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in 2005, a few hundred members among the nearly 35,000 or so attending the meeting petitioned to have the invitation rescinded.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 scientifi c 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?”