Hello Dalai

After waiting over ten years for permission to visit the United States--a decadehangingon the intricacies of U.S.-China relations--His Holiness the fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet came to the U.S. this fall, completing a 49-day tour of the country last week with a three-day visit to Harvard.

The 44-year-old Buddhist monk's reception here was typical of the enthusiasm that followed him throughout the country. His address on "The Nature of Self" at Sanders Theater last Wednesday drew a crowd of over 1500, and the waiting list for tickets stretched into the hundreds. Over 200 graduate students and faculty members filled his seminar on "Buddhism and Society" given at the Divinity School the next day, and requests for interviews, audiences and autographs innundated him until he left Saturday afternoon for his home in exile in northern India.

When he arrived in New York seven weeks ago, expatriate Tibetan Buddhists, American devotees and interested followers thronged the airport to chant greetings to the Dalai Lama. Through weeks of appearances and talks in eleven cities, innumerable colleges, Buddhist centers and public forums, his welcome remained strong. And although he came to Harvard at the invitation of the Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR), the Dalai Lama's significance as a religious leader here and elsewhere seems to be more than simply academic.

For centuries the Dalai Lama was the god-king of Tibet, spiritual and temporal ruler of an enigmatic Asain civilization hidden among the Himalayas. Today the Dalai Lama remains a spiritual leader for millions of followers of Tibetan Buddhism across the world. But since Communist China took over Tibet twenty years ago, he has become a controversial political figure as well.

From a Western point of view, the Dalai Lama is a deposed king, an exiled leader of the world's last theocracy. Tibet, ringed by the highest mountains on earth, suspended midway between the imposing civilization of India and China, was for hundreds of years a land of mystery, effectively keeping out intruders. In the early 1950s, however, China began to push for the annexation of Tibet. The current Dalai Lama, then 15 years old, was still undergoing monastic training as successor to the previous Dalai Lama and had not yet assumed leadership of the country. After consulting with the state oracle, however, the Tibetans made him head of state to better defend the nation. On a visit to China soon after his inauguration, he was seized, virtually imprisoned, and coerced into signing a treaty giving control of Tibet to China. The treaty supposedly allowed Tibet to retain its cultural autonomy.

In 1959, after almost ten years of pressure, China marched in and declared Tibet a Chinese territory. The Dalai Lama and about 100,000 Tibetans managed to escape. Since then the exiled leader and roughly 70,000 Tibetans have been living in Dharamsala, India, trying to preserve Tibetan culture and liberate their country from the Chinese.

"Culture is something that belongs to the whole world," the Dalai Lama said at this last American press conference here Friday. "Tibetan culture, I feel, is helpful in terms of helping one live daily life," he said, "so I work to sustain it." He added that Tibetans everywhere have been working to preserve their "distinctive culture."

From all reports that surfaced prior to 1959, Tibetan civilization was indeed unique. Occasionally enterprising Westerners who had made it past the Himalayas returned to the Occident telling tales of an amazing land of miracles, where the religious rituals, customs and supernatural occurences were equaled in strangeness only by the pervasive sense of peace and happiness that seemed to suffuse the country's inhabitants.

James Hilton, the author of Lost Horizons, modeled his apocryphal land of "Shangri-la" after Tibet. Heinrich Harrer, a European mountaineer who served as tutor to the Dalai Lama during the 40s, wrote in wonder of a land where one quarter of the adult population were monks or nuns. In his travels through Tibet. Harrer noted that there were no public inns. Tibetans opened their homes to all travelers, he wrote, as if grateful for the opportunity to serve. Harrer encountered niches of subtropical vegetation growing amidst snow-covered montains, monasteries built upon seemingly inaccessible cliffs, and mediums who, in trance, bent swords with their minds alone. Perhaps most significant, however, was his observation that Tibet had no police force, and no standing army.

Although pre-communist Tibet closely approximated a feudal society, with the majority of the population serving as herders or farmers while the lamas, or monks, reigned as the nobility, anyone was free at any time to become a lama. The monasteries provided spirtual education and organized the administrative aspects of government, while the rest of the Tibetans lived mostly in villages, owned their own means of lievelihood, and above all, practiced Tibetan Buddhism.

