The Mind and Life Institute: How a Monk, a Scientist, and a Lawyer Created Contemplative Science

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Three Men in Dharamsala

In October 1987, in the private audience hall of the Dalai Lama’s residence in Dharamsala, India, five scientists sat in a semicircle across from the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso. Between them, on a low table, sat a small model of a neuron. The scientists had brought it as a teaching aid, expecting to explain basic neuroscience to a Buddhist monk. What happened instead was something none of them anticipated: a dialogue so rich, so intellectually fertile, and so challenging to both sides that it would eventually spawn an entirely new field of science.

The meeting had been organized by three people: Francisco Varela, the Chilean-born neurobiologist and Buddhist meditator who would later develop neurophenomenology; Adam Engle, an American lawyer and entrepreneur who had the organizational skills to make such an unlikely gathering happen; and the Dalai Lama himself, who had been interested in science since childhood, when he dismantled and reassembled watches and film projectors in the Potala Palace in Lhasa.

The five scientists at that first meeting were Varela, Jeremy Hayward (a physicist and educator), Robert Livingston (a neuroscientist from UC San Diego), Eleanor Rosch (a cognitive psychologist from UC Berkeley and Varela’s future co-author of The Embodied Mind), and Newcomb Greenleaf (a mathematician and computer scientist). The topics ranged from the nature of cognition to the neuroscience of perception to the relationship between Buddhist concepts of mind and Western scientific models of the brain.

The Dalai Lama, far from being a passive student of neuroscience, was an incisive interlocutor. He asked questions that exposed assumptions the scientists had not examined. When Livingston explained the neuroscience of perception — how the brain constructs visual experience from retinal inputs — the Dalai Lama pointed out that Buddhist philosophy had made essentially the same argument about the constructed nature of perception 2,000 years earlier, and then asked: what does the brain construct perception out of? What is the raw material of consciousness? The question sent the neuroscientists into a long, uncomfortable silence.

That first meeting lasted five days. By the end, all participants agreed that something extraordinary had occurred — not a lecture by scientists to a monk, but a genuine dialogue between two sophisticated knowledge traditions, each with something to teach the other. Varela and Engle proposed formalizing the dialogue as an ongoing institution. The Dalai Lama agreed immediately.

The Mind and Life Institute was born.

The Vision: Two Knowledge Traditions in Dialogue

The founding vision of the Mind and Life Institute rested on a specific insight that Varela, Engle, and the Dalai Lama shared: that Western science and Buddhism are both empirical traditions — both are committed to investigating reality through direct observation, testing hypotheses against experience, and revising conclusions when evidence demands it. They differ in their instruments (the fMRI scanner vs. the trained mind), their methodologies (third-person measurement vs. first-person investigation), and their domains of expertise (the external material world vs. the internal world of consciousness). But they share the fundamental commitment to understanding what is real through disciplined investigation.

This was not the typical “science and religion” dialogue, which usually involves scientists explaining science to religious people, or religious people defending faith claims against scientific criticism. The Mind and Life model assumed parity — that each tradition had genuine expertise that the other lacked, and that combining them would produce insights that neither could achieve alone.

Buddhism brought 2,500 years of systematic investigation into the nature of consciousness — detailed phenomenological maps of mental states, attentional processes, emotional regulation, and the constructed nature of self. It also brought living practitioners with tens of thousands of hours of contemplative training who could serve as both research subjects and expert consultants.

Western science brought the experimental method, neuroimaging technology, statistical analysis, and the ability to measure physiological changes associated with mental states. It also brought a tradition of skepticism and falsifiability that could test contemplative claims rigorously.

The Dalai Lama’s personal commitment was crucial. Unlike many religious leaders, who treat science with suspicion or hostility, the Dalai Lama has consistently stated that if science conclusively disproves a Buddhist claim, Buddhism should modify its position. “If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims,” he has said repeatedly. This intellectual honesty — this willingness to submit contemplative knowledge to scientific testing — gave the Mind and Life dialogue a credibility that no other science-religion initiative has achieved.

The Dialogues: Thirty-Five Years of Conversation

The Mind and Life dialogues have continued for over thirty-five years, growing from the intimate five-day meetings in Dharamsala to large public conferences attended by thousands of scientists, contemplatives, and lay people. Each dialogue focuses on a specific topic at the intersection of science and contemplative knowledge.

Some of the landmark dialogues:

Mind and Life I (1987): Cognitive Science. The founding dialogue, described above, which established the model of parity-based conversation between scientific and contemplative perspectives.

Mind and Life IV (1992): Sleeping, Dreaming, and Dying. This dialogue explored the neuroscience of sleep states, lucid dreaming, and the process of dying — topics on which Tibetan Buddhism has an extraordinarily detailed phenomenological literature (including the Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan Book of the Dead). The dialogue revealed both convergences (the importance of awareness in sleep states) and fascinating divergences (the Tibetan Buddhist model of consciousness persisting through the dying process, which materialist neuroscience cannot accommodate within its current framework).

