Use of the Templeton Prize Money
I have decided to donate $1.5 million of the Templeton Prize money to support Save the Children Fund, specifically to address the problems of malnourishment among children in India. I have always had great admiration for the work of Save the children Fund in improving the lives of children through better education, health care, and economic opportunities, as well as providing emergency aid in natural disasters, war, and other conflicts. It is my belief that little can be done to defend the rights of children or to help them fulfill their potential unless they first of all have enough to eat.
I wish to donate $200,000 to the Mind & Life Institute, an organization that has for nearly thirty years helped promote an important exchange of ideas and collaboration between science and spirituality. Through these exchanges the Institute has successfully promoted a truly multi-disciplinary and integrated approach to understanding reality, especially of our mental and emotional world, with potentially important implications for our understanding of ethics and human values.
The remainder of the prize money (approximately $75,000) will be used towards funding our ongoing efforts to introducing formal modern science education to monk students in the various Tibetan monastic universities. Since the past several years, we have been teaching science to selected monk students and are now expanding that effort by introducing modern science within the general monastic education curriculum.
The Dalai Lama
Dated: 14 May 2012
