Dear friends, in my lecture I’d like to concentrate on the term ‘beyond’.
Beyond of what we normally consider as being science and following so to say this courageous pilgrim
who sticks out his neck in the unknown here, across here, not only the horizon but beyond whatever we know.
And I mean there is a lot beyond the limits of traditional science.
Please turn down the lights.
And there is the arts, the humanities and there is what I like to call the passions.
Which is a very broad term, we will come to that just in a second.
You know when you are a scientist and you have a goal in mind, like here, a long dusty road
and this goal must not necessarily be Stockholm, it could be a more sensible goal.
Then it’s so difficult to hop on a single leg, I mean it’s very hard, you need a second leg
and the second leg, these are your passions.
And only when you have a second leg then inspiration starts to occur,
then you start to sparkle in your brain and that makes life then interesting and science successful.
You are longing for a passion, you might have not a passion which you are satisfied of.
You see this is not the only possibility, there are other possibilities for passions
and I mean if you look at the world, it is wide open for new surprises and discoveries.
And I mean if you think about role models, this could be for example one, Albert Einstein and his beloved violin.
Or it could be Murray Gell-Mann, the theoretical physicist, Nobel Laureate, the bird watcher, nature is so fascinating.
Or it could be Richard Feynman physicist and a drummer.
Or it could be Carl Djerassi a chemist, you know the inventor of the pill and at the same time a brilliant poet.
Or you could take this as a role model, Manfred Eigen, a physical chemist and a great pianist,
performing with the best orchestras of the world.
Or it could be Leopold Ruzicka a collector of paintings, donating his paintings to the museum of Zurich.
Or you could be fascinated by Helmut Schmidt who is chancellor and pianist at the same time.
Or Roald Hoffman a famous chemist and artistic director of the Cornelia Street Café in New York.
Or the ultimate, I mean the ultimate genius, Leonardo Da Vinci.
He had more legs than a centipede.
Anyway the scientist and the arts, they have a lot in common, curiosity and creativity,
this is the common denominator of arts and sciences.
And probably you have heard this sentence, whoever retains his child like curiosity and creativity
becomes either a scientist or in the best case an artist.
So we are on our way to becoming artists.
Anyway so keep your eyes open and be ready for surprises in your life.
And I don’t want to go on in this generality anymore, I’d like to concentrate a little bit on my own life story,
only a small part of it.
So we were for 5 years in the United States, in beautiful California, these were the best 5 years of our life.
And then we wanted to go home to Switzerland and sent our children by airmail to Switzerland and we went via Asia.
And here the discoveries were made.
We went to Kathmandu, it was a beautiful medieval city at that time,
today it’s mostly gone due to all our cars and the smoke and so on.
But anyway at that time it was beautiful.
And here, please turn down the light even more.
Anyway here we discovered for the first time these kind of paintings.
And these kind of paintings, they were coming from Tibet, they came across the Himalaya with the refugees,
they brought these paintings and put them on the market because they had to survive.
So we bought this beautiful painting, we didn’t understand it,
it was just very colourful with 4 Arhats, 4 disciples of Buddha who spread the message around the world.
And we were fascinated.
I was fascinated.
I mean that was my little toy, I was just a playboy and playing with his toy
and helped Kurt Wüthrich to determine molecular structures by 2 dimensional NMR and it was a fascinating tool also.
But now I had now suddenly my second leg.
I had one leg exploring nature by NMR and the other one Himalayan art.
You know this is magnetic resonance imaging where I made a little contribution,
this is my head recorded by this technique and now suddenly my grey matter became colourful.
I had blue here for science and here for Tibetan art.
So that made it more interesting.
Anyway from this painting here a lot emerged.
And first of all I got interested in the cultural history of central Asia which is fascinating, very complicated.
I got interested of course into painting art, I started to collect paintings,
I became interested a little bit in Buddhist philosophy as this belongs to it.
Then I started to learn about painting technology and pigment analysis,
about conservation of the paintings which I have now in my little collection.
And finally we started the project on science teaching for monks which I will mention at the very end.
So these are the 6 subjects which I want to go very briefly.
First history, history is quite fascinating in central Asia.
And I didn’t know at that time that Buddhism has been introduced 650 AD into Tibet across the Himalayas,
along the silk road from China into Tibet.
And this was the most important king Songtsan Gampo, 650 with his castle here in Tibet and he then married 2 princesses.
One from Nepal, she was a Buddhist, she was afterwards identified with the green Tara, Bhrikuti.
He married also a Chinese princess who got also married to him, she was also a Buddhist.
So he had now 2 influences from his 2 sides.
