in the bell and went in to see the dalai lama and no one was really knocking on his door in &pdpdabp,p. dealing with beijing for 25 years at the plate and of course i couldn't almost -- i

understand and as soon as the dalai lama made his first trip to this country five years later in 79i went durham and then in the 1980's he began to come more often and i would see him fairly regularly in new york and again it's remarkable now to think back that in 1984 for example, almost nobody really knew who or what a dalai lama was, whether he was a person of legend or eight real human being. he would hold press conferences and new york for four people, usually three tibetans and me. i just on my way here met a colleague from "time" magazine and was remembering in 1985i said at a lunch with the dalai lama with my colleagues from "time" magazine and before the lunch one of them running up and said brush him off we don't want to come on a monday to have lunch with a monk. three years later the same editors are flying and of away from new york just for ten minutes with him but nobody was aware exactly of what a treasure of centuries-old wisdom was

available to the outside world for the first time in history. and the final part of this process for me was very soon after china opened tibet to the world i quickly went to a loss of course and i think many of you in this room have been there and you know that it is almost impossible not to be moved just by the intensity of the elements, the sharp shafts of sunlight coming in on the chapels where the monks in the corners reciting their citrus. it's hard not to be moved by the warm and hospitality by the people who've never seen foreigners and history and were very excited to see the handful of us traveling there in those days, and also hard not to be moved by the resilience of the fortitude with which they were trying to sustain their country in very difficult circumstances. and the one final thing i will say before i leave the subject to myself and turn to the dalai lama is all the time that i was going to visit him and traveling

back-and-forth to tibet i was also as i still am, and as you heard in the introductions, a full-fledged journalist. i've been writing for "time" magazine for 27 years now. so as with eric, i spent a lot of my time in very difficult north korea and averitt and sri lanka during of the war and ethiopia and yemen and el salvador never to be like anyone going back and forth between these places good preparation and champion of peace. i always wondered what the sun usually nuclear site man might have to offer to those places to help release them from their seemingly intractable cycles of violence and i should say at this point that i am not a buddhist. i don't speak tibetan so i can't follow the dalai lama when he is at his most forceful and articulate and i do spend a lot of time in a monastery but i wouldn't presume to talk about his monastic life. but one thing that struck me was

on like of course any dalai lama in history he spends a lot of his time in rooms like this, the national cathedral. certainly he spends a lot of his life talking to people like us who may have no interest in buddhism and no interest ever in acquiring a knowledge of buddhism and i think that almost as a doctor of the mind, and like any doctor, he sits on this very intricate and technical body of knowledge and like any doctor, his mandate is to compress that specific knowledge into precepts so simple and every day and human that anyone can follow them or can not follow them. and as you know, whenever he travels to a place like washington he says well, this is what i thought to be useful. if it works for you, great. if it doesn't, turn to another doctor of the mind. and what i began to find as i was listening to him was how many of the precept that he was showing actually shed a bit of light on my own life or anyone's

life. as you know he always stresses china and tibet are always went to the neighbors and so anything that helps china will help tibet and anything that harms did it will harm china. the destinies are intertwined. and so, when i got back to my home in california this week let's say i find in my absence my neighbor has flung a stone through my window. i will pick up the stone and as i am about to bring it back if i stop for just a second and think the minute i through the stone of course i am going to make my neighbor's life a lot worse, that's probably my intention, but i'm also likely to enrage and alienate the entire neighborhood and a list of all i'm going to make my own life for the next few years misery and set into motion lawsuits and endlessly prices and conditions so if i'm only thinking of my own well-being the sensible thing is to put down the stone. when i hear the dalai lama speak on here that on happiness and

suffering, and this speaks to eric's expertise, and happiness and suffering are very different things. suffering for buddhists of course is the fabric of life. every life in san def, every meeting ends in separation. all loveless are at some point likely to know disease and sickness as well of course as death and yet on happiness is just the position we choose to bring to it. apply you change the world by changing the way you look up the world. there's nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so as hamlet said and so suffering is by no means a necessary collis of on happiness and i also hear him say for example that all of the peace treaties in the world are not going to be worth anything if the people signing them are still jealous or territorial. or defensive in sight. if at the end of this session on a sign a treaty of internal friendship with eric and then i

suddenly remembered his book was a best seller and he gets to live in washington, d.c. and has a wonderful life and start feeling jealous the treaty or the agreement isn't going to be worth anything. the only way we will have substance is each of us slowly works towards a more inclusive and spacious vision of ourselves and if we do that we don't even need that treaty. and eric very kindly said he felt that i was always interested in essence and certainly that's how i would describe the dalai lama. i remember a couple of years ago i read in london of all places that they had found in northern ireland to remain with shovels and a little hot constructing a half ton bomb and when this fact was presented to the police department one senior officer said i think. wisely well, there is no way you can decommission shovels. you've got to decommission mines and like that is exactly what the dalai lama is doing which is

