The foreign policy of any democratic nation today must be directed toward neutralizing or demolishing threats to its liberties. These are twofold. Totalitarian governments must be countered for their expansive external policies. So-called revolutionary organizations must be met and overcome because their activities are the thin end of the wedge opening the door to total anarchy.

I have always believed that there are times when diplomacy can fairly use the balance of power as an aid to peace. Equally, it is important to know where to draw the moral line; one must sometimes sup with the devil, but not fatten him

There is no such thing as a typical Asian or Oriental .mind any more than there is a typical Western mind. The phrase is only a shorthand way of stating that, if we wish to understand a people, we must take seriously the internal dimension of mind and feeling as well as external factors such as pontics, economics, kinship and social structures, diplomatic relations and military affairs. We are all what we are—psycho-physical-spiritual beings—mortals endowed with memory, intelligence and sexuality, trying to make some sense out of our transitory existence in this mysterious universe. Yet different cultural traditions have developed their own characteristic way of apprehending the meaning of life, nurtured and preserved by respective languages, customs, myths and religions.

I am going to argue for two major theses which seek to relate Buddhism to the processes of social and political change. The second thesis also relates the processes of social and political change to each other, a very important linkage in view of the prevailing assumption that government is the major initiator and director of social change.

Senior editor Arnaud de Borchgrave of Newsweek writes (July 10,1972):

Today, Western Europe is a collection of nations united only in disunity. Within the last month, I have spoken with more than a dozen of the top foreign policy planners in Europe. Never before have I seen them so gloomy; never before haye I heard so much talk about Europe's confusion and disarray. “The spectacle we are presenting to the world,” one expert told me, “is truly lamentable.” It is more than lamentable; it is highly dangerous. For Western Europe faces the threat of “Finlandization”— which is to say, of finding itself effectively dominated, so far as foreign affairs are concerned, by the Soviet Union.

Living with the oppressive reality of death is difficult for most societies. Israel is no different in this respect. But there is a way in which Israel is impertinently different. Here death is somehow more fitly celebrated. Not in a macabre fashion, but accepted for what it is: both a tragedy and an opportunity for celebration. It is celebrated in the true meaning of that word: “solemnized, with appropriate rites and ceremonies.” Anthropologists studying primitive peoples find the rites associated with death a clue to many values of the tribes. I believe that a trenchant sociological analysis of societies from the perspective of funeral rites may get us closer to the inmost core of values than their other analytic strategies.'This essay is to be understood in that light.

Nineteen seventy-three, it is said, may long be remembered as a momentous turning point for American Christianity. Some are even talking about the possibility of a Third Great Awakening. Key 73 is certainly raising expectations, but the presuppositions underlying Key 73 may be more vulnerable than its promoters now realize.

Key 73 might be described as a Christian blitz. It' is an all-out attempt to evangelize America in 1973 by capitalizing on the strengths of a coordinated thrust. Five years ago an editorial in Christianity Today entreated all evangelicals: “Somehow, Let's Get Together.” In his own words, Dr. Carl F. H. Henry; then editor of the biweekly, observed: “The response was immediate and impressive; few editorials in a decade had stimulated more letters.”

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was at work in China from 1924 to 1945, the years in which Chinese communism emerged. The Jesuit scientist saw jhis struggle for mastery in a way almost unique for a Westerner. After only a few years in China Teilhard could write: “Politically the situation is more troubled than ever with the Bolshevists gaining the upper hand on the Yangtse. I am beginning to believe that their success will be the signal for the reorganization of China—but at the expense of the Europeans.”

Teilhard was pulled by both East and West; from Europe and America came the flow of discovery, and yet Western churches and nations disparaged the new movements under way.

To the outside world the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution which convulsed the People's Republic of China from 1966 until 1969 looked like a whole society gone mad. An aging and seemingly demented revolutionary leader had unleashed a teenage rabble on the middle and upper-level leadership of the new China and paralyzed the economic, cultural and educational life of the largest nation on earth. Now, three years after the close of the Cultural Revolution, those of us who have been able in recent months to visit a more stable and tranquil China have come away with a different impression.