The Dalai Lama's daunting teachings on reality

 When the Dalai Lama, was presented with the Congressional Gold Medal in a Washington D.C. ceremony on Oct. 17, the focus was on his role as a voice for human rights in Tibet and worldwide. But he is also the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism. USA TODAY religion reporterCathy Lynn Grossman attended his latest three-day teaching on Buddhist philosophy.

In the art deco masterpiece of Radio City Music Hall, where the Rockettes will soon kick off their Christmas extravaganza, the Dalai Lama is a riveting presence, perched cross-legged on a lavishly-decorated platform center stage.

He's still the monk with the big smile and deep laugh and the aphorisms about compassion and peace that anyone can understand.

But in a series of six two-hour sessions, each as intellectually daunting as twice-a-day football workouts might exhaust an athlete, he holds forth on concepts of reality that have challenged philosophers for millennia.

He barely breaks a sweat, but unlike the 100 monks arrayed in rows on burgundy meditation cushions the Dalai Lama has two advantages.

First, of course, His Holiness is already enlightened, a master of what he's teaching to the crowd of nearly 6,000 people, who paid from $80 to $330 for their three-day-passes.

Secondly, he's got a red golf visor plopped on his shaven head to cut the glare of the lights.

Sitting front and center, surrounded by monks, is actor Richard Gere, a Tibetan Buddhist and host of the session. Gere sits with perfect posture beside the Dalai Lama's translator.

The theme for five sessions is "emptiness" — the concept that all beings and events are relational and interconnected and therefore have no separate, absolute reality in space and time. And the final Sunday session is a public talk in English, addressed to ordinary folks, Buddhist or not.

Every day at 10 and again at 2, the Dalai Lama speaks for five to ten minutes in Tibetan; a translator follows in English. It's soon evident that his concepts take a lot of time to translate.

Much of the time is spent on explicating "The Seventy Verses on Emptiness" composed by an early follower of the Buddha, Nagarjuna, one of the great philosophers of the Tibetan branch of Buddhism, one of the many branches followed by the world's nearly 400,000 million Buddhists.

The audience was totally silent — perhaps stunned by such verses as:

"Whether the Buddha said they last, are produced, or perish, exist or do not exist, are inferior, equal, or special, he did so based on ordinary convention, not based on a perfect reality."

Huh?

His Holiness explains that Buddha was just borrowing the language of conventional reality to speak to his followers, not actually speaking of objective reality, which does not exist.

"The intrinsic nature of all things is emptiness."

"The understanding of emptiness opens the door to true freedom."

All is transient. All is impermanent. Hence, there is no beginning in the material world, in the mental world, in our thoughts or emotions.

Past, present and future exist only in relation to each other. They are, in effect, empty of any discreet, absolute existence, he says.

Not everyone is tracking. Here and there are people snoozing, texting or sneaking photos with their cellphones.

Even Robert Thurman, professor of Tibetan Buddhism at Columbia University and a former monk who has studied with the Dalai Lama since they met in 1962, calls it "tough going. Isn't it tricky of His Holiness to make us all go back and study more."

Many ideas are parsed into lists: two forms of understanding, three poisons of the mind, five fields of knowledge, 10 negative reactions and so on.

But most verses circle back to the same idea: We do not exist as individual selves, immutable, unchanging and discrete. Ultimately, there is no self in the mirror staring back. We are all mutually defined.

We all want to seek happiness and avoid suffering. We have a natural sense of self-love, which serves as the basis of compassion, rooted in the recognition that these desires are common to all humanity.

"Compassion" is so critical that he says the word in English, amid the stream of Tibetan.

There are periods during the Friday-Sunday sessions where he chants, slowly bobbing his head. It is mesmerizing, a sort of spiritual music, even when the words are indistinct.

He chants portions of the Diamond Cutter Sutra, Buddha's teachings on wisdom, cleansing away all pollutants of the mind and heart and "the flowering of all realization."

At the end of each session, he claps, announces "Finish" with a smile, clambers down from his perch, waves and winks to the audience and walks off stage, often hand in hand with Gere.

The last two sessions begin with a question-and-answer period (questions from the Internet) where he fits in a few jokes, admits it's all very hard — "too bad the great yogis of all time don't come back and explain this all to us" — and pokes fun at himself.

When the master of releasing attachment goes to the shopping mall, he says, "I want this. I want that."

Neither is he a healer, he says, waggling his pinky finger and saying, "It suffers." If someone in the audience has healing powers, would they please see him backstage, he says to great guffaws from the crowd. It is by a lifetime of practice that he can quickly let such self-centered thoughts evaporate.

By his morning talk on Sunday, he begins speaking in more accessible terms about inching day by day toward a life of inner peace, gaining confidence as each moment, each day becomes more valuable.

Do not be discouraged by slow progress. Dharma (teaching) is "not fashion" so jumping from one spiritual school to another leads, he says, to "No Nirvana!"

Gere wraps up the five teaching sessions with emotional gratitude: Everyone has been "riding on the horse of His Holiness' wisdom, from joy to joy these last few days," he says.

Then, in a distinctly earthly thump of reality, a monk with a ledger comes on stage to spell out the cost of the Radio City events, $1,396,425, and the proceeds from ticket sales, donations and other solicitations, $1,392,546.

"As it is incorrect to profit from teaching, we are pleased to report we have a loss of $3,879," he says.

The finale of the weekend, the public talk, is delivered in English. The Dalai Lama is still wearing his visor but now he's struggling to squeeze his knees into a cross-legged position on a wing chair placed downstage, like he's a guest on a TV talk show.

Here is a less convoluted, broader appeal to compassion and non-violence toward "all sentient beings."

Joyce Hernandez, a convert to Buddhism from Monroe Township, N.J., says that it's very important to her that "he includes animals when a lot of religions don't." Hernandez says she took off work to hear him.

"Small planet. Everything inter-related. We have to take the whole picture. Very important!" he exclaims.

Again compassion and inner peace are the keys. His Holiness calls this "internal disarmament to achieve external disarmament."

Anu Ravouri of Finland, doing research in the U.S. on psychiatric epidemiology, says even though she's read all his books, hearing him lecture in person "makes it easier to grasp this idea that consciousness never begins or ends. "But it's still hard to grasp that (Buddhists) don't believe in an eternal soul," says Ravouri, who describes herself as Christian.

Indeed, on Sunday, His Holiness stresses his respect and admiration for all religions. However, he makes clear, Buddhism is "not like a theistic religion in which truth is revealed from a divine source. Truth is attained through inner enlightenment."

"Prayer?" he says, clasping hands and looking up as petitioning a heavenly source.

"I don't think of it. Work hard," he exhorts the crowd.

"Work with vision. Work with self confidence.

"Nine times failure? Nine times more effort!"

The indefatigable monk teaches, "Hopelessness is a form of laziness."

He leaves New York on Sunday afternoon, no closer to an enlightened world, no closer to a free Tibet — and utterly undiscouraged.

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