"Pilgrimages are undertaken because people want to move beyond their normal, mundane life," says Virginia Raguin, a professor at the College of the Holy Cross. Raguin is also the curator of a traveling exhibit on pilgrimages in Buddhism, Christianity and Islam.

Monks from the Dalai Lama's private monastery in India spent five days building a sand mandala at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City. The mandala is a symbolic structure that represents a Buddha's dwelling. It is said to bring peace and harmony to the area where it is being made. Karen Humphries Sallick, who organized the monks' tour, explains.

“It’s a spectacular opportunity for cross-cultural associations that are peace-based, that are based in the holiness of this land,” says Steve Lozar, a council leader of the Salish Tribe in Montana.

When disaster strikes, the character of a culture is revealed, and in Japan, perceptions of disaster are deeply rooted in traditional religious culture.

The New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care, directed by two Buddhist monks, is training chaplains, caregivers, and health care professionals to listen to patients and lighten the burden of their suffering and pain.

"We can open up the question of financial incentives" for organ donations "without worrying about undue coercive pressures," says medical ethicist Robert Veatch of Georgetown University.

"As the mind becomes a little more quiet, the sacredness of everything, within and without, becomes clear," says Norman Fischer, a practicing Jew and a Zen Buddhist priest who has been teaching meditation for over 30 years.

"There's no such thing as a hermetically sealed religion or culture. We human beings have been talking to each other since the beginning, and every time we talk to each other we change each other."

"The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them," said artist Mark Rothko.

Engaged Buddhism means "you must confront social suffering," says Thai scholar and activist Sulak Sivaraksa, "and people suffer now because of the environment."