JOHN WOOD: We are, you know, not a religious organization. Our religion is literacy, our religion is gender equality and education.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: Here is John Wood spreading his religion in Vietnam, in Africa, in India. It was only 15 years ago that Wood took a hike that changed his life and impacted millions of others. He was a Microsoft executive trekking in Nepal when a headmaster invited him to visit his run-down, dilapidated, overcrowded school.

WOOD: And we went to this school’s library, and it was a library in name only. They didn’t have any books for the children. And I asked the headmaster why, and he said we’re too poor to afford books. And I said, well, that must make your job very difficult as a headmaster and he said well actually in Nepal we’re too poor to afford education for our children but until we have education we’re always going to remain poor.

SEVERSON: This came as a shock to Wood, who as a kid loved to read more than anything.

WOOD: I loved to read. I’ve loved to read from the day I could first decode words. And when I was growing up, if I did something well, you know, I surprised my mom by washing the dishes, and I was given anything I wanted as a reward, I would always say I want to stay up late and read tonight.

SEVERSON: Wood promised the headmaster that he would return with books for the school’s library. He asked his friends and his parents for help and they did, big time—more books than his yak could carry. But he kept his promise.

WOOD: I was just in awe of how excited those kids were when we delivered the books. And then to see the kids then running with the book, sitting under a tree, and you see three kids all with their eyes wide open looking at a picture of men walking on the moon, looking at photographs of African wild life, kids in a land-locked nation who had never seen sharks or whales.

SEVERSON: Wood says he’s inspired by Buddhism and had been reading the Dalai Lama’s teaching that the greatest happiness comes from giving something to someone in need.

WOOD: I thought, what am I doing patting myself on the back? That’s one library in a world that needs tens of thousands of libraries. That’s 450 children helped in a world where 800 million people are illiterate. That’s almost a billion people who can’t read or write, and then people remain, you know, confused about why do the poor remain poor. Well, if you don’t get an education, if you can’t read or write, the odds are stacked against you.

SEVERSON: So Wood decided to leave his lucrative job at Microsoft for the low-paying life of a book peddler, although that may be an oversimplification of what his nonprofit organization does. It’s called Room to Read and they now have libraries and schools and millions of books in 10 countries, including Cambodia.

(to Kahn Kall): Room to Read has been doing very well in Cambodia?

KAHN KALL: I would not hesitating to say yes.

SEVERSON: Kahn Kall is the head of Room to Read in Cambodia. He’s happy because the Cambodian government has given its rare blessing to the Room to Read mission. This is the country that barely survived the terror reign of the Khmer Rouge, in which education was completely obliterated. It was so bad even after the Khmer Rouge that the current provincial education minister says as a school teacher he had to scrounge for a piece of paper.

MR. UNG SIREIDY: No chair, no table, no clothes for children, no books. Sometimes I collect the paper from the road to make my lesson plan.

SEVERSON: Even today in many schools in Cambodia, reading, especially for pleasure is often frowned upon.

KAHN KALL: You only allowed to read the book which is related to what you learn. Any other books they always say it’s not useful. And you know what I did, I go to the bookstore and then I rented a book, I had to hide it behind my back, because otherwise my father when he saw I read the book that were different, I read the story, I read everything, he would spank.

SEVERSON: There are about 6,500 primary and secondary public schools in Cambodia. Until 10 years ago, about the only books found in these schools were official, authorized textbooks, one per grade. Now more 1,500 of these schools have their very own library, like the one behind me, provided by Room to Read with the blessings of the Cambodian government. Now, in Phnom Penh, hot off the press, books with pictures created and published by Room to Read.

WOOD: If you look around the developing world, when you bring bright, colorful children’s books into a child’s life, there’s just something instinctive, inherent inside them where they just get it immediately. Their faces light up.

SEVERSON: (speaking to young girl through interpreter) How many books have you read?

INTERPRETER: Around 30 books.

SEVERSON: How about your girlfriend?

INTERPRETER: She reads five books a day.

SEVERSON: Five books a day?

INTERPRETER: Yeah, yeah.

SEVERSON: These bright, colorful books were commissioned by Room to Read and created by local Cambodian artists, always with a message.

RATANA: Yes, very popular among the children.

SEVERSON: Ratana says this one is meant to discourage young girls from leaping into marriage.

RATANA: The message is that she is too young. She needs to learn more, so she cannot get married when she is very young.

SEVERSON: The story lines always treat boys and girls as equals.

WOOD: If you’re working with boys and girls you want to make sure you don’t have gender stereotypes, right? So sometimes in books you’ll see the boys are out playing soccer while the girl is inside, you know, washing the dishes. Well, is that really the lesson we want to teach to kids or do you want to reverse that and make sure that you’re having good gender roles in the books.

SEVERSON: Room to Read pays special attention to young girls because, Wood says, that’s where the need is the greatest.

WOOD: You know, two-thirds of those who are illiterate, two-thirds of those who are out of school are girls and women. And this is basically nothing less than planned poverty, that if you have a woman not get educated, of course the next generation does not get educated.

SEVERSON: Now Room to Read has a program that guarantees girls an education all the way through high school, including, when necessary, room and board. Borin is one of the organization’s few full-time employees in Cambodia.

SREY BORIN: We provide the girls with something like school uniforms, the shoes. And we provide them with transportation, let’s say, bicycle for those who live far away from the school.

SEVERSON: So far 20,000 girls worldwide have enrolled. These girls are old enough to be in college, but this was their first opportunity to go to high school.

FIRST STUDENT: My father and my mother, when I study, know what,he very happy.

SEVERSON: With you?

FIRST STUDENT: Yeah, with you, with me.

SEVERSON: And what about your parents, are they happy?

SECOND STUDENT: Ah, the same, too.

SEVERSON: Room to Read now has an annual budget of $44 million, funding that comes from individuals, foundations, and corporations. Wood says one reason Room to Read has been so successful in the 12 years since it was founded is because local communities are also required to contribute.

WOOD: In Room to Read we honor the communities we work with by requiring them to co-invest, right? They can give land, they can give labor. You know, I’ve had parents who will point out, they’ll point to the building and they’ll say I painted that building. You know, there’s an old adage you can’t help people if they don’t want to help themselves.

SEVERSON: As philanthropic organizations go, few have grown as big and fast as Room To Read.

WOOD: Somebody once just said to me you’re no longer going to be rich monetarily but you’ll be rich in books, you’ll be rich in experiences and you’ll be rich in just absolute happiness. In a certain sense it’s like being a millionaire but you’re counting your millions in terms of the number of kids and books.

SEVERSON: Room to Read has now constructed 15,000 libraries, over 1,500 schools and distributed over 12 million books in 10 countries.

(to Wood): I’m about done here.

WOOD: I’m not. I got a lot more to say.

SEVERSON: For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: During a special reception in New York, guests are paying their respects to the Venerable Nicholas Vreeland, or as many here still call him, “Nicky.” The Dalai Lama has given Vreeland an historic task: as the first Westerner appointed abbot of a Tibetan Buddhist monastery, he’s to be a bridge between East and West.

ABBOT NICHOLAS VREELAND: His holiness wishes to bring Western ideas into the Tibetan Buddhist monastic system and that comes from his recognition that it is essential that there be new ideas brought in, that there be new air brought into these institutions.

LAWTON: For many observers, it may be surprising that an American has been given this important role…and perhaps even more surprising given the background of this particular American. Vreeland had a privileged upbringing: his father was a US diplomat and his grandmother was fashion icon Diana Vreeland. He was a photographer who had worked in some of the top studios. And then in his 20s, he began exploring Tibetan Buddhism.

VREELAND: What is it about Tibetan Buddhism that interested me? I think that it’s this very linear, very carefully organized, path to enlightenment that I, I liked.

LAWTON: Vreeland sees a linear progression in his own path into Buddhism. He was born in Switzerland and also lived in Germany and Morocco, before his family returned to New York. They were Episcopalian and sent 13-year-old Nicky to a boys’ boarding school in Massachusetts. He was miserable there, until he discovered photography.

VREELAND: I don’t know what it was about it that caught me. I really don’t know, but it caught me.

LAWTON: Vreeland says he had a good relationship with his famous grandmother, Diana, the legendary editor of Vogue magazine.

VREELAND: I went to NYU to study film and at that time initially lived with her and became very close. She was a wonderful, enthusiastic friend.

LAWTON: She opened the door for him to work with prominent photographers Irving Penn and Richard Avedon.

VREELAND: In my role in the studios of these photographers I was the assistant, I was the student, I was the devotee as it were. It is the relationship that I have with my teacher now.

LAWTON: It was Richard Avedon’s son John who in 1977 first introduced Vreeland to Khyongla Rato Rinpoche, founder of the Tibet Center. Under Rinpoche’s supervision, Vreeland began learning about Tibetan Buddhism.

Then in 1979, he went on a photography assignment in India. Because of his growing interest in Tibetan Buddhism, he included a visit to Dharamsala, headquarters of the Dalai Lama. Vreeland received permission to photograph the Tibetan leader. His camera had an extremely slow exposure, so his subjects had to sit absolutely still for one minute. That was a challenge for the Dalai Lama.

VREELAND: The shutter opened and we waited 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds, 40, seconds, 50 seconds, and then his holiness started to move. And we did one time after another, after another, and suddenly after all these attempts to get a, a fully, a properly exposed shot, we both burst into laughter and it was as if all the tension went.

LAWTON: The Dalai Lama tried standing and they finally managed to get the shot.

VREELAND: His holiness very, very kindly remained there as I packed up my equipment and talked to me. And I had been so moved by the way in which the Tibetan people had supported me, had helped me in my travels and during my time in Dharamsala, and I asked his holiness what I could do in return. And he said, “Study.”

LAWTON: Vreeland took that advice to heart, and with the help of his teacher, explored the Tibetan Buddhist concept that logic clears the mind and facilitates meditation, which then can lead to developing compassion and attaining enlightenment.

VREELAND: If the ultimate goal is the full enlightenment of a Buddha, a Buddha who is omniscient, that’s the ultimate state of awakenness. All the steps that lead to that are little awakenings.

