The New York Times reports on a talk that the Dalai Lama gave to more than 35,000 people in Rutgers Stadium, where he received an honorary degree. Two of the Tibetan monks sitting in the stadium bleachers remembered the first time that he spoke to an audience in the New York region, more than 25 years ago. Just a few hundred heard him then.
More are hearing him today, and the message he delivers is one that we need to hear.
As the Dalai Lama neared the end of his speech, he explored the difference between attachment and compassion - attachment being a selective connection shared by friends, he said, while compassion is an “unbiased” act. The two Tibetan monks, Mr. Gyantso and Japal Dorjee, 97, sat hunched and listening, their eyes closed. Nearby, a former flight attendant, Kathleen Davis, squealed. She had been taking notes on a pink piece of paper and pointed to the words “attachment” and “compassion.”
“That’s it!” she said. “It’s one or the other. I’ve got the goose bumps.”
The “zen” explosion of the ’60’s and ’70’s was inspired by D.T. Suzuki’s presentation of zen as a discipline which could whack a seeker over the head with sudden insight—a direct route to experience unmediated by training, culture, intellect. Suzuki himself gets pretty fuzzy-minded, and his followers more so; their proselytizing led to what Chris Locke calls “the sanctimonious narcissism of the New Age”. Whatever the roots of zen might have been, by the time it reached the tennis court and the board room, and came to inform the art of motorcyle maintenance, the Buddha had pretty much disappeared from the scene.
This time around, the Buddhism is more traditional, rooted in the Buddha’s own teaching of the Dharma. That’s not mystical—not even “spiritual”, whatever that over-burdened term might mean. It’s practical stuff, leading us to an understanding of how our actions have consequences, and how we might train our minds so that our actions generate good consequences. It’s not fuzzy minded at all, but simple and real. Attachment on the one hand. Compassion on the the other. We get to choose. We have to choose.
It gives you goose bumps.
(Thanks to David Weinberger for the link to Chris Locke’s blog.)
bill | 26-Sep-05 at 9:49 pm | Permalink
Richard,
For every journey worth taking it seems, there will be at least one offer of a short cut.
bill
richard | 27-Sep-05 at 5:44 am | Permalink
Bill, are you suggesting that the Dalai Lama is offering a shortcut!
As opposed to the long, long journey of “just believe in Me and you’ll be saved”?
Come now. The Buddha’s message of attachment and compassion is indeed, a journey worth taking. And those who persist on that journey throughout their lives, lifetime after lifetime, eventually arrive at a place where they have attained wisdom and equanimity, even to the extent that they are able to help others who are trapped in samsara—the inevitable stress, suffering, discontent, discomfort, malaise that arises from wanting more from life than life can offer. The Dalai Lama appears, uniquely among those with something to teach us, to have reached that state of attainment. I give him great honor.
To suggest, as you seem to have, that his message offers “a short cut”, is demeaning and silly. It is equivalent to suggesting, as The Onion famously did, that “Jesus died because he was weak and stupid.” Except not as funny.
Richard