Buddhism arrived in Tibet during the 7th century A.D. Over the following centuries it merged with many of the shamanistic practices of the native Bon religion to become a somewhat more mystical brand of Buddhism than that practiced in either India or China. A combination of the Theravada, Tantric, and Mahayana achools, modern Tibetan Buddhism blends the idea of seeking personal liberation from the material world through spiritual enlightenment and "magical" techniques with the supreme importance of helping others along the path toward enlightenment in this world.

"Selflessness, switching self and others," is the goal of Tibetan monks in the world, the Dalai Lama said at the Divinity school last Thursday. The emphasis is on helping others find their own way, he added.

The true Tibetan Buddhist monk need not wear maroon robes nor even be Tibetan, the Dalai Lama stressed. The external aspects of religion--the rituals and customs, the surface manifestations-- are peripheral from the true religious standpoint. "The emphasis is on essence," he said repeatedly during his visit. "All religions are basically the same," he added, "we are all seeking to grow spiritually."

According to Tibetan Buddhist belief, the material world is a school through which all souls pass in order to learn the spiritual lessons of sympathy for human suffering, patience, humility, and love. Death, they feel, is simply a release from the illusion of the material world. They believe in each life the soul within its body acts on the environment for a limited time, until, like a lightbulb, the body burns out, allowing the soul, or electricity to flow on. This soul is born again and again in material form, until it has learned all the lessons of the earth. Then it becomes a Buddha, a pure spark of compassion, love, and joy. The cycle of reincarnation completed, the Buddha is free to return to the universal energy source--God, or the Void-- to enjoy the eternal bliss of Nirvana.

Tibetan Buddhists feel that throughout history many souls who approach Nirvana decide to return to earth to help others in times of need. A person who turns down Nirvana to help others is called a Bodhisattva. To Tibetans. His Holiness the Dalai Lama is just such a Bodhisattva. Tibetans consider him a "living Buddha," the fourteenth consecutive incarnation of Avalokita, "spirit of infinite compassion."

Sometime during his first incarnation as leader of Tibet in the late 1500s, the Dalai Lama came to a momentous decision. For the sake of Tibet, he decided to reincarnate life after life in the same human niche, as leader of his country, to preserve its spiritual welfare. Each lifetime, before he dies, the Dalai Lama gives several clues as to where his soul will next be born.

When the last Dalai Lama died in 1933, after predicting the future destruction of Tibet, he left no clues. According to custom, however, attendants placed his body in a shrine facing south. Within several days, cloud formations appeared over the northeastern end of the city. A giant star-shaped fungus grew overnight on a pillar in the northeast corner of the Dalai Lama's room. And, several days after his death, the head of the deceased ruler had turned from facing south to facing towards the northeast.

Two years later, a lama in the National Assembly received a vision of a house with blue tiles, twisted drainpipes, and a spotted dog. Immediately, thousands of lamas went into prolonged meditation to seek further direction. Soon after, the same lama saw several symbols identifying the region of Tibet where the house was to be found. Guided by this vision and disguised as merchants, a search party of monks traveled 1000 miles northeast to Amdo, where they were led to a house matching the one seen in the vision.

Upon reaching the house, the monks greeted the owners, a farmer and his wife, and requested some tea. As they sat in the kitchen a two-year-old boy ran into the room and hopped onto a monk's lap. The boy correctly called the disguised traveler "a lama of Sera," and identified two other members of his party as well. The child, named Tenzin Gyatso, spoke to the lamas in the court dialect of Lhasa, unknown to anyone in his district.

According to the lamas and to state tradition, this was still insufficient proof of the child's identity. For a more definitive test, the monks placed several of the deceased Dalai Lama's personal possessions before the boy, along with an equal number of skillfully-wrought replicas. The child chose the right item every time. Finally, the lamas examined the child for the eight birthmarks that reputedly identify the Dalai Lama. From large protruding ears and marks like a tiger's skin on his legs to two vestigal bits of skin on his shoulders representing the third and fouth arms of the Bodhisattva Chenrezi, the child had every mark. The lamas then recognized the boy as the reincarnation of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama and took him back to the capital. At age four and a half, Tenzin Gyatso entered the city and began his training as the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, spiritual and political ruler of Tibet.

