The Dalai Lama and Hick's pluralistic hypothesis

This is not a compare-and-contrast paper, and writing one is the commonest way it goes wrong. The brief says to analyse the perspective of the Dalai Lama *from the vantage point of* John Hick's pluralistic hypothesis. That makes Hick the instrument and the Dalai Lama the object: you are applying a theory to a position and reporting what the application reveals. An essay that summarises Hick for two pages, then summarises the Dalai Lama for two more, and closes by noting that both value religious diversity has described two things and analysed neither. The governing question is narrower and much more interesting — when Hick's framework is placed over the Dalai Lama's account of Buddhism and other faiths, does it fit, does it distort, or does it break? Name that verdict in your opening sentence and the rest of the paper has a job to do.

Get Hick's hypothesis stated precisely, because a loose version makes the whole paper unfalsifiable. His claim is not the vague one that all religions are equally good. It is that the great traditions are culturally conditioned human responses to a single ultimate Reality — the Real — which is itself beyond the reach of our concepts, and that their validity is shown by a common transformation from self-centredness to reality-centredness. Two features of that do the work in your paper: the Real is ineffable, so no tradition's description of it is literally true of it; and the test of authenticity is ethical and soteriological rather than doctrinal. Once stated that sharply, the hypothesis makes predictions about the Dalai Lama's position that can actually be checked. Write the hypothesis out in your own words once, early, and refer back to that statement rather than restating it.

The crux is whether Buddhism as the Dalai Lama presents it can be redescribed as a response to Hick's Real without losing what makes it Buddhism. Core doctrine — non-self, dependent origination, the absence of a creator deity, nirvana as cessation rather than union — is not obviously a culturally conditioned image of a divine reality, and it is not clear the two-truths distinction between conventional and ultimate maps onto Hick's noumenal-phenomenal split, however similar they look at first glance. The Dalai Lama also tends to affirm religious diversity in a practical register — different traditions suit different dispositions and all cultivate compassion — which is a weaker claim than Hick's metaphysical one. Deciding whether that difference is a detail or a refutation is where your thesis lives. Whichever way you decide, the decision has to be argued from the texts rather than asserted as obvious.

The required format tells you the objection is a graded section, not a courtesy. Thesis, Argument, Objection(s), Response(s), Conclusion means you must construct the strongest case against your own position and then answer it — and a strawman here is visible immediately. Useful material is available either way. If you argue Hick's framework fits, the standing objection is that a pluralism which rules out traditions promoting hatred and violence has after all imposed a single standard of legitimacy, which is the difficulty critics press hardest. If you argue it does not fit, the objection is that you have read the Dalai Lama's doctrinal statements literally where Hick's whole point is that no such statement is literally true of the Real. Pick the objection you find hardest to answer, not the one you have already answered.

Two mechanical requirements are easy to lose sight of and both are explicit. The paper is 1,200–1,500 words, which is tight for a five-part structure — roughly 250 words a section — so the summarising impulse has to be resisted from the first sentence. And citation is **MLA**, not APA, which catches students whose other courses have trained the opposite habit. The brief also asks for *substantial engagement and specific references to both* texts, so quoting the Dalai Lama interview and Hick's article directly, rather than paraphrasing from a summary, is a stated requirement rather than a stylistic preference. The permission to disagree with Hick and even to role-play does not soften the demand for a defended thesis. Check the word count before the objection is drafted, because that is the section a long summary strangles.