Dalai Lama

Michael Kunzelman, The Associated Press: Tenzin Priyadarshi, a Buddhist monk with a physics degree, is Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s first Buddhist chaplain.

Tenzin Priyadarshi’s path to becoming a Buddhist monk began when he was just 10 and he ran away from home in pursuit of the recurring ‘vision’ he saw in his dreams of a monastery and an old man.

Tenzin, who grew up in an upper-class Hindu family of intellectuals and bureaucrats, slipped away from his boarding school one morning with the equivalent of $5 in his pocket. He left a note for his parents that he was embarking on a ‘spiritual quest.’

After a 24-hour train ride, he found himself at the foot of a mountain in Rajgir, India. It was at the top of that mountain where he found the very same monastery he had seen in his dreams, he said. He recognized the face of one of the monks who greeted him as the same man he had seen in his vision.

‘This is what in Buddhist terms we call karma,’ he said, adding that his story may sound too fantastic to be true. ‘I have no reason to fabricate it,’ he said.

The monks took him in, not realizing he was a runaway child.

‘Even at that age, I looked like a 35-year-old guy,’ said the 26-year-old, whose large forearms pour out of his monastic robes.

He probably never envisioned the pursuit of Buddhism would lead him to the United States, on the grounds of one of the nation’s elite universities: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is the school’s first Buddhist chaplain.

Many colleges and universities have added Buddhist monks to their roster of chaplains as the religion has grown in the United States. MIT didn’t have one until Tenzin arrived in 2002, while he was completing his graduate work at Harvard Divinity School.

Tenzin’s parents, who knew about his fascination with Buddhism when he ran away, tracked him down eight days later. Although they disapproved of his interest in Buddhism, they agreed to let him split his time between a traditional school and the monastery.

Tenzin never had second thoughts about becoming a monk.

In 1992, he left India to study Buddhism in Nepal and Japan. He enrolled at Syracuse University in 1996 to study physics.

Tenzin isn’t hard to pick out of a crowd at MIT, given his habit of roller-blading across campus with his monastic robes flapping in the wind. But what has most impressed his students and colleagues is his encyclopedic command of a diverse range of subjects.

‘I live to learn,’ said Tenzin, who speaks five languages. ‘I live to study new things.’

He went from being ordained by the Dalai Lama to earning a physics degree, so it makes sense that Tenzin has found a home at MIT, where the scientists who surround him are on a similar path: unlocking the mysteries of the human mind.

‘The methods are different, but the goal is the same,’ he said. ‘They’re both looking at the nature of reality, whether it’s physical or metaphysical.’

Tenzin, whose name in Tibetan means ‘holder of dharma,’ said he believed his religion’s teachings and practices ‘ including meditation ‘ could help students cope with the pressures of attending one of the world’s most prestigious universities.

‘It is visibly the most stressed-out campus in the world,’ he said. ‘I believed I could help ease the suffering in students.’

Robert Randolph, senior associate dean for student life at MIT and a Protestant minister, recruited Tenzin after hearing about him from colleagues at Harvard University.

‘It has paid off wonderfully,’ Randolph said. ‘We wanted to have a religious presence on campus to serve our Buddhist students, but he also has broadened the experience of students who wouldn’t know how to spell ‘Buddhism.”

One percent of college students identify as Buddhist, according to a recent study of college students’ spiritual and religious practices, conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute and funded by the Templeton Foundation. The same study found that Buddhist students had high levels of charitable involvement and religious skepticism and they espoused ecumenical world views.

Tenzin not only teaches and counsels students, he also lives in a campus residence hall, in a studio equipped with a meditation room and a laptop with a high-speed Internet connection.

He started with only three students, who gathered in his room for meditation sessions and a weekly class on basic Buddhist philosophy. His class has since grown to 30 to 40 students, and he has added a forum on contemporary ethical issues called ‘Dharma and Chai.’ Next semester, he said he plans to start teaching a new course, ‘Practice of Contemplation.’

Tenzin said his students know he isn’t there to convert them.

‘It’s a very nonthreatening tradition, and it doesn’t require any conversion,’ he said. ‘Religious conversion is something that has to be done at a deeper level and takes years of time.’

John Essigmann, a professor of chemistry and engineering at MIT, said he saw Tenzin in the dining hall discussing gravitational lensing with a renowned physics professor. The next night, he and a neurophysician were debating theories about meditation’s effects on the brain.

‘All in a seamless conversation, as natural as could be,’ Essigmann said.

Tenzin said his spiritual adviser is the 14th Dalai Lama, who is no stranger to MIT. The exiled monarch of Tibet visited the campus in 2003 to participate in a conference called ‘Investigating the Mind: Exchanges Between Buddhism and the Biobehavioral Sciences on How the Mind Works.’

B. Alan Wallace, a Buddhist scholar who spoke at that conference, said science and Buddhism is a ‘match waiting to be made,’ although there are skeptics on both sides.

‘The very conservative elements on both sides will in all likelihood continue to ignore each other for the foreseeable future,’ he said.

Tenzin said Buddhists have been studying and cultivating the mind for 2,500 years, but he wants to explore ways that science can answer questions that religion cannot.

‘Buddhism goes very well with MIT,’ he said. ‘We both want people to have good reasons for their beliefs.’

Original article no longer available.

Buddha Lessons (Newsweek)

September 26, 2004

Original article no longer available…

Claudia Kalb, Newsweek International: A technique called ‘mindfulness’ teaches how to step back from pain and the worries of life.

At the age of 39, Janet Clarke discovered that she had a benign spinal tumor, which caused her unremitting back pain. Painkillers helped, but it wasn’t until she took a meditation course in Lytham that Clarke discovered a powerful weapon inside her own body: her mind. Using a practice called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), Clarke learned to acknowledge the aching, rather than fight it. “It was about getting in touch with your body, rather than your head,” she says. “Mindfulness gives you something painkillers can’t—an attitude for living your life.”

With its roots in ancient Buddhist traditions, mindfulness is now gaining ground as an antidote for everything from type-A stress to depression. At the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care and Society at the University of Massachusetts, where MBSR was developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn, 15,000 people have taken an eight-week course in the practice; hundreds more have signed up at medical clinics across the United States. Now scientists are using brain imaging and blood tests to study the biological effects of meditation. The research is capturing interest at the highest levels: the Dalai Lama is so intrigued he has joined forces with the Mind & Life Institute in Boulder, Colorado, which supports research on meditation and the mind. Next month, scientists will meet with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India, for a major conference on the neuroplasticity of the brain. “People used to think that this was a lot of mystical mumbo jumbo,” says psychologist Ruth Baer, of the University of Kentucky. “Now they’re saying, ‘Hey, we should start paying attention’.”

Paying attention is the very essence of mindfulness. In 45-minute meditations, participants learn to observe the whirring thoughts of the mind and the physical sensations in the body. The guiding principle is to be present moment to moment, to be aware of what’s happening, but without critique or judgment. It is not easy. Our “monkey mind,” as Buddhists call the internal chaos, keeps us swinging from past regrets to future worries, leaving little time for the here and now. First attempts may provoke frustration (“I’ll never be able to do this”), impatience (“When will this be over?”) and even banal mental sparks (“What am I going to make for dinner?”). The goal, however, is not to reach nirvana, but to observe the cacophony in a compassionate way, to accept it as transient, “like bubbles forming in a pot of water or weather patterns in the sky,” says Kabat-Zinn.

