When the Society for Neuroscience asked Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama
(the leader of Tibetan Buddhism), to address its annual meeting in Washington,
D.C., in 2005, a few hundred members among the nearly 35,000 or so
attending the meeting petitioned to have the invitation rescinded. A religious
leader, they felt, had no place at a scientific meeting. But this particular
leader turned out to have a provocative and ultimately productive question
to pose to the gathering. “What relation,” he asked, “could there be
between Buddhism, an ancient Indian philosophical and spiritual tradition, and modern science?”