MINDSCIENCE MindScience AN EAST-WEST DIALOGUE The Dalai Lama Herbert Benson • Robert A. F. Thurman Daniel Goleman • Howard Gardner et alii Proceedings of a symposium sponsored by the Mind/Body Medical Institute of HarvardMedical School & New England Deaconess Hospital, and Tibet House New York Edited by Daniel Goleman & Robert A. F. Thurman WISDOM PUBLICATIONS Boston First published in 1991 WISDOM PUBLICATIONS 361 Newbury Street Boston, Massachusetts 02115 USA © Mind/Body Medical Institute Inc. & Tibet House New York Inc. 1991; Chapter 4 © Robert Thurman 1991 Illustrations Fig. 1 © Robert Beer 1991; Figs. 2 & 3 © Venerable Perna Losang Chogyen 1991 All righ ts reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording. or by any information storage and retrieval system or technologies now known or later developed. without permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data MindScience: An East-West Dialogue His Holiness the Dalai Lama et al. edited by Daniel Goleman and Robert Thurman. p. cm. Talks delivered on March 24, 1991 at a symposium called Mind Science, part of the continuing education program of Harvard Medical School. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0 86171 066 5 1. Buddhism-Psychology-Congresses. 2. Meditation-Physiological aspects-Congresses. 3. Meditation-Buddhism-Congresses. I. Bstan-'dzin-rgya-mtsho, Dalai Lama XlV, 1935-. II. Goleman, Daniel. III. Thurman, Robert A. E IV. Harvard Medical School. BQ4570. P76M57 1991 294.3'375-dc20 91-30288 00 99 98 97 96 8 7 6 5 4 Cover design by L].SAwLit' Cover painting; Bird Cloud, 1926, by Lyonel Feininger, courtesy of the Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, purchased in memory of Eda K. Loeb. Wisdom Publications' books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. Manufactured in the United States of America. Contents Foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama Preface by Dr. Herbert Benson Vll IX INTRODUCTION A Western Perspective 3 Daniel Goleman A Tibetan Perspective 7 Robert A. F. Thurman PART ONE: BUDDHISM, NEUROSCIENCE & THE MEDICAL SCIENCES 1 The Buddhist Concept of Mind II The Dalai Lama 2 Dialogue 19 The Dalai Lama· DavidM. Bear· Herbert Benson Steven W. Matthysse • DavidD. Potter Joseph]. Schildkraut • Carl E. Schwartz 3 Mind/Body Interactions including Tibetan Studies 37 Herbert Benson PART TWO: BUDDHISM, PSYCHOLOGY & THE COGNITIVE SCIENCES + Tibetan Psychology: Sophisticated Software for the Human Brain 51 Robert A. F. Thurman 5 Cognition: A Western Perspective H(JWard E. Gardner 75 VI 6 CONTENTS Tibetan and Western Models of Mental Health Daniel Goleman 7 Dialogue 103 Diana L. Eck • H(JWard E. Gardner · Daniel Goleman Robert A. F. Thurman CONCLUSION Looking Ahead Daniel Goleman II7 • Robert A. F. Thurman Contributors Notes Glossary Select Bibliography Index II9 123 127 133 135 THE DALAI LAMA Foreword I believe the ultimate aim of all human beings is to obtain happiness and a sense of fulfillment. These objectives can be achieved through physical amenities and proper mental development, but the dominant and ultimate factor is the mental aspect. In order to achieve these objectives one must have knowledge about both mind and matter. Science has made tremendous progress in understanding and har­ nessing matter. Buddhism, on the other hand, has a profound phi­ losophy and over the centuries has developed a systematic method of shaping and developing the mind. Whether we are scientists or spiritual practitioners our basic needs and aspirations are the same. Scientists may study mainly matter but they cannot ignore the human mind, or consciousness; spiritual practitioners may be engaging mainly in developing the mind but they cannot completely ignore their physical needs. It is for this reason that I have always stressed the importance of combining both the mental and the material approach to achieving happiness for humankind. I am therefore very happy to learn that Wisdom is publishing this book MindScience. August 5 , 1991 Preface The talks published here were originally delivered at a symposium called Mind Science: A Dialogue between East and West. Part of a program of Harvard Medical School's Department of Continuing Medical Education, the symposium took place on March 24, 1991, at the Kresge Auditorium, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, under the joint auspices of the Mind/Body Medical Institute and Tibet House New York. It gathered together experts