Today's meeting of Barack Obama and the Dalai Lama will be framed by most commentators as a political event. Indeed, the symbolic impact upon U.S.-China relations of the American president's outreach to the Tibetan spiritual leader is well documented. Also fascinating and vital, however, is the moral dimension of this encounter of these two leaders. After all, this is the meeting of two Nobel Peace Prize laureates.
A tension remains between the views of peace-and-conflict espoused by the Dalai Lama (the 1989 recipient) and the complex perspective offered by Barack Obama in his December 2009 Nobel address. Obama's view on the particular obligations of a political leader€”who may need to declare war to defend a just cause€”led Obama to distance himself, in the presidential role, from the strategies of a movement leader like Martin Luther King, Jr. The Dalai Lama is neither a political leader nor a social movement leader, though he is in some ways both of these. Will he make any public comments on Obama's leadership? What will Obama say about the Dalai Lama's vision and values? These are the key moral and even perhaps spiritual questions at stake in the meeting.