After careful thought, I have decided, like the Prime Minister, that I have no time in my busy schedule to meet Jetsun Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso, aka His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama.

This may be my loss. When Tony Abbott saw the bouncy bonze on Tuesday he announced that their meeting had been "good and constructive". He had gained "an added consciousness of the importance of the spiritual dimension to life", he said, without a hint of irony.

Makes you feel all warm and runny inside, that does. Perhaps they discussed homosexuality, where their views happily coincide, one mad monk to another. His Holiness regards gay or lesbian sex as a sin, and even masturbation - or "use of the hand", as he coyly puts it - is "sexual misconduct''. And oral sex, too. And gay marriage. Also bad.

The starry-eyed idealists who believe the Dalai Lama to be goodness incarnate must be unaware of this puritanical streak. His Holiness swans around the world on a cloud of adulation, much of it generated by an uncritical Western media.

Journalists who would not hesitate to take a stick to the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury for their failings report the Dalai Lama's giggly banalities with all the fawning solemnity of truth revealed. There is a curious notion in the West that Asian religions in general, and Tibetan Buddhism in particular, have reached an ethereal plane of spiritual perfection beyond the reach of the rest of us.

Yet some of his stuff is just plain barmy. Reincarnation is as silly as it gets. After the Hollywood tough guy Steven Seagal forked out a whopping donation, the Dalai Lama discovered that he had once been a 17th-century Buddhist master named Chungdrag Dorje. The actor, famed for his on-screen violence, was therefore a "tulku", or sacred vessel. Hollywood loves guru-babble. Richard Gere, Sharon Stone and Goldie Hawn are also devotees.

Silliness is one thing. Nastiness is another. The so-called apostle of kindness has been ruthless in crushing a rival Tibetan Buddhist sect known as Dorje Shugden, expelling its monks from monasteries and ostracising or exiling its adherents.

And it is almost forgotten now, but about 20 years ago he accepted more than $2 million in donations from the Japanese terrorist Shoko Asahara, leader of the Aum doomsday cult, who thereafter murdered 11 people and poisoned thousands more by releasing sarin nerve gas in a Tokyo subway.

So I don't think Julia Gillard missed a lot of spiritual uplift. Until corrected at a press conference, the old nutter thought that she was a he.

Mike Carlton