On November 13th I have been to His Holiness Dalai Lama public speech in Washingon, DC.

The MCI Center was packed. 16,000 people came to listen to His Holiness.

He is 70 years old but seems to possess the energy of a child. His presence lightened up the stadium.

The public talk was names "Global Peace Through Compassion". He alternated between English and Tibetan, most of the time His Holiness spoke English.

Basically we spoke about the importance of three factors for the world peace:

1. Compassion as motivation for bring Happiness
2. Promotion of Religious Harmony and Tolerance
3. World Peace.

For compassion HH does not intend to mean being pity but being respectful and understand the others and other people suffering.

About the promotion of Religious Harmony and Tolerance, His Holiness explained his notion of: one world several religions, one individual one religion.
He explained that the world needs several religions. The analogy is that we need several pills for different diseases and we need different religions for different traditions.
Each one of the religions has a record of inner peace and good values. They all share same values like respect for the other, compassion, contemptment. And the religion is ingrained in the tradition of its people.

At the individual level, one person should follow one religion otherwise he can be confused: one God vs. several gods, image workship versus no image workship, etc.
His Holiness enfasize the difference between Faith and Respect.
Faith in one religion should come with Respect for all the other religions.
Being faithful to one religion does not prevent us to admire and respect other religions.
All the religions share basic values (which His Holiness calls Secular Values): respect for the other, comtemptment, tolerance, hapiness, compassion.
The question of what is the best religion is a bad question (according to HH), the best religion is the religion that is most effective for the time and the place. It is more important to be a serious and sincere practitioner following the religion teaching with the practice.

For the global peace, the first advice is to achieve inner peace first. It is important to disarm internally. We do not need Weapons of Mass Destruction to start a war with others: it could be a war of words, words that hurt those we love and other people.