I, for one, want more homosexual agenda in my science fiction. Also, I want some Marxist-Leninist, atheist futures where humans aren't better than robots because of some ineffable spark of blah. Humanity--bah humbug!
In all seriousness (well, I wasn't entirely joking in that mini-manifesto above), I didn't love this story because it felt too familiar: as has been pointed out, the Zen Buddhist aliens aren't particularly alien. There were a few gestures towards foreignness here and there--a metaphor about wateriness, a Zen koan about fixing your shape, the stable and shifting gardens. But it felt a bit too much like "man learning Eastern wisdom" (although it makes me wonder how basic and widespread the monastery structure would be in a multi-alien universe).
As for the "forbidden love" angle, I'm serious when I say I don't mind didacticism in my fiction; I take very seriously--well, I take everything seriously, but I like Keynes commentary on how absence of theory usually means adherence to some previous, unarticulated theory. Or in the case of sexuality, a heterosexual character would merely be articulating a different theory of sexuality.
(I'm particularly sensitive to any attempt to institutionalize X as normal because I'm a science fiction fan; so when people talk about sex, race, orientation, or genre, I like to point out that male, white, heterosexual, and mimetic/literary are all specifics, not universals against which to judge the others, "abnormal" settings. This is also a huge issue in 1950s novels by African-Americans, whose work often tries to paint the particularities of black experience as a part of the whole of America, not a deviation from some standard white story.)
That said, I also felt that the "forbidden love" angle was a little too familiar; and Damo's conversion from disgust to acceptance happened a little too quickly. I was just listening to an early Writing Excuses episode, where they discussed mixing familiar with strange, so that may have influenced this criticism that the two major pieces of this story (shapeshifting aliens, forbidden love) felt too familiar. Still, any story that causes discussion can't be all bad.