“To me, letting go is one of the key things we learn in meditation.... Meditation has confirmed for me the old saying that the best things in life are free.” -- SANTIKARO BHIKKU, at his workshop

WE ARE IMMEDIATELY encouraged to let go of something at the conference. The nearly 300 attendees -- mostly white and from Western European nations, America, Canada and Australia, the nametags reveal-- sit in an intimate, darkened auditorium inside Waterfront Hall. Yellow orange lights illuminate a striking stage, which is surrounded by seats as in a theater-in-the-round.

The stage -- about the size of a badminton court -- has been covered to a depth of several inches with the actual soil of Belfast. An Oriental rug with two chairs on it covers a portion of the dark brown earth. This is where Father Freeman and the Dalai Lama will shortly undertake their dialogue. A live potted tree stands in one corner, a microphone and podium in another. A small ring of stones a few hand-widths across, is laid out in the soil in a third corner.

“Come and bring your part of the earth and put it on Belfast earth,” says a conference host. The circle of stones is a cairn, she says, a nod to the traveler’s cairns that Tibetans, American Indians and others created as trail markers and spiritual rests stops, depositing a stone when passing by. I mentally thump my forehead. We had been told in a pre-conference mailing to bring a stone from our hometown. People stream down to the stage and deposit their rocks and pebbles; the pile will grow significantly as the days unfold. I root around in my rucksack. The best I can come up with, being a guitar player, is one of the grey plastic Dunlop guitar picks I always carry. That seems symbolic enough, so onto the cairn it goes.

The host says that in the same fashion as a Tibetan sand mandala, the cairn will be scattered to the elements after its aim is fulfilled. So at conference’s end, the stones of several hundred hometowns from across the Western Hemisphere will be poured into the nearby River Lagan which cuts through Belfast. I smile, pleased with the thought that my guitar pick, light as a leaf, won’t sink but will float off into the wide world.

“We wanted to come to a place of conflict. When the word ‘Belfast’ came up, your eyes lit up and you said ‘This is where we should come!” -- FATHER FREEMAN, on choosing Belfast for the next dialogue between himself and the Dalai Lama.

THE DALAI LAMA SPEAKS IN A PLEASANT, if often imperfect, pidgin English. So his dialogue with Father Freeman is actually a threesome, as the Tibetan spiritual leader’s personal translator sits at his elbow on stage, leaning into the conversation between the two monks. The Dalai Lama will gamely give answers a go in English. But when needing to make a more subtle or elaborate point, he’ll tilt his head in thought, shift smoothly into Tibetan and have at it. Then his translator, a former Tibetan monk who now wears a suitcoat and tie, will explicate His Holiness’s remarks, speaking in a resonant voice with crisp British English diction that is a pleasure to hear.

So, if the reporters are not massaging the material, any quotes you read by the Dalai Lama from his public appearances -- such as those in this article -- should be a mixture of the monk’s often quite charming pidgin English and the more mellifluous, complex renderings of his thought served up by his translator.

At Belfast's Waterfront Hall, Father Laurence Freeman and the Dalai Lama (with his translator between them) discuss the roots of intolerance while seated on a rug atop several inches deep of the actual soil of Northern Ireland. Photo by DOUGLAS IMBROGNO

The other thing to be said about the Dalai Lama’s public “affect” is his own voice. It ranges from a deep-chested and throaty sound when speaking in his native tongue, to an almost squeaky, upper register -- dare I say almost “girlish”? -- quality that often dissolves into chuckles and giggles. He also likes to move and look around, shading his eyes to peer into the audience, twisting in his seat to look at someone, leaning forward to post his hands like pillars on his knees. And, of course, he smiles and laughs a lot. A lot.

He is one of the great spiritual leaders of our day and -- either despite it or in the service of it -- he is also one savvy communicator in his own fashion. He is, quite honestly, fun to watch. Even if you didn’t understand a word he said -- and you might not, when he mangles some English locution or veers off into Tibetan to make some esoteric, complex point -- his body, his demeanor, his laughter and his face often communicate all you may really need to know at that moment.

“I always believe non-violence is an expression of compassion, of caring.” - THE DALAI LAMA, at the conference.

THIS IS HOW IT LOOKS. The Dalai Lama in one chair, hands posted on knees, Father Freeman facing him in another chair, a few feet away. The Dalai Lama wears orange-red robes, Father Freeman wears the white robes of the Benedictine order. Between the two of them, there is not enough hair on both their close-shaved heads to fill a shot glass.

Father Freeman begins by citing his fellow monk’s “endless pilgrimage of peace.” “You point out everywhere you go there is common ground among us all,” he says to him. “But it’s a very difficult message for people to remember, so it needs constant repetition.”

Never more so than in a place like Northern Ireland, one thinks, where Catholics and Protestants have had such an affinity for tossing petrol bombs at one another that someone once coined the merry phrase sprayed on walls as political graffiti: “Throw well -- throw Shell.”

Father Freeman lobs the Dalai Lama a big one: what is the root of intolerance and division among people? The Dalai Lama swings his index finger into the air and jabs at his chest. “I,” he says. And for just a moment an onlooker’s brain goes, “Huh? The Dalai Lama is the root of intolerance?!” But you catch up as he goes on.

“I,” he says. “That’s the center of the whole universe. In Mexico. China. India. The United States. That’s the center of the world.” This “I” is so blinded by its self-interest and preoccupation with its wants and beliefs that it cannot see beyond itself. It cannot see that its own fate is inextricably bound up with all the other “I’s” out there.

So from these roots intolerance arises and “the inability to recognize one’s interest is very much linked with the interest of others, especially in modern times,” says the Dalai Lama. “This is one way to promote the sense of caring, of respect. Recognizing just as you wish to be happy, others wish to be happy... If we look very closely, the concept of ‘we’ and ‘they’” -- he pauses, slipping in this most subtle and difficult of Buddhist teachings -- “no longer there!”

“Like it or not,” he goes on, “you have to live side by side. Not only in one area, but the whole world. Heavily interdependent. So destruction of your neighbor is destruction of yourself!”

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