I was in the car yesterday and happened to catch this show I am only moderately familiar with, “Interfaith Voices.”

The host interviewed the writer Pico Iyer who has a new book out on the Dalai Lama. I always thought the Dalai Lama was an interesting cat (and not just because an earlier one told Carl Spackler that he’d have total consciousness on his death bed). Iyer’s a pretty mainstream writer; I believe he used to be an essayist for Time. One of the things that’s always interested me is that the Dalai Lama is actually far more “conservative” in his social views than Western liberals realize. As I understand it, he downplays his views on homosexuality and abortion when he’s raising money in the West.

Anyway, the host asked Iyer about the Dalai Lama’s personal story. And Iyer tells it — exactly as I would expect a believing Buddhist to tell it. When the Dalai Lama was just two years old, some travelling monks found him. The tyke greeted them in the monks’ own language even though he had no reason to know it and recognized the old men as long-lost friends. He — at the age of two — “knew all about” his previous life.

Now, it seems to me that from any objective viewpoint this is, quite simply, a miracle. Perhaps not divine if you have a certain denominational definition of the divine, but certainly a supernatural phenomena no more implausible from an atheist perspective than parting the Red Sea or turning water into wine. But Iyer gave no indication that he found any of this implausible, nor did the host.

As to whether this actually happened, I see no reason why I shouldn’t be agnostic, as I like the idea of miracles quite a bit and pooh-poohing it would be distraction from the point I want to make. But I thought it was really interesting that no skepticism was brought to bear. I listen to discussions of Christianity from time to time on NPR and it seems that it’s simply required in such conversations to take the “magic” out of the Judeo-Christian narratives. But when the religion in question is Buddhism, it’s apparently fine to suspend ones rationalist mind. Again, I’m not a regular listener of this show, so maybe my surprise is a little misplaced and all such talk is greeted with such open-mindedness. But that’s certainly not my impression of NPR in general.

You can listen to the discussion yourself here. The whole thing takes place in the first three minutes.

Gunga galunga . . . gunga, gunga-lagunga