THE ENLIGHTENED GENE

Are humans inherently good? Where does compassion come from? Is death essential for life? Is experience inherited? These questions have occupied philosophers, religious thinkers and scientists from the beginning of civilization. In today’s discourse, much of the dialogue is reduced to the old sciences-vs-spirituality context. In this book, a scientist and a Tibetan monk will show that this doesn’t have to be the case.

Many of biology's recent discoveries move science closer to spiritual concepts. In fact, science often ‘discovers’ significant truths that Buddhism and other religions have long known (but from a different angle and without the measurables of science). THE ENLIGHTENED GENE joins our longtime fascination with ‘the wisdom of the East’ and the recent leaps in biological knowledge. It explores the connections between Buddhism and cutting-edge biology, showing how this convergence offers a new way of looking at ourselves and the world. THE ENLIGHTENED GENE addresses readers of classics such as "The Tao of Physics" by Fritjof Capra and Gary Zukav’s "The Dancing Wu Li Masters", as well as recent bestsellers by Sharon Begley, the Dalai Lama, Deepak Chopra and Leonoard Mlodinow, Thich Nhat Hanh, Jon Kabat-Zinn and Jack Kornfield. His Holiness, The Dalai Lama and his organization in the Emory Tibet Science Initiative are in full support of the book. Dr. Arri Eisen is a Professor of Pedagogy in Biology at Emory University where he has taught and done research for more than 25 years. He obtained a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Washington in 1990, founded and directed Emory’s Program in Science & Society, and has won numerous awards. He has widely published in the peer-reviewed literature, and the popular media. Geshe Yungdrung Konchok, born in 1982 in a place still not connected to the rest of the world between Tibet and Nepal. He runs the Tibetan Yungdrung Bon Library at his monastery—a huge facility dedicated by the Dalai Lama. He was in the initial group of monastics of the Emory Tibet Science Initiative in 2008 in Dharamsala and was selected as a Tenzin Gyatso scholar with five other monks from that cohort to study science at Emory for three years. Konchok attained his geshe degree at Menri in 2014, and he has been serving as a translator in the Emory Tibet Science Initiative since then.