Visions of Compassion: Western Scientists and Tibetan Buddhists Examine Human Nature Richard J. Davidson Anne Harrington, Editors OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS visions of compassion This page intentionally left blank visions of compassion Western Scientists and Tibetan Buddhists Examine Human Nature Edited by Richard J. Davidson & Anne Harrington 1 2002 3 Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogotá Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris São Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 2002 by the Mind and Life Institute Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Visions of compassion: western scientists and Tibetan Buddhists examine human nature / edited by Richard J. Davidson and Anne Harrington. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-513043-x 1. Meditation (Buddhism)—Psychology. 2. Meditation (Buddhism)— Physiological aspects. 3. Compassion (Buddhism) 4. Altruism. 5. Empathy. 6. Buddhism—China—Tibet. I. Davidson, Richard J. II. Harrington, Anne, 1960– BQ7805 .S35 2001 294.3'375—dc21 2001021078 Title page and chapter openers: Lotus flower from Mädavela Ra¯jama¯haviha¯ra (Sri Lanka), fresco, mid-eighteenth century. Reproduced from John Clifford Holt, The Religious World of Kı¯rti ´ Srı¯ (Oxford University Press, 1996). Used by permission of the author. 987654321 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Preface This book is about compassion: what it is, where it “fits” into our under- standings of human nature, and what it could mean for science in partic- ular to learn more about it. It is also a book about what could happen if Western biobehavioral science were to allow its thinking to be chal- lenged by the interrogating voice of a fundamentally different cultural perspective: that of Tibetan Buddhism. While there is a modest research tradition in the Western behavioral sciences concerned with altruism, prosocial behavior, the development of sympathy, empathy, and so on, the dominant note of the biobehavioral sciences in the West has been tragic-machismo: We find our origins in ancestors we call “killer apes,” ponder our potential for violence, explore the genetic and biochemical bases of our capacity for selfishness, depression, and anxiety. In contrast, Tibetan Buddhism has long celebrated the human potential for compas- sion, is dedicated to studying the scope, expression, and training of com- passionate feeling and action, and sees compassion as a key to enduring happiness and, even more fundamentally, spiritual transformation. Given this, two questions immediately suggest themselves. (1) Why these differences? And (2), given our understandings of our points of differ- ence and of overlap, what can we expect to learn from each other when we start to talk? The idea of developing an edited volume devoted to these questions had its inspiration in a week-long conference entitled “Altruism, Ethics, and Compassion” that took place in October 1995 in Dharamsala, India. The participants in that meeting consisted of a small group of Tibetan Buddhist monks, His Holiness, the XIV Dalai Lama—exiled po- litical and spiritual leader of Tibet—and six leading Western scholars and scientists: a developmental psychologist (Nancy Eisenberg), a neuro- scientist (Richard Davidson), a social psychologist (Ervin Staub), an economist (Robert Frank), a historian of science (Anne Harrington), and a philosopher of biology (Elliott Sober). Each speaker was provided with an entire morning to present. The charge was to “locate” the topic at hand—“compassion”—within the theoretical framework of one’s own discipline, and its empirical knowl- edge. The afternoon sessions, turned over wholly to discussion, then of- fered a further challenge: to see what might happen when a particular disciplinary understanding was subjected to the scrutiny of a radically unfamiliar cultural perspective, namely, Tibetan Buddhism. Underlying the entire process was an implicit question: were there ways that Western biobehavioral science and scholarship had an impoverished sense of human potential; failed to do justice to certain human emotions and be- havior—like compassion—that were perhaps much better understood and honored within other cultural systems? Structured around both the metaphor and the reality of dialogue, the book that has resulted from that 1995 meeting aims to be more than just a proceedings of a meeting, however extraordinary. Chapters are in- cluded here that address questions that emerged during the week but were not adequately resolved by its close. For example, in attendance at the Dharamsala meeting was a Western Tibetan scholar (Georges Drey- fus) who for many years lived as a monk and now teaches Tibetan stud- ies in America. As the dialogues unfolded, many technical subtleties and linguistic ambiguities associated with differences in Tibetan and Western understandings