from the fields of medicine, psychiatry, psychobiology, neurobiology, education, comparative religion and Indo-Tibetan Buddhism in open dialogue and exchange on the various concepts, approaches and understandings, East and West, of the science of mind. Guest of honor was His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. The symposium celebrated more than a decade of collaborative research between the Tibetan Buddhist community and Harvard Medical School. This work had its genesis on October 18, 1979, when I met with His Holiness the Dalai Lama during his first visit to Harvard University. On this occasion, I had explained our labora­ tory's experiments on the physiological effects of simple meditative techniques, and requested permission to study several of the ad­ vanced meditative techniques of Tibetan Buddhism. The rationale was straightforward: If simple meditative techniques resulted in such notable physiological changes as decreased metabo­ lism, heart rate, blood pressure and rate of breathing, as well as distinctive brainwave patterns, what could the effects of advanced meditative techniques be? Could they possibly demonstrate even more striking mind/body interactions? We had been attempting to investigate these advanced techniques for several years, but could find no practitioners who would consent to be studied-they had little interest in the scientific documentation of their practices. x PREFACE I had just finished reading Alexandra David-Neel's Magic and Mystery of Tibet) which contained her early-twentieth-century accounts of gTum-mo yoga being performed by Tibetan Buddhist monks. In this practice, an internal heat, which is generated for religious purposes, has demonstrable effects on the body. David-Neel described what she saw in a midwinter encounter: The neophytes sit on the ground, cross-legged and naked. Sheets are dipped in the icy w;lter, each man wraps himself in one of them and must dry it on his body. As soon as the sheet has become dry, it is again dipped in the water and placed on the novice's body to be dried as before. The operation goes on [in] that fashion until daybreak. Then he who has dried the largest number of sheets is acknowledged the winner of the competition. Besides drying wet sheets on one's body, there exist various other tests to ascertain the degree of heat which the neophyte is able to radiate. One of these tests consists in sitting in the snow. The quantity of snow melted under the man and the distance at which it melts around him are taken as measures of his ability. I I hoped that with the permission of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, I would be allowed access to study the remarkable alleged mind/body effects ofgTum-mo. Our October 1979 meeting took place in the living room of the Dana-Palmer House in Cambridge, an 1823 building in which William James had lived and where he is believed to have conceived his idea of a pluralistic universe. After I had explained my rationale for requesting to study practitioners of gTum-mo, His Holiness re­ plied, 'It will be very difficult to measure these abilities. The people who practice this meditation do so for religious purposes. It must be experienced in order to feel the benefits. You must experience it first.' Then he added, 'Still, our culture is undergoing many changes. We have been forced out of our homeland into exile . . . perhaps there is some worth in allowing this study to be done.' Several months later I received a letter from His Holiness's office inviting us to study three gTum-mo practitioners who lived near Dharamsala, India. Some of the successful and striking results of these studies and others are described in this book. We determined through scientifically-based investigations that advanced meditative techniques do indeed lead to profound, hitherto unrecognized human mind/body capacities. Preface Xl In the autumn of 1990, we believed that it was time to take stock of where these experiments had brought us, and thus the Mind Science Symposium was conceived. His Holiness agreed to attend, and the dialogue was further expanded to embrace Eastern and Western concepts of the mind. I am grateful to all those who attended and made the symposium such a success. My hope is that it will not only act as a watershed for the decade of fruitful mind science interactions between East and West, but also point to future advances in our continuing collabora­ tion. HERBERT BENSON, MD Boston, 1991