Word: religion
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...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 who will suggest that old Tibet may have contributed in part...
...faiths. Such conjunctions have led to conflicts and even riots, not just when moods clash, but because "the public sphere is being contested." Kumar is convinced, however, that "a new generation is emerging that is more pluralistic and they don't feel threatened just because someone is from another religion...
...farmer's son born in a stone-and-mud house in a 20-home village in one of the world's least materially developed countries has, rather remarkably, become one of the leading spokesmen for a new global vision in which we look past divisions of nation, race and religion and try to address our shared problems at the source. Acts of terrorism, he said when I saw him in November, usually arise from some cause deep in the past and will not go away until the root problem is addressed. He could as easily have been talking about...
...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, and yet those who are strong within can survive even material hardship (as many monks in Tibet have had tragic occasion to prove), it makes more sense to concentrate...
...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...