A Simple Monk

I certainly feel unqualified to report on this in any depth, but yesterday I went to a lecture by His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama, and what blogger worth her salt could fail to at least mention it? It was curiosity more than reverence that motivated me. After all, who could resist an opportunity to see one of the great spiritual leaders of our time, a beloved icon recognized throughout the world? Tickets for his two lectures at UCSB went on sale in early December and sold out within two hours. I was out of town at the time, but my dear friend Kelley bought me one as a birthday present. The lecture she chose was titled The Nature of Mind, which sounded pretty interesting.

It was a chilly gray morning but the campus was crowded and festive as we inched our way towards the security checkpoint at the entrance to the event center. We climbed up the bleachers and found our seats in the distant shadows, and then I went down again for a preemptive rest room stop. The queue for the ladies’ room was absurdly long, but it was hilarious to see how many "women-of-a-certain-age" had had the same thought, and we were all of a type: a bit disheveled and vaguely hippie-esque, our post-prime plainnesscountered by colorful scarves or an ethnic-looking necklace, all in practical shoes and intrepid spirits. A woman in a purple fleece jacket was telling her friend about the condors she had glimpsed during a recent foray into the backcountry. Someone else was talking about her recent trip to Bhutan. After seeing me greet two old friends, the woman standing behind me tapped my shoulder and asked, “Oh, how do you know Dan and Linda?” The line crawled along and we joked about our bladders and finally, mission accomplished, I returned to my seat just in time.

Everyone rose when His Holiness appeared on the distant stage along with ChancellorHenry Yang and a dean and professor or two. Dressed in a red robe with a saffron undergarment, he turned away from the audience to pray and bow to a Buddha image, lowering his body and touching the ground with his arms and forehead three times. The vast auditorium was hushed as he positioned himself cross-legged on the yellow cushion of a carved wooden sofa at the center of the stage and began to speak: “My dear brothers and sisters…usually my voice a little better…” He clearly had a terrible cold.

And never having heard him speak, I had not known how difficult it was to understand him. This was partly because this lecture was exactly that: a lecture, and at times I felt as though I was sitting in the advanced graduate course without having taken the basic 101. Among other things, he talked about the various states of consciousness, including the brain activity that exists after death. After speaking in heavily accented English for a short time, he switched to his native Tibetan, pausing intermittently for translation.

His interpreter was a professorial gentleman in a dark suit who sat with rod-straight posture on a small chair on the stage. And he was brilliant, I must say, for he translated with a quickness and elegance that was simply stunning, and some of the passages were long and complex and required more than just a literal translation but explanation and pedagogy. The lecture was quite technical, including passages from Buddhist texts and discussion of various states of the mind. Perhaps it was directed toward university scholars or the rows of monks who sat in the front row chairs just below the stage. High up in the bleachers, I could sense the audience growing bored and fidgety. It seemedunimaginable to walk out on the Dalai Llama, but I noticed a few who did.

I thought he was a trooper. I imagined that he might have preferred to stay in bed on this particular morning, but he diligently forged ahead. He paused now and then to sniff and cough and blow his nose, but meticulously covered his topic. I wondered what it would be like to have been chosen as a child to lead such a rare and astonishing life, but I could not begin to picture it. Yet he seemed a gentle and good-natured man with a sense of humor and humility. He has described himself as a simple monk.

Here are a few points I was able to glean from the talk:

The only way to reduce destructive emotion is to increase constructive emotions.

Simply focusing on the sensory level of experience is not adequate.

If one observes the mind, one can perceive a sequence of thought processes withtiny intervals in between. The trick, through meditation, would be to try to“tease up” these transitional periods and hold onto them. These gaps betweenthe arising of thought and the dissolution of thought represent true moments ofconsciousness.

To attain such consciousness, we must refrain from chasing retrospective orfuture-directed thought, remaining simply in the present. Through practice, onecan learn to recognize the gap or absence of thought, and prolong it. Theresult is a clear-line state of mind, a sense of pure wonderment that allowsfor the natural quality of the mind to express itself.

H-m-m-m.

No doubt a lifetime of discipline and practice is required to attain this, but another point His Holiness made is that motivation is the bottom line. “The mind creates the world,” he said (I think), “and the mind creates the action that leads to that creation.”

H-m-m-m.

His personality emerged more fully when questions were presented that had been posted via email. Is it harder in America, someone had asked, with its fast pace and constant stimulation, to achieve a tranquil state of mind? “I don’t think that much difference,” he replied. “Same human mind everywhere. External influence important, but nature of mind same.”

Another question: Can you explain what you meant when you said that Buddhism is not a religion but a science of mind?   His answer: “I didn’t say this. Western scholar said it. Ask him.”

When asked about the use of LSD and other drugs to achieve enlightenment, he said that although he had not tried them himself, it seemed to him that they produced a great profusion of illusion, and since we already have plenty of illusory experiences, what was the point? Serious practice should rely not on these external things but rather on internal work.

I very much wanted to hear him answer the question on how he maintains a peaceful, happy heart when life is such hard work, and how to stay true to one’s principles, but he smiled and said that question was for the afternoon lecture, which was titled Ethics for Our Time. Its focus would be on compassion, and I later heard it was a more accessible talk, but I’m grateful for the experience I had, and I feel that I have a lot to ponder.

In his travels throughout the world during all the years of his exile, His Holiness has been an emissary of peace and an advocate for compassion and nonviolence. “Our happiness,” he has said, “is inextricably bound up with the happiness of others. There is no denying that the more our hearts and minds are afflicted with ill will, the more miserable we become. Thus, we can reject everything else: religion, ideology, all received wisdom. But we cannot escape the necessity of love and compassion.”

“So are you enlightened?” wrote my mischievous friend Cornelia.

Obviously not. But I am A Woman Who Has Seen the Dalai Lama.