LAWTON: In 1985, Vreeland decided to become a Buddhist monk. I asked him how his grandmother took the news.

VREELAND: She was definitely concerned. She was not a big proponent of following a spiritual life, and so for a grandson to wish to become a monk was not something she was too happy about.

LAWTON: But she came to accept it?

VREELAND: Well, yes. She was always wonderful about showing her support for whatever I decided to do.

LAWTON: Vreeland pursued his monastic studies at Rato monastery in South India, the monastery that he will now lead. Rato was established in Tibet in the late 14th century to preserve Buddhist teachings on logic and debate. After the Chinese takeover of Tibet, Rato was reestablished in India.

When Vreeland arrived in 1985, there were 27 monks. Today, there are about 100 between the ages of six and 90. The monastery undertook a massive construction project, which was largely funded through the sale of Vreeland’s photographs. He raised $400,000 with a special series of photos documenting life in and around the monastery.

This 2002 photo of the Dalai Lama was taken in Rato’s debating court. Over the years, Vreeland has collaborated closely with the Tibetan leader,

VREELAND: His Holiness is practical, down to earth. It was those two qualities that I felt the moment that he walked into the room the first time I met him. And they were a surprise. I mean, I think in the West we have a view of holiness as being sort of ethereal and this person was not that.

LAWTON: He says the Dalai Lama hasn’t gotten any more patient in posing for photos.

VREELAND: Many years ago, when I photographed His Holiness, he, I was using the large-view camera. And, after a few sheets of film, His Holiness said, “So, OK?” And I said, “Well, not quite.” And he said, “We must be content with what we have.” [Kim laughs.] And he left.

LAWTON: As abbot of Rato, Vreeland will have administrative and spiritual responsibility for the monastery and its monks. He’ll also interact with abbots of the other Tibetan monasteries. And it’s here that the Dalai Lama has instructed him to help incorporate more Western ideas.

VREELAND: These institutions, if they, if they aren’t contemporary won’t have any relevance. Now, of course one has to be very careful. If you go too far you dilute what they do possess and you’ve lost everything.

LAWTON: Vreeland will divide his time between India and New York, where he’ll continue as director of the Tibet Center, which helps promote Tibetan Buddhism in the West.

VREELAND: I am a human being, I’m a Buddhist monk, I am a Westerner, and how I will bring what I believe in and what I have been, let’s say formed in, trained in? I think it’s by just living my life.

LAWTON: He’s well aware of the challenges he faces.

VREELAND: Your only influence on the rest of the world is the work that you do on yourself and this is an opportunity to do just that in respect to my monastic community.

LAWTON: As for his photography, he says in the new digital world, he finds it challenging to maintain an attitude of mindfulness as he takes pictures.

VREELAND: I wish it were easier to give it all up. I tried hard. But I’m still taking photographs and whether the abbot is going to be able to go out and take pictures, I don’t know. I shall see.

LAWTON: I’m Kim Lawton in New York.

KAREN HUMPHRIES SALLICK (Tibetan Buddhist Practitioner): The mandala is a teaching and meditation tool so that we can focus on evoking in ourselves the Buddha nature that we Buddhists believe you have inside you.

A sand mandala is made typically from precious stones that have been hand-ground and then hand-dyed. The sand goes in a funnel. They’ll rub it and the sand will come out. That’s how they put these layers of sand down to create these beautiful, spiritual forms of art.

One can use the mandala as an aid to meditation helping you through the process of eliminating emotions that are unhelpful to you so that you can then uncover and evoke what’s in the center.

There are thousands of mandalas, and, in fact, even for one type of mandala there are several ways to do it, depending on how much time the monks have. You can take five days. You can take a month to build a mandala. Every aspect of the mandala has meaning.

The very center is the representation of Chenrezig, the Buddha of compassion. Tibetan Buddhists actually believe that His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama is the reincarnation of Chenrezig.

The next ring outside of the central figure of compassion are representations of four different Buddhas. The Buddha for eliminating hatred is represented by a thunderbolt. Then we have a jewel that represents the deity that can eliminate suffering. Then we have a wheel of knowledge or dharma, the deity that represents the elimination of ignorance. And then the last is a green sword that cuts through jealousy.

The next circle are lotus leaves. If you’ve ever seen a statue of a Buddha, they are often sitting on a lotus flower, so the family of Buddhas that are represented in the center are sitting in a ring of lotus.

Then outside of that is the vadra ring of protection from negative thoughts.

Finally, in the very outside ring — fire, and that fire is to burn through ignorance to enlightenment.

The dissolution is actually a very important part of the mandala process, because it really is showing the nature of impermanence. As Westerners, we get so attached to things. So here’s this beautiful mandala that these monks have worked five days on. And, with no emotion whatsoever, they reach their hand into the middle and just mess it up. And then they’ll sweep it up with brushes, and they’ll place it into a vase.

The mandala will be brought to the water. The deities in the mandala will then go into the water as a blessing, back to the Earth.

The Tibetans believe that anyone who watches the building and dissolution of a mandala actually accumulates merit and can begin to evoke that Buddha nature, being the most compassionate we can be.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: It has been described as a piece of heaven on earth, tucked in the foothills of the glacier topped Mission Mountains in northwestern Montana, a place where cows and farmers manicure the green grass. It is not a place you would expect to see a 24-foot-tall Buddhist statue of Yum Chenmo, the Great Mother of Wisdom and Compassion—certainly not in a land that has been sacred to Native Americans for centuries.

STEPHEN LOZAR: This is where we live. This is where we were born and where the bones of our ancestors reside, so this is our home.

SEVERSON: Steve Lozar is a council leader for the Salish Tribe. Julie Cajune heads the Center for American Indian Policy at the Salish Kootenai College.

JULIE CAJUNE: The land around us, you know, is part of our creation story. The geography, the place names go back to our creation stories when coyote and fox went through this area and got this place ready for human beings.

SEVERSON: One of those human beings turned out to be Tulku Sang-ngag Rinpoche, the highly respected Tibetan lama who says he saw this exact place in a dream when he was eight years old in Tibet.

TRANSLATOR FOR TULKU SANG-NGAG RINPOCHE: And he says when he came here to this very site – little bit that site also – he says there was such an overwhelming sense of déjà vu, and it was as if he had seen it before, as if he had really known this place, and he talked to his acquaintance about it, and of course they convinced him that he had never been here before. Then he realized that this was the exact visualization that he had of America when he was a child.

SEVERSON: So this is where Rinpoche supporters bought a 60-acre sheep ranch. It’s inside the confederated Salish-Kootenai-Ponderai Reservation. Because of a unusual hundred-year-old federal law, non-natives can acquire land within the reservation. Guided by his vision, the Rinpoche determined that this was where he should build a Garden of 1000 Buddhas to promote world peace.

Workers have been busy casting Buddhas for months, but it’s a slow process, and each Buddha must be perfect before it’s blessed.

TRANSLATOR FOR RINPOCHE: This is the spine of the statue which has been cast. All these are scrolls which contain sacred Tibetan power syllables or mantras all with healing prayer, all that goes right in the cast.

SEVERSON: Sitting in this old barn are hundreds of Buddhas waiting to make their grand entrance.

The site is still under construction, but when it’s completed it will resemble the shape of a dharma wheel, which symbolizes the basic teachings of Buddha. At the center of the eight spokes is the statue of the Great Mother packed inside with sacred texts. But before the Rinpoche did anything, he wanted to make sure the garden of Buddhas was acceptable to the tribes.

TRANSLATOR FOR RINPOCHE: And so he extended his hand to the tribal elders to come and bless the land.

SEVERSON: Dan Decker is the lead attorney for the Salish Tribe.

DAN DECKER: And they didn’t come to the reservation saying you have to think like we do, which has been our history. Our history has been that newcomers come in, want us to welcome them, and then immediately tell us how we need to think. That’s not the experience here. The experience is “share with us.”

LOZAR: I actually was so excited I yelled out in the tribal council meeting, I think it’s a spectacular opportunity for cross-cultural associations that are peace-based, that are based in the holiness of this land. I can’t think of better possibility for neighbors.

SEVERSON: It turns out that Tibetan Buddhists and Native Americans have quite a lot in common.

TRANSLATOR FOR RINPOCHE: He gets a sense that, you know, there are similarities in our experience as oppressed people. He understands that once these particular areas were numerous with the natives, and their numbers have dwindled so much so that now they’re in the minority—a similar situation we may be facing in Tibet also.

SEVERSON: In Tibet, the Rinpoche was revered as the sixth incarnation of one of the great Buddhist teachers. He was imprisoned for nine hard years, and he says he was tortured. His prominence did not sit well with the Chinese.

TRANSLATOR FOR RINPOCHE: That’s what got him into trouble, because he says, from the Chinese perspective, number one they look upon religion as poison, something that is totally undesirable, and so if you were a religious person it’s almost the same as if you were like a drug peddler or somebody wh’os peddling something really terrible.

CAJUNE: Another thing that we share with the Dali Lama and the Tibetan people is nonviolent resistance, and if you knew the history of our people, we have really been engaged in nonviolent resistance for hundreds of years. We’re still engaged in nonviolent resistance.

SEVERSON: They also discovered a shared belief, that all natural things—the earth, trees, animals—have spirits dwelling within them.

TRANSLATOR FOR RINPOCHE: In the Tibetan tradition, suppose you were embarking on a journey, and you saw an eagle overhead. You would celebrate, and you would look upon it as a good omen, that success is on the way, and he was amazed that the Native Indians have such a similar belief.

SEVERSON: Now they share another tradition, an annual peace festival at a time when peace seems almost unattainable. Originally the Rinpoche planned to put a statue of Buddha at the center of the wheel, but after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, he decided instead to build a statue of the Great Mother with guns and swords buried underneath, symbolizing the victory of peace over violence.

TRANSLATOR FOR RINPOCHE: He sensed that 9/11 may have planted a seed of conflict, enmity, hatred, and according to the scriptures, and according to his religious training, the Great Mother has that unique blessing to bring about peace, to reduce conflict.

