LET'S TALK ABOUT DOGS. After all, this Winter 2001 edition of Hundred Mountain features guest columnist Tom Armstrong's stimulating riff on the timely question: "Does a Robot Dog have Buddha Nature?" But I want to talk about Irish dogs, since this issue also features my own "Belfast Diary" essay on a peace conference in Northern Ireland that I attended in October along with people from across the world.

I have Gerry Adams' dog specifically in mind. Adams is the leader of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the IRA. Along with other Irish, British and American leaders, Adams has been one of the key players who negotiated the Good Friday Agreement which, for the moment at least, has stilled the worst of the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland known as The Troubles. Whether a lasting peace is ever achieved remains to be seen. But before Adams was seen as a peacemaker -- invited to Washington to address members of Congress, standing beside the Dalai Lama at the Belfast conference -- he was an activist on the run in West Belfast. (Adams has always claimed he was a Sinn Fein "activist" and was never an IRA member, mostly because had to so as to be effective, it seems.)

But in 1971 and 1972 he was on the run in West Belfast, the neighborhood where he was born in 1948 and grew up. British troops had orders to shoot him on sight, he recounts in his autobiography, "Before the Dawn" (William Morrow, 1996). The soldiers were inclined to ransack any house where Adams and his new wife, Colette, where rumoured to have stayed, as the couple sought to stay one step ahead of them. The soldiers also weren't above killing his dog, Mickey, which they did, to make the point that they didn't much like him and his friends. So Adams got another dog. He named it Shane. The British captured it. Adams picks up the story:

"[But] one day not long after, I saw him going up the street with a patrol. They had him on a lead and I waited until they were a good distance from me before I whistled him, the way I always whistled for him: one long, three short, then one long whistle, all in one breath; he went mad, broke away and came to me."

THE IMAGE OF GERRY ADAMS whistling for his dog in the West Belfast streets of his youth--with his freedom or even his life on the line, if troops noticed him-- stuck with me as I sat down to write the Belfast Diary piece and to put this new issue of Hundred Mountain together. At the end of my essay, I describe the grim environs of the so-called Peace Line, the micro-Berlin Wall that divides Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods in West Belfast. After that visit, my friend Michael and I walked over into Protestant West Belfast. We saw the other side of the coin -- the aggressive wall murals lauding Protestant paramilitaries, the many rows of British flags flapping pointedly in the breeze above shops and houses.

Then we started walking back down the Shankhill Road, heading for Belfast city center. It was early Sunday morning, few people were about, few shops open. A small red car drove past us and moments later it came back down the road. The driver pulled over to the curb. A beefy, friendly-faced man called out to us: "Do ya' need a ride down into the city?" We agreed to the lift and climbed into the back of the cramped little car. A woman sat on the passenger side, a fluffy, white, smart-looking little dog in her lap. "I'm Jim, this is Millie. That's Sunny," said the man, introducing us to his wife and their dog.

We chatted as they drove. Jim helpfully pointed out an empty lot on the Shankhill Road, a place where years before a riot had taken place during the Protestant marching season. No mention of the casualty count.

Nothing momentous happened or was said on this ride. They were a lower-middle class Protestant working couple. "I'd love to go to America, but we could never afford it," he said, when I asked him if he and Millie had ever traveled to my country. What money they had, they had used to help a grown child of theirs do some studying in America.

Michael and I got out near Great Victoria Street in downtown Belfast. We thanked them. "God bless ya'," Millie said. My last image was of Sunny the dog on her lap, looking out the window, as they headed back up into West Belfast.

Sunny the Protestant dog, I suppose you could say. And that would make, Shane, Gerry Adams' pooch, a Catholic canine, correct?

SOME PEOPLE DESPAIR OF THE IRISH and British ever getting it right, and that things will never really change in Northern Ireland. After all, people don't change all that much, especially when caught up in such deepy ingrained "habits of hatred," as the Belfast piece puts it. Let's be real -- Catholics and Protestants have been at each other's throats for 400 years. True enough. Yet dogs have been dogs a lot longer than that. And will be dogs in the future long after The Troubles fade into history . Forget robot dogs for the moment, but if a real dog has Buddha-nature, so, too, must its owners, whether Protestant or Catholic. And like their dogs, maybe their owners will outlast The Troubles, too.

