The Dalai Lama & the Pope and Wars We Learn to Live With
Something happened during Holy Week that deserved more attention than it received.
On Palm Sunday, Pope Leo XIV told the world that no one may use the name of God to justify war. He did not use the cautious language that institutions often reach for when clarity has a price. Christ, he said, rejects the prayers of those whose hands are full of blood. He called on those with weapons to lay them down.
Two days later, the Dalai Lama publicly and wholeheartedly endorsed the Pope's appeal. No qualifications. No diplomatic softening. The call to renounce violence, he said, went to the heart of what the great religious traditions teach. Whether one looks to Christianity , Buddhism , Islam , Hinduism , Judaism or other paths, the message at its core is love, compassion, tolerance and self-discipline. Violence finds no true home in any of them.
This could be mistaken for interfaith courtesy. It is not. It is something more demanding: two old religious languages, formed by very different histories, arriving at the same moral refusal.
The Pope speaks from a tradition that places human dignity beyond the reach of armies, states and emergencies. The killing of the innocent cannot be purified by necessity, nor made sacred by rhetoric. Christianity has had its own long and troubled history with power, empire and war. That makes the Pope's statement more important, not less. He was not offering a bland generality about peace. He was recalling his own tradition to its most difficult claim: that God cannot be conscripted into violence.
When Leo said this, he was not departing from Christianity. He was enacting it at a moment when evasion would have been easier. Fidelity is one word for that. Courage is another.
The Dalai Lama comes from different ground, but it leads to the same refusal. At the centre of Buddhist practice lies compassion, not as sentiment but as the disciplined wish to relieve suffering wherever it appears. It rests on interdependence: the recognition, reached through reflection and experience rather than commandment, that no life stands alone. Our well-being is entangled with that of others. To be indifferent to another's suffering is therefore not merely morally cold. It is also a failure of perception.
His support for the Pope was not a gesture. It was a conclusion.
Both men are resisting the most seductive argument of war: that this particular violence is different; this enemy has forfeited the ordinary claims of humanity; this killing, though tragic, is necessary. Every war dresses itself in exception. Every war promises that force will produce the peace that force has so often destroyed. The record is not kind to that promise.
The Dalai Lama knows this from within. The Tibetan people have endured one of the most sustained exercises of political coercion and cultural erasure of the modern era. Its justifications have been elaborate; the world's response, mostly muted. He has lived with that silence. Yet he has refused to make hatred the governing language of his struggle. Not from naivety. Not from weakness. He understands that hatred narrows the mind. It may mobilise for a season; it cannot heal. It hardens the very identities that a durable settlement must learn to loosen.
The Pope brings another inheritance to the same point. Catholic teaching on human dignity is not new. What matters is a Pope willing to state it without hedging, in circumstances where hedging would have been safer, and in a world where religion is too easily recruited into national, civilisational or sectarian projects.
I was with the Dalai Lama in Jerusalem, and I return to that journey at moments like this. He moved through a city where traditions have so often met as rivals: mosque, synagogue, church, shrine. At Al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock, he removed his shoes and prayed, not as a visitor performing respect but as a practitioner entering the grammar of Islamic surrender. At the Western Wall, sacred to Judaism and heavy with the memory of exile and return, he stood in long, unhurried silence. At the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, central to the Christian memory of crucifixion and resurrection, he entered without possession or condescension, attentive to another tradition's deepest wound and promise. At Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, the register changed entirely. There was no living tradition to enter. Only the magnitude of what human beings had done to one another. He stood before it with a bowed head and a stillness that had nothing ceremonial about it. The refusal to look away.
He was welcomed everywhere. Not out of hospitality. Recognition.
It is worth asking, then, what exactly these two men are opposing. Not war as an abstraction. War as it actually works on bodies, minds and memory.
When we lose one person we love, we know what has gone: the voice, the gait, the particular way of entering a room, the small habits that made a life recognisable, the gap in daily existence that refuses to close. Grief has a face and a name. It is not a number.
