Dharamsala, HP, India, 1 March 2013 (By Naresh K. Thakur, Hindustan Times) – The Central University of Himachal Pradesh (CUHP) conferred the honorary degree of Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil honoris causa) on Nobel laureate for peace and Tibetan Spiritual Leader, the Dalai Lama on its first convocation ceremony held at Temporary Academic Block (TAB), Shahpur here on Thursday.

Christian Thomas Kohl dissects key terms in the teachings of Nagarjuna and transposes these ideas with Quantum Physics. The following is a summary of his thesis on the subject.

I believe that the collaboration between neuroscience and the Buddhist contemplative tradition may shed fresh light on the vitally important question of the interface of ethics and neuroscience. Regardless of whatever conception one might have of the relationship between ethics and science, in actual practice, science has evolved primarily as an empirical discipline with a morally neutral, value-free stance. 

Mundgod, Karnataka, India: - The spiritual leader of Tibet, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama arrived at Mundgod for Mind & Life meeting today, 21 January, his shoulders draped with a green shawl that he explained he had been given by people who had just met him seeking his support for the local polio vaccination campaign. His Holiness laughed to see that the day's first presenter, Sona Dimidjian, was wearing almost exactly the same colour.

Can Buddhist practice liberate us from the prison of physical pain? How can meditation help when medicine falls short? Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph. D., professor emeritus of medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, speaks to these questions as a longtime practitioner of Buddhist meditation and hatha yoga, and as a pioneer in the use of mindfulness to treat chronic pain and illness. More than 13,000 people have visited the world-renowned Stress Reduction Clinic that Kabat-Zinn established in 1979 at the UMass Medical Center, and the eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program—described in Kabat-Zinn's bestseller Full Catastrophe Living—is now also offered at some two hundred other medical facilities worldwide. 

What the Buddha taught was not based upon divine revelation or some other source of superior authority. All his teachings derived directly from his own personal experience that arose from his compassionate efforts to relieve the sufferings of beings. During the years of his meditation and reflection, he directly observed his own mind with the precision and objective exactness that we have now come to associate with scientific research.

 The coming 21st century will begin in a chaotic condition with the fever of capitalism and individualism. we tend to interpret the word 'ism' as an expression of will of human beings....However, capitalism and individualism are not 'isms' by which we, human beings, consciously remake our world.

The eminent scientist, Bertrand Russell, has summed up the position of present-day philosophical thought follows: '' Assuming physics to he broadly speaking true, can we know it to be true, and if the answer is to be in the affirmative, does this involve knowledge of other truths besides those of physics? We might find that, if the world is such as physics says it is, no organism could know it to be such or that, if an organism can know it to be such, it must know some things other than physics, more particularly certain principles of probable inference".

Before we answer that question it would be best to define the word 'science'. Science, according to the dictionary is: "knowledge which can be made into a system, which depends upon seeing and testing facts and stating general natural laws, a branch of such knowledge, anything that can be studied exactly". There are aspects of Buddhism that would not fit into this definition but the central teachings of Buddhism, the Four Noble Truths, most certainly would. Suffering, the First Noble Truth, is an experience that can be defined, experienced and measured.

In the seventeenth century when Rene Descartes divided everything in the universe into two realms as "Res Extensa" (matter) and "Res Cogitans" (mind), gathering knowledge within the realm of Res Extensa was called Science and the phenomenon of reincarnation got pushed into the other realm Res Cogitans which was condemned to be not respectable and not up to the dignity of Scientists to probe into. Science was considered the respectable realm to study.