Bad things happens, to paraphrase the old bumper sticker. And a lot of bad things have gone down in Northern Ireland. But change happens, too. How it happens is part of the question, and maybe part of the answer. At the Belfast conference, the Dalai Lama did a curious thing. At the end of the conference, while seated in Ulster City Hall surrounded by nearly 400 people, he gave some closing remarks. Then, he lifted up his right hand, reached around behind himself and patted himself on the back. "Now, I have done my job," he said.

I think he meant that he had done what he had come to Northern Ireland to do -- and that was all he could do. He had offered some guidance on how to make peace. He had told the country that its warring people must learn to live side by side. He had offered insight on how people must realize that "destruction of your neighbor is destruction of yourself" (as so pointedly embodied in the shattering story of former Protestant paramilitary Alistair Little). And after all was said and done, after all the big headlines, photo-ops and editorials, what was left to do was pretty much up to them. Even the Dalai Lama could only do and say so much.

FOR CHRISTMAS, SOMEBODY GAVE ME a Dalai Lama "Words of Wisdom" quote-of-the-day calendar. The quote for January 5 says: "Change in society must come from within the family and within the community." The quote speaks succinctly to the challenge Northern Ireland faces as it tries to unlearn its habits of hatred. It speaks to the exact place where the seeds of peace must be deeply rooted and carefully nurtured.

Change can -- and has -- happened. A friend of mine is a radio news editor based in Dublin. Lisa e-mailed me recently after I had asked for some feedback from someone who lives there on some of my perceptions about what is going on in Ireland these days. She wrote:

"[The] things that are happening these days are quite mind-boggling, if you stop and think about them. I was in work the other night, writing a story about Gerry Adams going to Downing Street for talks with Tony Blair. This kind of thing is taken for granted nowadays. But I stopped in my tracks and thought: I can't believe I'm writing a story about Gerry Adams going to Downing Street for talks with Tony Blair. Ten years ago, he would have been arrested and thrown in jail if he'd tried to get anywhere near Downing Street."

THIS BEING A BUDDHIST-ORIENTED journal, and not a political one, I should stop talking about "political" matters, now, right? And talk about the transformative power of meditation and the spiritual path, and all of that good stuff. But the spiritual path is nowhere else than where we stand. Having stood on its divided paths, I can't get Belfast and Ireland out of my head and heart. Certainly, part of it is a dark fascination with how awfully awful people can be. It makes for an entertaining experience to visit the dark side, huh? And Belfast, to be sure, has been Dark Side Central.

But the Belfasts of the world -- and the Beiruts, and the Kosovos, and the Chechnyas -- are really just the darkest parts of our human nature and human confusion writ large, and splashed upon huge, ugly canvases. The same challenges and insights that the Dalai Lama offered to the combatants of Ulster --- “When human emotions come out of control, then the best part of the brain in which we make judgments cannot function properly" -- are exactly what we need to heed in living out our own daily lives.

It is not to diminish the terrible suffering caused by The Troubles to observe that all of us not living in such a war zone -- and on far tinier canvases -- stage our own variations on The Troubles. We bring our own "habits of hatred," our own confusiuon and pain, to our family, work and community lives. The canvases may vary in size, and the suffering may differ in scale (and certainly the suffering of Northern Ireland has been operatic in scale). But suffering is suffering, wherever it occurs.

THE BUDDHA SAID HE REALLY only taught two things, when it came right down to it: suffering and the end of suffering. The Dalai Lama picks up the threads of these teachings, when he tries to point out how we create suffering in ourselves and then project it out into the world. And how we must make changes at home (remember the geography lesson that home is where the heart is) if we ever hope to curtail the suffering which we experience and create. And in so doing, to create more peaceful lives and communities. That's a lesson for Belfast. But it's also a lesson for any one of us, anywhere.

So now, after all is said and done, it's time to look to Sunny and Shane in the streets of West Belfast. It's time to walk the dog.