What Did Carl Sagan and the Dalai Lama Talk About?

Carl Sagan was one of the world's most famous atheists and scientific skeptics. The Dalai Lama invited him anyway.

It was 1991. They met in Ithaca, New York — on Sagan's home turf at Cornell University. The meeting was part of a series of dialogues the Dalai Lama had been organizing since 1987, specifically to bring Buddhist scholars and Western scientists into real conversation. Not debate. Conversation. His conviction was that truth should be able to withstand inquiry from every direction, including from people who disagreed with everything he believed. His conviction was simple: truth should be able to withstand conversation across traditions.

Sagan came with data. The Dalai Lama came with philosophy.

They talked about consciousness — what it is, whether science can explain it, whether anything survives death. Sagan pressed hard on reincarnation, asking for empirical evidence. The Dalai Lama asked, just as precisely, how science could account for the subjective experience of awareness — the fact that there is something it is like to be you.

Neither convinced the other.

But something more interesting happened. The Dalai Lama later described it as one of the most stimulating conversations of his life. Sagan wrote that the encounter made him more careful about certainty — that the Dalai Lama's willingness to be wrong, even about doctrines central to his own tradition, was "a teaching by example."

The Dalai Lama told Sagan: "If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change."

Sagan called that one of the most remarkable things any religious leader had ever said to him.

The Dalai Lama later formalized this conviction in his book The Universe in a Single Atom: "My confidence in venturing into science lies in my basic belief that as in science, so in Buddhism, understanding the nature of reality is pursued by means of critical investigation."

Two men at the farthest ends of the world's beliefs, sitting together and asking honest questions. Neither left the same.

That's what real conversation does. It doesn't require agreement. It requires curiosity — and the willingness to be changed by what you hear.

Ann Druyan, Sagan's wife and collaborator, later described the encounter as one of the most important of his life. She noted that the Dalai Lama's intellectual honesty — his willingness to say that Buddhist teachings should yield to empirical evidence where the two conflicted — was unlike anything Sagan had encountered from a religious leader. Sagan had spent his career pushing back against faith claims that couldn't survive scrutiny. Here was a spiritual leader who agreed with him.

The Dalai Lama has continued these dialogues for more than 35 years. The Mind and Life Institute he helped found now supports scientific research on meditation, consciousness, and contemplative practice. It turns out that the atheist and the monk had more to learn from each other than either expected.

Today's question: Who holds the most different worldview from yours that you could actually sit across a table from and listen to — not to debate, but to understand?