qz.com, 17 November 2015
World leaders have been highly vocal in the aftermath of the attacks in Paris. Now the Dalai Lama, the spiritual head of the Buddhist faith with millions of devotees around the globe, is weighing in with his thoughts on the violence and how to respond to it.
We cannot solve this problem only through prayers. I am a Buddhist and I believe in praying. But humans have created this problem, and now we are asking God to solve it. It is illogical. God would say, solve it yourself because you created it in the first place.
His response to the Paris attacks echoes remarks he made in 2003 about the Sept. 11 attacks in New York two years earlier, in which he said the “real antidote” to terrorism is compassion and dialogue—although he suggested then that violent countermeasures might be necessary to fight terrorism.