SEVERSON: And so now they dine together and share a dream that the Buddha garden will one day contribute to peace.

CAJUNE: There’s that old saying that says never underestimate what a single act of integrity can accomplish, and I really believe that that is what Rinpoche has done here. Something very good is going to come from it.

SEVERSON: The Rinpoche says the Garden of 1000 Buddhas will be ready for visitors by 2014 and that the Dalai Lama has agreed to personally consecrate it.

For Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Arlee, Montana.

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BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: The Dalai Lama is now here in the US for nearly a month of teaching across the country. He is the world’s best-known representative of Tibetan Buddhism, perhaps of all Buddhism. But now another potential Buddhist leader is emerging. The Dalai Lama, who turned 73 last Sunday, leads one of the four schools or denominations within Tibetan Buddhism. The 23-year-old Karmapa Lama leads another. His supporters believe he may one day succeed the older man as Buddhism’s leading international voice. Recently the Karmapa visited the US for the first time, and Kim Lawton talked with him.

KIM LAWTON: They call him a reincarnation of the living Buddha, and this young spiritual leader is already on his way to international superstar status. His name is Ogyen Trinley Dorje. His title is the 17th Karmapa Lama, and after the Dalai Lama he’s now Tibetan Buddhism’s second-highest ranking spiritual leader. During a recent visit to the US, his first introduction to the West, thousands came out to venues from New York to Seattle to see the 23-year-old Buddhist master.

DZOCHEN PONLOP RINPOCHE (Narlanda West Buddhist Center): The young Kamarpa is the most powerful Buddhist meditation teacher. His scholarship is excellent, and also his youth and his presence makes a profound impact.

LAWTON: The term “karmapa” literally means the embodiment of all the activities of the Buddhas. For the last nearly 1,000 years, a Karmapa Lama has led the Kagyu tradition within Tibetan Buddhism. Buddhists believe enlightened spiritual masters can choose to be reincarnated in order to come back and help others achieve enlightenment. This Karmapa’s followers see him as part of an unbroken line of Buddhist wisdom.

LAMA SURYA DAS (Western Buddhist Teachers Network): He feels very close to us from the last life and through all of our good aspirations and good things that we have been trying to do together to help bring peace and sanity and wisdom and love into this very volatile modern world.

LAWTON: In an exclusive American television interview, the Karmapa told me he’s pleased with how Buddhism has taken hold in the US.

GYALWANG KARMAPA (through translator): Americans have taken a great interest in Buddhism and many Americans have put forth a lot of energy in order to propagate the teachings of Buddhism, and I think they have achieved excellent results within this short period of time.

LAWTON: The Karmapa’s international acclaim is enhanced by the dramatic story that surrounds him. He was born in 1985 to a family of nomads in eastern Tibet. When he was eight years old, he was identified as fulfilling the prophecy left by the previous Karmapa who had died in 1981. The Dalai Lama had a dream which confirmed the recognition of the new Karmapa, and Dorje was taken to live in a monastery. Although some rivals support a different Karmapa, Dorje is the only high lama to have been officially recognized by both the Dalai Lama and the Chinese government. But China keeps a tight reign on Buddhism in Tibet, and when he was 14 Dorje snuck out of his monastery and made a secret escape across the Himalayas by foot, horseback, taxi, and train. Eight days later, he arrived in Dharamsala, India, headquarters of the Dalai Lama, where he has spent the past several years in study and meditation. As the heads of two different streams within Tibetan Buddhism, Karmapas and Dalai Lamas have historically been rivals. That has now changed.

SURYA DAS: This Kamarpa 17th is very close to the Dalai Lama and lives in Dharamsala, and they’re like this. So there is no sectarian rivalry or anything. They’re very much close together.

LAWTON: That closeness has led many to suggest that the Dalai Lama, now 73, is grooming the Karmapa as his spiritual heir and the next international voice of Buddhism. It’s a suggestion the Karmapa doesn’t shy away from.

GYALWANG KARMAPA (through translator): I have no special plans to take over any specific role after whenever it is that His Holiness the Dali Lama passes away. However, I would be delighted to serve in accordance with the level of confidence and trust the people had in me. It does seem to be the case that I am receiving more and more recognition in the world, and my main aspiration is that I use this recognition for a beneficial purpose.

LAWTON: Because the Dalai Lama heads the Tibetan government-in-exile, there is much speculation about the Karmapa’s potential role in China-Tibet politics as well. He avoided such sensitive topics during his visit to the US, and steered questions about politics back to the practice of Buddhism in Tibet.

GYALWANG KARMAPA (teaching, through translator): It’s important to understand that cherishing sentient beings, loving sentient beings is really the root of compassion.

LAWTON: As his public role now expands, expectations about his future leadership are high. With his trip to the US, the teachings he once gave to private audiences at his monastery are being sold on DVDs and posted on the Internet.

PONLOP RINPOCHE: I’m not talking politics but from spiritual point of view. You know, he is like a spiritual king. Naturally he has that presence, he has that command.

LAWTON: The Karmapa is learning English, although not yet confident enough to teach or give an interview in the language. But a few words trickle through.

GYALWANG KARMAPA (speaking English): I need dictionary.

LAWTON: He can come across as uncomfortable, reserved, even stern. Yet there are flashes of humor, too.

GYALWANG KARMAPA (speaking English): I forget the translator.

LAWTON: It’s easy to forget he’s only 23. During one Seattle appearance, he mentioned that he used to like reading X-Men comic books, but then people stopped giving them to him. So we got him one. In many ways, he’s been isolated, his responsibilities pressed upon him since he was a small child.

GYALWANG KARMAPA (teaching through a translator): And I would think thoughts like, why are my attendants who are disciples of the Karmapa making my life so miserable? Why are they locking me in a box and putting on the lid?

LAWTON: Followers say this Karmapa is well aware that technology has made the world a smaller place and that Buddhism must stay relevant.

GYALWANG KARMAPA (through translator): Because of the Internet, we live in an age in which information can travel very rapidly to different places. Before, it used to be the case that just having a Karmapa alive was good enough for everyone. People didn’t need a lot of information about who the Karmapa was or what the Karmapa was doing.

SURYA DAS: He has continuously talked about not holding on to things just because they’re old, but to adapt, and keep the essence, but to adapt to new times and places.

LAWTON: This Karmapa believes that Eastern Buddhists and Western Buddhists can learn from one another.

GYALWANG KARMAPA (through translator): The essential points of Buddhism are beyond culture and beyond traditions.

LAWTON: Given the level of devotion he’s already cultivating in the West, his followers say this Karmapa Lama may well be the future face of Buddhism around the world.

I’m Kim Lawton in Seattle.

Q: What is the core message of your recent speech about the Dalai Lama and Tibet?

A: I think it’s important to make a distinction between the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan independence movement and also to understand the Dalai Lama from a more religious perspective than simply a political perspective. It’s important for China to become religiously musical and also concerned about identity politics. So in the long term perspective there is a great deal of space for communication and negotiation and of course on the side of the Dalai Lama the possibility of allowing both the Dharmsala radicals to express themselves but also to distance himself from some of the so-called rioters.

Q: What has been the impact of the recent Tibetan protests inside Tibet and inside China?

A: I think in a way [it has been] unprecedented, but in the long run I hope some reconciliation can be worked out. From the Tibetan side, of course, 50 years of Dalai Lama’s exile provided an opportunity for the Tibetans to rethink about their situation and because of the young Tibetans, the so-called Youth Council, their position in a way is not identical to the Dalai Lama’s position. I think the Dalai Lama makes this very explicit on a number of occasions, that he is searching for autonomy and hopefully with an emphasis on culture, whereas the young Tibetans are more interested in independence, separating from China. China because of her involvement with the Olympics wanted to present a peaceful, harmonious image, and the Tibetan situation has fundamentally challenged that. That’s not only the position of the government, but I think the intellectual community and the general people as a whole, and that’s the reason why the situation becomes very explosive.

Q: Does the Chinese government really believe, as they say, that the Dalai Lama is behind the protests?

A: The Chinese government is not at all informed about the Dalai Lama as a spiritual leader. They always perceive him as a political leader interested in mobilizing anti-Chinese forces outside of China, not only the United States but in Europe and even in Japan and other places. My sense it’s a misperception that needs to be corrected.

Q: The current president of China, Hu Jintao, oversaw Tibet and a harsh crackdown on it in 1989. Shouldn’t he know about Tibetan culture and religion?

A: China, before the open reform policy, had gone through radical transformations every 5 years, so the sense of restlessness, the sense of the importance of stability is very pronounced. Any challenge to that particular sense of stability would be considered as a major threat. On the other hand, precisely because Chinese leaders have been overwhelmed by modernization, development, I would say a form of scientism, the leadership has very little understanding of religion, especially of religion in the 21st century, and they are also not very sensitive to what may be called identity politics. So it’s not just Tibet, but also the whole question of the non-Chinese speaking Muslim community, the so-called Eastern Turkestan issues. So they look at it in a broader perspective. They are deeply worried about the question of sovereignty being compromised because of this particular challenge.

Q: Robert Thurman says that prior to China’s 1959 invasion the Tibetans had turned their swords into plowshares and were a peaceful people. The Chinese say they see Tibet as part of their country. What is the reality as you see it?

A: I think from the Chinese point of view ever since the Opium War in the mid-nineteenth century, every ten-year period there is major change. Chinese sovereignty was totally overwhelmed by Western powers. So this sense of trying to make China an integrated nation was very strong not just in People’s Republic of China, but I would call Chinese diaspora or cultural China broadly defined. There’s no question about the fact that after Tibetans had become very much in the tradition Tibetan Buddhistan, they became peaceful and the situation happened recently and the Chinese so much concern about the harmonious society of the whole nation believes that any sort of challenges especially linked to the outside world would be too threatening for their stability. I think that’s a misconception. The Chinese even mentioned, some scholars mentioned about the danger of “Khomeni Phenomenon,” for example, if the Dalai Lama returns to Tibet, Lhasa in particular … the situation may be uncontrollable. But on the other hand I think it is highly desirable for the Dalai Lama to return to China, maybe to go to a sacred mountain, a kind of Buddhist pilgrimage, and on his return give a [press] conference in Beijing to make his own position very explicit. Then of course the Chinese government can also organize a press conference to state their own position. So with that kind of communication, I think the possibility of some settlement very good. So far there have been about six or seven direct communications, but on the Chinese side it is run by the so-called United Front. People are very acutely aware of political issues, and these people are not particularly sensitive to religion, and no religious leaders are being involved in this kind of negotiation. There’s also a misconception of Dharmsala and their concern for independence as being very firm, and that’s the conflict.