Anyway, and then Buddhism started to develop in Tibet, first of all before there was native religion of Tibet,
the Bon religion, non Buddhist, then came the first schools, Nyingma school, 650 around and still persist until today.
Then came an interregnum again of 200 years where the Bon priests were throwing out the Buddhists from Tibet.
And then finally Buddhism started to develop the Kadam-Pa school with the Sakya-Pa schools
and the Kagyu-Pa school and the Gelug-Pa school.
So the red hats, the black hats and the yellow hat monks.
And Tibet at one moment was enormously big, I mean you see it reached down to the gulf of Bengal even,
it was a short time but it was a huge country at that time.
And it had a lot of cultural influence on central Asia.
I mean it spread to Mongolia, it spread to Buryatia in Siberia, it had a lot of influence also in Beijing
and many other influences here in the neighbouring countries.
So even at the Chinese court starting with Kublai Khan, I mean the most important Yuan period emperor,
there were always Buddhist wise men at the court.
And here for example at the first was Phags-Pa, he was around 1280 at the court in Beijing.
Then during the Ming period, I mean that was so to say the cultural zenith
and a lot of artefacts have been produced during that time, many of them influenced by Buddhism,
like this book cover which is a beautiful book cover which was given by the emperor
to an abbot of the Sakya monastery from Tibet coming on a visit and this book cover is now in our home in Winterthur
not too far from here.
And that’s the back side inscribed in Tibetan and in Chinese.
And then during the Qing period it went on, that was this Yonghe Lamasery in Beijing consecrated, still exists to day.
And if you go in the Forbidden City on the forbidden path, off the main road, you find this Tibetan temple for example.
And it’s full of Tibetan artefacts.
Still today, it’s normally not allowed to visit but all these artefacts are in the centre of Beijing.
And finally the last Chinese Empress, Cixi in 1908, she received the Dali Lama and she had good relations.
So it was always important.
So that’s history.
But now let’s go to the fascinating painting art and I’ll show you just a few paintings.
Let’s first of all go to this painting here, it’s an old one.
These are from the Kagyu-Pa school, from the black hat school, we don’t know so well who these 4 are,
that’s a guess that they have to do with Taklung Monastery.
And this is the founder of the Taklung Monastery, number 4 here and these are his predecessors.
But it’s a beautiful old painting, we wanted to know of course how old it is, so we can do carbon 14,
they think carbon 14 is being produced by cosmic ray, protons and these protons are transformed into neutrons
and neutrons they transform nitrogen 14 into carbon 14 and the carbon 14 is radio active and this decays
and from the decay rate we can determine the age.
And we have in Zurich, they have this machine, an accelerator mass spectrometer and with this you can do the measurements.
You get this decay curves.
You measure a certain radio carbon age and then by this curve here you finally get the date of production of the material.
In this case of the cotton of the painting.
And the painting is in this case, has been produced at 1229 plus or minus 61 years.
That’s what we know now.
And now the interpretation of these paintings, as I said we are not so sure about the big monks here
but the small ones are easy to interpret.
This here is Marpa, this is Milarepa.
Marpa and Milarepa, Milarepa is the great poet, the Tibetan poet, he has written beautiful poems
which are still existing today and he was his teacher.
And that's the life story of Milarepa.
He is sitting here holding his hand to the ear to hear this spherical music for inspiration and here is his life story.
Let’s look at the few details, for example here.
Here Marpa is teaching, he’s teaching on the 8 fold wheel here and this is Milarepa but Milarepa was a bad student,
you know how to treat bad students, you have to beat them.
So that’s what happened.
But fortunately Marpa had the compassionate wife and she was coming and begging her husband not to kill him completely,
so he’s moving away with his books under his arm, being very, very sad.
And in gratitude for that he formed here a chair and she could sit on him in order to milk the cows more easily.
Very nice story.
And here he does the same in the kitchen, she makes some butter tea for him and he gets here a cup of butter tea.
Anyway then came Marpa again and Marpa said now you have to build a tower and he started to build and build and build.
First he built a round tower and Marpa said "nonsense", and he built a triangular tower and Marpa said "nonsense",
he built a half round tower and he said "not good either" and finally he built a square tower
and it stands still today, 800, 900 years later.
Anyway these are these nice stories which you find in these paintings, which makes them so fascinating.
Here the 8th Dalai Lama on the occasion of his enthronement in 1762, it’s a very delicate
and more Chinese influenced painting, actually that's his birth place here, he is being born in here,
here is on his throne and this is the Portala Palace here, it’s a very nice painting.
And what you see here in particular are all the guests, guests coming to this ceremony from all the different countries.
