Pico Iyer
No sooner had a tsunami, in March 2011, swept 18,500 souls to their deaths in Japan than the Dalai Lama, in his home in northern India, expressed his determination to make a “pilgrimage” to offer what he could to the devastated area. Before the year was out, I was accompanying him to Ishinomaki, a fishing village almost entirely leveled by the disaster. I’d met him first as a teenager and had already been speaking regularly with him for 37 years, as well as published a book on his work and his vision.
The minute his car came to a halt amidst the debris, the Tibetan leader strode out and offered blessings to the hundreds lined up along the road, together with words of encouragement. He held heads against his heart, trying to soothe tears. Then, in a nearby temple that had somehow survived the cataclysm, he recalled his own sudden flight from Tibet in 1959. No life is without loss, he observed—but renewal is an hourly possibility.
That morning is a tiny reminder of how, as he prepares to mark his 90th birthday on July 6th, the 14th Dalai Lama has come to symbolize a sort of planetary doctor of the mind, making house-calls on every continent. Regularly noting that “my religion is kindness” and frequently reiterating that if scientific findings contradict Buddhist teachings, science must trump Buddhism, he’s become the rare spiritual teacher who can speak across every border in our ever more divided world.
In an age when moral leadership can be hard to find, he’s become a voice of ecumenical wisdom and compassion to whom millions from every tradition can turn, for both solace and guidance.
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