Q: Historically was Tibet already part of China or did it become part of China in the 1950s?

A: Sovereignty was an issue that didn’t emerge in China before it became important in the nineteenth century, so China was a great civilization that became a nation, or struggling to be a nation, since the nineteenth century. So the question of whether Tibet is an integral part of China from the point of sovereignty didn’t even occur before the nineteenth century, but Tibet has been very closely linked to China and has been in communication with the Chinese leaders probably for centuries. And China claimed that Tibet is an integral part of China, not in terms of sovereignty but in terms of cultural interaction and in terms of the power of China in the political sense that in a way embraced the Tibetan region. But from the Tibetan point of view the cultural differences have been very great. At the same time there are religious differences, not to mention ethnic differences, so the sense that Tibet is independent from a cultural point of view has a great deal of merit as well.

Q: You have mentioned the importance of stability to China and the fact that there is little understanding of religion among Chinese leaders. Is religion seen as an attack on stability?

A: They are actually learning. Right now there is a very strong sense religions — such as Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and of course Taoism and so forth — can be important stabilizing force of this society, allow the people to search for certain kind of spiritual sanctuary so they would be able to collaborate with this enterprise, I would say “joint venture,” to make China peaceful, the so-called peaceful development actually is accepted by everyone.

Q: Tibetans say the Chinese improvements and modernization of Tibet dilute their culture and religion. Is there some truth to that?

A: I certainly think from the perspective of the Dalai Lama and many Tibetan intellectuals and Tibetan people in general that is the case. On the other hand, I think the truth of the matter is China believes that in the last few decades the government has contributed significantly to Tibetan growth in terms of economic growth, in terms of building roads and so forth. But from the Tibetan point of view, if cultural identity is not respected, if Tibetan culture, especially religious practice, is not fully understood then even this modernization in material terms may not be particularly welcomed. I think recently one of the major problems is the government’s intention to educate the Tibetans. They tried to promote patriotism or patriotic education among all these temples, so the monks became very resentful of this kind of imposition of ideology and, you may say, even cultural chauvinism. So I think it’s important for the government to be very sensitive to the Tibetan sense of self-understanding and self-identification. It is extremely difficult for Chinese from Beijing and other places to settle down in Tibet, and very few of them managed to do that. Hu Jintao, for example, was in control of the area, but he stayed most of the time in Sichuan and other places rather than Tibetan plateau, because it’s very difficult for anyone to settle down there for an extended period of time.

Q: Because of the altitude?

A: Because of the altitude, yes. So many Chinese that went to Tibet, either traders or merchants, they had a very specific interest in Tibet either from the commercial or political point of view, I think most of them — their appreciation of Tibetan culture is I would say outmoded because this very strong scientific ideology, the assumption that human history progressed from religion to metaphysics to science and rationality, a very limited sense of rationality — I call it instrumental rationalilty. As a result the Tibetans feel that they are humiliated, they are ignored, they are marginalized, because people don’t understand why they are so devoted to religion, to the Dalai Lama. Their devotion sometimes is wrongly perceived as a kind of superstition that should be overcome by modernization, by progress, right now by the market economy. But I think it’s important also to note that Tibet, like all parts of China, and to a certain extent East Asia as a whole, this has been very much “marketized,” so the younger people do not have a very strong sense of their cultural heritage or their religious identity. That’s true with all parts of China. Materialism, progressivism, scientism, instrumentalism all become powerful forces in threatening [what has been] a great cultural tradition, religious tradition, for centuries.

Q: The Dalai Lama has accused China of waging religious and cultural genocide in Tibet, destroyed monasteries, imprisoning monks, forcing monks to denounce him. Has this been happening in China’s patriotic education programs?

A: It’s been happening, but I think the idea of forced migration and arresting monks and so forth sometimes may be exaggerated. On the other hand, because of this tension and conflict between the Chinese perception, Beijing’s perception of what Tibet ought to be and many Tibetans, spiritual leaders and people in general, what they would like to be, that conflict is very strong, and when the conflict leads to confrontation often the reaction of Beijing is very strong and that provoked a counter reaction from the monks. I think that’s, to me, very unfortunate. It’s been going on for some time, and I think a long-term resolution would have to be made, and some kind of mutual understanding is necessary. Direct political negotiation is important, but cultural interchange and understanding in the long run would be more important.

Q: As the Chinese leadership becomes younger will they be more open and not so afraid of Tibetan culture and religion?

A: Yes, my sense is that if China begins to understand her own religious traditions — Buddhism, Taoism, even the spiritual side of Confucianism, for example — if they take India absolutely seriously as a reference culture, then China would mature in the sense to understand the positive aspects of religion, and now I think they must have learned the lesson: inability to understand religion can turn out to be very costly in terms of their diplomacy, public image, or political activity, both inside and abroad. So I think in the long run the possibility of mutual understanding is really there, but in the short run the situation is not only very dangerous, the situation to me is very depressing, precisely because misconception, misunderstanding will persist. I think China should take the lead to try to change and improve the Chinese mentality in understanding not just Tibet but all the minority groups and of course the whole question about how religion in general can be a harmonizing and stabilizing force.

Q: What will happen when the Dalai Lama is no longer on the scene? Could there be much more violence, since up to now he has been keeping a lid on the younger Tibetans?

A: I totally agree. I was deeply worried when I was in China that not just the government officials [but] some intellectuals believe that if Dalai Lama fades from the scene the problem will be resolved. My sense is the Dalai Lama has played a very important role in the peaceful transformation of Tibet, outside of China, and also the possibility of mutual understanding, and he is a key factor for the resolution, that China should seize that opportunity. I met him a few times and I think he even made rather explicit the idea that he wanted to withdraw from politics and to become a spiritual leader exclusively. From the Chinese point of view it is very important to take advantage of the effectiveness of the Dalai Lama, not only in the spiritual realm, but also in the political realm, to come to terms with the rapid and even explosive change of the Tibetan communities not only in China, but outside of China. So I agree with you. If the misunderstanding persists, if Dalai Lama fades from the scene, the situation will be uncontrollable. It will be more than 10 or 100 Falun Gong situation. Of course, we also cherish the hope that the situation will not occur, but the danger is always there. I think the Chinese government should be critically aware of this.

Q: Do you have any idea where the Panchen Lama [the second highest ranking Lama after the Dalai Lama] is?

A: I have no idea, but I am really disappointed that misunderstanding occurred, because originally the Dalai Lama and the Chinese government identified the same person. Unfortunately, the Chinese perception, once that news was announced first before China announced it, [led to] total misunderstanding of the situation. Now we have presumably two Panchen Lamas, and I think most of the people outside of China would consider the real Panchen Lama is now in prison, one of the youngest political prisoners. I think that issue needs to be openly discussed. Of course, there is also the radical situation, the Dalai Lama actually mentioned it, that whole system of the Dalai Lama maybe in danger, because that system from the deep political sense is a collaboration between Tibet on the one hand and Beijing on the other. If that relationship is severed, then certainly there will be no real relationship politically between Beijing and Lhasa.

Q: The Tibetan protests seemed to demonstrate that the average Chinese looks at the Dalai Lama as a rather evil, sinister character.

A: This is in the broader context, because the Olympics has been built as one of the most important events in modern Chinese history to present the best possible image of China, and either through propaganda or actually voluntary participation this has been embraced by not only the Chinese in the People’s Republic of China but in cultural China and other areas. Certain form of patriotism, some people say maybe nationalism, are very strong, very strongly felt, especially when the press outside of China, Europe, and the US began to underscore negative features of China, and they become very worried about this real confrontation between two very different perceptions about what China is. Similarly, Dalai Lama in Chinese press and Dalai Lama in any other presses, including Japanese, are two radically different Dalai Lamas. One is totally a political figure with a great deal of ambition and capable of mobilizing all kinds of anti-Chinese forces. You can say it is anti-Sinitic. On the other hand, the Dalai Lama — even with many Chinese people they deeply understand his spirituality. He’s one of the most influential spiritual leaders in the world and certainly is a focus of Buddhist devotion. So these two images on the surface cannot be reconciled, but they function at different levels. If China begin to understand the Dalai Lama at a spiritual level and the Dalai Lama and his group become more sensitive to the Chinese worries at the political and economic levels, and some kind of understanding can be reached, my sense is the Dalai Lama’s understanding of the Chinese situation is much superior to the Chinese understanding of Tibetan culture and the role of Dalai Lama in the spiritual world, not just in Buddhism but in many other areas as well. The Dalai Lama is like the pope in the Buddhist tradition.

The perception from the Chinese side [is] the Dalai Lama is involved in the conspiracy against China. From the Dalai Lama’s side, China is developing a strategy to destroy Tibetan culture. My sense is it is not necessarily the case. Dalai Lama, so far as I can tell, really wants to have reconciliation. He hopes that he will be able to return to China, and as a spiritual leader that is his home. From the Chinese point of view, China certainly wants this tension and conflict to be reduced, and there is some desire, and maybe a strong desire with the more sensitive intellectuals, to become religiously more knowledgeable and more sensitive. So I think the conspiracy theory needs to be reexamined. The other one is extremely complicated, is the tension in Dharmsala between Dalai Lama’s perception of what ought to be done, and some of the young Tibetans who advocate independence, very hostile to the Chinese situation. I think they don’t mind some kind of riots happen in China. From the Chinese point of view, there are many, many Tibetans, they are already leaders probably in Tibet and other places, and they are in control, and they worry about any change because that would affect their personal interest and their power base. So the situation is complicated, not just Chinese and Tibetans, but Chinese and Chinese and Tibetans and Tibetans. That’s the reason why the more reasonable groups in China and reasonable groups in Tibet need to begin a serious not just dialogue, but a dialogue that leads to concrete action. Of course, the international community, those who are very much interested in human rights, in the cultivation of a cultural peace, and the importance of resolution of any conflict in the world, should take part in this joint venture. Of course, this is my wishful thinking, maybe highly idealized, but I think we need to enter this question not with an either-or approach, but both-and, to look at it as a complex issue to be resolved and to find a way of doing it. Any improvement is desirable. Any conflict will lead to further conflict and may lead to an irreversible process of violence. Both possibilities are there, and given the current situation, it’s so explosive I’m worried that the kind of option everybody, rational people, don’t want to see happen may even happen.

