The Dalai Lama has been awarded this year’s Templeton Prize, an annual honor given by the Templeton Foundation to a figure who, according to the foundation’s website, “has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension.” In practice, the Prize has gone frequently to thinkers who have investigated the interaction between science and religion. The Dalai Lama, as spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, has also concerned himself with this topic, and has released just this year his newest book, The Universe in a Single Atom, which investigates, in light of each other, Buddhist thought and modern science. While Catholics can certainly laud the Dalai Lama for his affirmation that the materialistic view of things falls short, they should also look at his Buddhist philosophy with some serious reservations. If the Dalai Lama is right in affirming a dimension to reality beyond that known by science, just what that dimension is remains a serious question.
Beyond the complex world of nature, Buddhism asserts a fundamental “nothingness.” Buddhist thought sees as illusory all distinction between beings. As the Dalai Lama writes in The Universe in a Single Atom, “According to the theory of emptiness, any belief in an objective reality grounded in the assumption of intrinsic, independent existence is untenable. All things and events, whether material, mental or even abstract concepts like time, are devoid of objective, independent existence.” Recognizing this illusion is important, claims the Dalai Lama, because such division is the cause of suffering. Invoking the central Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna, the Dalai Lama writes: “…Nagarjuna argues that grasping at the independent existence of things leads to affliction, which in turn gives rise to a chain of destructive actions, reactions and suffering.” In addition to these moral concerns, the Dalai Lama bases his appreciation for modern science, physics in particular, in this Buddhist concept of negation. “To a Mahayana Buddhist exposed to Nagarjuna’s thought, there is an unmistakable resonance between the notion of emptiness and the new physics. If on the quantum level, matter is revealed to be less solid and definable than it appears, then it seems to me that science is coming closer to the Buddhist contemplative insights of emptiness and interdependence.”
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