Beyond the Self: Conversations between Buddhism and Neuroscience

A Buddhist monk and esteemed neuroscientist discuss their converging—and diverging—views on the mind and self, consciousness and the unconscious, free will and perception, and more.

Buddhism shares with science the task of examining the mind empirically; it has pursued, for two millennia, direct investigation of the mind through penetrating introspection. Neuroscience, on the other hand, relies on third-person knowledge in the form of scientific observation. In this book, Matthieu Ricard, a...