From Mongolia, from China, from India, from everywhere they are coming and it’s so lively this painting.
I like it very much.
Here a completely different one.
That’s Yamantaka, and the Yamantaka is the conqueror of death.
You know Buddhists believe to be reborn and they need somebody to help them on their way of being reborn
and that’s Yamantaka, he’s a very strong personality and that’s his expression, I mean is to frighten all the enemies.
He has 9 heads, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and the 9th, the 9th is important because all these are frightful heads
and this is a peaceful head.
And this peaceful head belongs actually to this deity up here.
Lets see, here and here again and this deity, that’s Manjusri and Manjusri is a deity of wisdom.
So I mean for overcoming death you need wisdom.
That’s exactly what we are doing by writing all our publications, we need the strength of this personality,
but we will need wisdom to become immortal through our publications.
So Yamantaka is a good symbol for us scientists.
Anyway that was a little bit painting art.
Then of course that’s all related to Buddhist philosophy, I can’t go into too much detail here,
it has to go fast but 2 very important terms are wisdom and compassion.
And this contrasts which finally are combined are very important in Buddhism and these are 2 very important terms,
wisdom and compassion as well.
So that’s which we might sometimes miss in science but it also belongs to our life.
And I mean they speak about dependent arising, that means that everything is coming out together.
That everything is connected, all the different effects in the world are connected and there are no contrast,
there is no cessation, there is no birth, there is no nihilism, there is no eternalism, no coming, no going,
not many things, not one thing.
so you have to find your truth in combining everything.
And you see that also in these kind of paintings, that's Tantric Deity Guhyasamaja, it’s a Tantra of the Secret Union,
again unifying and here it’s symbolised by this unification of a female and a male, just in a symbolic way,
its again a beautiful 15th century painting.
And it has something to do more or less with yin and yang.
I mean this symbol is not Tibetan, it’s truly Chinese but it fits here as well,
it’s a combination of the 2 sides which fit so neatly together.
That’s so important, unity in duality, that’s a term which comes on over and over again.
And you see that also in the representation of deities, each deity has different shapes.
I mean we don’t, in Buddhism there is not good and evil, I mean the term that you know so well from the last 8 years,
but here there is angry forms, representation of the same personality and the peaceful form of the same personality.
We have both sides in us, so these are just different projections.
And I mean the 4 noble truths in Buddhism are very important, life means suffering, very simple.
The origin of suffering is attachment, attachment and of course me as a collector, attachment that’s a delicate term
because I’m attached to these paintings.
But still I should let them go and I shouldn’t attach too much.
The cessation of suffering is attainable and the path to that is 8 fold path.
So these are just some thoughts on Buddhism and I don’t want to go into all these details,
its finally becoming very complicated but the basis is very simple.
The Tibetan book of the death or its importance, we can perhaps this afternoon talk a little bit more about that.
And then the Mandalas, Mandala is a representation of our universe,
here these most beautiful Mandalas have been painted in the Ngor monastery, Ngor monastery in the centre of Tibet
which we visited once but it was destroyed at the time.
Anyway these Mandalas they are fascinating and this Mandala for example has been painted on a very particular occasion,
1580 for an abbot of the Ngor monastery who just has deceased by one of his successors.
And these Mandalas are so to say a path from the outside to the inside, to the inside of your own mind.
So it’s a universe inside universe which is represented and of course what you need first of all is a body,
you need speech in order to express yourself, you need a mind to,
again to express your deeper thoughts and finally comes wisdom and in the end comes the great bliss.
And the great bliss here is represented by Kalachakra, it’s a Kalachakra Mandala, again with his companion,
Kalachakra is actually the wheel of time, the continuation of our world, developing and Vishvamata,
she is the old mother, she is the origin of all existing things.
Anyway that’s the kind of painting and this mandala here contains 634 deities, horrible, incredible.
It’s something like a 634-fold blasphemy.
But I mean when you look at this painting, these are just symbolic representation.
You see for example here a painting which you don’t understand, it could be modern painting,
abstract painting but these are just attributes of a deity, the deity is again on vacation
and he is not here but the attributes are here.
And during meditation one has to project the deity into the painting oneself.
So again these deities are just projections of our inner self, they are not realities in the true sense.
And you see here that this, the deity, the head, the armoury here and so on.
So these are projections, this is the deity which one finally should project into the painting, it’s a protector of the teaching.
Anyway that’s a little bit philosophy and then we come into painting technology
and I’d like to guide you here into a painters workshop of 1760 and the work shop you see actually here,
lets blow it up, we know exactly when this has been painted, 1760,
in the work shop of Zhu-Chen in Derge monastery in very eastern Tibet.
