The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (660 page)

Dialogue
.

Religions historically have been traditional discriminators within humanity, sacralizing identity by force of doctrine and culture, and establishing (indeed, being) systems for the protection and transmission of highly valued, non-negotiable information.
But in recent decades ‘dialogue’ has come to be a word in frequent currency among theologians—not the Socratic-style dialogue which assumed and sought the single thread of reason and logic, but a much more perplexing engagement with the authority and interrelation of truth-systems claiming disparate, if not rival, sanction in and by the transcendent.
The Vatican Secretariat for Non-Christian Religions, the Unit on Witness and Dialogue of the World Council of Churches, and the Committee for Relations with People of Other Faiths of the British Council of Churches, have published studies in the theology of dialogue and guidelines for relations with other faiths and with the ethnic groups which hold them. Observers from other faiths, firmly excluded from the 1961 Assembly of the World Council of Churches, were officially invited and welcomed at its 1983 Assembly in Vancouver.

 
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Diamond Cutter
:

see
DIAMOND S
TRA
.

 
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Diamond Ma
ala
:

see
TAIZO-KAI MANDARA
;
SHINGON
.

 
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Diamond S
tra
.

A short Buddhist text from the corpus of the ‘
Perfection
of Wisdom’ (
prajñ
p
ramit
) literature which compresses the essential teachings into a few short stanzas. Composed around 300 CE, it was translated into Tibetan and Chinese and has remained immensely popular as a summary of the doctrine of ‘emptiness’ (
nyat
) or ‘voidness’ which lies at the heart of the Perfection of Wisdom writings. The full title of the text is ‘The Diamond-Cutter Perfection of Wisdom Sutra’ (
Vajracchedika-prajñ
p
ramit
-s
tra
), and, as its name suggests, it is thought to have the power to cut through ignorance like a diamond for those who study and reflect upon its profound meaning.