Cabezón at Jokhang temple in Tibet during a research trip last summer.

José Cabezón’s Unexpected Discovery

José Ignacio Cabezón ’78 was a budding scientist when a chance purchase at the Caltech Bookstore foretold his true calling. The physics major would subsequently go on a spiritual journey—living for years with Tibetan refugees in India, traveling and translating for the Dalai Lama, and becoming a Buddhist monk.

Now he is serving as the first XIV Dalai Lama Professor in Tibetan Buddhism and Cultural Studies at UC Santa Barbara, a major center for the study of world religions.

Cabezón was recruited by UCSB in 2001 to develop undergraduate and graduate programs in Tibetan religion and culture, including Tibetan language studies. His appointment, which the university calls the only endowed program and professorship of its kind on the West Coast, is supported by funds raised from various donors over a decade. The endowment was inspired by the Dalai Lama's campus visit in 1991.

Cabezón’s early years didn’t foreshadow a life of world travel, Eastern religion, or academia. His family moved from Cuba to the United States when he was four years old. Growing up in a hard-working Boston blue-collar family, a university education was not a given, he says. Today, sitting in his UCSB office, where the wall is adorned with a Tibetan prayer cloth and the windows overlook campus bluffs that lead to the beach, he recalls, “I had to make the case with my parents for the importance of the intellectual life.”

At a young age, he became interested in science, which brought him to Caltech.

“In a way, what drew me to physics was the same thing that later drew me to Buddhism. Both physics and Buddhism are interested in going beyond our intuitive, often naive, understandings of the world so as to access a reality that is more fundamental.” A good example of this, he says, is the way students of physics make the early realization that our seemingly solid world is actually composed entirely of minute atomic and subatomic particles.

For Cabezón, the big-picture aspects of the science became more interesting than its equations and algorithms. “At some point, I realized that I was always interested more in the philosophical questions of physics. And, in retrospect, probably, I was less interested actually in the science itself than in those questions.”

In a turn of events that some might consider fate, during Cabezón’s junior year a friend offered to buy him a book as a birthday present. Perusing the shelves at the Caltech Bookstore, he chose one on Tibetan Buddhism. He is still not sure why.

“I don’t think at that point I even would have said that I was interested in Buddhism. I think I developed an interest as a result of reading about it.”

The book made a strong enough impression to convince him to completely change his academic universe just a few courses shy of a completed physics major. Since Buddhist studies aren’t part of the standard Caltech curriculum, Cabezón informed the Institute that he wanted to enroll in the independent studies program. “To my surprise, I received a great deal of support, especially from the then head of the independent studies program, planetary-science professor Andy Ingersoll.”

His search for a university program matching his newfound interests drew him to the Midwest. “I spent the first half of my senior year at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying
Tibetan language and Buddhist philosophy, and the second half in Dharamsala, India, studying at the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives. That’s when I realized that this is what I really wanted to do.”

During the period he was earning his PhD, Cabezón completed much of his doctoral work while living for six years with Tibetan refugees and studying at the Sera Je Monastic University in India.

In India he met the Dalai Lama, who later asked Cabezón to travel with him in Spain, Mexico, and Costa Rica to translate his teachings and texts. In addition to his expertise in Tibetan and Spanish, Cabezón also has some fluency in Sanskrit, Pali, Japanese, Hindi, Latin, French, and German.

During the 1980s, José Ignacio Cabezón traveled with and translated
for the Dalai Lama in India, Spain, Mexico, and Costa Rica.

Some of the professor’s Dalai Lama–related work is available in U.S. bookstores, including Answers: Discussions with Western Buddhists. Cabezón compiled and edited the text, which is drawn from informal group discussions between the Dalai Lama and Western Buddhists that took place at a village in North India, where the Dalai Lama travels annually to give teachings.

“The Dalai Lama is a very impressive person who tries to live out the tradition of Buddhist values and to be an example for people all over the world,” says Cabezón.

“He is one of those rare individuals who manages to live out day to day the values that he espouses.”

Around the same time that Cabezón was rising at dawn to pray at Sera Je Monastery, American readers were eagerly exploring the ties between science and mysticism. During the 1970s and 1980s, several books on the topic were best-sellers, including The Dancing Wu-Li Masters by Gary Zukav and The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra.

As a Caltech-trained physicist turned Buddhist scholar, Cabezón has his own views about the apparent parallels between quantum physics and Eastern religious beliefs. “When I first read about The Tao of Physics, I became quite excited because I thought it was a kind of bridge between science and Buddhism. I’m not so sanguine about this anymore. I think that those similarities tend to be only on the surface. They’re superficial. What’s interesting to me, and where my approach is quite
different, is in exploring those differences.

