Dalai Lama is going to retire. He is part of the world furniture, he has always been there, it sounds weird he will not be in the future. But the fact is that he wants to step out and leave it to a younger Lama, with whom all teenage girls are in love - that's something not even His Holiness can claim in this world.
His unique presence is due to the fact that he has had a dual role: he spoke for the Tibetans as a people and for their suffering at the hand of the invader and, at the same time, and with startling directness, he told the truths of Buddhism. The Independent says:
'The trampling of Tibet by the People's Liberation Army, the trashing of its monasteries and the brainwashing of its monks and nuns, the colonisation of its towns and cities by Chinese settlers, all of which continues, was an outrage of which the Dalai Lama spoke with unique eloquence, and because the outrage was so stark he found a huge ready audience everywhere. And then, almost without us being aware of it, he was telling us about values, about morality, about happiness, in the simplest words. And because of the way he did it, most of us lingered to listen to that message, too. Tibetan Buddhism is a fabulously exotic construct, as remote and strange a religious tradition as any in the world, ineffably far away. Yet Tenzin Gyatso has a way to make it simple, without cheapening its truths. "Happiness is not something ready made," he will say, "it comes from your own actions." "In the practice of tolerance, one's enemy is the best teacher."
No comments:
Post a Comment