Culliford (2002, this issue) has given us a valuable tour of what is involved in an appraisal of a patient's spirituality and its relevance to the assessment of mental state and prognosis. My task here is to provide some commentary from the perspective of a Buddhist. What immediately confronts me, therefore, is whether the teachings and practices of Buddhism do, in fact, find a place upon the map here set out. This is not a straightforward question, and this alone illustrates the fact that this is a subject within which one has to be willing to encompass, or at least allow for, differences of basic paradigm. However, what strikes me particularly is the fact that the Buddhist paradigm actually may be less at odds with the medical model than many might imagine.