The keystone of mindfulness is daily meditation, but the practice is intended to become a way of life. At Stanford University, Philippe Goldin encourages patients battling social-anxiety disorder to take “meaningful pauses” throughout the day as a way to monitor and take charge of their fears and self-doubts. Inner control can be a potent tool in the fight against all sorts of chronic conditions. In a pilot study of 18 obese women, Jean Kristeller, director of the Center for the Study of Health, Religion and Spirituality at Indiana State University, found that mindfulness meditation, augmented with special eating meditations (slowly savoring the flavor of a piece of cheese, say), helped reduce binges from an average of four per week to one and a half.

Mindfulness takes you out of the same old patterns. You’re no longer battling your mind in the boxer’s ring—you’re watching, with interest, from the stands. The detachment doesn’t lead to passivity, but to new ways of thinking. This is especially helpful in depression, which plagues sufferers with relentless ruminations. University of Toronto psychiatry professor Zindel Segal, along with British colleagues John Teasdale at Oxford and Mark Williams at Cambridge, combines mindfulness with conventional cognitive behavioral therapy, teaching patients to observe sadness or unhappiness without judgment. In a study of patients who had recovered from a depressive episode, Segal and colleagues found that 66 percent of those who learned mindfulness remained stable (no relapse) over a year, compared with 34 percent in a control group.

The biological impact of mindfulness is the next frontier in scientific research. In a study published several years ago, Kabat-Zinn found that when patients with psoriasis listened to meditation tapes during ultraviolet-light therapy, they healed about four times faster than a control group. More recently, Kabat-Zinn and neuroscientist Richard Davidson, of the University of Wisconsin, found that after eight weeks of MBSR, a group of biotech employees showed a greater increase in activity in the left prefrontal cortex—the region of the brain associated with a happier state of mind—than colleagues who received no meditation training. Those with the greatest left-brain activation also mounted the most vigorous antibody assault against a flu vaccine.

There’s more in the pipeline. Stanford’s Goldin is taking brain images to see if mindfulness affects emotional trigger points, like the amygdala, which processes fear. And at the University of Maryland, Dr. Brian Berman is tracking inflammation levels in rheumatoid arthritis patients who study mindfulness. One of them, Dalia Isicoff, says the payoff is already clear: “I’m at peace,” she says. Mind and body, together.

With Clint Witchalls in London

A religion for everyone? (The Scotsman, Edinburgh, Scotland)

May 27, 2004

Original article no longer available…

Stephen McGinty, The Scotsman: The robes are mustard and plum. The glasses are thick as jam-jar bottoms. The head is shaven to a dark, prickly fuzz. The smile can only be described as beatific.

When the Dalai Lama steps out on to the stage of the SECC in Glasgow on Saturday afternoon, the applause generated from 10,000 admirers will match that for U2, Britney Spears or any other previous occupant of the concert hall. Packed in the audience beside the scarlet robed monks of the Tibetan monastery in Eskdalemuir will be plumbers and teachers, office managers and doctors, the young and the old. All believe the path to serenity and happiness lies in the 2,500-year-old teachings of the Buddha, the jolly fat chap with the rotund belly whose effigies in clay or brass are cropping up with increasing regularity in homes across Scotland.

The Dalai Lama, in his first visit to Scotland in more than a decade, will give a lecture entitled Inner Peace, Outer Harmony, advocating the practice of meditation as a means to achieve contentment. Unlike other spiritual beliefs, Buddhists have science on their side, with recent medical research revealing that practitioners of meditation lower their stress levels, heal faster and are freer from anxiety and depression.

So why in this secular age is a spiritual movement that seeks to eradicate the “self” gaining ground? In a time when avarice and greed is epidemic, why is a belief system that targets desire and possessions as the cause of unhappiness drawing hundreds of new followers each year? And, more curiously, how did the Scotland of the Kirk become an international centre for the Karma?

Today, according to the General Register Office for Scotland, there are 6,580 Buddhists in Scotland, a figure that puts the faith on a par with Judaism and Sikhism and ahead of Hinduism, the root from which it first sprang. As Christianity sub-divides into denominations such as Catholic, Baptist and Protestant, so Buddhism in Scotland is divided into Zen, Sri Lankan, Western and the Tibetan practices of the country’s oldest institute, the Samye Ling monastery nestled among the lowlands of the Borders near Eskdalemuir.

According to Professor Perry Schmidt-Leukel, of the department of theology and religious studies at Glasgow University, the popularity of Buddhism in Britain is down, on one level, to its relative novelty in a traditionally Christian country. This, combined with high-profile followers such as Richard Gere and Tina Turner, can make it attractive to those in search of a new spiritual path. But, while many express an interest in Buddhism or attend classes in Buddhist meditation, the faith has a high turnover. “Buddhism has a reputation as an accepting faith,” says Prof Schmidt-Leukel. “But if you study and practise you realise that it is as rigid on matters of sexual practice as any other world religion. It requires commitment, it puts strong limits on your behaviour.”

JOYCE HENDERSON, 42, has always sought answers to the big questions of life. Baptised in the Church of Scotland, she first encountered Buddhism, as so many teenagers do, in the pages of Hermann Hesse’s novel Siddhartha, which tells the story of a search for enlightenment. The death of her brother, William, from cancer when she was just 26 accentuated her questioning. A few years later, while on a Buddhist retreat in Shropshire, she discovered that meditation had greater benefits than prayer. “I feel in Buddhism I’m seeking answers in the right place. I’m sure the same answers can be found in Christianity, but I felt it was in a coded language I couldn’t understand,” she says.

Nicola Nisbet, 19, a student in public art at Falkirk College, encountered Buddhism through her teacher while studying for higher philosophy. She attended her first class in Buddhist meditation in January and on 2 July will become a Mitra – a person who considers themselves a Buddhist – during a short ceremony where she places flowers, a candle and incense by the Buddha’s statue. “I don’t believe there is a god,” said Nicola. “But Buddhism will help me to be a better person while I am here and I want to find peace within myself.”

Buddhism’s hip appeal is broached in Anne Donovan’s novel, Buddha Da, in which Jimmy, a Glaswegian painter and decorator, goes in search of enlightenment. Although not a Buddhist herself, Donovan has taken classes in meditation and will be attending the Dalai Lama’s talk this weekend. “I have a great respect for the culture and spirt of Buddhism and meditation. Anything that encourages people to slow down their busy lives and appreciate the now can only be helpful.”

Scotland’s first brush with Buddhism came in 1967, when Samye Ling, the first Tibetan Buddhist centre in the West, was established by two Tibetan rinpoches or “precious ones”. The pair had fled Chinese-occupied Tibet in 1959, and were attracted by the location’s serene surroundings. For the next 25 years, the community gathered lay students of Buddhism and supported only a handful of monks and nuns. In 1992, the centre was animated by the arrival of a new abbot, Lama Yeshe, the brother of the original founder. One young monk described him as “the rock’n’roll rebel of institutionalised religion”.

UNLIKE THE vast majority of Tibetan monks who enter holy orders as children, Lama Yeshe had experienced life in all its western decadence. Although born in Tibet and raised in a monastery, he fled to India at the age of 15 and spent his 20s in America, where he rode a motorcycle, had a string of girlfriends and developed a passion for Hendrix. Drawn back to his faith, he took his vows aged 30.