And we have here this scene again and it consists actually of 2 rooms, this is the room of the master painter.
We see the master painter here preparing the canvas, putting on in ink the drawing, finally for putting in then the colours.
And we know who this master painter is, that’s Zhu-Chen himself.
This monk here, he mounts the canvas, this monk is preparing the ink, this little monk holds the ink pot.
Here we have a student and the teacher watching what the great master is doing and here we have the good for nothing,
watching out into the sky, watching the birds and so on.
So this is also necessary, it’s very nice.
And anyway the next room here there are the student painters,
they fill in the pigment according to the instructions of the master, we have monk painters and we have lay painters here.
That’s how a Thangka is being done.
But why do these students know what pigment to put in, because the master painter has put in here these symbols,
the letters here for the different colours sa for ser, yellow for example, that’s Tibetan S and so on or numbering.
That’s inscription which is now underneath the paint layer which we can’t see anymore
but modern technology can visualise that again.
We can do infrared photography for example and infrared photography is very simple, everybody has a digital camera at home,
all you have to buy is an infrared filter which does let pass only infrared light which has a characteristic like that.
So visible light is being stopped and infrared is being passed.
And then you can do infrared photography, very simple.
Now lets look at this painting again, you saw it before and let’s look at it now through an infrared filter.
That’s what you see, the colours are gone and you see the under paint drawing which has been done by the master painter,
you see exactly what he has done.
Or look at this painting here, I don’t want to explain the contents but we just look now at the infrared part
and you see again here the symbol for red, for blue, for orange, for green,
so in this way we can figure out what they have done, by very simple technical means.
And now work shop 1999.
I went once to Nepal to learn a little bit the technology.
Here is one of the painters working on a modern painting, it’s again a Mandala painting.
And here’s a work shop and you start out with a piece of cotton, attach it to a wooden frame,
then you cover it with gesso of chalk, gypsum or kaolin in hide glue, that’s a binder.
And then you start, that’s what I’m doing here.
And I had a helper who flattened it with the stones to make it flat that I could then make my drawing on it,
the drawing you take out from a sketch book.
And you see how they do this construction, very neatly and that’s why the proportions are so nicely done.
And then I start here to, with ink to make the drawing and finally you have to put in the pigments.
And the pigments they are inorganic pigments like malachite, copper carbonate, azurite, the copper carbonate, cinnabar,
that’s mercury sulphide, red lead, lead oxide and orpiment, that’s arsenic sulphide, very poisonous and a few others.
And I wanted to do an analysis of the different pigments, I mean the Thangka paintings are coming from everywhere,
they’re coming from Nepal, from India, from Tibet, from China and from Mongolia and Buryatia as well in Siberia.
And for that I use Raman Spectroscopy, unfortunately NMR is useless, that’s a very, the first occasion
where I discovered that NMR could be useless for something, but Raman is doing it.
So you have a strong laser, you irradiate with a laser your painting, hopefully not burning a hole
and then you get stray light out and stray light contains now
in addition to the basic frequency the vibrational frequencies of the molecule.
And these are these additional frequencies which you see here on the side.
And this is now a finger print of the molecule you are irradiating at, looking at.
And this way you can make pigment analysis.
For example the blue pigments you see azurite, smalte, Prussian blue and indigo,
you don’t have to understand this spectra, you don’t analyse them really,
you are really just finger printing and that’s what I’m doing now.
And fortunately I have just in my home, very near to my bedroom I have this very small laboratory with a Raman spectrometer,
so whenever I can’t sleep then I’m going to my lab and doing Raman spectroscopy and that’s really fun.
And combining art and science here in a very particular way.
And this is the Raman spectrometer and I mounted it in such a way that it can be scanned across even very large paintings,
it’s very handy, very useful and I’m the only one having such a spectrometer in the world.
You can even look through the glass here on the painting and you can find out the pigments.
For example this painting here which we saw before, we find that the blue is indigo,
the green is a mixture of orpiment and indigo, so it’s yellow and blue mixed together.
Yellow is orpiment, arsenic sulphide.
Here mixture of cinnabar, red and little bit of red and orange gives off, and yellow gives orange,
the red is cinnabar, the black is carbon black and white is chalk.
And here for the eyes they use the special white.
It’s a very simple spectrum or assembly of pigments which are used for this painting, that’s a very old painting.
And these are just a few of the spectra, this is cinnabar spectrum,
very characteristic and orpiment spectrum you see here, simple compound and simple spectra, very characteristic.
That’s a painting or a drawing actually from the same period and here these pigments which we saw before,
they are the typical pigments actually coming from Nepal, this painting before had a strong influence from Nepal.