Mind and Life VIII (2000): Destructive Emotions. This dialogue, documented in Daniel Goleman’s book Destructive Emotions, featured a pivotal moment in Mind and Life history. Paul Ekman, the world’s leading researcher on facial expressions and emotion, spent time in dialogue with experienced Tibetan meditators and had what he described as a transformative personal experience of the quality of presence and warmth that long-term meditators radiate. Ekman, a rigorous and skeptical scientist, was deeply affected by the encounter — which provided a kind of first-person evidence that complemented the third-person data from brain scanners.

Mind and Life XIII (2005): The Science and Clinical Applications of Meditation. This meeting at the Dalai Lama’s residence brought together the leading researchers in meditation neuroscience — Davidson, Kabat-Zinn, Helen Slagter, Antoine Lutz, and others — to assess the state of the field and identify the most promising research directions. It was a watershed moment: the assembled scientists agreed that the evidence for meditation’s effects on the brain had crossed the threshold of scientific respectability.

Mind and Life XXVI (2013): Mind, Brain, and Matter. This dialogue focused on the relationship between physics and consciousness — exploring whether modern physics (quantum mechanics, cosmology) supports or undermines the materialist assumption that consciousness is produced by the brain. The dialogue featured physicists Arthur Zajonc and Michel Bitbol in conversation with the Dalai Lama and Buddhist scholars about the nature of reality, the observer problem in quantum mechanics, and the hard problem of consciousness.

The Summer Research Institute: Training the Next Generation

In 2004, the Mind and Life Institute launched its Summer Research Institute (SRI) — an intensive week-long program designed to train the next generation of contemplative science researchers. The SRI brings together early-career scientists (graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and junior faculty) with senior researchers, contemplative teachers, and methodologists for a week of lectures, workshops, group discussions, and meditation practice.

The SRI is unique in the landscape of scientific training because it requires participants to engage with contemplative practice as part of their scientific education. Attendees do not merely learn about meditation research — they learn to meditate, guided by experienced teachers. This reflects Varela’s neurophenomenological principle: that studying consciousness requires first-person experience of consciousness, just as studying a foreign language requires speaking it, not just analyzing its grammar.

Over its two decades of operation, the SRI has trained hundreds of scientists who have gone on to populate the field of contemplative science worldwide. Alumni of the SRI now hold positions at major research universities on every continent, run meditation research labs, and collectively produce a large proportion of the published literature in contemplative neuroscience.

The SRI created something that individual labs could not: a community. Before Mind and Life, researchers interested in meditation were isolated — scattered across institutions, often working in secret, afraid that studying contemplative practice would damage their careers. The SRI brought these researchers together, gave them a shared language and methodology, introduced them to contemplative teachers who could serve as collaborators, and showed them that they were not alone.

This community-building function may be the Mind and Life Institute’s most important contribution. A scientific field is not just a collection of papers and findings. It is a community of researchers who share methods, standards, questions, and a sense of collective purpose. Mind and Life created that community for contemplative science.

The Research Grants: Funding the Field

Beginning in the early 2000s, the Mind and Life Institute established a competitive grants program to fund contemplative science research directly. These grants, while modest in size compared to NIH funding, played a catalytic role — they provided seed funding for studies that later attracted major institutional support, and they signaled to the broader scientific community that contemplative research was fundable, legitimate, and worth pursuing.

The grants have supported research on:

• The neural effects of different meditation practices (focused attention, open monitoring, compassion, non-referential awareness)
• Meditation-based interventions for clinical conditions (depression, anxiety, PTSD, chronic pain, addiction)
• Contemplative education — the effects of mindfulness and compassion training in school settings
• The neuroscience of prosocial behavior and compassion
• The relationship between contemplative practice and aging, neurodegeneration, and cognitive decline
• The effects of meditation on immune function, inflammation, and telomere biology

The cumulative research output enabled by Mind and Life funding, combined with the training provided by the SRI and the intellectual framework provided by the dialogues, has been extraordinary. The field of contemplative neuroscience — which did not exist as a recognized discipline in 1987 — now has dedicated journals, academic departments, clinical programs, and a research literature numbering thousands of peer-reviewed publications.

The Legitimization Problem: How Mind and Life Changed Science

The most important thing the Mind and Life Institute did was not any single study, grant, or dialogue. It was the systematic legitimization of contemplative science as a respectable field of inquiry.

In the 1970s and 1980s, studying meditation was career suicide for a serious neuroscientist. Richard Davidson was told not to pursue it. Herbert Benson, who published The Relaxation Response in 1975, was marginalized by many colleagues for taking meditation seriously. The scientific establishment viewed meditation as vaguely religious, methodologically unrigorous, and associated with countercultural movements that were antithetical to serious science.

