the minds of children, producing so strong and perhaps an inherited effect on their brains, not yet fully developed that it would be as difficult for them to throw off their belief in God as for a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear and hatred of a snake. The Dalai Lama has his own iconic perspective on these issues. Both Buddhism and modern science shared a deep suspicion of any notion of absolutes, whether conceptualized as a transcendent being, as an eternal unchanging principal such as soul, or as a fundamental substratum of reality.