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 I’d never seen His Holiness in person. My contractor friend, Ken Lewis, had seen him numerous times. He never missed the chance for a Dalai Lama road trip when His Holiness was anywhere within striking distance of Ken’s home in Spencer, West Virginia. This time, he’d lined up his wife and son, as well as a Spencer schoolteacher friend, plus myself, a longtime student of Therevadan Buddhism.
We popped for the $85 fold-downs. The schoolteacher took it to the bank so he could sit down on the gym floor. Income from the talk was to be used to support a multi-year project including an event the summer of the year 2,000 on the National Mall in the capital, something called “Tibetan Culture Beyond the Land of Snows.” Ken won over an niggling doubts about the propriety of spending so much money for what amounted to a five-hour lecture: “If I trust anyone with how my money would be spent, it’d be the Dalai Lama.”
BUDDHIST STARS
WE WERE IN GOOD COMPANY. The Friday night before the event we ate dinner at an Italian restaurant a few blocks from the White House. At one point in the evening, a man with a great shock of grey-black hair and wearing a tweed jacket with elbow patches crossed the room.
Ken looked up from his forkful of pesto linguine. “That’s Robert Thurman!” he cried.
It helps to know that Ken—whose day job is building houses and U-Store-It buildings—is founder of West Virginia Friends of Tibet, a Buddhist meditator of many years, and an omnivorous reader of Buddhist books and articles, including ones written by Robert A.F. Thurman. Thurman is one of the West’s leading Buddhist commentators and scholars. He is also a significant Western player in the Dalai Lama’s American support group for the cause of Tibetan autonomy in the face of China’s long reign of repression in the exiled spiritual leader’s homeland.
Oh, and Thurman’s daughter is beautiful Hollywood star Uma Thurman.
Ken’s son, Ryan, sitting across the restaurant table, would no doubt report back to friends at his high school that he had seen Uma Thurman’s dad. His father had glimpsed a star of a different sort. Setting down his fork and wiping his mouth with his napkin, Ken flagged Thurman down as he passed nearby.
“I just want to shake your hand.” Ken said, gripping Thurman’s in his own.
A smiling Thurman didn’t miss a beat. Perhaps he was used to this sort of thing in the spirited circles he traveled. He graciously greeted everyone at the table, asked us where we were from, wished us well and resumed his interrupted bathroom quest. We moved on to bowls of pistachio-flavored gelato, pleased with the feeling that we were part of a Buddhist happening.
DANGEROUSLY HOLY
H.H.THE DALAI LAMA CERTAINLY fit the definition. That would be the Buddha’s definition of “The Holy Person,” from chapter 26 in “The Dhammapadda,” the collected verses of the Buddha’s essential teachings:
“One who without resentment endures abuse, beating and punishment, whose power, real might, is patience—such a one do I call a holy person.”
Yet exactly because he was so powerfully, so firmly patient in the face of the untold suffering inflicted upon Tibet by China these last 40 years, the Dalai Lama was a dangerous figure to the Chinese government. It was hard to reckon that such a man could be dangerous—and also be in danger. Yet hadn’t an assassin poured bullets into Mahatma Ghandi’s chest?
So it was that instead of striding into the university gym that Saturday morn, several thousand of us stood in line in cold rain, sipping lukewarm coffees, waiting to walk through an airport metal detector arranged at the door. We had to have our bags, purses and persons examined, to sift out guns, knives, blowdarts or whatever else a sickened soul would take in to try and take out this man they call His Holiness. Who would do such a thing? Would the Chinese dare it? Or those disaffected followers of a Tibetan diety that the Dalai Lama had frowned upon? Or your garden variety wacko in search of negative karmic grandiosity? Had there been threats? Or was fin-de-siecle America just too crazy?
Men in suits, with short neatly trimmed hair and earholes plugged with receivers, eyed the line. Asked what their shiny-red lapel pin that read “D.S.S.” stood for—Dalai Lama Secret Service?—one of them replied: “Diplomatic Security Service of the State Department.”
The ticketholders formed a multi-ethnic conga line several hundred yards long, snaking uphill along a sidewalk. Five thousand tickets had been sold or given out and a small but significant contingent included Eastern and Western Buddhist monks and nuns. The maroon and orange robes of Tibetan and Therevadan monks mingled with the occasional Zen figure in grey and black. The deep-hued faces of several hundred lay Tibetans adults and children, some dressed in formal Tibetan clothes splashed with color, added to the mix, evidence of the Tibetan diaspora’s deepening roots in America.
There were few black faces—par for the course in the vexsome issue of Buddhist America’s chiefly white, middle and upper middle class makeup.
The security precautions proceeded to bollox things up. The event was to start at 9 a.m. But when that bewitching hour came several thousand people stood outside the building, still awaiting their electronic frisking. Our party had passed the mark by then and was seated in the nippy gym. But the organizers’ miscalculation —5,000 people funneled through the keyhole of a single metal detector—had repercussions. We would lose nearly an hour of our mind training time and not start until 10 a.m. as the crowd continued to trickle in. As a sort of spiritual sop, a half-dozen Tibetan monks mounted the stage and sat cross-legged in a rustle of orange robes. They commenced to chant, filling the gymnasium with the now-familiar bullfroggy, polyphonic, throat singing that itself is supposed to bring spiritual benefit to listeners. We huddled in our coats and sweaters, hoods up who had them, tuned in and gained some merit.
RICHARD WHO?
WORD WAS THAT RICHARD GERE was somewhere in the place. Not to mention, of course, Uma Thurman’s dad. Gere, Hollywood’s highest profile Buddhist—and a prime financial backer in the West for the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan cause—was keeping a low profile, perhaps so he wouldn’t be mobbed, perhaps to direct attention to the day’s real order of business. I would have liked to have seen him. I respected Gere, a serious and thoughtful Buddhist practitioner, who did not at all deserve the “recreational Buddhist actor” caricature sometimes hung upon him. Thurman was out in the open, though, and his standing in the Buddhist world was evident. He sat in the front row down on the floor, to the right of a small stage decorated with Buddhist imagery and fresh flowers. The Dalai Lama would greet Thurman personally as His Holiness entered the arena. | TO PAGE 3: 'A SIMPLE MONK'
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