Do all religions have essentially the same message, about love, compassion, and forgiveness?

I don't know "all religions," but I am fearfully confident that the 16-volume The Encyclopedia of Religion would lead me to many that obscure that message with so many practices and beliefs that it'd be hard to bring that trio forward. Some religious leaders would no doubt say that their faith is essential about, e.g., justice, and in their minds it might conflict with love, compassion, and forgiveness.

But let's give the Dalai Lama the general point about his generalization. He is a man of great good will and good effect, and I would not want to criticize him and his reaching out here. We do have to ask, however, what we do with such a hunch or such knowledge.

In my observation, the practices and beliefs of the separate religions, which do share many things, "get interesting" in the minds and hearts of billions of people when mediated through the stories that give them, animate them, and hold them to a faith. And we live by such stories.

So I am happy to look to the nearby zone and see Buddhists or Hindus being loving, compassionate, and forgiving. Yet we Christians, typically, are motivate to pursue love, compassion, and forgiveness, because of our particular story--e.g. of Jesus Christ--just as the Dalai Lama draws on particular Tibetan Buddhism and not generic religion.

As Santayana said, we do not talk "language," we talk "a language." The Dalai Lama is a great influence on helping people not be captive of and exclusive about their stories, beliefs, and practices, but believers and "behavers" ordinarily are not impelled by abstractions so much as by the concrete stories and what they represent, within, say, Judaism, Hinduism, etc.