This post contains material from Dr. Pierce’s blog, https://piscience.wordpress.com/, written after his India trip in 2016.

So . . . how did the Tibetan-monks-learning-science-thing come about?

I imagine it starts with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who started the Mind & Life Institute with scientists through Dialogues and Meetings that started in 1987. I was told that prior to this alliance between Tibetan Buddhism and Western scientists, the Tibetan monks had a traditional Buddhist curriculum that remained unchanged for over 600 years.  This traditional curriculum is largely spiritual and not in concert with the principal discoveries of “Western science”.  The beauty of the Dalai Lama’s initiative is his encouragement of the monks to understand Western science as a compliment to Buddhism, with an openness to science’s empirical findings and a rejection of dogma that should inspire all science/religion discussions.

How did this Dialogue manifest itself into something tangible?

The Emory Tibet Science Initiative (ETSI), was founded through coordination between Geshe Lhakdor, Director of the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, and Emory University’s Dean Robert Paul.  This started as a 5-year program at a Tibetan monastery in Dharamsala, India and has since expanded to three monasteries in Southern India.  The program relies on monks learning Western science during the year, with reinforcement by US instructors (from Emory, mostly) during team-taught week-long sessions of four subjects: philosophy of science, biology, neuroscience, and physics.  The program in this iteration will go for the next five years, with 2014 being the pilot session in the three new monasteries, resulting in hundreds of monks with a further understanding of these subjects. Here’s a 2009 NY Times article that explains the program more.