These were mostly Nepalese artists coming to Tibet and doing the job there.
This is now a more Tibetan painting from the same period where they use for the blue azurite and malachite.
These are, this copper carbonate which they use here for making this painting.
And then these are the formulas here, copper carbonate and copper carbonate 2 and here no 2, so they’re very similar compounds.
There are other pigments which are used, I don’t want to go into the details because I’m a little bit short of time.
This is an interesting painting, this is coming from Buryatia, very nearby lake Baikal
and even there Buddhism has been introduced, originating from Tibet.
This is the Western Paradise of Amitabha, Amitabha is sitting here and this is the Western Paradise.
A place where all Buddhists would like to be reborn in.
And they are actually being reborn here out of the lotuses, you see here these are all Buddhists
and some of them are being carried over by a soul boat.
By a soul boat going so to say across lake Baikal, into this paradise.
But that’s not what I’m interested in at the moment, I just want to show you pigments.
And it contains 3 different arsenic containing pigments, namely orpiment which is just arsenic 2, sulphide 3,
then we have realgar arsenic 4, sulphide 4, which is more orange and finally we have pararealgar,
a modification of this one which is again yellow.
And these are the typical spectra and these 3 pigments by chance occur all in this painting.
So pararealgar we find here in this yellow, that’s this mineral, realgar we find here in the orange,
mixed together with red lead, that’s this one and orpiment we find mixed with Prussian blue to give the green pigment.
It’s a very rare occasion where all these pigments are coming together.
Ok that’s a little bit about pigment analysis and of course I need this pigment analysis
when I want to conserve or even restore my paintings.
And here a small painting is coming from Mongolia, it’s a Mongolian painting
and you see that very easily, you have for example here a Ger, this tent occurs only in Mongolia, there are also camels here.
So it’s a typical Mongolian, very small, very tiny painting, it’s only 15 by 19 centimetres.
It’s really a miniature painting.
And I had to do some restoration, you see before, after the restoration,
before, after, before, after and I had to know which pigments to put in, so I did pigment analysis on this painting also.
So here these are typical pigments from Mongolia, lazurite, is the blue here, its similar to lapis lazuli,
I’m just finishing soon, emerald green is a synthetic pigment which has been invented 1840, that’s in here,
so the painting cannot be older than that but it must be a 19th century painting.
There are other pigments as well which I don’t want to mention.
Cinnabar is red as usual, cinnabar and lead white for making this lighter red and so on and gold,
there is a lot of gold in this painting.
Ok that’s conservation of art, which I am, it’s fascinating to do the conservation yourself.
I mean when you start to look through a microscope at these paintings, then you have to spend hours, weeks,
even months on the same painting and you learn about it
and when you walk through a museum you spend 20 seconds in front of a painting and you learn nothing.
But that’s fascinating, it’s really fascinating for me.
And finally I mean we have also to do something good and we are doing something good for the Tibetan monks in India.
So we started a teaching program for the Tibetan monks and nuns in south India.
And it’s a wish of the Dalai Lama, I mean you know the Dalai Lama is very much involved in science.
He is very much interested in our science and he actually reached a very high level
and he wants that his monks also learn something about science.
So we are starting to make, organise science workshops in south India.
We call that science meets Dharma, science the western side, Dharma the eastern side and we meet here and exchange here.
It’s really an intercultural exchange and it’s a very fascinating activity.
It’s just a fun visit where we were ourselves there, I never did teaching myself, I didn’t have the time for that.
But we have teachers who we sent, like this one to India, teachers and scientists.
And these are very good students, they are very interested, I mean they are very much advanced mentally
but they know nothing about science, so we have to start on a very low level but I mean spiritually they are very advanced.
So it’s nice to talk to them.
Of course they never did our experiments, they did contemplation, meditation but never an experiment,
so we have to learn them to do experiments, that’s probably the most important.
And here in a nunnery, we do also teaching in nunneries, here.
And it’s a project which is being organised by the Tibet institute, Rikon, that’s the manager,
that's his email address and you are very welcome to help yourself and help here in this project,
you learn a lot and you provide input for these monks, it’s a nice exchange project.
And I have outside on the tables a few brochures describing this project and just take one if you are interested in it.
Anyway you see it started all with this painting here, when we visited Nepal and all that came out and it really enriched me.
And it’s very important that I have now these 2 legs and that helps me to move in a much safer way.
And I met many beautiful people in the meantime, these monks or these pilgrims who have their wealth inside, in them,
they are poor outside but they are rich inside.
And so never forget your passions and don’t become a one-sided nerd.
Thank you for your attention.
(applause).