When Lama Yeshe arrived at Samye Ling he set about making it more accessible to western minds. Instead of taking vows for life, he introduced a probationary scheme, an unprecedented move in Tibetan Buddhism. He was accessible to the media and turned the monastery into an international destination for courses and seminars for those interested in all aspects of Tibetan life. Last year saw the fruition of his Holy Island project – when the retreat centre for world peace was finally opened.

In Glasgow during the early 1970s, just as Samye Ling was becoming established, a group of young Scots, infused by the vibe of the times, were experimenting with meditation. Sangharakshita, a Buddhist teacher of the Western Buddhist Order, lent his services and a centre was established. For the last 25 years the Glasgow Buddhist Centre has been based up a tenement close on Sauchiehall Street, bringing a stillness of mind and clarity of thought to a generation of curious Scots.

The current director is Viryadevi, formerly Maggie Graeber, a 51-year-old former music teacher. Each morning at 7am she sits before a Buddha figure and lights a candle to signify the light of wisdom, looks at the flowers to remind her of the impermanence of all things and breathes in incense that represents the spirit. She then meditates for 40 to 60 minutes. Today the centre has 60 Mitras, while four times this number attend meditation classes.

“The appeal of Buddhism, for me, was that it was not necessary to take on a set of beliefs,” explains Devi. “Buddhism taught me in practicable terms how to be kind to myself and to other people. Other people may be drawn because there is a distrust of organised religion, which is a pity because all religions have to be organised. For me there is depth to Buddhism, but it is also very practical.”

• Tickets for the Dalai Lama’s talks on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday at the SECC are priced at £20 per day and available from the SECC box office on 0870 040 4000

On a mission (The Oberver, UK)

May 23, 2004

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Ed Douglas, The Guardian: As the exiled leader of Tibet flies into Britain, supporters detect a fresh urgency in his pleas for an end to Chinese oppression. At 68, the Buddhist monk knows his people’s hopes live or die with him.

y the time the Apache leader Geronimo surrendered in 1886, stifling the last gasp of native American resistance, ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody had been touring for three years with the Wild West Show, selling a version of the world he helped destroy.

Something similar happened in the old Tibetan capital of Lhasa this month. Visitors to the Jokhang temple, the spiritual centre of the country and its religion, reported that the Chinese authorities had installed metal barricades across the inner temple’s entrance to make sure that tourists can no longer sneak in without paying.

The irony won’t be lost on Tenzin Gyatso, once the most important inhabitant of Lhasa but now a longstanding exile in India and better known as the Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of Tibet and of the Tibetan Buddhist diaspora.

Just as Buffalo Bill cashed in on a disappearing world, the Chinese have created a Tibetan Wild West Show. The Dalai Lama may be in charge of a ‘splittist clique’, but Lhasa’s temples and his former homes – and all that they represent – are a superb business opportunity.

His Holiness wouldn’t recognise much else of his old home town. For at least a decade it has had more in common with a generic modern Chinese city than the ancient capital of a wholly different culture. More recently, the city’s authorities have acknowledged what had long been known; more Chinese now live there than Tibetans.

That he wants to return is undisputed. The Dalai Lama arrives in Britain for the first time in five years this week, on his never-ending tour to drum up political and popular support for his people’s cause. In their struggle to achieve some level of self-determination in the face of China’s 54 years of occupation, the 68-year-old monk remains by far their most powerful asset. He himself fled Lhasa in 1959, despairing at the broken promises of the Chinese, his dramatic escape fixing his plight in the world’s eye ever since. The democratically elected Prime Minister of Tibet’s government-in-exile, Samdhong Rinpoche, is also in London next week, lecturing at the International Society of Ecology and Culture. But everyone knows who the real draw is.

The Dalai Lama has his critics. Rupert Murdoch told Vanity Fair in 1999: ‘I have heard cynics who say he’s a very political old monk shuffling around in Gucci shoes.’ Given Murdoch’s ambitions in China, the put-down was laughable. The Dalai Lama doesn’t wear Gucci shoes, not even metaphorically, and to describe him as a political monk is like asking whether the Pope is a Catholic. Holding the future of millions of his fellow countrymen in his hands, what choice does he have? If anything, some critics argue, he has proved not political enough.

But there was a whiff of a more serious charge in Murdoch’s charmless sniping. The Dalai Lama is not as thoughtful as he might be about his public profile. And his willingness to meet pretty much anyone who asks can leave the public with the impression, however unfair, that he likes hanging out with movie stars. Christopher Hitchens has said that he heads ‘a Hollywood cult that almost exceeds the power of Scientology’.

Some of the celebrities devoted to the cause of Tibet have a long-standing commitment, like the glamorous Joanna Lumley, whose grandfather was a trade agent in the Tibetan town of Gyantse, close to the Indian border, and a friend to the Dalai Lama’s previous incarnation. As Kate Saunders, the Tibet specialist and a friend of Lumley, puts it: ‘People like Joanna can be very useful to the Tibetan cause. She has access to the right people, is friends with politicians and can raise a lot of money.’

Others, you feel, have a less than firm grip on what his life’s work means. Sharon Stone, barefoot and with a boa draped across her shoulders, invited the audience at an event in Los Angeles to applaud ‘the hardest-working man in spirituality … Mr “Please, please let me back into China!”‘ Or even Tibet.

The Dalai Lama’s secretariat, at times naïve, at times frustrated by their leader’s openness, hasn’t always picked the right openings for him to spread the message. He suffered particularly at the hands of CNN host Larry King, who introduced him on his Millennium Special , ‘as a leading Muslim’ – not a mistake Larry would make now – and then, six months later, conducted an interview which made the Tibetan leader appear incomprehensible.

Martin Scorsese’s film Kundun, which the Dalai Lama saw and admired, went some way to explaining that beneath the National Geographic glitz of Tibetan culture is a country with a gritty political history. But it is difficult for Westerners to get past the ineffable exoticism of the Dalai Lama’s childhood.

He was born Lhamo Thondup, the fourth son and fifth child to survive of Choekyong Tsering, a farmer from a small village called Takster in north-eastern Tibet in the former province of Amdo. Amdo has been swallowed up into the modern Chinese province of Xining. The boundaries of the Tibet Autonomous Region are often confused with historical Tibet. In fact, the TAR is a fraction of the old territory. Takster is, unsurprisingly, off limits to tourists.

Tibetan agriculture – and society – was largely feudal but the family worked for themselves, leasing a small parcel of land and growing barley, potatoes and buckwheat as well as keeping a herd of yaks, sheep and goats.

This life was interrupted by the arrival of monks from Lhasa. Through clues left by his predecessor, they identified the child as the fourteenth Dalai Lama. The family moved to Lhasa and while the young lama began his training, the family became involved in Tibetan political life. His mother was adored, but his father became embroiled in the internecine bickering which hamstrung any chance the Tibetans had of resisting the Chinese. The Dalai Lama’s brother, Gyalo Thondup, told the writer Mary Craig that he was convinced his father was murdered to get rid of a political nuisance.

From a young age, the Dalai Lama has been mesmerising in the flesh. After attending his enthronement in 1940, British diplomat Basil Gould said he had ‘never seen anybody assume more complete and natural control of great assemblies’. That ability has only deepened with the passing years. He can hold a crowd of agnostic Westerners in the palm of his hand despite simple English, but he is most impressive with his own people. Speaking Tibetan, his voice seems to possess a more serious tone.

