What was the Dalai Lama doing for two days among free-marketeers and capitalist-roaders at a fabled conservative think tank?

For a moment, when I read Danielle Pletka’s e-mail, I wondered if it might be a joke. Pletka, vice president of the conservative Washington, D.C., think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, was writing to inquire whether “Vanity Fair would like to spend some quality time with His Holiness the Dalai Lama”. He, she went on, was going to be at A.E.I. for two days as its guest. He would be speaking there at a conference on “happiness, free enterprise, and human flourishing” at a private lunch and at several invitation-only discussion panels. I would be welcome to attend all of it, and could also expect an exclusive interview with him.

I had first met Pletka 12 years ago, when A.E.I., seen then as the intellectual command post of the neoconservative campaign for regime change in Iraq, welcomed another visitor from the East: Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress, the purveyor of “intelligence” about Saddam Hussein that would later turn out to be bogus. The shift in emphasis seemed marked. It was always apparent that fulfilling Chalabi’s ambitions was likely to require a war. The maroon robes of His Holiness, Tibetan Buddhism’s spiritual leader and a lifelong advocate of nonviolence, are cut from very different cloth.

However, perhaps the most surprising thing about the Dalai Lama’s sojourn at the A.E.I., which took place at its downtown 17th Street headquarters on February 19 and 20, was that the relationship between spiritual leader and think tank began at his behest, not A.E.I.’s. In the very days last autumn, as Congressional Republicans were charging down the political blind alley of the government shutdown, Pletka and A.E.I.’s president, Arthur Brooks, were meditating with His Holiness at his base in Dharmsala, India, in the Himalayas. They were there at his invitation, which had been conveyed through mutual contacts at Radio Free Asia, the U.S.-government-funded broadcaster.

There was something, it seemed, about the A.E.I.’s message under Brooks’s leadership that had prompted the Dalai Lama to reach out. Part of it, I later learned, was Brooks’s assertion that the ultimate goal of public policy should be to maximize human happiness, not material wealth. Indeed, the title of one of Brooks’s books, published in 2008, is Gross National Happiness—a phrase that is also employed as the official metric of prosperity espoused by the rulers of the Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan.

Meanwhile, Brooks has been spending a lot of time trying to develop what George W. Bush once termed “compassionate conservatism.” Brooks believes that the only way the American right can regain both moral stature and political energy is to prove itself more effective at eliminating poverty than the left has been. Conservatives, he says, need to be able to go to bed each night knowing they did something that day to help the poor.

It need hardly be said that compassion has always been the human quality preached most insistently by His Holiness. It extends even to the people of China, which has occupied his country, often brutally, since 1951. To illustrate the point, he likes to recall a conversation he had with a monk who had been a political prisoner in a Chinese labor camp for 18 years, and told how this had exposed him to danger—not physical peril, but “the danger of losing my compassion for the Chinese.”

“Strictly speaking, I am socialist,” he told me in our interview, “so I am leftist. Some people say, this organization [the A.E.I.], is more rightist.” But that did not preclude a dialogue: “I have a very good impression [of Brooks], so therefore I accept his invitation. I felt, rightist also human being . . . Their main purpose is how to build happy society. So it doesn’t matter.”