THE DALAI LAMA AND ACADEMIC RESEARCH TO THE 85TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE 14TH DALAI LAMA
The article is dedicated for the 85th anniversary of His Holiness Dalai Lama the 14th Tenzin Gyatso and considers his contribution to establishing the dialogue between academic research and spirituality. It depicts main points of Dalai Lama’s way in science, the results of which he described in his book ‘The Universe in a Single Atom. How Science and Spirituality Can Serve Our World’. In this book His Holiness tried to explain the possibility of reaching a unified vision of the world, based not only on science but also on spirituality. Dalai Lama is sure of the necessity of the dialogue between science and Buddhism; he believes that there are certain points, where science and Buddhist philosophy come very close to each other, and may form a good base for such a dialogue. It is for example non-theistic character of both science and Buddhism, the similarity of their methods of cognition, along with the common goal of attaining the truth. Dalai Lama raises one important question: Should there be a place for ethics in science? Giving the positive answer, he then proves it expressly. For several decades Dalai Lama has been undertaking active efforts to facilitate the dialogue between science and spirituality. Recently Russian scholars have also joined this process. By Dalai Lama’s initiative two big conferences were held under the aegis of the program “Fundamental knowledge: dialogues of Russian and Buddhist scholars”. As a result of these meetings the joint Russian and Buddhist research center was organized in South India to study the altered states of conciseness, basing on various types of Buddhist meditation.