Q: You mentioned the Chinese government is religiously unmusical. Why is that? Is it because of communism?

A: I don’t think so. The issue is much more complicated and historically more significant. Ever since the May Fourth Movement in 1919, 30 years before the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the ethos of the Chinese intellectuals, overwhelmed by aggressions from the outside, is to say wealth and power — these are the things if China wants to be integrated, wants to be respected, China will have to develop its economic base, its political system, even its military might. And that is so pervasive, that’s the basis of what we perceive as either patriotism or nationalism. Virtually all Chinese, when I talk to the dissidents, before they became dissidents, all of them were committed to this notion of national integration or sovereignty. Sometimes that [was] even considered superior to democratization, to the possibility of amicable relations between China and the rest of the world. So one thing, I feel very troubled if the people in China, under the leadership or the promotion of the government’s position, believe that sovereignty is at stake, they can sacrifice the Olympics. So that is the bottom line. If sovereignty is not at stake, and it’s a question of some kind of aggressive attitude towards China, because of China’s so-called peaceful rise, or peaceful development, those issues can be resolved.

Q: How has religion come into conflict with Chinese notions of sovereignty? Why has there been such a negative reaction toward religious groups?

A: Throughout Chinese history, often the government takes a kind of benign neglect, but once a religion became politicized, became a force for challenging the authority of the government, it happened also in China quite often — the so-called White Lotus group, the Taiping Rebellion, some rebellions motivated by Buddhism and so forth — the Chinese government became very determined to suppress these religious movements, so the nervousness about religion, especially foreign religions, especially religion that’s not part of the indigenous tradition, and especially the modernistic mentality — you know, many of the leaders in China are engineers and scientists, and some of the scientists really strongly believe, I think, an outmoded notion: that religion is superstition. Religion is sometimes identified with superstition, but I’m aware of the fact that many younger scholars with good training in religion now become advisors, so my recommendation is that even though United Front represents the political side of Beijing, the United Front will have to be advised, will have to be informed by these complicated not just religious but culture issues.

Q: Has there also been a rise in religious life in China, perhaps a search for spirituality after everything has been so material?

A: I think it is probably broader than that. Certainly recently the market economy may be very important for the accumulation of wealth and even reduction of poverty and so forth. There are many, many positive sides. But when the society becomes “marketized,” the market society or the marketization penetrates into all forms of human relatedness and the society is so transformed that younger people, I mean the younger people not only in the major cities of China but in Tibet as well, have become insensitive to the cultural resources, because their cultural tradition with very short memory is totally disconnected with the traditional culture, and that situation provide the ethos that is worrisome for all spiritual leaders. On the other hand, precisely because historically, meaning everything since the Opium War, especially May 4, 1919, the Chinese intellectuals were so much obsessed with modernization, modernism, scientism. That is the reason it’s difficult for the Tibetans.

Q: Currently in China is there more religious freedom? Less? The numbers of not only Buddhists but Christians and Muslims are supposedly on the rise.

A: Precisely. The religious activity have become more pervasive, sometimes more compelling, and the nervousness about religion also becomes greatly enhanced. So you can say there are more attempts to control, but at the same time no government, including Beijing, is able to control the situation. Because one religious sect has made the whole country nervous, the whole leadership nervous, so to try to learn about religion is also greatly pronounced as an urgent matter. In fact, the leadership in Beijing has made it very explicit: “We really have to understand religion.” But, of course, hopefully the religion that emerges in China will be part of the peaceful transformation, rather than major challenges. My sense is that religion is absolutely crucial for the 21st century, but at the same time religion can be both extremely positive and extremely negative, and I think the Chinese government is aware of it and yet how to really learn about it — not just the government but the intellectual community as a whole — is important. Twenty years ago, I talked about China’s need to take India as a reference, because if China does that then the forms of spirituality exhibited in India — they are so varied, so complicated — will be a major reference for China. This is beginning to happen, but slowly. Once China takes India seriously — it’s basically the software, the economic competitiveness, not enough about Indian spirituality.

Q: Does Confucianism play into the Chinese psyche?

A: Absolutely. I think the area we call Chinese culture area, maybe Confucian culture area, includes mainland China, Hong Kong, Tawain, Macau, Singapore, Vietnam, South Korea, and Japan — very large area, and in this area for years and years peaceful coexistence of religions turn out to be defining characteristic of the spiritual landscape of this area. China, we talk about three religions: Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism. More recently, ever since the Ming Dynasty, 14-15th centuries, five religions: Islam and Christianity. Japan — three religions: Buddhism, Shintoism, and the Japanese understanding of Confucianism. And in Korea right now Christianity is very, very vibrant. But Confucianism persists in terms of the habits of the heart, so in Confucian world religious cooperation, religious coexistence is taken for granted, but Confucianism itself was totally marginalized, even deconstructed for the last three generations. So the ethos that emerges in China is totally obsessed with wealth and power, with scientism, with modernism, so they look up to Japan and the Western powers, especially recently the US, but not the more subtle religious traditions. You know, the US is one of the most religious countries in the modernized societies, much more than all the European countries, and China’s understanding of the US is basically market economy, military might, and political organization. I think that’s unfortunate. It’s very deeply rooted in the Chinese psyche, especially in the modern decades.

Q: Back to Tibet — what does its historical relationship with China have to say about the present situation?

A: Chinese history, of course, is long and complicated. If you look at the Manchu Empire from roughly 1644 to 1912, Tibet is an integral part of China, because the Manchu dynasty is linguistically plural, ethnically and religiously pluralistic. Four languages were used as official languages in the Manchu Empire: Manchu, Chinese, Mongolian, and Tibetan. So there’s no question about the fact that Tibet — of course the Dalai Lama system also emerged in that period. Now earlier, ever since the Tang dynasty, you can also see close relationship. You can say that Tibet has been for a long time very much part of the Chinese political sphere. This does not mean that Tibetan culture, Tibetan religion, Tibetan self-understanding has become an integral part of the Chinese psyche. In fact, for years and years Tibet as a culture believes that India is the father of spirituality, the source of inspiration, and China is a political protector. Recently, India still is a cultural resource, but China becomes an aggressive force against Tibet. So I think historically we make a distinction between a cultural history and the political history. Then we can see the interaction of these two civilizations in a complex way. There’s no reason why Tibet cannot be an integral part of China, as the Dalai Lama suggests, in an autonomous way. But since Dalai Lama’s understanding of Tibet is significantly different from the Chinese government’s understanding of Tibet, the conflict cannot be easily resolved. For the Dalai Lama, Tibet is a cultural idea, so it’s not in the Tibetan region. … From the Chinese perspective, Dalai Lama is claiming more than 20 percent of the Chinese territory as under his influence. This is unacceptable. But from the Dalai Lama’s point of view, what he wants to have is a peaceful existence, is to allow the Tibetans all over China to become equitable, to become possible preserving their own culture and developing their own styles of modernization. In fact, I believe this is not only doable, this is something that ought to happen — of course, again, from my wishful thinking. But there is a good possibility.

Q: What is it that the Chinese fear?

A: They are much more worried about the non-Chinese speaking Muslim communities, the so-called Uighurs. The Uighurs are so much a part of Central Asia now, with their own culture and ethnic identity. [It is] the so-called Eastern Turkestan issue. So China is worried about it, and understandably. Even Taiwan issue — the tension [is] greatly lowered. Again, it is something that can be very explosive.

Buddhist teachings do not rule out the use of force to relieve a greater suffering, although the Buddhist tradition is rightly known for the systematic practice of nonviolence, its first ethical precept.

A concise summary of the texts authorizing the use of force may be found in Peter Harvey’s An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics, where most examples are of killing a tyrant who is terrorizing the masses. Even here, however, the paradigm is of the Buddha, who famously stopped a serial killer in his tracks by the force of his goodness and then accepted the criminal (known as Angulimala for his signature “necklace of fingers”) into the monastic order.

The Tibetans are historically a bellicose people who have defended themselves with force throughout history. Monks have taken to the streets before, even in the 20th century. What follow is a summary of the Tibetan conflict with the Chinese in modern history.

The struggle for Tibet is perhaps the best known theater of engaged Buddhism in the early 21st century, due in part to the global activism of Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, and the strong interest of the press and the public since 1959, when Chinese troops overran the country. Certainly the political, economic, cultural, and environmental carnage that resulted from Chinese annexation of the Tibetan region has been well documented (see recommended reading list).

Political instability is not new to Tibet, but it is arguably its defining characteristic since before the transmission of Buddhism to the region in the 7th century CE. Its provinces were not unified until the 17th century, when the first Dalai Lama consolidated the country under Manchu patronage. When the British invaded in 1904, the 13th Dalai Lama fled to Mongolia and attempted unsuccessfully to enlist Russian support. The Chinese recovered control of the country in 1909, but were expelled by the Dalai Lama in 1913.

Declaring independence in 1914, the 13th Dalai Lama attempted to institute political reforms but was opposed by the monasteries. After an uprising of monks in 1921, the Dalai Lama gave up all efforts to modernize the country; the army was disbanded, English schools closed, and regents took over the country following the Dalai Lama’s death in 1933. In 1947, armed monks of the Sera Je monastery took part in a rebellion that resulted in 300 deaths. Elements of the sangha (Buddhist clergy) called on China to liberate the country. The People’s Liberation Army entered the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, in 1951 and brokered a 12-point accord between Beijing and Lhasa. But in 1959 another uprising of monks triggered a crackdown that has placed the country firmly under Chinese control ever since. The 14th Dalai Lama, still a teenager, fled to India with the senior members of the government.

