On the day after the inauguration ceremony at Lerab Ling in August 2008, a group of leading Tibetan Buddhist scholars came together for a meeting in the temple. Their discussions marked a major step forward in the work of the Tenzin Gyatso Institute, an initiative founded by Sogyal Rinpoche to serve the vision of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and to help preserve Tibet’s unique wisdom culture. Andy Fraser reports on the development of the Tenzin Gyatso Scholars Program.

Members of the Tenzin Gyatso Scholars Program’s advisory council in discussion at Lerab Ling. From left to right: Geshe Lobsang Tenzin, Judy Weddle (hidden) of the Tenzin Gyatso Institute’s Program Committee, TGI executive director David Rand, Professor Jay Garfield, Geshe Ngawang Samten, Patrick Gaffney, Professor Georges Dreyfus, Rinchen Dharlo, President of the Tibet Fund, and meeting facilitator Chris McCarthy.

··“Buddhism in the twenty-first century implies fuller knowledge: fuller knowledge of modern science, modern education and today’s reality, and at the same time a fuller knowledge of the structure of Buddhism.”

This is how His Holiness the Dalai Lama presented his blueprint for ‘twenty-first century Buddhists’ as he gave a teaching in the Lerab Ling temple to students following Rigpa’s Three Year Retreat. It was not the only time the Dalai Lama had spoken about the future of Buddhism during his visit to Lerab Ling. With the situation in Tibet so uncertain, he emphasized on several occasions the importance of establishing a stable basis for the preservation of the teachings of the Tibetan tradition outside of their homeland, both in the Tibetan communities in the East, and in the many Buddhist centres that have been established all around the world over the past few decades.

On the day after the Dalai Lama’s departure, a group of Tibetan and western scholars and professors held a meeting in the temple’s East Apartment to discuss the contribution they could make to this vision through the Tenzin Gyatso Scholars Program. Their aim was to develop an initiative to broaden the base of education within the Tibetan Buddhist monastic system, enriching the tradition and shaping the emergence of a group of Tibetan men and women capable of taking on leadership roles in monasteries, in society or in government. At the same time, these scholars will be better equipped to communicate the teaching of Buddha in an accessible, effective and beneficial way in the wider world.

Professor Samdhong Rinpoche, the Chairman of the Cabinet in the Central Tibetan Administration (the Tibetan government-in-exile) and head of the Scholars Program’s advisory council, presented a clear mission statement to the meeting in a conference call from India. The initiative, he said, “should aim to prepare the future leadership of the Dharma and the various lineages of Tibet” by helping to train a new generation of teachers who could combine an in-depth knowledge of the Tibetan tradition with a keen understanding and appreciation of the issues affecting people today.

“For Tibetan Buddhism to thrive, particularly in the West, it is very necessary for practitioners to undertake serious study and in-depth understanding of the tradition, and it is very important for them to have a good Dharma teacher and guidance,” said Samdhong Rinpoche. “It is therefore particularly important to prepare a new generation of lineage holders, spiritual masters and scholarly teachers of Buddhist philosophy and science. Intelligent and energetic young monks and nuns who have a firm grounding in Buddhist philosophy need to be exposed to modern science to enable them to understand and explain the deeper and the subtle Buddhist philosophy and metaphysics in a modern vocabulary, in order to make it easier for modern western people to comprehend Buddhism in its totality.

“In addition, His Holiness the Dalai Lama has opened a new direction for introducing Buddhist science, philosophy and religion in a very innovative way that is suited to modern western minds. It is a unique teaching of secular ethics, non-violence, universal responsibility, compassion and so on, which is exceptionally important for the future of humanity. In particular, the intimate dialogue between Buddhism and modern science initiated by His Holiness has great potential for the future. Therefore, the preservation of the unique legacy of His Holiness is our moral responsibility.”

It was the suggestion of Lodi Gyari Rinpoche, Special Envoy to the Dalai Lama, that the Tenzin Gyatso Institute should bring a number of the most promising monks and nuns from Tibetan monastic institutions in the East to study in the United States. The scholars would be introduced to disciplines such as western philosophy, psychology, neuroscience and world religions, through an educational model designed in collaboration with a US college or university.

The advisory council assembled to discuss how this could be done brought together a wealth of expertise and experience of both the Tibetan scholastic tradition and the western higher education system. Gathered around the table for the council’s first meeting at Lerab Ling were: Geshe Ngawang Samten, the director and vice-chancellor of the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies in Sarnath, near Varanasi in India; Geshe Lobsang Tenzin, the president of Drepung Loseling Monastery, Inc—a centre for Tibetan Buddhist studies, practice and culture based at Emory University in Atlanta, USA—and chairman of the Emory-Tibet Partnership; Professor Georges Dreyfus, the first westerner to obtain the degree of Geshe Lharampa in the Tibetan scholastic tradition; Dr Elizabeth Napper, a professor in Buddhist Studies and co-director of the Tibetan Nuns Project in Dharamsala, India; and Professor Jay Garfield, director of the Five Colleges Tibetan Studies in India Programme, which runs exchange programmes for students of the Five Colleges in Massachusetts, USA, and the Tibetan universities in exile in India.

