Stephens: Today, the Dalai Lama was warmly received by the Christian clergy of the National Cathedral who invited him as the keynote speaker and allowed him to perfom his religious rituals with several Tibetan Buddhist lamas on the second anniversary of September 11. How should we as Americans view his visit?
Trimondi: Frankly speaking, the Dalai Lama has two faces. He makes his official contact with the West under the maxim of Mahayana Buddhism and then deftly assimilates the highest values and ideals of western culture (Christian, Jewish and humanist). On his present trip to America he has met with Muslims like Mohammed Ali, Jesuits at the University of San Francisco, political leaders from Republican and Democratic persuasions, and then will comfortably meet with ethicists and scientists at MIT and Harvard.
Through diplomatic tolerance he wins Agnostics as well as the hearts of unsuspecting Jews and Christians, to whom he preaches in the tongue of “a man of peace” and as a human rights activist relates passages of “compassion, love, and non-violence” from the “Sermon on the Mount.” Nearly all of the speeches the Dalai Lama delivers in public are extremely tolerant, human and compassionate. You can only agree. And yet, there is another face that peeks out from behind the mask of goodness, charity and kindness, which gives one pause to think more deeply about the shadow of this “man of peace.”