of emotion came to the surface. Dreyfus was an ener- getic, clarifying voice in these exchanges, and we therefore asked him to write on this issue for this volume. His Holiness the Dalai Lama was also persuaded to contribute a chapter to this volume on his views on “human nature.” It became clear over the course of the week that a cer- tain understanding of essential human nature was coloring many of his interventions and comments, and a self-standing exposition of these seemed potentially very useful. To our knowledge, it is the most compre- hensive statement of his views on this matter available in the published literature to date. The book opens with an unusual multi-authored chap- ter that describes an effort by one of us (RJD) and his colleagues to launch a research project on the psychophysiological effects of long-term meditation practice among Tibetan monks living in semi-isolation in the vi preface mountains around Dharamasala. With the encouragement and support of the Dalai Lama, and loaded down with laptop computers and various electrophysiological recording instruments, the researchers had hiked up the mountains behind the town, searching out the scattering of humble huts on the mountainside that they knew were occupied by the monks. The goal: to persuade these practitioners to participate in a study that would allow certain kinds of neurophysiological and cognitive data to be gathered on their mental abilities (especially emotional and attentional abilities). The scientists were interested in characterizing the kinds of shifts in mental functioning that one could hypothesize might result from spending a major portion of one’s life in intensive meditation practice. But the monks, while concerned to be helpful, somehow did not quite “get it.” Instead they perseverated with a series of questions that had not been part of the scientists’ own original brief. In their practice, they said, one studied meditation in order to enhance one’s capacity to practice compassion in the world. Was this also the intention of the work of these scientists? If not, what was the goal? Little by little, the back-and-forth of these conversations took on a dynamic that transcended the original re- cruitment goals. It began to provoke as well a process of reflection on all that might really be involved, tacitly and explicitly, in proposing an en- counter between the tools and perspectives of Western experimental sci- ence and the tools and perspectives of traditional Tibetan Buddhism. The decision by one of us (RJD) to take the lead in organizing the 1995 meet- ing was, in a very real sense, born directly out of those somewhat destabi- lizing mountainside conversations. Structurally, this book is organized in two parts. Part I draws on Bud- dhist studies, anthropology and history of science to bring into focus some of the cultural, historical, and metalinguistic challenges that face an effort such as this one. Part II shifts gears and moves the reader systemat- ically through some of the best of what the Western (largely North Amer- ican) biobehavioral and social scientific tradition has to say about altru- ism, ethics, empathy, and compassion, with the goal of seeing how the different elements bear up to cross-cultural scrutiny. We round off each of the two parts of the book with two thematically organized series of conversations edited from transcripts of our actual exchanges in Dharamsala. The first of these is concerned with “Funda- mental Questions” about compassion and its standing in human psy- chobiological functioning (as understood both by Tibetan Buddhism and by various disciplines in Western biobehavioral science). The sec- ond is concerned with “Pragmatic Extensions and Applications” of the preface vii understandings in question. While these dialogues can be read and un- derstood on their own, they obviously cover a broad range of issues that were stimulated by the formal presentations in Dharamsala. Taken to- gether, we think they also convey a sense of the intellectual intensity, the surprising moments of convergence, the frequent humor, the occasional tensions and misfirings, and the general feeling of the unexpected that characterized our efforts to talk across our differences about a topic that mattered greatly—albeit in different ways—to us all. On this level, if nothing else, they are offered as a record of a cross-cultural project-in- process, with progress made to date. viii preface Contents Contributors, xi part i. historical and philosophical background 1. Training the Mind: First Steps in a Cross-Cultural Collaboration in Neuroscientific Research, 3 Zara Houshmand, Anne Harrington, Clifford Saron, & Richard J. Davidson 2. A Science of Compassion or a Compassionate Science? What Do We Expect from a Cross-Cultural Dialogue with Buddhism? 