Tibetan Monks and Nuns Turn Their Minds Toward Science

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. Read Article

By Amy Yee