When Mao heard that the Dalai Lama had fled Lhasa in 1959 in the face of rising tension with his Chinese overlords, the Great Helmsman is reported to have said: ‘In that case we have lost the battle.’

If his leadership is totemic, it hasn’t always been politically astute. Many believe the Tibetans missed an opportunity in the 1980s to take advantage of a thaw in relations when Deng Xiaoping invited exiled Tibetans to return home. In 1989, His Holiness declined an invitation to attend the funeral of the Panchen Lama – effectively the second-most important spiritual leader in Tibetan Buddhism. The Tibet scholar Tom Grunfeld described it as ‘probably the gravest error of his political life’.

The 1990s were a lost decade, but his government in exile seems to have learned from its mistakes. Discussions have resumed with the Chinese, and there is cautious optimism that these may lead towards some kind of settlement. His special envoy, Washington-based Lodi Gyari, is an astute lobbyist in Washington – the Dalai Lama met President Bush in 2001 – but some are concerned he is not sufficiently on the wavelength of the current Chinese leadership.

There is also the suspicion that all the Chinese have to do is wait until the Dalai Lama dies. Even if the discovery of the next Dalai Lama proves uncontroversial, it would be decades before he became a political force, by which time the idea of Tibetan autonomy will have lost impetus. His Holiness seems aware of these dangers, saying that his administration must now ‘turn its face to China’ for a solution and putting his foot on the diplomatic gas pedal. Luckily for Tibet, the Dalai Lama is in rude health.

His acknowledgement of Western advances – he always advises the sick to use whatever medicine will work – and his deep spirituality put the Dalai Lama at an interesting crossroads. His ideas about compassion strike a chord in the West but he is equally forthright on the damage consumerism and sexual freedom can inflict on individuals. Not attitudes, you feel, that would go down well in mainstream America.

He feels strongly about the environment and the damage inflicted on it. ‘An environment that is full of life is much better, much more attractive. Forests without animals or birds, bad. Without trees, even worse,’ he has said. Given the environmental price China is paying for its economic growth, he has a point.

Those of his people still in Tibet will continue to be second-class citizens in their own land. More or less, urban Tibet is now Chinese and making economic progress, while rural Tibet remains as it was, without health care or education.

Meanwhile, Tibet’s natural resources are beintrucked east. Soon a railway between Chengdu and Lhasa will open and the process will accelerate. Critics of the Dalai Lama say the old system in Tibet was backward and oppressive. But both communism and Chinese consumerism have plunged the people of Tibet into a morass of corruption and indifference.

With the Beijing Olympics on the horizon, perhaps the Chinese will see the merits of letting the hardest-working man in spirituality come home.

Dalai Lama

DoB: 6 July 1935 (Takster, Tibet)
AKA: Tenzin Gyatso, Lhamo Thondup, Ocean of Wisdom (a translation of Dalai Lama), Yeshin Norbu (Wish-Fulfilling Dream), Kundun (the Presence)
Jobs: Exiled head of state of Tibet, Buddhist leader

The Pursuit of Happiness (CBC News)

April 23, 2004

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Eve Savory, CBC, Canada: Erin Gammel is a shoo-in for the Canadian Olympic swim team. Canadian record holder, champion backstroker – unless something wildly unexpected happens, she’s going to Athens.

But four years ago she was a sure bet for the Sydney Olympics, too.

“Everyone kept telling me you’re a shoo-in,” she says. “And we had the strategy and everything was perfect. And I thought this is it, I’m going to the Olympics.”

She was racing at the Olympic trials in Montreal. She hit the lane rope, lost her concentration and lost her place on the team.

“It was just extremely disappointing. I was depressed. I was just really sad. I was crying and I couldn’t control myself,” Gammel says.

Erin Gammel cried for two years. Help was to come in a way she would never have dreamed, from Dharamsala in Northern India, 5,000 kilometres and cultural eons away…

Dharamsala is the home in exile to thousands of Tibetans who followed the Dalai Lama, after China occupied Tibet.

For 25 centuries Tibetan Buddhists have practised and refined their exploration. For generations they probed their inner space with the same commitment with which western science explored the external world and outer space. The two inhabited separate worlds.

But now, they are finding common ground in a remarkable collaboration.

In March 2000, a select group of scientists and scholars journeyed to Dharamsala. They came to share insights and solutions – to human distress and suffering.

Among them was Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist from the University of Wisconsin. He finds nothing contradictory about doing science with Buddhists.

“There is almost a scientific-like attitude that is exemplified by Buddhist practitioners in investigating their own mind,” he says. “Their mind is the landscape of their own experimentation, if you will.”

The westerners had been invited by the Dalai Lama himself to his private quarters.

For five days, monks and scientists dissected what they call “negative emotions” – sadness, anxiety jealousy craving, rage – and their potential to destroy.

One of the participants, Daniel Goleman, author of the book Destructive Emotions, says, “As we were leaving the U.S. to come here the headline was a six-year-old who had a fight with a classmate and the next day he came back with a gun and shot and killed her. It’s very sad.”

Why would the scientists seek answers in Tibetan Buddhism?

Because its rigorous meditative practices seem to have given the monks an extraordinary resilience, an ability to bounce back from the bad things that happen in life, and cultivate contentment.

Richard Davidson’s lab is one of the world’s most advanced for looking inside a living brain. He’s recently been awarded an unprecedented $15-million (Cdn) grant to study, among other things, what happens inside a meditating mind.

“Meditation is a set of practices that have been around for more than 2,500 years, whose principal goal is to cultivate these positive human qualities, to promote flourishing and resilience. And so we think that it deserves to be studied with the modern tools of science,” Davidson says.

A little over a year later, in May 2001, the Dalai Lama returned the visit to Davidson’s lab in Madison, Wis.

His prize subjects – and collaborators – are the Dalai Lama’s lamas, the monks.

“The monks, we believe, are the Olympic athletes of certain kinds of mental training,” Davidson says. “These are individuals who have spent years in practice. To recruit individuals who have undergone more than 10,000 hours of training of their mind is not an easy task and there aren’t that many of these individuals on the planet.”

The Dalai Lama has said were he not a monk, he would be an engineer.

He brings that sensibility – the curiosity and intellectual discipline – to the discussion on EEGs and functional MRIs.

But this isn’t really about machines.

And it isn’t about nirvana.

It’s about down-to-earth life: about the distress of ordinary people – and a saner world.

“The human and economic cost of psychiatric disorder in western industrialized countries is dramatic,” says Davidson. “And to the extent that cultivating happiness reduces that suffering, it is fundamentally important.”

The monk and the scientist are investigating – together – the Art of Happiness.

“Rather than thinking about qualities like happiness as a trait,” Davidson says, “we should think about them as a skill, not unlike a motor skill, like bicycle riding or skiing. These are skills that can be trained. I think it is just unambiguously the case that happiness is not a luxury for our culture but it is a necessity.”

But we believe we can buy happinessï¿½if we just had the money. That’s what the ad industry tells us. And we think it’s true.

People’s theories about what will make them happy often are wrong. And so there’s a lot of work these days that shows, for example, that winning the lottery will transiently elevate your happiness but it will not persist.