Forty years and vast oceans of experience later, the Dalai Lama feels that his mission as a spiritual leader extends beyond Tibet. "As long as there are sentient beings to be liberated from suffering and unhappiness, I will work for the sake of all of them," he said last Thursday. Combining inner meditation with outward service, he embodies the central tenets of Tibet. The practice of kindness, compassion, and love for one's enemies, he says, brings a clear realization of the true nature of reality. "Compassion is something very forceful," he said, adding that it is a potent remedy for dealing with social problems.

Perhaps Tibet's adherence to spiritual goals like loving enemies and avoiding violence helped to make China's vanquishment of Tibet so complete. Along with the thousands of armed batallions that marched into Tibet in 1959 came over five million Chinese "settlers." The Chinese indiscriminately murdered the Tibetans, dismembering and torturing thousands. Monasteries with up to 10,000 inhabitants each were levelled. The invaders forced monks and nuns to copulate and then perform miracles to save themselves. And the Chinese used guns, grenades and missiles on an antiquated country with little more than swords and branches at its disposal for defense. And yet the Tibetans, steeped in centuries of compassion, could not now turn against other men, no matter how barbarous. In the face of imminent destruction, Tibetans returned Chinese fire with passive resistance and an undaunted faith in the justice of circumstance.

"Until the last day, I tried to bring about a peaceful settlement," the exiled Dalai Lama said in his first press conference in 1959. He added that he hoped to help the continuing struggle in Tibet "by means of peaceful solutions rather than military force." Nevertheless, Chinese brutality drove some Tibetans into the mountains to organize guerilla resistance. Their efforts have been futile. Today an occupation army of 300,000 enforces Chinese dictates. Dissentors are publicly executed. Monks who refuse to defrock are interred in labor camps. Between 5000 and 6000 monasteries have been destroyed.

The nation that was Tibet no longer exists. The monasteries are gone, the land belongs to China, and the Tibetans have either been killed or assimilated. And yet, while China may have vanquished the country of Tibet, it cannot kill the Tibetan spirit. Hundreds of thousands of Tibetans throughout the world, as well as adherents of Tibetan Buddhism of all nationalities, still recognize the Dalai Lama as their leader. And many non-Tibetan Buddhists bow down before him as well. He is, perhaps, the world's most powerful living representative of the Asian religious ideal.

At the request of the U.S. State Department, the Dalai Lama de-emphasized politics in this visit to the United States, according to Jan Anderson, media coordinator for His Holiness in this country. Permission for his visit seemed to rest on the recent U.S. recognition of China and the U.S. did not want the sticky question of the status of Tibet to cloud developing Sino-American relations. In this first trip to America, the Dalai Lama said he came to "spread compassion, to teach, and to learn," and spoke in terms of humanity in general, rather than Tibet in particular.

"I call myself a world citizen," the Dalai Lama said at his last press conference Friday. "Tibetans believe there are many worlds, and I am a citizen of this world. As a Buddhist monk, there are no boundaries in my mind, all countries are the same. All people are alike."

It seems somehow fitting that the Dalai Lama's last stop in the United States should have been at the country's oldest university, which the Chinese call the "University of the Laughing Buddha." Carrying with him centuries of Eastern wisdom he expressed his deep gratitude to America for her hospitality, and said the U.S. has a vital spiritual-historical role at this time. Since the U.S. is the world's most materially successful nation, Tibet, a spiritual society and America's opposite image, has a lot to teach. A journalist at the press conference last week asked for a concise statement of his ideas for America. The Dalai Lama meditated briefly, as if drawing on lifetimes of teachings, and said, "Kindness and love--this is my real message." Like the Pope before him he left us with humanity's oldest lesson, and perhaps its hardest.