Word: lamas
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...This all has deep and wide implications for a world that seems as religiously polarized now as it has ever been. Always stressing that the Buddha's own words should be thrown out if they are shown by scientific inquiry to be flawed, the Dalai Lama is the rare religious figure who tells people not to get needlessly confused or distracted by religion ("Even without a religion, we can become a good human being"). No believer in absolute truth-he eagerly seeks out Catholics, neuroscientists, even regular travelers to Tibet who can instruct him-he is also the rare Tibetan...
...This determination to be completely empirical-as if he were a doctor of the mind pledged to examine things only as they are, to come up with a clear diagnosis and then to suggest a practical response-is one of the things that have made the current Dalai Lama such a startling and tonic figure on the world stage. There are few monks in any tradition who speak so rarely about faith while rejecting anything that has been disproved by scientific inquiry; on his desk at home, he keeps a plastic model of the brain with detachable parts so that...
...ScientistI have been visiting the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala regularly since 1974 and have been listening to him speak to psychologists, non-Buddhist priests and philosophers-from Harvard to Hiroshima and Zurich to Malibu-since 1979. I'm not a Buddhist myself, only a typically skeptical journalist whose father, a professional philosopher, happened to meet the Dalai Lama in 1960, the year after he went into exile. But having spent time watching wars and revolutions everywhere from Sri Lanka to Beirut, I've grown intrigued by the quietly revolutionary ideas that the Dalai Lama has put into play. China...
...Among fellow Buddhists, the Dalai Lama delivers complex, analytical talks and wrestles with doctrinal issues within a philosophy that can be just as divided as anything in Christianity or Islam, but he has decided after analytical research that when he finds himself out in the wider world talking to large audiences of people with no interest in Buddhism, the most practical course is just to offer, as a doctor would, simple, everyday principles that anyone, regardless of religion (or lack of same), might find helpful. Since material wealth cannot help us if we're heartbroken, he often says...
...larger sense of identity being proposed by the Dalai Lama-and many others from every tradition-has special relevance today because, as the Tibetan leader likes to say, we are living in a "new reality" in which "the concept of 'we' and 'they' is gone." And if the terrorist attacks and wars of the new millennium have made some people on every continent wary and skeptical of religion, they have also made them ache, more palpably than ever, for precisely the sense of moral guidance and solace that religions traditionally provide...