Dalai Lama - Toward a True Kinship of Faiths: How the Worlds Religions Can Come Together

Fifty years ago, a young man of twenty-four, I walked out of the Norbu Lingka palace in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, with a gun slung over my shoulder. I was disguised as a bodyguard, wearing a chuba, the traditional Tibetan laymans costume, and without my glasses. With a small group I fled the city and began the journey to freedom and exile in India. The political circumstances that drove me into exile remain such that I have not been able to return.

Since that night of March 17, 1959, our world has changed almost beyond recognitionand certainly beyond the imagination of a Tibetan monk who had never been outside of Asia. Some of todays household wordsInternet, e-mail, digital camera, genome, AIDS, globalization, iPodhad not even been coined. Today, the world we live in is truly global. No country can remain untouched by technological innovation, environmental degradation, the globalized systems of modern economics and banking, instant communications, and the World Wide Web. Furthermore, the pace of exchange in ideas and peopleboth tourists and refugeeshas created unprecedented contact and closeness among the worlds many cultures. Swiftly, the effects of what happens in one part of the world are felt everywhere else. Nowhere is immune. The challenge before usmuch more urgent than in the pastin this era of nuclear weapons, international terrorism, financial uncertainty, and ecological crisis, is simply peaceful coexistence.

This challenge of peaceful coexistence, I believe, will define the task of humanity in the twenty-first century. As early as 1930, one of Indias greatest modern visionaries saw the problems clearly. In his Hibbert Lectures at Oxford, Rabindranath Tagore wrote:

The races of mankind will never again be able to go back to their citadels of high-walled exclusiveness. They are today exposed to one another, physically and intellectually. The shells, which have so long given them full security within their individual enclosures, have been broken, and by no artificial process can they be mended again. So we have to accept this fact, even though we have not yet fully adapted our minds to this changed environment of publicity, even though through it we may have to run all the risks entailed by the wider expansion of lifes freedom.

( THE RELIGION OF MAN, PP . 14142)

These sentiments are exactly to the mark. But the pressures on us now are far greater than when Tagore wrote.

In the face of the stresses caused by the confrontation with other cultures and ideas, and the rapidity of their effects on ones own world of such global events as the economic downturn, which in part originated elsewhere, it is not surprising that some have spoken of a clash of civilizations. Personally, I find such talk disturbing and unhelpful, for it only serves to accentuate the potential for discord. There is another possibility. The pressure cooker of globalization can move humanity in another direction, to the deeper plane where peoples, cultures, and individuals can connect with their basic, shared human nature. In that place, it is possible for us human beings to recognize the global nature of the problems facing us and our shared responsibility to confront them together, and to affirm the oneness of our human family. If we do not, the very survival of our species is at stake.

One area where peaceful coexistence has been hugely problematic in the history of humankind is in the relations between the worlds religions. In the past, conflicts generated by religious differences may have been significant and regrettable, but they did not threaten the future of the planet or the survival of humanity. In todays globalized world, where extremists have access to vast technological resources and can draw on the immense emotive power of religion, a single spark could ignite a powder keg of truly frightening proportions. The challenge before religious believers is to genuinely accept the full worth of faith traditions other than their own. This is to embrace the spirit of religious pluralism.

The line between exclusivismwhich takes ones own religion to be the only legitimate faithand fundamentalism is a dangerously narrow one; the line between fundamentalism and extremism is even narrower. The time has come for every individual adherent of a major world religion to ask: What, in my heart of hearts, is my attitude to the followers of other faiths? We, the believers, no longer have the luxury of the kind of tolerance that does not accord full respect to other religions. After 9/11, the upholding of exclusivist religious bigotry in todays world is no longer a private matter of an individuals personal outlook. It has the potential to affect the lives of all.

The lesson I draw is that understanding and harmony between the worlds religions is one of the essential preconditions for genuine world peace.

Over the years I have come to recognize that I have three principal commitments in my lifeone might even call them missions. First, as a human being, I am committed to the promotion of what I call basic human values, by which I mean especially compassion, which I see as the foundation of human happiness. Nurturing this compassionate seed within us and acting from this innate capacity are the keys to fulfilling the basic aspiration to happiness. There is an intimate connection between love and compassion, on the one hand, and genuine happiness, on the other. The indispensability of compassion touches us all, whether we are rich or poor, educated or uneducated, religious or nonreligious, from this nation or from that one. It is innate in us, the birthright of everyone born human. From our very first day in this life, we are wholly dependent on the love of our mother or some other caregiver. If we as a species are serious about creating a more caring and happier world, then it is this precious quality we need to foster and practice.

My second commitment, as a religious person, is to the promotion of inter-religious understanding and harmony. This book, which I have been so happy to write, is primarily aimed at contributing to this objective. Finally, my third commitment, as a Tibetan and as the Dalai Lama, is to the pursuit of a happy and satisfactory solution to the sad crisis of Tibet and its people. While the third commitment is an inherited one, bequeathed to me in my role as the Dalai Lama, the first two are voluntarywillingly and happily taken up by meand will last until my final breath.

Despite the tremendous progress in material conditions the world over, suffering remains. The afflictions such as greed, anger, hatred, and envy that underpinned much of our misery thousands of years ago continue to do so even today. Unless there is a radical change in human nature within a rapid period of time, these afflictions will plague us for many centuries to come. The teachings of each of the worlds great religions, in their own unique way, have been and will continue to be a spiritual resource to counter the effects of these afflictions. Therefore, religion remains relevant and will have an important role in human society for the foreseeable future. Supremely, the religions have inspired the flow of compassion and great acts of altruism, the effects of which have resonated in the lives of millions. So, both from the point of view of peace in the world and to foster the beneficial potential of religion in the world, the faith traditions must find a way of relating to each other with mutual acceptance and genuine respect.