There’s some evidence that our temperament is more or less set from birth. So and so is a gloomy Gusï¿½someone else is a ray of sunshine – that sort of thing.

Even when wonderful or terrible things happen, most of us, eventually, will return to that emotional set-point.

But, Davidson believes, that set point can be moved.

“Our work has been fundamentally focused on what the brain mechanisms are that underlie these emotional qualities and how these brain mechanisms might change as a consequence of certain kinds of training,” Davidson says.

His work could not have been done 20 years ago. “In fact, 20 years ago, we had dreams of methods that allows you to interrogate the brain in this way, but we had no tools to do it.”

Now that we have the tools we can see that as our emotions ebb and flow, so do brain chemistry and blood flow. Fear, depression, love ï¿½ they all get different parts of our brain working.

Happiness and enthusiasm, and joy – they show up as increased activity on the left side near the front of the cortex. Anxiety, sadness – on the right.

Davidson has found this pattern in infants as young as 10 months, in toddlers, teens and adults.

Davidson tested more than 150 ordinary people to see what parts of their brains were most active.

Some were a little more active on the left. Some were a little more active on the right.

A few were quite far to the right. They would probably be called depressed. Others were quite far to the left, the sort of people who feel “life is great.”

So there was a range. Then Davidson tested a monk.

He was so far to the left he was right off the curve. That was one happy monk.

“And this is rather dramatic evidence that there’s something really different about his brain compared with the brains of these other 150 people. This is tantalizing evidence that these practices may indeed be promoting beneficial changes in the brain.”

Here, the Olympic athletes of meditation meet the Cadillac of brain scanners.

Khachab Rinpoche, a monk from Asia, came to Madison to meditate in perhaps the strangest place in his life: the functional MRI.

It let’s scientists watch what happens inside his brain when he switches between different types of meditation.

They want to know how his brain may differ from ordinary people, and whether that change is related to the inner contentment the monks report.

So they test how subjects react to unpleasant sounds and images flashed into the goggles they wear in the MRI.

Normally when we’re threatened one part of the brain is tremendously active, but in the monks, “the responsivity of this area is specifically decreased during this meditation in response to these very intense auditory simuli that convey strong emotions,” Davidson says.

It’s very preliminary work, but the implication may be that the lamas are able to move right through distressing events that overwhelm the rest of us – in other words, one of the keys to their happiness.

It may tell us something about our potential. “Our brains are adaptable, our brains are not fixed. The wiring in our brains is not fixed. Who we are today is not necessarily who we have to end up being,” Davidson says.

Tibetan Buddhism is said to be one of the most demanding mental endeavours on the planet. It takes 10,000 hours of meditation and years in retreat to become adept. Few of us can imagine such a commitment.

But that doesn’t mean the benefits of meditation are out of our reach.

Zindal Segal is a psychologist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto. He uses meditation to treat mood disorders.

It’s based on Buddhist teachings and its called mindfulness.

Michael Herman, senior partner with the law firm of Goodman and Goodman, meditates in his office.

“Very few of us can sit for 10,000 hours to be able to do this but the interesting thing is that we don’t need to. These capacities are available to all of us,” Segal says. ” We’re talking about paying attention, we’re talking about returning wherever our minds are to this present moment. These are things that we all have. We don’t have to earn them, we just have to find a way of clearing away the clutter to see that they are already there.”

Meditation is now out of the closet. The word is, it eases stress, drops blood pressure, helps put that bad day at the office in perspective.

Meditation is being mainlined by the mainstream, from corporate offices to factory floors.

These days it’s not unusual to find hospitals like St. Joseph’s in Toronto offering meditation programs. Some 360 people pass through the eight-week course every year.

Like most, this program has taken the simplest form of Buddhist teaching and adapted it for busy lives.

“Meditation is a skill, and like any skill it needs to be practised. So we use the breath as the place where we start to practise but eventually what we want to be able to do is to be able to use the awareness of the breath in our daily lives,” Segal says.

“When we have the ability to do that we can then use the breath when we’re standing in line at a bank, or if we’re having an argument with a spouse, as a way of grounding ourselves in the middle of something that is disturbing.”

Something disturbing, like the mind movie Erin Gammel couldn’t escape: the day when she failed to make the Olympic team.

“I just remember my hand getting caught in a lane rope and thinking to myself, it’s over,” Gammel says.

She lost her focus, her place on the team, and her heart to swim.

“It affected my entire life. I cried at the drop of a hat. I wasn’t improving and it didn’t look like anything was really improving. And I felt everything I did I seemed to fail at,” she says. “That was part of the depression and the sadness because I felt like I was failing at the time. Nothing was going well.”

Until she hooked up with the National Swim Team’s sports psychologist, Hap Davis. Davis had been fascinated by scientist Richard Davidson’s work.

He had a hunch that reliving the trauma was suppressing that part of Erin’s brain on the left that Davidson had found was so active in happy people.

He devised a rescue plan – a breathing meditation that she was to do before and after repeatedly viewing the video.

“If a person can ground themselves and feel centred with meditative breathing they can get to the point where they can look at it and view it with a critical mind, with a mind that is capable of being open to the experience and looking objectively at what took place,” Davis says.

“You know what it felt like during the race. It felt like I stopped absolutely dead. But in the video I look and it looks like just a little glitch. Nothing.”

It’s more than two years since they’ve needed to study the tape – because it worked. Erin’s joy of swimming returned; she’s winning race after race.

“She’s more resilient emotionally. She’s more stable emotionally. She’s more consistent in terms of performance,” Davis says.

“Meditation isn’t necessarily about happiness but it makes you happier. I guess that is how you would say it. And I feel more confident. That I know how to work with this stuff and work with bad things that happen in my life,” Gammel says.

Once again there’s one more race to win – the trials to make the team that goes to Athens.

“This is my year. That’s what I keep telling everyone. This is my year to make the Olympic team because making it through all those times there it’s just going to happen, I know it is. lt’s just going to happen,” she says.

“Meditation has been around for 2500 years so it’s not like a new practice,” Davis says. “But science is catching up to an old tradition and the evidence seems to be emerging that meditation can change the pattern of brain chemistry or blood flow in the brain.”

And now there’s proof meditation can change the brains of ordinary people and make them healthier.

Promega is a biotech company in Madison, Wis., where the researchers from the Brain Imaging Lab recruited typical stressed out workers – office staff, managers, even a skeptical research scientist, Mike Slater.

“Things were chaotic and crazy. We had a newborn. We had three deaths in the family. So it was a pretty topsy-turvy time,” Slater says.

All the subjects had activity in their brain measuredï¿½and half – including Mike Slater – were given an eight- week course in meditation.

Then everyone – meditators and controls – got a flu shot, and their brains were measured a second time.

The meditators’ brain activity had shifted to that happy left side. Mike Slater was almost too successful.

“I was pretty happy all the time and I was worried that maybe I was masking some stuff that might really be irritating me so I stopped it and my wife noticed an increase in my irritability, so, you know, I have both sides of the experiment now. It calmed me down and I stopped doing it and my irritability increased,” he says.

That wasn’t all. Their immune systems had strengthened.

“Those individuals in the meditation group that showed the biggest change in brain activity also showed the biggest change in immune function, suggesting that these were closely linked,” Davidson says.

Davidson and his team had shown meditation could shift not just mood – but also brain activity and immunity in ordinary people.