In 1966, the Chinese Cultural Revolution encompassed Tibet in the systematic destruction of all things Buddhist: clergy, monasteries, libraries, rituals, and artifacts. The Free Tibet Movement emerged in the Tibetan refugee camps in India in the 1970s, with the Tibetan Youth Congress and the Tibetan People’s Freedom Movement giving voice to the growing militancy of the exiles. In 1977, a group of young Tibetans held a hunger strike outside the United Nations Information Center in New Delhi, stating to the press, “We Tibetans are treated as political lepers by the international community and our cause as an embarrassing and contagious disease. We the victims are ignored and shunned while our oppressors are courted and feted by a world gone mad. We are peaceful people and we have nowhere to turn to for justice except the United Nations.”

In the three decades that followed, while unrest has simmered within the refugee communities in India and the West, the Dalai Lama has increasingly become an international icon of nonviolent resistance. His tools have been the lecture circuit and the printing press, not the streets that Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. used to such advantage in the struggle for independence in India and civil rights in the United States. The Dalai Lama’s consistent rejection of military means is based on Buddhist principles, as is his deep conviction that political reform must be built on the interdependence of human goals and “a policy of kindness,” as he explained in his evening address to the Nobel Committee upon receiving the Peace Prize in 1989: “It is quite clear that everyone needs peace of mind. The question, then, is how to achieve it. Through anger we cannot; through kindness, through love, through compassion we can achieve one individual’s peace of mind. The result of this is a peaceful family….Extended to the national level, this attitude can bring unity, harmony, and cooperation with genuine motivation. On the international level, we need mutual trust, mutual respect, frank and friendly discussion with sincere motivation, and joint efforts to solve world problems. All these are possible. But first we must change within ourselves.”

Such a “ripple effect” of spiritual practice on social and political reality — His Holiness frequently describes to Western audiences how he rises at 4 a.m. each day to generate kindness toward the Chinese, “who are also subject to suffering, as the Buddha taught” — is recognized as a traditional principle in Buddhist social ethics and has become a touchstone for engaged Buddhists today. The slogan “Inner Peace, World Peace” has motivated individuals and organizations to enter the political arena on behalf of the Tibetan cause and many others.

Christopher Queen is a lecturer on the study of religion at Harvard University and president of the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies in Barre, Massachusetts.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: We have a special report today on the plight and paradox of Tibetan Buddhists. They teach nonviolence, but their demonstrations against the Chinese have sometimes become violent. How can they persuade the Chinese that they and the Dalai Lama are not a threat? Lucky Severson reports.

LUCKY SEVERSON: Chinese authorities called these protesters in San Francisco “Tibetan hooligans” whose only purpose was to use violence to embarrass China in its moment of Olympic glory. Lhadon Tethong was there. She’s a Tibetan activist and leader of Students for a Free Tibet.

LHADON TETHONG (Students for a Free Tibet): There has to be tension. There has to be crisis. They have to feel the occupation is a problem for them whether they agree with us or not.

SEVERSON: The protests in San Francisco and around the world were mainly a reaction to demonstrations by Tibetan monks inside Tibet and China. The Chinese government mobilized troops. Many Tibetan monks and nuns were arrested when the initial demonstration began earlier this year in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. The Chinese placed the blame squarely on the leader of some six million Tibetan Buddhists — the Dalai Lama. Columbia University professor of Buddhist studies Robert Thurman says the charge is simply not true.

Professor ROBERT THURMAN (Department of Buddhist Studies, Columbia University): The Chinese are desperate now to try to claim that the Dalai Lama caused all this upset, which of course he totally did not. He was totally upset.

SEVERSON: The work of the protesters is raising questions among Tibetans themselves and people around the world. For instance, will the demonstrations actually force the Chinese to loosen control of Tibetan Buddhism? And how can a religious philosophy built around peace and compassion continue to hold the high ground when the protests are resulting in so much violence? Professor Thurman says the Tibetan devotion to nonviolence goes to the core of their faith –the path to total enlightenment takes place over many, many lifetimes, many reincarnations, and to commit violence threatens that path.

Prof. THURMAN: My life is my own evolutionary moment to progress, and I’m not going to do violence. So therefore, to cherish your own life, you don’t want to risk it for some sort of worldly aim. You want to develop your soul because that’s what your life is for.

SEVERSON: But he says those who think protestors have violated the basic principle of nonviolence don’t understand the Tibetan Buddhist philosophy of self-defense.

Prof. THURMAN: Buddhist ethics is intense about nonviolence, but it’s also pragmatic. There is one sutra where it’s stated if you are invaded by an enemy and you can successfully defend yourself and repel the enemy, and the enemy while occupying you will cause tremendous violence, then you should defend yourself.

SEVERSON: Chinese history professor Tu Weiming of Harvard believes at least part of the problem stems from a lack of understanding by the Chinese leadership of Tibetan Buddhism and the role of the Dalai Lama.

Professor TU WEIMING (Harvard University): The Chinese government is not at all informed about the Dalai Lama as a spiritual leader. They always perceive him as a political leader interested in mobilizing anti-Chinese forces outside of China. My sense is that it’s a misperception that needs to be corrected.

SEVERSON: If any Westerner ought to understand the role of the Dalai Lama among Tibetans, it is Robert Thurman. Before choosing to be a professor, Thurman became the first Western Tibetan Buddhist monk under the tutelage of the Dalai Lama. He says the Dalai Lama is to Buddhism what Jesus is to Christianity.

Prof. THURMAN: If Jesus was constantly coming back, how would Christians feel about that person? You can get an idea of how the Tibetan and Mongolian Buddhists feel about the Dalai Lama.

SEVERSON: But Chinese officials say the looting, the beatings, and destruction of property prove that the Tibetan people and their leader are hypocrites. The Chinese government maintains, and most of its citizens believe, that Tibet has always been a part of China. The Tibetans disagree saying their country didn’t become part of China until 1951 after it was forcefully occupied by Chinese troops. The Dalai Lama fled to his new home in exile in India in 1959.

Prof. THURMAN: For 30 years, from the ’50s to the end of Mao, they did the most violent thing. You can’t even believe it. They killed a million people. Half of it was famine craziness, and a lot of it was this class struggle thing, you know, “kill the landlords,” and political things and eradicating the religion. You couldn’t even have a rosary. You’d go to work camp prison for life.

SEVERSON: Chinese authorities dispute these charges and say China has lifted Tibet into the 21st century.

Prof. WEIMING: China believes that in the last few decades the government has contributed significantly to Tibetan growth in terms of economic growth, in terms of building roads and so forth.

SEVERSON: But many Tibetans say the Chinese government is systematically diluting their culture and religion while encouraging millions of Chinese to move here. The Dalai Lama has called it “cultural genocide.” The Chinese dispute the genocide charge and accuse the protesters of purely anti-Chinese activity. Many of today’s Chinese leaders come from engineering and science backgrounds. Professor Weiming says these leaders are most interested in generating wealth and modernization — that they have a deep skepticism of all religions especially if their leaders threaten authority.

Prof. WEIMING: Tibetans feel they are humiliated, they are ignored, they are marginalized because people don’t understand why they are so devoted to religion, to the Dalai Lama. Their devotion sometimes is wrongly perceived as a kind of superstition and that should be overcome by modernization.

SEVERSON: The Dalai Lama has always preached nonviolence and never demanded independence from China.

DALAI LAMA (during U.S. visit): The whole world knows the Dalai Lama not seeking independence. Our approach is not separation, within the People’s Republic of China for full guarantee about our unique culture and heritage including our language.

SEVERSON: Arjia Rinpoche was a highly positioned Lama in Tibet before he defected to the U.S. 10 years ago. He supports the Dalai Lama’s approach to peace.

ARJIA RINPOCHE (Tibetan Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center): Most of Tibetans like His Holiness’ idea. You know, the Middle Way works.

SEVERSON: The Middle Way, however, meaning more autonomy and more freedom, is not the ultimate goal of young Tibetans. They want full independence, their leader the Dalai Lama notwithstanding.

LHADON TETHONG: He is like a parent, a senior elder, respected member of the family whom you love and whom I can also disagree at times when I hear him saying something politically that I might not necessarily agree with or like. But that doesn’t change the nature of how much I respect or how much I love him.

SEVERSON: They may love him, but young Tibetans are growing impatient with the Dalai Lama’s Middle Way, and he may be feeling the pressure.

DALAI LAMA (during U.S. visit): If things become out of control then my only option is completely resign.

SEVERSON: Professor Thurman says if Chinese leaders were willing to meet with the Dalai Lama in person, the conflict could be resolved.

Prof. THURMAN: If I can get him a room with Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, it would have a profound impact actually on the world. They would turn around, I think.

Prof. WEIMING: I was deeply worried when I was in China that not just the government officials, but some intellectuals believe that if the Dalai Lama fades from the scene the problem will be resolved. If the Dalai Lama fades from the scene, the situation will be uncontrollable. I think the Chinese government should be critically aware of this.

SEVERSON: Even the most ardent followers of the Dalai Lama, like Arjia Rinpoche, appear to be losing hope that the Chinese government will come around.

Mr. RINPOCHE: When I escaped in 1998 then I thought, oh, in eight years I might return to home. Ten years, I’m pretty sure. So today is exactly the 10 years now. So the situation is getting worse.

SEVERSON: For now, there is little indication that the Chinese will relax control of Tibet. Many Tibetans are counting on the next and more informed generation of Chinese leaders to realize they are not a threat.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson reporting.

Q: What is Jewish Renewal?

A: Let me begin with the issue of renewal itself. There are some people who after the Holocaust felt that we have to do restoration. We have to get back to where Judaism was before Hitler decimated 6 million. And it was such a deep cut, as it were, of vital power and energy of our people. When the refugees came, they settled in enclave[s] in New York and elsewhere and in Jerusalem, and they wanted to reconstitute what they had before, namely, they were restorationists.

