Word: dalai
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...ever, few of his supporters are equally ready to acquiesce in such lese majeste. (When I ask a group of Tibetan officials if this one will be the last Dalai Lama, they all say anxiously, "No, no.") And even relatives have sometimes found it hard to countenance his policy of forgiving the Chinese (he once described Mao as "remarkable," has referred to himself as "half Marxist, half Buddhist," and has stepped back from his original demands of independence to calling only for an autonomous "Zone of Peace"). The pressure on him to forswear his policy of nonviolence has intensified...
When I left Dharamsala at dawn, the Dalai Lama was leading his monks in a three-hour ceremony while the sun came up behind the distant snowcaps. It struck me that the man has lived out a kind of archetypal destiny of our times: a boy born in a peasant village in a world that had scarcely seen a wheel has ended up confronting the great forces of the day--exile, global travel and, especially, the mass media; and a man from a culture known as the "Forbidden Kingdom" now faces machine guns on the one hand and Chinese discos...
...this state-of-the-art challenge the Dalai Lama brings, in his own words, a "radical informality," a gift for cutting through to the heart of things and an unusually open and practical mind. If I had to single out one sovereign quality in him, it would be alertness, whether he's reminding me of a sentence he delivered to me seven years before or picking out a friend's face in the middle of a jam-packed prayer hall...
This mindfulness, as Buddhists might call it, is particularly critical these days as the Dalai Lama finds himself more and more appealing to people who know nothing of his philosophy--and may even be hostile to it. The Tibetan has delivered lectures on the Gospels, celebrated the Internet as a talisman of human interdependence and, especially, mastered the art of talking to ordinary people in ordinary human terms, about "spirituality without faith." As his longtime friend the composer Philip Glass says, "He talks about compassion, he talks about right living. And it's very powerful and persuasive to people because...
...Dalai Lama is unbending on this point. "Out of 5.8 billion people in the world," he tells me, "the majority of them are certainly not believers. We can't argue with them, tell them they should be believers. No! Impossible! And, realistically speaking, if the majority of humanity remains nonbelievers, it doesn't matter. No problem! The problem is that the majority have lost, or ignore, the deeper human values--compassion, a sense of responsibility. That is our big concern. For whenever there is a community without deeper human values, then even one single family cannot be a happy family...