Geshe Lhakdor, the Dalai Lama’s translator and religious assistant, and director of the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives in Dharamsala, joined the meeting by telephone. Geshe Thubten Jinpa, a distinguished scholar who has been the principal English translator to His Holiness the Dalai Lama for almost twenty-five years, and Professor Alan Wallace, an author, teacher and translator who is president of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies, were unable to attend, but both offered their thoughts in writing. Geshe Thubten jinpa wrote: “The meeting of Tibet’s great classical tradition and the West’s scientific and humanistic intellectual traditions could usher in a new and a constructive world view, which can benefit both our own classical tradition as well as the contemporary world. So in this spirit, I am delighted to be part of this wonderful initiative.”

As the discussions progressed, a picture emerged of an initiative that would take a non-sectarian approach (Rimé in Tibetan), selecting monks and nuns from all of the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism. The heads of the monastic colleges, nunneries, lineages and major institutions would play an important part in the selection process, helping to identify scholars with the potential to become teachers, leaders or lineage holders in the future. The ideal candidates would hold a deep understanding of Buddhist philosophy and have a number of years of study behind them. As the ability to speak English adequately would be integral to their learning experience, it was suggested that feeder courses could be set up in India to help the monks and nuns to develop their language skills before beginning their studies in the United States.

For the Scholars Program to have a lasting impact, it was agreed that it would need to offer the participants, as Georges Dreyfus explained, “a genuine experience of what western learning and modern learning is about. We’re not talking about training lamas to become physicists, but we are talking about giving them a genuine taste of what it is to engage with these modern disciplines.”

Geshe Lobsang Tenzin, who has been involved in collaborative research at Emory University on meditation and its impact on health, said scientific knowledge would not only enrich the scholars’ understanding of their own tradition, but it would also give them the tools and the vocabulary to communicate the Buddhist science of the mind more effectively in today’s world.

“The Tibetan buddhist tradition has so much to offer to our modern world in terms of understanding mind, and how to bring about changes in that inner world of thoughts and emotions. And I think the western scientific tradition has reached that critical stage of development where it is able to address these issues about how our mind might affect the body and our general sense of well-being, physical or emotional. For these two to come together will be an incredible moment to enrich not only our human knowledge but also, through that new knowledge, to benefit humanity...

“Scientific knowledge will give the Tibetan contemplatives and monastics a way to address something that they have been studying for centuries. It will add that neuronal dimension to explain and understand the nature of the mind and its interrelation or connection with the body, the brain, the immune system, all the physiological properties of the components that interface with the mind… The Scholars Program will give the monastics the language to articulate the Buddhist models of the mind, meditation and contemplations, in ways that the wider population in the world will understand; because western society has long been introduced to the scientific ways of understanding the world. So it will give them the language to interpret and to convey their own wisdom to the modern world.”

Geshe Ngawang Samten was quick to point out that the interaction of Buddhism with other disciplines has been taking place since the time of the Buddha. “Buddhism has been having such interactions with the non-Buddhist philosophical schools in terms of logic, in terms of epistemology, medicine and so on. In the course of that, Buddhism has made a great contribution to these schools,” he said. “I think the same thing can be repeated in the modern age, that Buddhism can interact with the modern disciplines and sciences and can make a substantial contribution.”

At the same time, this exchange of knowledge would benefit the Tibetan tradition itself, because the monks and nuns who completed the courses would be able to share what they had learned when they returned to their monastic institutions in the East. “In that way, we can bring some important elements into our own system,” said Geshe Ngawang Samten. “As well as just training individuals in certain subjects, we can enrich the whole tradition.”

In an interview after the meeting, Georges Dreyfus spoke about the fifteen years he had spent studying the Tibetan monastic curriculum at monasteries in India. He described how, with the guidance of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, he had decided to undertake the examination process to become a geshe. He recalled the sleepless night he had spent before his first examination, a daunting, ten-hour test that involved him being challenged in debate by his fellow students. And he expressed his hope that the Tenzin Gyatso Scholars Program could play a part in helping to maintain the Tibetan tradition long into the future. “The experience I had from learning in a monastery was of how lively the tradition was,” he said. “Unless that can be sustained, there is going to be a real loss for Tibetans, but also for westerners, because this can be a source of learning, practice and inspiration for decades, and probably centuries. And unless you train great people, they don’t come around…

“The Scholars Program is going to, in a way, plant the seeds, so that we have some kind of intellectual flourishing which will happen over maybe ten, twenty, thirty years. So this is really for the long term, but I think if we do it well, we might have interesting results.”

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