Yet war turns people into numbers with terrible efficiency. Gaza has become a shorthand for a civilian catastrophe almost beyond language: more than 70,000 Palestinians dead, many of them women and children, families erased, bodies still believed to be beneath buildings, a strip of land asked to carry more grief than any place should. Ukraine is not only a matter of displacement, grave though that is. It is the slow violence of a long war: civilians hit by drones and missiles, cities far from the front drawn into danger, energy, railway and port infrastructure struck, winters made part of the battlefield, an entire society trained to live between alarms. Iran presents yet another moral obscenity: the threat to reduce an ancient civilisation to the Stone Age, as though bridges, power stations, universities, hospitals and water systems were merely instruments to be smashed until a people submit. At a certain point the figures cease to behave like lives. They become data in an argument about proportionality, security, deterrence or revenge. Someone whose absence tears a hole in the world becomes a unit in a calculation. We rarely notice the moment this happens. That is part of what makes it so dangerous.
Modern conflict reaches us as image: smoke above a skyline, children grey with dust, bodies under sheets, numbers scrolling across a screen. At first we recoil. Then we adjust. What was once unbearable becomes the news. What was once unthinkable becomes policy. This adjustment of consciousness is one of war's quieter victories. The threshold of what we will accept shifts; it does not easily shift back.
That is the war within war. Before violence can be normalised on the ground, it has to be normalised in the imagination. We begin by accepting an exception. Then we become accustomed to it. Eventually, we defend it.
Nor does war end simply because firing stops. Humiliation is not dissolved by an agreement. A people defeated, dispossessed or made to feel that their lives counted for less will carry that knowledge long after the formal end of hostilities. It passes from generation to generation, sometimes as explicit grievance, sometimes as something less articulate and more dangerous: a wound looking for a name, a rage waiting for an occasion.
History contains many peace agreements that were, in truth, timetables for the next war. They imposed exhaustion without reconciliation. They compelled submission without restoring dignity. They ended one phase of violence while leaving intact the emotional and political conditions for the next.
The Dalai Lama has made this argument for decades, in language simple enough to be mistaken for innocence. Peace built on the defeat and humiliation of another is not peace. It is a pause. A more durable settlement requires the transformation of the conditions that made conflict possible. That begins, however inconveniently, with seeing the other side as fully human. And that requires resisting the process by which they gradually cease to seem so.
This does not mean refusing the realities of politics, security or historical injury. It means refusing to let them exhaust the moral imagination. A state may speak of deterrence, a military of necessity, a diplomat of sequencing. These vocabularies have their place. But when they become the only language available, the dead disappear twice: first from life, then from thought.
There is also a public discipline implied here. It is not enough to deplore war in private and then speak only in the vocabulary of interests, alliances and costs. Those things matter; states cannot be run on emotion alone. But neither can civilisation survive if moral language is reduced to decoration, brought out for commemorations while the real business of violence proceeds elsewhere.
What the Pope and the Dalai Lama hold is a kind of authority the present world is poorly equipped to recognise. It comes neither from wealth nor force nor office alone. It comes from lives lived in accordance with what they profess; from positions taken at cost; from suffering known from the inside and refused as permission for retaliation.
Their convergence is therefore not a pious statement about peace. It is a specific, costly refusal of the drift towards indifference. It insists that the numbers were people; that humiliation outlives ceasefires; that a war lodged in memory and wounded pride will find another season unless something changes in the human heart.
A ceasefire may stop the firing. That is necessary, and urgently so. But it is not the same as peace. What these two men are asking for is harder: whether conscience can survive as a living force, rather than as a sentiment we invoke when it costs us nothing.
The answer, if there is one, begins in the quality of attention we are still willing to bring to another person's suffering. And in the daily, unglamorous, unwitnessed refusal to let that attention go dark.