And they’d answered a potential flaw in the monk study.

“Someone may say, well, maybe these individuals are that way to start out with. Maybe that’s why they’re attracted to be monks,” Davidson says. “And we actually can’t answer that on the basis of those data, but with the Promega study, we can say definitely that it had to do with the intervention we provided.”

There are reasons to believe the insane pace and many aggravations of daily life can be dangerous to the health of our minds and our bodies.

We can’t push the delay button on a busy world and we can’t bail out.

But perhaps meditation is a way to encourage a sense of well-being – a deep breath in the centre of the whirlwind.

“As the Dalai Lama himself said in his book The Art of Happiness, we have the capacity to change ourselves because of the very nature, of the very structure and function of our brain,” Davidson says. “And that is a very hopeful message because I think it instills in people the belief that there are things that they can do to make themselves better.”

Dalai Lama a hit before setting foot in Canada (C-News, Canada)

March 28, 2004

Emily Yaerwood-Lee, C-News, Canada: His Toronto event will be held at SkyDome and in Vancouver, tickets for two spiritual teaching events held in a 4,000-seat auditorium were snapped up in 20 minutes.

A fight reportedly broke out when a man who’d stood in line for tickets found out the appearance was sold out after the Vancouver event was moved to a 15,000-seat venue, the extra tickets were sold out within days. It was a different story when the Dalai Lama last visited Canada in 1993. About 4,000 turned out to see him in Vancouver.

Victor Chan, an organizer of the upcoming Vancouver visit who is also co-authoring a book with the Dalai Lama, suggested the Dalai Lama’s message of peace and compassion is one people are craving in a time of post Sept. 11 uncertainty.

He said the demand for spiritual teaching events is unprecedented.

“This is something I have not come across,” says Chan, who has travelled extensively with the Buddhist leader.

The Dalai Lama, whose celebrity supporters include actors Richard Gere and Goldie Hawn, speaks of common secular ethics and said spiritual growth does not need to come from religious faith.

His mantra of non-violence has been his calling card since he and thousands of his countrymen fled their Himalayan homes in Tibet in 1959 and set up a government-in-exile in India.

The Chinese government claims Tibet as part of its territory and refuses to negotiate even limited autonomy with the Dalai Lama – who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 for promoting human rights in his homeland – unless he acknowledges that authority.

Former prime ministers Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien both failed to meet the Dalai Lama during previous visits and it’s not known yet whether Paul Martin will see him.

But Thubten Samdup, national president of the Canada Tibet Committee, says one of the reasons for the Ottawa visit is to thank more than 100 MPs who he says have supported a campaign to have Canada facilitate negotiations between the Dalai Lama and China.

There is a bit of vindication in having his visit to Canada receive more attention this time around, agrees Samdup, who attributes the added interest to the Dalai Lama’s international profile.

“His name has become synonymous with non-violence and peace.”

It’s not just interest in the Dalai Lama that’s on the rise.

The 2001 census found the number of Buddhists in Canada increased 84 per cent over 10 years, representing about 300,000 people or roughly one per cent of the population.

The religion, with its many branches and spinoffs including various types of Tibetan Buddhism, has become attractive in the mainstream, says Suwanda Sugunasiri, founder of Toronto’s Nalanda College of Buddhist Studies and a former president of the Buddhist Council of Canada.

But he doubts the Tibetan style of Buddhism is responsible for much of the increase reflected in the census, attributing it instead to an increase in immigrants from other Buddhist countries.

Some of the religion’s popularity among North Americans could come from its hold on the media, says Frances Garrett, a Tibetan religion scholar at the University of Toronto.

“Probably because it’s kind of more picturesque,” says Garrett. “It films better.

“There are these highly exotic-looking rituals that are fascinating to people. Other forms of Buddhism … are more oriented to meditation and who wants to look at someone sitting on a meditation cushion?”

Its teachers may also seem more glamorous because of “their being exiled from Tibet and everyone’s very interested that they’ve been imprisoned,” says Garrett.

But for all of that interest, the Dalai Lama and Tibetan Buddhism have often been misunderstood in the West, says Tsewang Thethong, a former minister from the government-in-exile who now lives in Victoria.

“The Dalai Lama was called the god-king, which he simply detests,” says Thethong. “Even we don’t use that word.”

The Dalai Lama, born in 1935, is believed to be the reincarnation of the previous Dalai Lama and the incarnation of Avalokitesvara, the Buddha of Compassion.

He is viewed as an enlightened spiritual master.

But he “works very hard to make sure people do not cling to this idea that he is some kind of a supernatural being with some remarkable powers,” says Chan, who was in Prague with the Dalai Lama when a journalist insisted on asking about the holy man’s telepathic abilities.

“Her question to him was, ‘These days, do you tend to use more e-mail rather than telepathy, or do you use telepathy more?”

The reporter wouldn’t let up, “even after the Dalai Lama said he didn’t know anything about telepathy,” says Chan.

Samdup acknowledges Tibetans of his father’s generation would have viewed the Dalai Lama as a god-king.

“Those Tibetans who believe in him as the ultimate saviour, slowly that generation is dying,” he says.

“In my father’s time, Tibet was very isolated so religion played a very important role. In my life it doesn’t play that big a role.”

Samdup, who counts himself a Buddhist, says he appreciates the Dalai Lama’s humility.

He’s seen the teacher tell crowds they will be disappointed if they’ve come to see him perform a miracle.

“He really doesn’t want people to have this notion that all Buddhists are enlightened and Tibetans are super human beings. People tend to have these preconceived notions that they are all monks and nuns and elevate and fly around.”

For his part, Chan doesn’t expect many of the people who snapped up tickets to see the Dalai Lama are even that interested in his brand of Buddhism or want to become practitioners.

“For me, anyway, what the Dalai Lama represents are very universal, secular values,” says Chan. “He talks a lot about the warm heart. This is something universal that all the religions are advocating.

“It’s not Buddhism or Tibetan Buddhism per say that attracts people. I think people are attracted to him because he transcends that.”

The Dalai Lama will be in Vancouver April 17-20, Ottawa April 21-24, and Toronto April 25-May 5.

[Original article no longer available]

Buddhism: the new religion of choice for 30-somethings (Sunday Herald, Scotland)

March 7, 2004

Jenifer Johnston, Sunday Herald, Scotland: When the Dalai Lama visits Scotland this summer he will find fertile ground for his teachings. Experts believe the number of Buddhists in the country has risen past the 10,000 mark and is growing. The Glasgow Buddhist Centre has had to set up waiting lists for its meditation classes, informal Buddhist meditation and teaching groups have sprung up across the land and the Kagyu Samye Ling Monastery, in Dumfries, is expanding to accommodate the increase in visitor numbers .

The Dalai Lama’s visit in May is expected to encourage thousands more to take up one of the few booming faiths in the western world.

The 2001 Census recorded 6800 Buddhists in Scotland but, according to Dr Perry Schmidt-Leukel, an expert in Buddhism at Glasgow University, the true number is greater . “The Census was the first real statistic about the number of Buddhists in Scotland, but some wilder estimates put the number in the UK at around 500,000 people,” he said.

He believes that celebrity interest in Buddhism has prompted some people to join. “It is fashionable to flirt with the religion. It provides insights into the very questions of human existence and Buddhism gets a very good press through the media.

