The scientists were mostly, in their words, “quantum information” people, and their research focused on how quantum mechanics treated information, knowledge and reality. The theme for this year was ‘Observation and Reality’.

( Disclosure: The author attended the conference at the invitation of the Science for Monks Foundation and all expenses were borne by the foundation.) It counted five scientists from three countries and about 30 monks from 16 monasteries in India among its attendees. This year’s edition had been organised in Gangtok, Sikkim, and concluded on October 6. They have been funded by the John Templeton and Sager Family Foundations, and organised together with the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives (LTWA).

It was on the back of this aspect of Buddhism, at least Tibetan Buddhism, that the ‘Science for Monks’ workshops and conferences have been organised, according to Bryce Johnson, the director of a California-based foundation of the same name and point-person for these events. Analytical meditation is considered to be a form of evidence-sharpening and a part of proof-building. Thabke said that sometimes, people walk into his monastery expecting it to be a quiet environment and are surprised when they chance upon an argument. This is also a louder form of meditation. The less well known second kind is analytical meditation: when two monks engage in debate and question each other about their ideas, confronting them with impossibilities and contradictions in an effort to challenge their beliefs. On the sidelines of a conference called ‘Science for Monks’, I sat down with him for a chat, during the course of which he mentioned a curious thing. When most people think about the meditative element of the practice of Buddhism, he said, they think only about single-point meditation, which is when a practitioner closes their eyes and focuses their mind’s eye, so to speak, on a single object. Geshe Thabke is a Buddhist monk at the Sera Jay monastery near Mysore, Karnataka.

Dalai lama religion and science