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For it was time for the entrance—and it was a big one. I don’t mean to suggest that it was staged for effect. But it had a powerful resonance. “His Holiness is about to enter the room,” an organizer said into a microphone on stage. “Please take a moment of quiet to prepare yourself for his entrance.”

Outside the walls of churches, mosques, temples and monasteries, one forgets in today’s noisy, rude and fulsome world the stirring power of a few moments of respectful silence. The bustle and buzz of 5,000 people fell almost instantly away into an oceanic and expectant stillness. You could literally hear the rise and fall and rise again of your own breathing. That seemed apt for the entrance of a great monk who dispensed fundamental teachings that stressed breath-centered spiritual practice.

Whether you believed the Dalai Lama to be a highly evolved spiritual figure worthy of such reverence (he calls himself “a simple monk”) or just another celebrity worthy of curiosity, all eyes fixated upon the small beaming figure who hustled into the room swathed in folds of maroon and gold robes.

The dozens of Tibetan monks in attendance prostated themselves three times upon the floor. Many of us in the audience held our two hands templed together in a namaste of greeting and reverence. Ken and other spiritual veterans of Tibetan Buddhism dipped their heads low—lower than the teacher’s—in extra-special reverence. A pony-tailed and bespectacled college student nearby bowed, then resumed running his fingers along a mala of brown prayer beads thick as peas, lips silently mouthing blessings, as he had done all morning long.

The Dalai Lama’s famous cheerfulness was everywhere in evidence. A “ripple of mirth” washed outward from him across the big room, to borrow a phrase someone once used to describe another Tibetan’s monk’s demeanor. Slightly hunched over, His Holiness beamed right and left at people, greeting as many as he could. There was a whole lot of merit going on. Especially for the Tibetans on hand, such an encounter was great good fortune, an auspicious blessing. Back home, Tibetans who even possess the Dalai Lama’s photograph have been imprisoned and tortured by Chinese troops, vigilant to quash his support.

He mounted the stage, offered a namaste to the audience in several directions, removed his shoes and ascended the steps of a five-foot-high dais.Beside the dais stood a chair and table with a microphone for his longtime Tibetan translator. Standing atop the dais on a soft cushion, the Dalai Lama elicited the first belly-laugh of the day, bouncing with Charlie Chaplin-esque exaggeration three times. ‘Ah!” he said, grinning. The dais was indeed sturdy enough for a simple monk.

The Tibetans teach via long, complex talks and analysis whose sum and substance are not easily summed up in a few quotes. On a superficial level, you could say that His Holiness the Dalai Lama spoke—through stilted English and translated Tibetan—to the power of radically positive thinking. After all, verse six of the eight Lojong verses for training the mind is this:

“When someone whom I have helped
or in whom I have placed great hope
harms me with great injustice,
may I see that one as a sacred friend.”

Yikes. Your enemies are your beloved teachers, too, in other words.

An essential skill on the way to spiritual awakening is countering harmful, hateful and grasping mental states of mind, through constant mental discipline and insight into how we have helped to create our own suffering states, he said. “It is the undisciplined state of mind that is the origin of suffering.”

“If you let negative states arise without restraint, you are in essence giving them free reign. As they occur—instantly and immediately if you have the mindfulness—you don’t give them the opportunity to develop into a full-blown negative emotion or thought.”

And if they do, you work moment-to-moment to counter such emotional and mental defilements with “antidotes” of compassion, insight and fellow feeling for yourself and others. Generating humility is an antidote to arrogance and pride, for example. This includes the spiritual pride that tempts even him to wonder if people are enjoying his teachings and how well he is doing, he said. When he thinks he has it all figured out, said a smiling Dalai Lama, he administers a little anti-arrogance antidote. “When I have a little tingling sensation of pride, I think of computers.”

By day’s end, he had lectured farther and deeper afield. He spoke of the interrelatedness of all that we call reality, that puny, inadequate and constantly misleading notion. And he took on one of the subtlest, most difficult and far-reaching of Buddhist teachings—reality’s ultimate emptiness of any actual, absolute existence and the liberation that can result from this awareness.