“The Dalai Lama is a very symbolic and sympathetic figure to the media, as are the number of celebrities who are following the religion, including singer Tina Turner and actor Richard Gere.”

Dr Brenda E Brasher, an expert in the sociology of religion at Aberdeen University, said Buddhism has lots of appeal for young Scots.

“Because Buddhism is a way of understanding the self and the cosmos it is particularly attractive to young people who are not strong in believing in organised religion. The way Buddhism is practised in the West makes it viable for people who want to be spiritual without being religious, it suits a lot of people, it’s easy to fit it into the life you have, without denying yourself too much.

“Christian churches in Scotland seem to be behind the times – while business runs 24/7, the church is still a staid Sunday activity, and peoples lives don’t fit into that. But meditation for example can be done anywhere at anytime, so it is contemporary way of being spiritual.”

Erik Cramb, convener of the Church of Scotland’s committee on ecumenical relations, agreed that traditional faiths could seem grey compared to the lure of something new. “I think people can be turned off the religions of their childhood – it is a natural instinct for young people especially to venture away from what their parents practise. The church, if seen as something that represents your parents, can seem a bit boring, a reputation the church has probably lived up to on occasion.

“Buddhism offers the chance to step back and think for a lot of people.”

Buddhism focuses on personal spiritual development, rather than worship of a deity. Followers formally join a community by being ordained.

Hugh Green, who organises Buddhist meetings in Perth, said interest in the faith is growing. “There are 40 or 50 active Buddhists in the area, compared to a very small number three years ago,” he said. “Lots of groups are popping up all over the place, and I can see a real acceptance of Buddhism happening all the time.”

Joyce Henderson, who has worked for the civil service and in public relations, has spent the past six years volunteering at the Glasgow Buddhist Centre . She said: “I was brought up in the Church of Scotland but Buddhism gives you the tools to change yourself. When I first became interested in Buddhism there weren’t that many others in Scotland to learn from but that has certainly changed. I am quite conventional, but I’ve realised that it doesn’t matter how many material things you have, it really doesn’t satisfy you.”

Dr Patrick Nicholson, a physicist at Glasgow University, began finding out more about Buddhism in 1998. “With hindsight I think I had been looking for something spiritual for a while. It has changed my life – five years ago I became a vegetarian, I meditate every day, and I keep in mind the ethics of Buddhism that have become part of my life.”

Sally Watson, a marketing officer at Strathclyde University, said that while she is not ready to be ordained into Buddhism, it is now a permanent part of her life.

“When I first went to the Buddhist Centre in Glasgow 13 or 14 years ago it was quite hippy, but now there are a wide range of people and ages who go. It has definitely become a much more acceptable thing to be a part of.”

The Kagyu Samye Ling Monastery in Dumfries is in the middle of a major building programme to accommodate visitors . Ani Lhamo, a nun at the centre, said: “There is so much disillusionment with modern life and materialistic society. Twenty years ago it did tend to be the dreamy, hippy people coming, but now there are accountants, teachers, doctors and workers all looking for happiness and contentment.”

Cosmopolitan recently launched a new section to examine modern faiths. Section editor Hannah Borno said: “Young women seem not to be adopting Buddhism wholesale, but are extracting aspects of it that suit their lifestyle, for example doing 15 minutes of meditation in the morning and evening.”

[Original article no longer available]

Educating the Heart: Vancouver welcomes the Dalai Lama in April

February 1, 2004

Read the rest of the article…

Michael Buckley, Phayul, Tibet: In a world largely lacking peace and compassion, the Dalai Lama is a beacon in the darkness. His advocacy of a nonviolent approach to resolving conflicts earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. But more than this, the Dalai Lama has become an international icon for peace, an inspiration to millions who believe in nonviolence. He promotes what he calls “secular ethics”: living so that people can achieve a certain degree of happiness and cultivate compassion through “the warm heart”. These, he maintains, are values that should be promoted irrespective of one’s religion.

In April, Vancouverites will get a chance to welcome this charismatic thinker. His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama has been invited to inaugurate a contemporary Tibetan studies program-the only one of its kind in Canada-to be launched under the auspices of UBC’s Institute of Asian Research. Spinning off from this will be a two-day academic conference, a roundtable dialogue, and two public talks, one on universal responsibility and the other on cultivating compassion. (The talks are on Sunday, April 18, at the Pacific Coliseum. Tickets for each event go on sale Friday, February 20, through Ticketmaster.)

And what does the ancient and arcane Tibetan culture have to offer the modern world? Victor Chan, chair of the event’s visiting committee, elaborates in an interview: “The Tibetan Buddhist view and perception of reality is significantly different from that of the West. If you look at the monastic education of Tibetans, people go into that system when they are a few years old, and their whole training is to produce a person with heightened awareness of empathy and compassion, who can make a contribution to help others and alleviate suffering. So this is a highly focused education in mind science.”…

High in the Himalayas, isolated for more than a millennium from the West, Tibet fostered a culture without parallel. Central to the Tibetan world-view is the concept of accruing merit through performing good or compassionate deeds, or by going on pilgrimage to sacred sites. It is believed that this karmic energy can be carried through to the next incarnation.

The most famous graduate of the Tibetan monastic system is the Dalai Lama himself. He debated his way to attain the highest philosophy degree-that of geshe-while in Tibet, before fleeing into exile in India in 1959, following the Chinese invasion. Although he claims to be nothing more than a “naughty monk”, the Dalai Lama has become Buddhism’s first global celebrity, cutting across barriers of race, religion, and creed. Remarkably, for someone who has experienced the loss of his nation, he is famed for his offbeat sense of humour and his hearty laugh.

The 68-year-old Dalai Lama will give the keynote speech at a roundtable dialogue that involves Nobel Peace Prize laureates Shirin Ebadi and Desmond Tutu, former Czech Republic president Vaclav Havel (a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003), Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (scholar of Jewish mysticism), and Jo-Ann Archibald (B.C. First Nations leader). The moderator will be Anglican Bishop Michael Ingham of Vancouver. The dialogue is a collaboration between UBC and SFU. The discussion topic is Balancing Educating the Mind With Educating the Heart. The warm heart is one of the Dalai Lama’s core convictions. “He has always thought that regular education-going through high school, getting a degree, and so on-should be paralleled with ways to develop the warm heart so that young people have a perspective on the world around them, especially in ways that they can be of service to the people around them,” Chan says.

With this in mind, an essay-writing competition, open to grades 11 and 12 in B.C. and to students at SFU and UBC, has been initiated. Organizers will select six winners to ask questions at the roundtable dialogue, and runners-up will be present at a simulcast session. The 800-word essay is to focus on an aspect of balancing mind-heart education in the context of sustainable development or community-building. Chan sees this as inspirational. “For the students to be in the presence of these luminaries would be the kind of memory that they would take with them for a long time, and hopefully would have beneficial, far-reaching consequences.”

The Dalai Lama believes in promoting harmony between religions, thus reducing violent conflicts due to religious intolerance. Shirin Ebadi is the first Iranian to win the Nobel Prize (in 2003), and the first Muslim woman to do so; she has worked tirelessly to improve the status of women and the rights of religious minorities. “She is a dynamic advocate of basic human rights and nonviolence. We are extremely pleased she will share her vision and her time with us,” Chan says. Chan draws on September 11 as an instance of missing heart: “Basically, the way the Dalai Lama sees it, some highly educated people were able to put together a very complex set of logistics and devise a very complicated plan of a level sufficient to bring down the towers. These are highly intelligent, highly educated people, but because they do not have what he calls a warm heart, they are using this knowledge, this capability, in a very destructive way. That’s why it’s important to parallel education of the mind with that of the heart.”