18 Anne Harrington 3. Is Compassion an Emotion? A Cross-Cultural Exploration of Mental Typologies, 31 Georges Dreyfus 4. Kindness and Cruelty in Evolution, 46 Elliott Sober 5. Understanding Our Fundamental Nature, 66 His Holiness the Dalai Lama Dialogues, Part I: Fundamental Questions 81 [...]... one of the most salient recurring themes of the conversations between the scientists and the monks was how to conceptualize and possibly measure the unfolding of compassion when it arises, since this was so central to the goals of the practices pursued by the monks and thus had been made one target for study in tests of emotional reactivity Many of the monks offered their own insights on the nature and. .. expression of compassion It is difficult to gauge how much they spoke from direct personal experience and how much they were articulating traditional teachings, but some degree of convergence of the two was 14 Visions of Compassion certainly implied One monk gave a remarkably eloquent discourse on the nature of compassion and its relationship to, and distinction from, sadness He described compassion. .. answer I will explore in this chapter has two parts—one methodological and one metaphysical—but both of them concern how poorly compassion, as a phenomenon, “fits” into our modern understanding of what we think it means for science to study human beings as parts of nature 20 Visions of Compassion Compassion is a human emotional and cognitive experience that does not happen to a single individual in... framework for understanding human nature? The answer is complicated It would seem that the scientists who began to create understandings of human nature that would help set the tenor of research and question-asking up to our present may or may not have believed of cially in a Christian God Emotionally and morally it proved harder to shake off the Christian ethos in which so many of them had been raised... being It is a process of external and internal reorientation that softens our sense of our individuality by bringing it into a felt relationship with the pain and needs of some other We all know that such intimate experiences are the blood and flesh of a rich human life; yet the tradition of Western laboratory behavioral and brain science has been historically so attached to the idea of the autonomous “self”... Professor of Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy, Cornell University tenzin gyatso His Holiness, the XIVth Dalai Lama of Tibet anne harrington, ph.d Professor of the History of Science, Harvard University zara houshmand, b.a Editor, San Francisco, CA clifford saron, ph.d Consultant, San Francisco, CA elliott sober, ph.d Vilas Professor of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin ervin staub, ph.d Professor... renounces the causes of suffering and generates a desire to emerge from the continuous round of suffering This desire is then turned toward others: one assumes they also would wish to be free of suffering and experiences the urge to enable their release from suffering And at this point the feeling is one of compassion, experienced with equanimity and a lack of attachment The theme of compassion felt equally... concerns about the validity of scientific approaches to the study of the mind In a manner reminiscent of the competitive formal debates that are typical of Tibetan monastic training, one of them challenged the scientists: How can the mind, which is formless and nonphysical in nature, be physically measured? Wouldn’t any physical correlate of mind be of very limited utility? If scientists did not believe... context of the training into account? The scientists answered by stressing that 12 Visions of Compassion they did not wish to attempt a comprehensive characterization of the mind or of Buddhist meditation as such, but rather to focus on a few domains where small improvements in the understanding of human capacities for change might have a large impact on Western thinking Ultimately, the success of cross-cultural... Part II: Pragmatic Extensions and Applications 213 Appendix: About the Mind and Life Institute 247 Index 253 x contents Contributors richard j davidson, ph.d William James and Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry, University of Wisconsin georges dreyfus, ph.d Associate Professor of Religion and Philosophy, Williams College nancy eisenberg, ph.d Regents’ Professor of Psychology, Arizona State . Visions of Compassion: Western Scientists and Tibetan Buddhists Examine Human Nature Richard J. Davidson Anne Harrington, Editors OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS visions of compassion This. prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Visions of compassion: western scientists and Tibetan Buddhists examine human nature / edited by. left blank visions of compassion Western Scientists and Tibetan Buddhists Examine Human Nature Edited by Richard J. Davidson & Anne Harrington 1 2002 3 Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok