The following is excerpted with permission from a Christmas/Solstice 1998 letter sent to family and friends by Hugh Rogers and Ruth Blackwell Rogers of Elkins, West Virginia.

IN NOVEMBER, EIGHT OF US drove up to Pittsburgh for a public teaching by the Dalai Lama. You probably know he's a winning fellow. He spoke English in his introductory remarks, Tibetan to discuss the Heart Sutra, and English again to answer questions. He said he had come not to proselytise, "but if for someone it isa choice between absolute atheism, no spiritual value to life whatever, and Buddhism, then—OK!" The word hit the top of his vocal range, which can rumble around with the long Tibetan horns or climb to a high exuberant flute. We found that Tibetan sounds very much like Korean.

The translator for His Holiness, an earnest man in a gray Western suit, calmly accepted his interruptions, corrections, afterthoughts and jabs in their mutual effort to get it right, and yet it was clear all along that words were not, finally, what it was all about. Lecture as non-verbal experience.

As he answered the last question from the audience in Heinz Hall, the Pittsburgh Symphony's space, the DL bent over and pulled out his black brogans from under the chair he had sat on cross-legged, and kept talking to use while he laced them up.

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