1.....“Love, compassion and forgiveness” is the Dalai Lama’s sermon, and by it he is unobtrusively presenting himself as representing the heart of “all major religious traditions.” (Nothings new here: by definition, any missionary self-presents as representative of the best religion.) But this idealistic moralism is not the central characteristic of the world’s religions. I looked up the three words in the extensive index of that standard text on the world’s religions and found no references to “love” or “compassion” or “forgiveness." I would find them in a book on ethics, but not necessarily in a book on religion.

2.....The religious/ethical distinction, however, hardly exists for basic Buddhism, a protestant form of Hinduism, reducing that polytheistic religion to a deity-less ethic inspired by meditation-full “enlightenment” ("buddha"-hood). Between that and religions of revelation, the contrast is stark. The meditational monk talks like the Dalai Lama, without the necessity of prayer to any deity: the revelational monk prays like St.Francis of Assisi: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace....” As a Christian, I pray with St.Francis.

3.....The “major religious traditions” are so different, each so distinctive, that the notion of their carrying “the same message” is fatuous. Worse, it’s propaganda: hold still, and whoever makes this false claim will lay on you his/her distinctive message. But it sounds plausible to the wide public who believe that “we’re all going to the same place though by different routes.”

4.....Indeed, human life on this planet is so complex that even to speak of “religious traditions” is questionable. “Human traditions,” yes. But in most human traditions, religion is inseparable from life: our American “separation of church and state” is an unthinkable notion, as is the West’s distinction between sacred and secular spheres. (Unthinkable also is the nonsensical idea—now broadcast by aggressive atheists—that the world would be better off without "religion.")

5.....Every human tradition has its virtues and deficiencies, and no tradition’s virtues are easily transferable to other traditions. (An instance the world understands: American democracy is not easily transportable.) The virtues the Dalai Lama preaches from his monastic Buddhism are not as universal as he makes them seem. With their connotations, they abide in and derive from monastic withdrawal from the world—as Gautama, the original Buddhist, abandoned his family and communal obligations to run off on his own in personal spiritual pursuit, radically revising his Hindu religion in the process.

6.....While the Dalai Lama walks the free world as a free man, we should ask what social constructs, beyond the monasteries, are integral to what he means by “love, compassion and forgiveness.” When in 1949 the Chinese military suppressed a Tibetan uprising (and the Dalai Lama fled into exile in India), the Chinese government claimed that China was liberating the Tibetans from a totalitarian-feudal regime. Now in diaspora, this ethnic Buddhism is more influential than ever before, while the land of Tibet has increasingly become Chinese in population and culture.

It’s a paradox. The more we human beings are willing to hear one another’s differences, the more hope there is that we can cooperate toward truly human ends. The more we accept our divergences, the greater the hope for convergence. For we cannot arrive at the truth of love without working through our various versions of the love of truth. This was the project which the American monk Thomas Merton was about when he died, in 1968, while on a visit to a Buddhist monastery in Thailand. As a Christian, he believed in Jesus Christ as God come among us human beings to suffer with us and to die and rise again for us. But he respected and learned from the Buddhist “enlightenment” way of confronting suffering. And he was eager to join hands with all vicarious fellow-sufferers, all who are deeply concerned—in thought and action—about the downside of the human condition.