Spirituality/Eastern: Dalai Lama Tours America

When the Dalai Lama made an appearance on a recent Sunday afternoon in New York’s Central Park, a crowd of 40,000 people showed-up to hear him speak. Granted, that’s no big number for Central Park, which fairly regularly plays host for groups of over 100,000 for big name musical shows. But this was no entertainment event. There was no Streisand, Jagger or Garth Brooks to entice this crowd, only a simple man who lives in India and who probably would’ve never become known in this country if he had not been driven from his native Tibet by the Chinese back in 1959.

Actually, the ouster of the Dalai Lama by Mao’s communist thugs was probably a blessing in disguise for us westerners. It’s doubtful that the secrets of Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism, as understood by the Tibetans, would’ve ever been revealed to the “civilized” world if Mao had not insisted on bringing his “little red book” to the roof of the planet.

For good reason, the Tibetans had long been wary of foreigners. Centuries ago, they had watched as Islamic invaders did the impossible by wiping-out practically all traces of Buddhism in India, the birthplace of the Buddha himself. This effectively left the Tibetans as the sole storehouse for the vast body of knowledge that Buddhist intellectuals had garnered over the centuries, a responsibility which they took very seriously.

When the British arrived on the Indian subcontinent there were more problems. On several occasions, British troops traveled to Tibet and slaughtered Buddhist monks for no apparent purpose. Even when the British traveled to Tibet under the guise of friendship, they tended to act more like enemy than friend. English adventurers of the 19th century wrote fantastic tomes on the “sorcery” and “black magic” practices of the Tibetans, rarely mentioning the essence of Buddhism or that this was one of the most important intellectual achievements in the history of the Asian continent.

By the beginning of this century, Tibet was a closed country with no foreigners allowed.

All of this began to change rapidly when the Dalai Lama and his followers were forced by the threat of the invading Chinese to flea and settle in a region in northeastern India. They feared, as a people and culture in exile, that their six hundred year history of both preserving and evolving their complex body of yogic practices and teachings would slowly fade into the same void that they attempted to reach during meditation.

Once it became clear than an immediate return to Tibet was not in the cards, work was begun in earnest to bring the dharma, the teachings on Tibetan Buddhism, to the western world. They were given hope by the fact that the great Indian guru Padma Sambhava, who is credited with founding Buddhism in Tibet in 750 CE, had predicted that the dharma would reach the west when “men could fly in metal houses.” It seemed that the task would be relatively easy, since writers like Suzuki were having great success bringing the philosophy of Zen, the Buddhism of China and Japan, to a western audience.

But Zen is a head trip, a primarily intellectual exercise that can be easily divorced from its Asian heritage and is therefore relatively easy for the western mind to understand. Tibetan Buddhist practices, however, must be experienced to be understood. They had been developed over six centuries in a culture that was, for all intents and purposes, completely isolated from the rest of the world - even neighboring India. The techniques required would-be American practitioners to become immersed in a culture that was completely alien from anything known - something that most Americans were, in the early 60s, unwilling or unable to do.

This began to change somewhat in the late 60s and early 70s as writers like John Blofeld began to relate their experiences with the Tibetans in terms that the turned-on generation, who had experienced an LSD fueled mysticism, could understand. Young Americans who trekked to Nepal to experience cheap and legal hashish, returned with the message that they’d discovered that cannabis was only a tool and that the Tibetans had techniques that made expanded consciousness without drugs a reality.

During the mid to late 70s, as the counter-culture and anti-war movement in this country began to wind-down, many young Americans (often women) began to migrate to India and Nepal to become Tibetan Buddhist nuns and monks. Many, like Kathleen McDonald and Joan Ewing, eventually returned to the west and have used their understanding of both cultures to help develop Tibetan Buddhist practices that are palatable to the western mindset.

There is still much work to be done in this regard. For example, the most powerful Tibetan tantric practices have yet to be offered in the west since they are considered too dangerous for our materialistic culture.

But there is hope in the fact that the Dalai Lama can attract 40,000 to sit through a two hour teaching on peace and compassion. According to officials, only the Pope has drawn more people to a non-entertainment event in Central Park.

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