalai Lama never quite understood what Gere and Walker were talking about.) I also missed the second half of the day-long conference with research psychologists and primatologists.
I was there for the presentation of the next four Emory-developed textbooks intended to teach Tibetan monks and nuns the rudiments of evolutionary biology, genetics, brain physiology, and the other complex of investigational insights that compose contemporary science. The Dalai Lama has requested that all 20,000 contemplatives in the Tibetan meditational tradition be made scientifically literate, and an immense translation enterprise is producing textbooks to accomplish this goal.
The Dalai Lama is also seeing to it that the most promising candidates pursue advanced scientific study at Emory University under the auspices of the Emory-Tibet Partnership in general and the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative in particular.
They follow in the footsteps of Geshe Lobsang Tenzin Negi, who twenty years ago arrived in Atlanta to pursue a Ph.D. in psychology to match his comparably advanced degree in Tibet’s comparable academic disciplines. (Tibet’s study programs are rather more interdisciplinary in nature, recognizing that the analytical disciplines overlap.)
Geshe Lobsang has developed a—I’ll quote the literature so as not to distort—“secularized meditation protocol” based on the basic techniques of loyong (mind training) found in Tibetan meditational practice. Researchers at Stanford, Wisconsin, and elsewhere have been conducting experiments to determine whether the techniques of visualization it employs can produce lasting changes in brain physiology and changes in the personal behavior that follow from those physical changes.
The researchers are often singularly tin-eared, except for Geshe Lobsang, whose Cognitive-Based Compassion Training is nomenclature that grates less on the sensibilities than some of the misleadingly simple terminology developed by other researchers. As I remarked in the parallel essay I have posted on my Blogspot weblog Counterforces, an audience member suggested that the panel discussion could have used an evolutionary biologist when it came to exploring the incidence of empathy in non-mammalian species. They could also have used an anthropologist specializing in contemporary language and literature to point out the automatic negative reactions that terms such as Compassion Cultivation Theory arouse in typical readers of the TLS or the New York Review of Books—the sorts of persons who could do with some compassion cultivation, snark being their stock in trade.
So anything I summarize here about the conference will most likely meet with negativity on the part of my longsuffering readership. I’ll just say that the research on the doings of the amygdala and the vagus nerve go far towards providing tentative answers to the question posed by Frans de Waal from the perspective of primatology and the psychologists from their separate perspectives: “Is empathy a biological given, or can it be cultivated, or both?” The answer, clearly, is both, and one of the more interesting exchanges between the Dalai Lama and Frans de Waal is worth reporting:
( if you really care, that is. )
