I don't regard fundamentalism in the United States or in Europe as a terrible threat, partly because it is a self-curing disease. The younger generation drifts away, so fundamentalists always have to recruit to keep up with themselves.

The fact of the matter is that Buddhism has changed a lot. When St. Francis of Xavier arrived in Japan, he wrote back to the Vatican and made a joke. "It is unfortunate," he said, "that the Lutherans were here before me." By this he meant that Pure Land Buddhism was so much like Lutheranism.

If you were going to be attracted to a mystical faith which involved the contemplative life, Buddhism would be quite reasonable. But then, not everybody is a budding mystic. In fact, it's pretty certain that very few people are. So another kind of religion, one that was perhaps more pragmatic and service-oriented, might appeal to those others. So I think you have to take your values into account.

I often say that I'm a Buddhist-Episcopalian. I say that partly to annoy people.I like to annoy people who think that a religion can contain the whole truth. No religion, it seems to me, contains the whole truth. I think it's mad to think that there is nothing to learn from other traditions and civilizations. If you accept that other religions have something to offer and you learn from them, that is what you become: a Buddhist-Episcopalian or a Hindu-Muslim or whatever.

One of the effects of religions getting together is that they borrow from one another. An example is the growing number of Catholics who are practicing Yoga and meditation techniques borrowed from Buddhism and Hinduism. So there are these borrowings which I think fertilize the religions.

I think the Buddhist ethic is clearer and more systematic in some ways. The Buddhist notion is that our chief problems are greed, hatred and delusion. Well, delusion is not much mentioned in the Christian tradition. In the West, we have underplayed the idea that our moral and spiritual troubles have to do with a lack of clarity or insight because original sin has dominated so much of our thinking. We tend to think that our troubles are caused by insufficient will power.

Life is very difficult and we owe it to our fellow human beings to be as cheerful as we can.