Authored by: Rajiv Mehrotra
The author is Hon. Founding Managing Trustee of the Foundation for Universal Responsibility of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Views expressed are personal
On Palm Sunday, Pope Leo XIV told the world that no one may use the name of God to justify war. He did not use the cautious language that institutions often reach for when clarity has a price. Christ, he said, rejects the prayers of those whose hands are full of blood. He called on those with weapons to lay them down.
This could be mistaken for interfaith courtesy. It is not. It is something more demanding: two old religious languages, formed by very different histories, arriving at the same moral refusal.
The Pope speaks from a tradition that places human dignity beyond the reach of armies, states and emergencies. The killing of the innocent cannot be purified by necessity, nor made sacred by rhetoric. Christianity has had its own long and troubled history with power, empire and war. That makes the Pope's statement more important, not less. He was not offering a bland generality about peace. He was recalling his own tradition to its most difficult claim: that God cannot be conscripted into violence.
The Dalai Lama comes from different ground, but it leads to the same refusal. At the centre of Buddhist practice lies compassion, not as sentiment but as the disciplined wish to relieve suffering wherever it appears. It rests on interdependence: the recognition, reached through reflection and experience rather than commandment, that no life stands alone. Our well-being is entangled with that of others. To be indifferent to another's suffering is therefore not merely morally cold. It is also a failure of perception.
Both men are resisting the most seductive argument of war: that this particular violence is different; this enemy has forfeited the ordinary claims of humanity; this killing, though tragic, is necessary. Every war dresses itself in exception. Every war promises that force will produce the peace that force has so often destroyed. The record is not kind to that promise.
I was with the Dalai Lama in Jerusalem, and I return to that journey at moments like this. He moved through a city where traditions have so often met as rivals: mosque, synagogue, church, shrine. At Al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock, he removed his shoes and prayed, not as a visitor performing respect but as a practitioner entering the grammar of Islamic surrender. At the Western Wall, sacred to Judaism and heavy with the memory of exile and return, he stood in long, unhurried silence. At the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, central to the Christian memory of crucifixion and resurrection, he entered without possession or condescension, attentive to another tradition's deepest wound and promise. At Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, the register changed entirely. There was no living tradition to enter. Only the magnitude of what human beings had done to one another. He stood before it with a bowed head and a stillness that had nothing ceremonial about it. The refusal to look away.
It is worth asking, then, what exactly these two men are opposing. Not war as an abstraction. War as it actually works on bodies, minds and memory.
When we lose one person we love, we know what has gone: the voice, the gait, the particular way of entering a room, the small habits that made a life recognisable, the gap in daily existence that refuses to close. Grief has a face and a name. It is not a number.
Nor does war end simply because firing stops. Humiliation is not dissolved by an agreement. A people defeated, dispossessed or made to feel that their lives counted for less will carry that knowledge long after the formal end of hostilities. It passes from generation to generation, sometimes as explicit grievance, sometimes as something less articulate and more dangerous: a wound looking for a name, a rage waiting for an occasion.
The Dalai Lama has made this argument for decades, in language simple enough to be mistaken for innocence. Peace built on the defeat and humiliation of another is not peace. It is a pause. A more durable settlement requires the transformation of the conditions that made conflict possible. That begins, however inconveniently, with seeing the other side as fully human. And that requires resisting the process by which they gradually cease to seem so.
Their convergence is therefore not a pious statement about peace. It is a specific, costly refusal of the drift towards indifference. It insists that the numbers were people; that humiliation outlives ceasefires; that a war lodged in memory and wounded pride will find another season unless something changes in the human heart.
The answer, if there is one, begins in the quality of attention we are still willing to bring to another person's suffering. And in the daily, unglamorous, unwitnessed refusal to let that attention go dark.
Authored by: Rajiv Mehrotra
The author is Hon. Founding Managing Trustee of the Foundation for Universal Responsibility of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Views expressed are personal
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