More recently, I joined Christian and Buddhist leaders for a pilgrimage to Bodhgaya in India. Every morning we sat under the Bodhi Tree for a communal meditation session. Since the time of the Buddha over 2,500 years ago and the time of Jesus Christ 2,000 years ago, I think that was the first time such an encounter occurred.
There is a place that I’ve wanted to visit for a long time, but this wish has not yet been fulfilled. It is the Wu Tai Shan, the mountain of Five Terraces, venerated in China and dedicated to Manjushri, the bodhisattva of Wisdom. My predecessor, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, went there to pay homage, and during my first trip to China in 1954 I wished to follow in his footsteps. At that time the Chinese authorities refused my request, under the pretext that the roads were unfit for travel.
A life of contemplation on love
ON A VISIT TO THE GREAT MONASTERY at Montserrat in Spain, I met a Benedictine monk there. He came especially to see me—and his English was much poorer than mine, so I felt more courage to speak to him. After lunch we spent some time alone, face to face, and I was informed that this monk had spent a few years in the mountains just behind the monastery. I asked him what kind of contemplation he had practiced during those years of solitude. His answer was simple: “Love, love, love.” How wonderful! I suppose that sometimes he also slept. But during all those years he meditated simply on love. And he was not meditating on just the word. When I looked into his eyes, I saw evidence of profound spirituality and love—as I had during my meetings with Thomas Merton.
Temples
inside
IBELIEVE THE PURPOSE of all the major religious traditions is not to construct big temples on the outside, but to create temples of goodness and compassion inside, in our hearts.
Some people believe that the most reasonable way to attain harmony and solve problems relating to religious intolerance is to establish one universal religion for everyone. However, I have always felt that we should have different religious traditions because human beings possess so many different mental dispositions: one religion simply cannot satisfy the needs of such a variety of people. If we try to unify the faiths of the world into one religion, we will also lose many of the qualities and richnesses of each particular tradition. Therefore, I feel it is better, in spite of the many quarrels in the name of religion, to maintain a variety of religious traditions. Unfortunately, while a diversity of religious traditions is more suited to serve the needs of the diverse mental dispositions among humanity, this diversity naturally possesses the potential for conflict and disagreement as well. Consequently, people of every religious tradition must make an extra effort to transcend intolerance and misunderstanding and seek harmony.1
Transforming Our Minds
Analysis of the mind as a preliminary to spiritual practice
TO FREE OURSELVES FROM SUFFERING, we must understand what happens before suffering. For nothing appears without causes or conditions. It’s up to us to recognize the causes that increase suffering or diminish it. That is part of the analysis of the mind, an indispensable preliminary to spiritual practice.
The mind is subject to circumstantial pressures; it fluctuates with them and reacts to the impact of sensations. Material progress and a higher standard of living improve comfort and health but do not lead to a transformation of the mind, the only thing capable of providing lasting peace. Profound happiness, unlike fleeting pleasures, is spiritual by nature. It depends on the happiness of others, and it is based on love and tenderness. We would be wrong to think that being happy consists of grasping the best at others’ expense. The lack of altruism, which causes family discord and disturbance, causes solitude. We should take care not to be excessively concerned with the external world, realizing that grasping and owning material goods reinforce self-centeredness.
The key to happiness lies in strength of mind, inner serenity, and a quality like steadfastness. We can approach this by developing tenderness and love, which correspond to the profound nature of every human being. The mother-child relationship is probably the best example of the non-ordinary love of loving someone else more than yourself. The first word each of us has uttered is “mama,” and in just about every language this word contains the syllable ma. Another monosyllabic word in most languages in the world, with the exception of Japanese, designates the self: “me” (or “mine”) indicates the extreme attachment we have for our own person. It is an attachment we must fight in order to spread altruistic qualities.
Of course, one can cultivate human qualities without having a religion. But as a general rule, religion allows us to increase these qualities more effectively.
Impermanence and interdependence, or seeing the world as it is
BUDDHISM OFFERS A METHOD that will improve us while reflecting the true nature of things, without letting us be fooled by appearances. Phenomena, which manifest to our faculties of perception, have no ultimate reality. Let us take the example of a mountain. It seems to be the same today as it was yesterday. Formed thousands of years ago, it represents a continuity in the world of phenomena. Although we can note a relative stability in its appearance on a coarse level, we must still acknowledge that each of its particles, on a very subtle level, is changing from one instant to the next. Change, on the infinitesimal level, is accompanied in our mind by an appearance of continuity. Yet the continuity thus perceived is illusory. For nothing remains the same, and no two consecutive instants are alike.
After the example of the mountain, let’s take that of the flower, whose fragility and ephemeral nature are obvious. The flower that is blooming today was first a seed,
