Unchained Values

By Mukul Sharma

The Dalai Lama’s affinity for science and technology has become fairly well known of late. At his behest, several programmes have brought technical educators from various American universities to India to teach Tibetan monks and Buddhist nuns. He’s even gone so far as to say that if science proves some Buddhist claims to be wrong, then those claims would have to be dropped.

However, in a somewhat surprising Facebook post in 2012, he’s also taken on religion. He acknowledges that with their emphasis on love, compassion, tolerance and forgiveness, religions do promote inner values, but observes that the reality of the world today is that grounding ethics in religion is no longer adequate.

“That is why,” he writes, “I am increasingly convinced that the time has come to find a way of thinking about spirituality and ethics beyond religion altogether.”

This is almost the same thing that atheists from Bertrand Russell to Richard Dawkins — people whose moral fibres at least have never been doubted — have been saying for some time now: that we require an independent approach to ethics that is not necessarily associated or reliant upon religion.

They’ve proposed, instead, that the deeper roots of all moral behaviour predate religion and lie in humanity’s evolutionary past, which basically means that good does not need to be equated with any god.

Sam Harris, another outspoken atheist, goes one further by maintaining that science can answer moral questions. It seems that the Dalai Lama, who’s lately developed a great fascination for neuroscience, is talking along similar lines too.