“In the end, science is not a failure but it has limitations. And so I find Buddhism, because of its concern with both the outer and inner world, to be more pertinent to the human condition viewed holistically. I don’t want to paint science in a negative light. But overall, the scientific world view has an uncompromisingly materialist stance that I think from a Buddhist point of view isn’t entirely valid.”

The Tibetan government went into exile following the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1959. Since then, Buddhism has flourished internationally despite efforts to suppress it in Tibet, where, under the Chinese occupation, thousands of monasteries were destroyed and more than one million Tibetans were either killed or died of starvation.

Still, the visibility and popularity of the exiled Dalai Lama has only grown since he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 for his nonviolent resistance to Chinese rule. And many of the spiritual leader’s books, including An Open Heart, a compilation of lectures on the importance of compassion in everyday life, are best-sellers.

Cabezón is not surprised that many Westerners are drawn to Buddhism as an antidote to the modern world’s frenetic pace. A core purpose of Buddhism is to help people empty their minds of distortions and constant thoughts of the future and the past that cloud perception and prevent human beings from living fully in the present.

“The purpose of Buddhism is to add a kind of cognitive corrective dimension to our experience,” Cabezón says. “It’s realizing that our ordinary tendency in life is to misperceive ourselves by superimposing thought and feelings on events. When we realize that we live much of our life through the distorted filter of our past habits and actions, then the possibility of living a more free and open life opens up for us.”

Returning to the West in 1989, Cabezón spent 12 years as a professor at the Iliff School of Theology, in Colorado, teaching courses in world religions, Buddhist philosophy, and comparative philosophy. He was then recruited to Santa Barbara as the Dalai Lama Professor, and delivered his inaugural lecture in November 2001.

The professor in his UC Santa Barbara office, whose wall is adorned by a Tibetan scroll painting.

A university leader notes that Cabezón emerged early as a standout when it set out to appoint the chair. “After a rigorous, international search, Professor Cabezón was identified as one of the most outstanding scholars of Buddhism in the world today,” says David Marshall, UCSB’s dean of
humanities and fine arts.

One of Cabezón’s colleagues offers a similar assessment. “He is a first-rate scholar, and a prolific publisher; he has enormous linguistic skills,” says Sheila Greeve Davaney, a professor of theology at Iliff. “When we hired him, one of his letters of recommendation said he was the premier linguist of his generation.”

Cabezón’s breadth of scholarship also sets him apart, taking him from ancient Buddhist texts to contemporary Buddhist issues including sexuality. Davaney adds that as a practicing Buddhist, Cabezón offered a different perspective to Iliff students, especially those training to be Christian ministers or leaders of other religious communities.

“I used to kid him that before he was a Buddhist he was a Catholic,” Davaney says. “But he always insisted, ‘No, before I was a Buddhist I was a scientist.’” The scientific grounding gained from his earlier studies appears in his rigorous approach to academia and Buddhism, she adds. “He is very opposed to anti-intellectual movements in the world. He was insistent that you bring all your intellectual powers to your practice,” not merely accepting doctrine on blind faith.

Cabezón’s scholarship focuses broadly on Buddhist texts and Tibetan philosophy, religions, and cultures. His research interests include the intersection of Buddhism and popular culture and the ways in which the religion has been turned into a commodity through its growing popularity in the West. These are issues he will cover in an upcoming book, tentatively titled Consuming Tibet. He is also researching Buddhism and the ethics of sexuality, and is working on an annotated translation of a 15th-century Tibetan book on the theory of emptiness.

“This year has been tremendously busy but also tremendously exciting,” Cabezón says of his first year’s activities, which included organizing a national conference on Tibetan Studies at UCSB in May.

To help fulfill a cultural outreach and cultural mission, Cabezón has led department-sponsored programs that include a film series, lectures on different aspects of Tibetan culture, and performances by troupes of monks.

Last summer, Cabezón traveled to Tibet and India to gather data for a history of Sera Je Monastery, which he calls “one of Tibet’s great scholastic educational institutions.”

When all is said and done, this Tibetan Buddhist scholar might be expected to offer an explanation, or at least an interpretation, of why the book he chose at the Caltech bookstore all those years ago set in motion such profoundly life-changing events. But true to his tenets, Cabezón refuses to tie life events into neat packages. The most he’ll say is, “I don’t think I have an answer to that. If there is an answer, it is beyond me.”

Caltech News welcomes comments and thoughts from readers on how their lives and career paths were affected by their years at Caltech. Write to hja@caltech.edu.