And that’s how I began first, because I read the Dead Sea Scrolls, and I was very much impressed by the original of all monastic stuff in Christianity and even the dervishes in Islam, which was with the Dead Sea community. And the first group that I brought together was called “Be’ Nay Or,” because it was based on the scroll of the children of light against the children of darkness.

However, as time went on, the kind of community that I wanted to create, which was a monastic urban kibbutz — it didn’t come to be. And more and more, I felt that the people here in America needed first of all to lower the threshold and then to find ways where in this setting we could renew those values and those experiences that were there before.

The most important thing was to remove all the debris that was between souls and God. And so, therefore, I took the Hebrew prayer book — and working with it is called “davening,” which I believe comes from the word “davenum,” just as when we say the grace after [a] meal we call it “benching,” from benediction. When people start[ed] to daven, they didn’t know how to do it beyond reciting. So, therefore, I looked into the way in which I had been taught in the mystical tradition in Chabad and Lubavitch, and with this introspection I was able to learn how one moves on the inside, because it doesn’t have external markers.

I created something I called “davenology” in order to help people be able to go into that experience. Having done that, it became also clear that we had to do a theological job, which was that every religion has the magisterium, the teaching part of the religion, and it also has a cosmology, a reality map. And the reality map [for] most of the people trying to do restoration was an old reality map. It didn’t fit anymore. In other words, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Auschwitz, Birkenau, moon walk, fifth-generation computer, the whole story of the universe has changed. We are not talking about fields; we are talking about string theory. We’re talking about a whole other thing in quantum stuff, and that hasn’t yet been incorporated in our theology. A theology that’s out of date cannot get the loyalty of the people in the present.

So that was dealing with the more conceptual stuff. But beyond that, ever since what we call scientism and the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, what you couldn’t touch and what you couldn’t see, what you couldn’t measure didn’t exist for people. But then out-of-body experiences and all the old stories that people had been telling about spirituality and so on, so forth started to come back into view. And the question was: How do we take the teachings of Jewish mysticism and make them applicable to our day? Jewish Renewal is all that.

Furthermore, there’s an element of medieval awareness that said the body isn’t good, the soul is good. Leave the body behind or suppress the body and opt for the soul. Now that we’re talking holistic stuff, it didn’t make any more sense to do that. Also, Earth is suffering. If we could hear the outcry of Earth, her air, her lungs have emphysema. Her blood circulation, meaning the water table and so on, so forth is poisoned. And she has fever with global warming.

So when you look at all these things, the outcry, then the question comes: What is there in the way in which we deal with our commandments that would help heal the planet? We discovered something else — that much of our understanding of Judaism was very masculine, patriarchal, and was therefore left-brainish, and it didn’t have enough of the [imagining] of the heart and the intuitive. Jewish Renewal brought all these things together.

Q: Why is there a thirst for spirituality? Why do people yearn for the experiential?

A: Let me begin, first of all, with something that happens in all mysticisms. There is a four-level way in which people deal with things. There’s hatha karma yoga, one level. There’s bhakti yoga. There’s gani yoga. And then there’s raja yoga. In our understanding, we speak about the four letters of the divine name and the four worlds. Where does this come from, that all over, wherever you go, you find these four — or five, in Chinese medicines? Jung would talk about the quaternity and so on. [It is] because we’re hard-wired that way. We have the reptilian brain. We have the limbic part of the brain. We have the cortex, and we have a whole bunch of uncharted stuff that deals with intuition. We needed to become aware of that, because if you only live on this level, which is consciousness of the shopping mall mentality, then the needs that we have would all have to be dealt with on this level.

A rabbi friend of mine put it this way: “When I was a baby, when I was hungry, my mother took me to the breast, and it was good. And when I was lonely and I cried, my mother took me to the breast. When I was upset, my mother took me to the breast. And now I’m grown up. When I’m hungry, I go to the fridge. When I’m upset, I go to the fridge. When I’m lonely, I go to the fridge” — which means that we haven’t learned that our needs happen on other levels, and we still are trying to fulfill them on the bottom level, which is precisely what advertisement wants us to do. If I long for a beautiful woman, she’ll sit on the car that I should buy in order to get her. Advertisement is always built on trying to keep us on this lowest possible plane. But the hungers happen to be on other levels. Once you become aware that the bigger hunger is not for more conceptual stuff, it is for more heart, and it is for more of the intuition that allows each person to have the initiative over his own soul life. Whereas in the other situation it was always, “Clergy will tell us how to do it.” It comes from a heteronymous thing rather than autonomy and the soul.

But after this kind of paradigm shift, people want autonomy, and they want to have their self-experience. It began in the ’60s and a re-sensitizing where we are. And then later on, more intuitive stuff, and gestalt and psychology moved from behaviorism to Freud and then to humanistic psychology to transpersonal psychology, all of which is in order to fill that need, that hunger that people have for the intuitive and the emotional.

Q: But is it also a hunger for relationship with God?

A: That’s precisely the point. The definitions we had of God that were the old ones had to be discarded. No person can really have a real relationship with God unless they have been an iconoclast first. Abraham had to smash the idols of his father, and so we have to go through the same thing. We have to smash the idols of our childhood in order to get to a more mature God. But it turns out that philosophers have made God disappear from us by wanting God to be the omni, omni, omni, and that took away the heart connection, which is to say the root metaphor that each person has to have.

William James once asked a deacon in New England, “What do you do when you see yourself in the presence of God?” He said, “I see an oblong blur.” Well, the oblong blur is not what the heart can use. The heart needs to have a relationship word. So we talk about “father.” “Father” after Freud wasn’t so good. “Judge,” “king” — these words don’t work anymore.

So this is why our people have gone to speak of Melech instead of Melech Ha’olam, “king of the universe,” “the spirit of the world.” In other words, the life force in the world. With that we can have a connection, because the life force operates in us.

How do I know there is a God? Listen to the pulse. I don’t beat my pulse myself. The voice of my beloved is in the pulse. Once you begin to speak about the longing that we have and you sing the melodies that bring the longing to the fore, and you express that in prayer, in that longing there is a response that comes from the universe. [It is] the best way in which we can say that this is God. But the word is such a bad word. It’s because it’s become so contaminated by people pushing other people around with that word.

Q: Christians talk about a personal relationship with God, so when you say that it sounds very Christian.

A: This is so funny, because it looks to me the other way. Jesus is so thoroughly Jewish, and he talks about God as Abba: “Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name.” The Judaism has been filtered out for Christians, so they don’t know anymore what his origin is. And the worst thing yet is with Islam. They don’t understand what they owe to Judaism when they speak about the relationship to Allah. We need to just make this very clear. When you speak about the Ba’al Shem Tov and Hasidism and so on, it becomes very, very clear that there was a personal relationship. Just four generations ago for many people here, their mothers would put on a kerchief and say the prayer over the candles and then pray for every member of their family at that time and pour out their heart. People came for Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur. Even Rudolph Otto describes “the idea of the holy.” He says he came to a synagogue, and he discovered it when people were praying, because when you say “Baruch atah adonai,” you’re addressing God.

I remember when I was a child, my dad had just finished his prayer, and I peeked underneath his tallit, which he had over his head, and I saw he had been crying. So I said, “Papa” — I was speaking German at that time — “why do you cry?” He said to me, “Because I talked with God.” So I said, “Does it hurt when you talk with God?” And he said, “No, it doesn’t hurt. It’s very good. I only cried because it was so long since I last talked to him.” You get the sense that the personal was very, very real in everything that we did. It was only from the 1920s, I would say, to the late ’60s, ’70s that even in most synagogues God was absent.

Q: There are apparently disaffected Jews who are turned on to Judaism because of the renewal movement. Why was God absent in the synagogues, and how has renewal reenergized synagogue life?

A: I don’t want renewal to be seen as a denomination, but rather as a process, as a moment. Any revitalization, any connection that we have with that which is beyond ourselves and in ourselves at the same time is a revitalization, and it happens to some people in Orthodoxy and some people in Reform, and even it happened to one young woman who was just ordained who was serving a community that was humanistic Judaism. She mentioned God and she was fired.

There was this attitude that people had because very often oppression came connected with God — oppression by clergy, oppression by rabbis, oppression by people who couldn’t understand one generation. There was such a gap between one generation and the other, and they couldn’t bring God across.

Another element: as long as we had three generations in one household, then the grandparents could talk to the grandkids because both of them had an enemy in the middle. But once it happened that we now have these nuclear families and single-parent families, family values have to be rejected by the next generation.

Q: But tell me about synagogue life. You were saying that God was absent from institutional life. Why was that, and how did Jewish Renewal help?

A: First of all, it went back to reform in Germany that wanted to make sure that Judaism was the religion of reason. And reason then took God into “god idea.” “God idea” is just a concept, and the living God is not a concept. After all the “god ideas” had evaporated, the best thing that in many synagogues they could hear is, “We live under the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man,” and it didn’t mean very much, because you didn’t have a personal relationship.

It’s not true that that was absent completely, because there was a Reform prayer book for home use. [It] was pious, if you will, very heartful. But the pulpits were not doing that, and so people didn’t have a connection with that, and they talked a lot about Israel, which you need to talk about, about United Jewish Appeal, about helping to rebuild the infrastructure, bringing refugees from Europe, helping Russian Jewry. A lot of the time these were the topics in synagogues.

Q: You were influenced by other faith traditions. You took a trip to meet with the Dalai Lama, Thomas Merton, Howard Thurman. How were you influenced? What did you gain from them?

