(7 of 7)
The Dalai Lama is unbending on this point. "Out of 5.8 billion people in the world," he tells me, "the majority of them are certainly not believers. We can't argue with them, tell them they should be believers. No! Impossible! And, realistically speaking, if the majority of humanity remains nonbelievers, it doesn't matter. No problem! The problem is that the majority have lost, or ignore, the deeper human values--compassion, a sense of responsibility. That is our big concern. For whenever there is a community without deeper human values, then even one single family cannot be a happy family." For if we merely want to be happy, he says--though he has been forced from his homeland, seen 1.2 million of his people killed and had nearly all his 6,000 monasteries destroyed--it pays to be kind. Kindness, he says over and over, only stands to reason.