Science and spirituality: towards a plausible conjunction of polar opposites

East and West, the ‘twins’ that according to Leibniz would never meet, have become unexpected partners in sharing the feat of crafting a unitary knowledge of outer and inner reality.  The Quantum and the Lotus, to cite the apt wording of Matthieu Ricard and Trinh Xuan Thuan, are now engaged in coming up at the junction where science and Buddhism meet. My intent in this paper is to survey the lights and shadows of an encounter among minds that, perhaps from time immemorial in the history of the world culture, have, for grounded reasons, been cognitive rivals.