A: Much. What can I say? When you see another person praying with fervor, and you get the feeling that you attune your heart toward where a person is, and you get to see that person underneath praying. … I still remember THE BELLS OF ST. MARY, when I fell in love with Ingrid Bergman — how she was fully, totally into that prayer, and I was saying, “Oy, Yom Kippur, I want to be where she is at this point.” Or [seeing] Charlton Heston standing before the burning bush. I had that feeling, “Oy, how wonderful that would be to be in that place.” When they sing, “I want be in that number / When the saints come marching in,” that is a very real feeling. …

When I began to read about Rama Krishna and saw that there was a Hasidic rebbe, as it were, in India, when I began to read what people were describing as difficulties in mental prayer — and this was a Trappist monk who had written that book — that touched me a great deal. When I came to Boston University, I wanted to take a course in spiritual disciplines and resources that was being offered by Howard Thurman, and when I came and asked him, “Could I really trust you that you won’t want to manipulate my soul?” he said to me, “Don’t you trust Ruach Ha Kodesh?” He used the Hebrew words. That threw out for me a lot of the things about goy, and that was very, very much the point. “Ruach Ha Kodesh” means the Holy Spirit, but that he should use that Hebrew word, that was an important thing.

Q: You visited the Dalai Lama. What did he teach you?

A: That meeting with the Dalai Lama, which came about in the ’90s, had a prehistory. In 1962, when the Dalai Lama had to flee from Tibet, I sent off a telegram to Ben-Gurion and suggested that he should give him sanctuary in Israel. That never happened. I can understand why not. But then I was concerned about what will they do in the diaspora. I met Geshe Wangyal in New Jersey in 1962 and said that “I think we would be able to have something to share with you about how to survive in the diaspora.” It took about 30 years before we had this dialogue. But His Holiness was wonderfully open to this, and THE JEW IN THE LOTUS describes the whole thing.

I know what it means to live as a monk. I also know what it means to be the manager of a community. I expressed to him my compassion, really, for the role that he had undertaken and how this cuts him off sometimes from being able to do his own spiritual work. He then grasped my hand and appreciated that.

We work in different spaces, but it doesn’t mean that we do different work. We each want to preserve as much of the ethnic and traditional material that we can, but to transform it so that it can be practiced in the present. Once I see somebody like this doing it, I feel that I have greater connection with such a person than I would have even with people of my own faith who are trying to do, still, the restoration work. Matthew Fox, for instance, is a person with whom I have very, very close connection because of that. He’s doing it in Christianity, and the Vatican didn’t understand that. I see the same thing but much more hidden in Islam. There are some people. We met the Nobel Prize winner, Shirin Ebadi, a wonderful woman who wants to be able to work from within Islam. There’s another woman in Toronto at this point who is trying to create this kind of understanding. But the people who have cut off reinterpretation in Islam have gone with the Wahhabi sect, and they are the ones who have so much power.

You see that in every religion, the people to the right claim that they are the ones who need to be listened to, rather than to have a direct connection with God. They’re always afraid of spirituality because it seems to bypass their standing at — how would I say it? — the controls of things.

Q: You have written that Judaism has unique gifts to offer the world. What are they?

A: I believe that Gaia is whole and that every religion is like a vital organ of the planet. You cannot say that Earth can be alive with only the heart or with only the kidneys or with only the guts. It needs to have the whole thing. So if, for instance, I were to say, “We are the liver,” okay? (Everybody wants to be the heart.) If I say, “We are the liver,” if we’re going be a good liver, then the heart will be able to mend, the lungs will be able to mend, and so on and vice versa. If they will be able to renew Christianity or Islam or Buddhism in their own way so that it’ll be a vitally contributory element to the wholeness of the life on this planet, that’s just going to be wonderful.

What do we bring? First of all, we bring something about time. Commodity time has killed our relationship to nature. We have fluorescent lights that want to say it’s daylight when it’s night. We have temperature arrangements which make us feel that all seasons are gone now. We don’t live any more in organic time. Many calendars there are, and some can go by the sun alone. An Islamic one goes by the moon alone. But we go by sun and moon, which means that they both have influences, as if to say there’s a masculine time sense and a feminine time sense, and they work together. Passover is always at the time of the full moon of the vernal equinox. And the festival of the harvest is always at the full moon of the autumnal equinox, which means sun and moon are together.

When you understand living in organic time, then Shabbat comes in. There’s a big difference whether you celebrate the Sabbath as the seventh day or the first day. If you do it as the first day, then you say, “I’ll rest so I can work.” If you do it on the seventh day, then you say, “I worked and now I can be in being, not only in doing.” Shabbat is a very important thing, and some people have tried to obliterate it with 24/7 so that we no longer have the thing. …

The organic thing is important, number one. Second, we go to study. The way laypeople study Torah with us isn’t found anywhere else — the sense of wrestling with texts and working it through and asking, “How does this text speak to me at this time?” This is very much how we do Torah study in Jewish Renewal. I wish that people would study the New Testament the same way and then check with the Old Testament — and I’d like to say instead of “New Testament/Old Testament,” the “Younger Testament/Older Testament.” If they were to put these things together and really study … I think no Christian can fully understand what’s going on in the Gospels unless they have studied a little bit with Jews to understand what it was like to live in the time of Jesus.

I’ll give you a little example. I spent some time at a Trappist monastery in Snowmass, Colorado. Shabbat was coming [and] as for rolls and for wine and for candles they said, “What do you need it for?” I explained and they said, “Could we come and join?” It was wonderful. We had a nice Shabbat together. The next week I still was there, and they said, “Could we do it again?” And I said, “I have a condition. I will role-play Joseph of Arimathea and you will role-play the disciples of Jesus. And you will be coming to visit me in Jerusalem and we’ll have Shabbat together.” So I began. I made the prayer, the wine and the candles and so on, so forth. And then we talked about the lectionary, what we are reading, what they are reading at that point. And then I turned to them and said, “Well, what’s the Master been doing in Galilee?” And one says, “Well, we had this wedding. We ran out of wine,” and they brought [that] back into what was happening between us as Christians and the Shabbat, and everything came alive at that point. I think that’s a very important part for all of us — study of Torah and the celebration of it in time.

There is an element in the way in which we see instinctual stuff. We don’t say something is forbidden. We say a lot more: stop for a moment, become conscious. So, for instance, you want sex? Good. You make a brachah (blessing). You get married, and you raise it to a higher level. You want food? You make sure that if you slaughter an animal, you do it in the right way and then you share with other people. There is an element of that justice making in the world that we call “tzedakah.”

If you read the Torah clearly, you see that nobody could get so rich that they own everything, that they create a feudalism. And nobody can get so poor that they can’t have access to a corner of the land that’s being left for them. The sense that we have of tzedakah — I want to say, nowadays, I picked up a newspaper that had free loan things called “gemilut Hasedim,” the Hebrew for “doing of kindness.” If you want to get married and you want to have a gown, they have a whole closet full of gowns you can get. If you need to get dishes, there are a whole bunch of dishes available. If you need to have crutches or a wheelchair, they have created this whole system of being able to help people.

I wish that when they talk about faith-based charities they wouldn’t be just organizations [but] that they would do a lot more organically and communally in these things. These are the contributions we made, and people can watch us do them and participate with us and then bring it home to their situations.

We need to reconstitute and fix, if you will, that disturbance that creates life in the beginning. But it has to be made organic. It has to be harmonized. So we are told [in Kabbalah] that there are sparks of holiness and goodness hidden in so many places. The task that we have is to reconstitute these and to bring them and harmonize them together. That’s called “tikkun olam,” fixing the world.

One of the ways we do that is to ask, “What is the just, the balance of that?” At one point I wanted to create a research situation in commerce and ask people, “Tell me, when did you feel you did a righteous deal? You didn’t rip off somebody else. They didn’t rip off you. And what was the feeling that you had?” We need to create for the new market situation what is equity — the imbalance of trade and the way in which we are dealing with native peoples, indigenous peoples and paying them a small amount for what we charge a lot for and so on, so forth. There’s a lack of equity, a lack of tzedakah. And that justice element is very strong in tikkun olam.

Q: What is your goal?

A: I’m going to be 81 years old. I’m about to go into a place that’s going to be a lot more withdrawn from outer activity. I’ve worked for a while to bring consciousness to aging, and that was in my book, FROM AGING TO SAGING, to be able to help people see what to do with the later part of their life. We don’t have live models for what to do after retirement. That was an important part of my work. As long as I can connect people in a loving direction with God, the rest is up to God. Most of the time people feel as if God wasn’t there, and they have to fix everything up. I don’t feel that. What I feel is that once I have introduced people, as it were, to God and God to them, and they feel that they have a relationship which expresses them in prayer, in daily life and so on, then my job is done. I can withdraw. I would like to be able to have people think of me as having loved them to God.

There is spiritual technology that we haven’t yet learned to explore. We’re beginning to get glimpses of the crystals of water, how mind and spirit can influence that. I feel that in order to bring about peace and harmony in the world, we need to get adept at working in concert together, to work in ensemble together in order to create conditions on the higher level so that we don’t have such a clash of cultures and a clash of attitudes with each other that brings on such calamities. …

Q: Is there more you want to say about the impact of renewal on community and synagogue life, the impact on Jews who might not have ended up staying Jews?

A: Most of the people today in the world are underblessed. I want to bless people. I want to bring down blessings from God, and I want to bring up blessings from earth so that in your life you would feel that fullness that is your birthright. The planet is currently underblessed. We live on empty calories. It is really important to bless the food, to bless the relationship, to bless going in and out, to bless when you sit in the car and reflect again, “Could I do without as much gas?” and so on, so forth. That reflection is very important. I wish for our president and for our Congress to be able to start thinking in transpersonal terms. …

There was a time when Christians lived in a story they used to call the history of salvation. When a Jew lived in a story the story had an ending — Moshiach will come, the Messiah will be here, there will be peace on earth and good will for all people and so on. There is a same story in Buddhism, that Maitreya will show up, and so on, so forth. We have lost our stories, and I believe that unless we re-dream the myths that keep us alive, we are not going to be able to heal the planet. Most religions have claimed triumphalism, that when the final end will come, we’ll show we were right and they were wrong. We are in a post-triumphalist situation as we speak of Gaia and of all religions being vital organs of the planet. So here is really that collaboration and a vision and a dream of the healed world. Please, please dream a good world. If you stop dreaming the good world, you’re going to find yourself always guided by what is immediate or of bottom-line quality. You won’t think in terms of seven generations. So dream the good dream.