B. Alan Wallace Coins “Contemplative Science”

Today, “contemplative science” is often described as simply the scientific study of meditation, relying heavily on the tools of neuroscience and psychology to measure how meditative practices affect the brain and behavior. Missing from this conception is an acknowledgement that meditative practices themselves might be employed as tools to reveal useful scientific knowledge about the world. 

As a parallel, imagine if astronomy merely comprised the study of telescopes — never relying on these powerful instruments to make verifiable observations about celestial objects.  

To understand how the field known as “contemplative science” can reach its full potential, we would do well to consult the man who coined the term himself: CCR co-founder Dr. B. Alan Wallace.

In 1984, Dr. Wallace enrolled at Amherst College to finish his undergraduate degree after a 14-year hiatus from Western education, during which he was ordained as a Buddhist monk. When His Holiness the Dalai Lama (who was Wallace’s preceptor) came to visit Amherst in the autumn of that same year, he encouraged Wallace to continue his studies in both physics and Buddhist Madhyamika philosophy. Wallace took His Holiness’s advice to heart, and in the winter of 1986, he submitted a 500-page honors thesis to his faculty readers, Prof. Arthur Zajonc and Prof. Robert Thurman. It was in this thesis, titled Words of Emptiness: A Centrist View of Science and Reality that the words “contemplative science” were set in print for the first time.

You can read our expanded definition of contemplative science here, but when Wallace wrote about it in his thesis, he defined it as “the phenomenological study of physical and cognitive events” (p. 285). Still, Wallace hardly believed he was inventing a new branch of science on his own. As he wrote later, “At present we lack such a science in the West, but it would be rash to conclude that it has been developed nowhere else” (p.301). 

Wallace points us to the East — ancient India, to be precise — as the birthplace of contemplative science. It was there that sadhus perfected the art of meditative quiescence (also known as shamatha in the Buddhist tradition). Though extremely impressive, the profound stabilization and clarification of mental awareness that occurs with shamatha meditation is not the pinnacle of contemplative science. From the Buddhist perspective, the purpose of stabilizing one’s mind to such a degree is to make reliable and replicable observations about the nature of reality itself. As Wallace writes (p. 302, emphasis added):

The empirical methods of “contemplative research” presented as part of the Centrist [Madhyamika] View in Buddhism lead one to a direct realization of the nature of phenomena as dependently related events. This approach does not entail quantitative analysis or theory couched in mathematical terms; but it does, nevertheless, address many of the fundamental ontological issues that are being investigated in the context of the foundations of modern physics.” 

In the decades since Wallace submitted his 1986 thesis, the term “contemplative science” has increasingly entered the mainstream; entire university centers and institutes now include the phrase in their titles. But to realize the full benefit that can come from collaboration between contemplatives and modern scientists, the CCR is implementing the approach proposed in the document that gave us the term itself. This approach is defined by two main attributes: (1) contemplatives are regarded as colleagues, not simply study subjects, with respect to their scientific collaborators, and (2) both ancient and modern methods are used to intersubjectively investigate the mind and its relationship to the world.

To learn more about our approach to contemplative science, visit our Research Overview page, or read our essays, “The Nature of Contemplative and Scientific Discoveries” and “A New Paradigm for Science and Religion in the Twenty-First Century.”