“The Dalai Lama thinks that in some ways we would all be better people and the world would be a better place if we have this kind of parallel component in which we can somehow develop a heightened degree of compassion toward our fellow human beings, to instill in people a stronger sense of moral values, and a sense of doing the right thing,” Chan says. “The Dalai Lama has often said he is not a specialist on education. He would not presume to suggest very concrete ideas on how these things can be implemented. When the Dalai Lama talks about these things, there is a reasonable chance that people will listen. He is casting a little pebble into the pond, and hopefully the ripples would reach some of the right people who can do something about it.” The Dalai Lama has done his fair share of casting pebbles in ponds. In the 1980s, he initiated an ongoing dialogue with western scientists, meeting with them mostly in India every year, and thus catalyzing an interest in Buddhist philosophy. He once said that while western science pursued the physical world (such as in its quest for outer space), Tibetan Buddhism has turned inward, in a quest to understand the workings of the mind (inner space).

Western scientists have long been leery of anything to do with mysticism, but over the past decade some scientists have taken an interest in Tibetan Buddhist practices. Neuroscientists at a handful of U.S. universities have used sophisticated brain-imaging techniques to track activity such as blood flood in the brains of accomplished meditation masters. Research suggests that meditation practices reorient the brain from stress-induced mode to one of acceptance, a shift that increases contentment and calmness. The potential applications for this are wide-ranging: meditation practices have been effectively used by NBA teams to improve concentration and as a stress antidote by those with attention-deficit disorder.

The Dalai Lama’s invitation to Vancouver was somewhat casual: it was delivered in person by Chan on behalf of the Institute of Asian Research. Chan, now in his late 50s, is a research associate with the institute. Since 1999, he has followed the Dalai Lama around the globe in the course of co-authoring a book with him and about him.

Chan grew up in Hong Kong before moving to Canada, where he eventually graduated as a physicist. But that career took a strange turn in Afghanistan. In the course of driving overland from Turkey to India, Chan was kidnapped in Kabul in early 1972, along with two young women, one from Munich, the other from New York. Their Afghani captors were interested in the women, and Chan was simply unlucky. When the car they were riding in crashed, the three scrambled out and managed to escape, departing quickly from Kabul. The woman from New York, Cheryl Crosby, was a student of Tibetan Buddhism and was on her way to interview the exiled Dalai Lama at his seat in Dharamsala, in northern India.

Chan followed her. During the interview, the Dalai Lama kept casting glances at Chan’s long hair, droopy mustache, Moroccan pants, and black Spanish cape. He was giggling because he had never seen a Chinese hippie before. “I asked him whether he hated the Chinese for what they had done to Tibet, and he told me emphatically that there has been no hatred or resentment on his part; and that has always been his wish, to make friends with the Chinese. So I am sure this concept of nonviolence has been with him for a long time, and in spite of what has happened in Tibet, he has always adhered to this Gandhian philosophy.”

Enthralled by his visit to Dharamsala, where he experienced Tibetan culture for the first time, Chan became increasingly drawn to the Tibetan world. From 1984 to 1988, he made 11 trips to Tibet. Research from these forays resulted in the publication of Tibet Handbook: A Pilgrimage Guide, an epic tome weighing in at 1,100 pages. On a tour to promote the book in London in 1994, he met the Dalai Lama again and presented him with a copy.

Chan’s next book, to be published this fall, promises to be an unusual and intimate look into the life of the Dalai Lama. Chan was even allowed to sit in on the Dalai Lama’s morning meditation sessions in Dharamsala. “He meditates from 3:30 or 4 in the morning until 8 or so; most of that time is taken with sitting cross-legged in his inner sanctum, in his meditation room. It’s a good-sized room, with an altar, statues, thangkas (Tibetan scroll paintings), and picture windows of the mountains. Even when he is being served breakfast, he will not get up from this meditation posture.”

Chan’s portrait of the Dalai Lama will take in both his serious and lighthearted sides. “At one meeting in Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama, myself, and Pierce Brosnan were joking around and talking about reincarnation. Pierce Brosnan said he would like to be reincarnated as a bald-headed eagle. And the Dalai Lama said he would probably be reincarnated as a caterpillar because when he was young he was awfully afraid of caterpillars. So there was a great deal of daughter and hooting around. This forms one of the chapter titles in the book.”

Chan-working with Pitman Potter, director of the Institute of Asian Research-was able to arrange degree-conferral ceremonies for visiting Nobel laureates by both UBC and SFU. On April 19, honorary doctor of laws degrees will be conferred on the Dalai Lama, Ebadi, Tutu, and Havel at UBC. The following day, the same degrees will be conferred by SFU.

During the Dalai Lama’s visit, a two-day academic conference, titled Tibet in the Contemporary World, will take place at UBC. Top Tibetan research scholars have been invited to participate in discussions. Among them will be Robert Thurman, who is an ordained Tibetan monk, a widely published Tibetan scholar, and father of actor Uma Thurman. He is chair of religious studies at Columbia University, which is also initiating a Tibetan studies program.

Potter is hoping for input from these visiting Tibetologists on shaping UBC’s new Contemporary Tibetan Studies Program. “We have not entirely defined the syllabus,” Potter says. “It’s part of a graduate program: the principal component is to study aspects of Tibetan culture, encompassing socioeconomic, cultural, and political issues. Another dimension will concern the application of Buddhist principles of compassion and cross-cultural understanding associated with His Holiness the Dalai Lama to contemporary issues such as sustainable development, community building, economic and social change, security, women and development, governance, and human rights.” Potter is hoping, too, that this new program will encourage bridge-building and interaction between Tibetan, Chinese, and western scholars and specialists.

The Dalai Lama last visited Vancouver in July 1993, giving several public lectures. When he lectures in April, Chan said, he will be reaching out to Chinese Buddhists in Vancouver, to connect with what he terms his “Chinese brothers and sisters”. But the Dalai Lama’s visit is bound to be a high point for B.C.’s tiny Tibetan community. There are about 100 Tibetans living in the Lower Mainland, according to Tenzin Lhalungpa, president of the B.C. chapter of the Canada Tibet Committee. “And Tibetans from Alberta and from Seattle and Portland will come to Vancouver to attend the talks, and for a special audience. They are eagerly looking forward to this visit,” Lhalungpa said.

The Dalai Lama is revered by Tibetans as an emanation of Avalokiteshvara, the universal bodhisattva of compassion. To many others, he is a source of great inspiration. He is a superstar without the trappings of stardom: he doesn’t care if he stays in a five-star hotel or a tent. He teaches that wealth isn’t on the exterior of the self; it is on the interior. He himself may well be the greatest living example of those teachings. And as Chan puts it, “The Dalai Lama’s concept of educating the heart may prove to be one of his greatest legacies.”

–Michael Buckley is author of Tibet: the Bradt Travel Guide (2003), and Heartlands-Travels in the Tibetan World (Summersdale, 2002).

Student finds transformation in monastery stay (Buddhist News Network)

January 29, 2004