The Mind and Life Institute changed this perception through a deliberate, multi-decade strategy:

Associating contemplative research with elite science. By involving the Dalai Lama — one of the most respected and recognized figures on Earth — the Mind and Life dialogues attracted world-class scientists who might not otherwise have engaged with meditation research. When researchers of the caliber of Davidson, Ekman, Kabat-Zinn, and Antonio Damasio participated in Mind and Life meetings, it sent a signal to the broader scientific community: this is not fringe. This is where serious scientists are working.

Publishing in top-tier journals. The research funded and inspired by Mind and Life has appeared in PNAS, Nature Neuroscience, Science, The Lancet, JAMA, and other premier journals. Each publication in a high-impact journal further legitimized the field.

Establishing methodological rigor. Mind and Life researchers developed and promoted rigorous methodological standards for meditation research — active control groups, randomized designs, pre-registered hypotheses, adequate sample sizes, and the sophisticated neuroimaging protocols that make results credible to the broader neuroscience community.

Training a generation. The SRI created a critical mass of well-trained, well-connected young scientists who could advance contemplative science within their institutions, establishing labs, training graduate students, and building the field from the inside.

Building institutional infrastructure. The Center for Healthy Minds at Wisconsin, the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research at Stanford, the Oxford Mindfulness Centre, the Max Planck ReSource Project — these major research centers, all connected to the Mind and Life network, provided the institutional infrastructure that a scientific field needs to sustain itself.

The result is a transformation of the scientific landscape that would have been unimaginable in 1987. Meditation research is now one of the fastest-growing areas of neuroscience. The NIH funds contemplative studies. Medical schools teach mindfulness. Insurance companies cover meditation-based interventions. What was once dismissed as unscientific is now one of the most productive and well-funded research programs in the brain sciences.

The Engineering Metaphor: Building a Bridge Between Knowledge Systems

In the Digital Dharma framework, the Mind and Life Institute represents something specific and crucial: it is the interface layer between two operating systems.

Western science is an operating system for investigating the external world — the material, measurable, third-person aspects of reality. It has developed extraordinarily powerful tools for this investigation (the scientific method, mathematics, technology, instrumentation) and has produced extraordinary results (modern medicine, physics, engineering, computing).

The contemplative traditions are an operating system for investigating the internal world — the subjective, experiential, first-person aspects of consciousness. They have developed extraordinarily powerful tools for this investigation (meditation, phenomenological observation, contemplative philosophy) and have produced extraordinary results (detailed maps of consciousness, practical methods for emotional regulation and well-being, reproducible techniques for ego transcendence).

These two operating systems are not incompatible. They are complementary. But they cannot communicate directly — they use different languages, different methodologies, different standards of evidence, and different assumptions about what counts as real. They need an interface layer — a translation protocol that allows data and insights to flow between them.

The Mind and Life Institute is that interface layer. It has built, over thirty-five years, the protocols, the shared language, the methodological standards, and the human relationships that allow scientific and contemplative knowledge to inform each other. The dialogues are the interface specification. The SRI trains engineers who can work on both sides of the interface. The grants fund the data transmission. And the publications are the output — verified, peer-reviewed knowledge that integrates first-person contemplative insight with third-person scientific measurement.

Francisco Varela proposed that this interface was possible. Adam Engle built the organizational structure to make it real. And the Dalai Lama lent his moral authority, his intellectual curiosity, and his tradition’s 2,500 years of contemplative expertise to the project.

Together, they created something unprecedented in the history of human knowledge: a sustained, rigorous, mutually respectful dialogue between the world’s most advanced tradition of external investigation (science) and one of the world’s most advanced traditions of internal investigation (Buddhism). And that dialogue has produced a new field — contemplative science — that is greater than the sum of its parts.

The Ongoing Mission

The Mind and Life Institute continues its work, adapting to new scientific developments and new global challenges. Current priorities include:

Contemplative approaches to systemic challenges. Climate change, social inequality, political polarization, and other civilizational challenges that cannot be solved by technology alone but require changes in human consciousness — in how people relate to themselves, each other, and the natural world.

Ethics of emerging technology. Artificial intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, genetic engineering, and other technologies that raise profound questions about the nature of mind, the boundaries of personhood, and the responsible use of power.

Global contemplative education. Bringing contemplative practice into educational settings worldwide — not as a religious practice but as a secular, evidence-based methodology for developing attention, emotional regulation, compassion, and self-awareness.

Diversity and inclusion. Expanding the contemplative science community beyond its historically Western, Buddhist, and academically elite base — incorporating contemplative traditions from Africa, the Americas, and other indigenous cultures, and ensuring that the benefits of contemplative research reach marginalized and underserved communities.

The vision that animated the founding meeting in 1987 — that science and contemplative wisdom are complementary, that each has something to teach the other, and that their integration can produce knowledge and practices that transform human life — remains as vital and as relevant as ever. The Mind and Life Institute is, thirty-five years later, still the world’s primary laboratory for this integration.

The bridge between the scanner and the cushion, between the experiment and the experience, between the measurement of the brain and the training of the mind — that bridge was built by three people in a room in Dharamsala, and it now spans the entire landscape of consciousness research.