The Dalai Lama is in the details
In the Financial Times this week, writer Pico Iyer uses words to create an unusually close-up and revealing picture of the human being who is the Dalai Lama (“The ascent of a man” by Pico Iyer, May 1 2008).
Iyer’s article is based on some rare perspectives, the most prominent being, as he writes, that he has been “talking to the Dalai Lama and visiting him in his home-in-exile in the British-built hill station of Dharamsala, northern India, for 33 years now.”
Two paragraphs from the piece:
I am surprised to find him much more realistic and persuasive than almost all the politicians I’ve met, some of whom stress the future, some of whom speak for the past. “Dream – nothing!” the Dalai Lama said when I was with him in Hiroshima 18 months ago. Do not wait or pray for a miracle; do something that might make your life and the lives of others a little better right now.
The world wants, at times, to place the Dalai Lama on a mountain top, but he has never had such a luxury and seems always in our midst, trying to remind us that we change the world by changing how we look at it. And to point out that suffering (the day-to-day reality of the world) is not unhappiness (the way we choose to respond to it).
Read more here.