These points in the teaching demanded close attention. And the Dalai Lama's often professorial and analytical dissection at length of the minutie of the spiritual path—"Self and person should be understood as a designation dependent on mind and body..."—led more than a few of us to waver in our attention at times. Leastwise I didn't drift off to la-la-land like the shaved-headed fellow slumped over on his girlfriend's shoulder across the aisle. At those moments, I'd rouse up some extra energy—energy-rousing for wholesome purposes being expressly encouraged by the Buddha—and the rewards were always good. "Not a charismatic speaker," Ryan remarked at one point. But this this was a teaching lecture, after all. If you stayed the course most of the time, big, filling insights stuck to your ribs. Nourishment for the days and weeks ahead when the celebrity rush of seeing the Dalai Lama had dissipated and you were left with—what? Something to work with.

Yes, and there were a few laughs along the way, too, for which he is also famous.

One of the questions from the audience at day’s end was: “Do you forsee any catastrophic world events at the millenium, and how should we prepare for them.” The Dalai Lama grinned as the translator read out the question. He scratched his bald head with one crooked arm then guffawed, as the audience burst into laughter along with him.

“I dunno!” he exclaimed. “If there is some major disaster in one place, so run to another place.”

And if the whole world goes up in smoke?

Smiling, he gestured to his cushions.
“Just sit here.”

THIS BUDDHIST BUSINESS of taking total responsibility for not only your overt actions in the world, but your moment-to-moment mental states—the fertilizing and nurturing of positive ones, the culling and replanting of poisonous ones— is an alarmingly big job.

My mind rebels, it's cozy with its bad habits. It has had it way for decades. Those grooves of unwholesome habits and behavior—killing rage, zombie-eyed lust, Olympian self-absorption,to name just a few—run deep. Hard to get my wagon wheels out of them.

I drive the 12 hours home on slick roads through the Appalachian mountains, feeling emboldened, charged up with spiritual resolve, heartened simply by recalling being in the same room as the Dalai Lama and seeing that cheery face. Yet also I feel fragile. Off in the darkness beside the interstate in the middle of West Virginia, a huge neon sign invites all comers to a gargantuan strip joint for truckers. My longtime companion the zombie speaks up—wouldn't a little bare anonymous flesh on parade taste good about now?

Oh boy, I've got my work cut out for me.

Can't say I've really worked the eight steps of the Lojong training per se, although they resemble lines from my Therevadan Buddhist practice that I do recite now and again. It's the same thing. Rouse up that energy. Keep tabs on that mind. Generate wholesome feeling, notice the staying power of the unwholesome. Work out your own salvation, as the Buddha famously reminded his followers in perhaps his final and most succint teaching, with diligence.

A picture of His Holiness the Dalai Lama now hangs on the bulletin board beside my computer at work (the same one that graces this article) and in a niche of my home meditation space. Not for any worshipful reasons—he's a simple monk after all, on a not-so-simple mission. Just like all of us.

Or maybe it's all far more simple than we, in our hysterical, distracted, self-sabotaging daily lives, are able to see?

All I know, is this—I need all the help I can muster.

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1) To read all eight Lojong verses for training the mind,
click here. Or go to the Hundred Mountain Reading Room.

2) For a brief word portrait of one of the Dalai Lama's Pittsburgh appearances, written by Hugh Rogers of Elkins, West Virginia, click right about here.

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PREVIOUS PAGE ONE FEATURES:

• What To Get a Buddhist 4 Christmas, Issue 5: A Collection of Useful, Wonderful Gifts for the Spiritual Seeker, Plus Some Ridiculous and Inane Ones, As Well.
• The Clear Light of Death, Issue 4: Walking hand-in-hand with your parents as they die with help from "The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying." By Ruth Black well Rogers
• From Drugs to Dharma, Issue 3: The Long, Strange Journey of Bhante Rahula from Hippie Trail to Buddhist Path. A Q-and-A interview with Douglas Imbrogno
• At the Autopsy, Issue 1: Trying to keep your head as they dismember a former human being. A First-Person Visit to an Autopsy Examination. By Walter Schwidetsky

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