the essentially to try to propagate the kind of revolution by going to the root of things out of which everything fall clothes and making the change but not even being distracted by the services and externals and i should probably say though i hesitate to say this in washington as a journalist i have met a lot of politicians and i think to my surprise i noticed some point that the dalai lama was the single most realistic politician i've ever met. i think of him as a hyper realist and so many politicians talk about the future which is a never never land and so many talk about the past which essentially can't be changed and this is one of the only ones i know looking almost like a scientist through his microscope at the present moment first to see put it is and then to see what can be done with it. so at the beginning of the century, many of you are travelers so you probably felt as i did that the world had never been more polarized than eight days in recent years and what i noticed first with the terrorist attacks on the city of new york and then on the other side of the world is more people

than ever before seen to be really horrified by what was being done in the name of religion and at the same time because of all of the suffering more people than ever before work reaching out for the solace or guidance that religion traditionally provides and so i thought this might be an interesting moment to look at this rather radical nonexclusive figure religious leader who as you know tells people not to get distracted or confused by religion, but a buddhist when he comes to washington tells people don't become buddhists. study within your own traditions where your roots are the deepest and there is least danger of misperception. he is an antimissionary almost and the buddhist also who delivers lectures on the gospels to christians who call themselves a defender of islam and whose greatest passion probably is spending time with scientist many of whom may be extremely hard and atheists. but was always singing that

religion often makes division and let's go to the human reality while we have more in common than apart and i think everyone in this room know that one of the unusual media makes things about the dalai lama is he has some needles comegys 80 facto leader of state, the head of buddhism, a lifelong monk, a keen amateur scientist and when you travel with him as i do every year, you see him moving at lightening speed between these different worlds, so he will have a meeting with the monks and deliver philosophical discourse so high toned i don't think anyone in this room could follow it and then he will go to the auditorium and there will be a four-year-old and he will yield down to her level and say something useful and then get in a car and go across town and deal with the most complicated matters of the politics involved in washington and tibet and

china but what struck me more interesting than this was that he is also pushing all of these together to see how each one can perhaps light up or elaborate the others. by which i mean he's the only politician i know well for a political leader who is a monk and brings to the fi device of world of politics much more selfless and farsighted vision of a monk at the same time the only monk but i know we years rigorously to scientific principles and who famously says its new research finds the buddhist precepts to be out of date or incomplete throughout the precepts and he's said that himself and his own life, there were certain tibetan squirrels that represent the moon and the sun for example and he says well we know that's not the case. i have no time for those tonga's now and i think the other particular part of his example for many people and maybe including me is that he has

never been a wise man sitting on a mountaintop dispensing the golden rule one for precepts for life. he's really in his entire life has been spent in a burning house and as i was saying he was the leader of the people at the age of four come at the age of seven he goes receding and voice from fdr with fairly substantial requests from the transportation of u.s. supplies across tibet in world war ii at age of 11 he was surrounded by a civil war in lhasa and in the age of 15 when most are thinking about our first prom or first date he was made for political leader and up against the leaders of the world's largest nation. and i think it's that in part that has intensified the national debate national pragmatism which means that in my experience it deals with obstructions or wishful solutions. he's always very much looking out will work at the here and

now. i remember once i went in to see him and he said you know i'm addicted and i was surprised. i felt what possibly could the dali lama be addicted to, compassion, certainly that, and permanence probably come emptiness i'm sure but he said no, i'm addicted to the bbc world service and every day when i do my four hours of meditation from 4:30 a.m. to 7:30 a.m. when he's traveling to places like washington and can't listen to the bbc service that he feels as if something significant is missing from his day and i think he follows the news much more closely than on or almost any journalist that on no does and i think again, that is what allows him to be a liberating and unorthodox light to the world of politics and when i listen to him i hear the outdated term, the war on terror, the war on terrorism at least is never

going to be one so long as there are people on the far side of the world so desperate they are ready to give up their lives in attacking us, but the war on terror, that's to say the war precipitates those attacks and the fear in those souls leaves them to make them, that can be one at any moment. each one at a time that any person can begin to transform their heart whenever she so chooses. i hear him say essentially so many politicians are quarreling with their to paint the vessel of society red or blue and he's kind of saying let's rewire the engine it doesn't matter what color it is. some of you may know that china has opened up a high-speed train linking lhasa and to get to shanghai and other cities ahead of schedule three years ago and most tibetans ino were up in arms say and this is the last nail in the coffin of the country. this is a way for beijing to flood with chinese and essentially make obscene minority in our own country and

many people of china said no,@@p see how moment by moment basis his largest living his principles but i think speaking for certain large principals the peace

trying to share and i remember a couple of years ago i was with him in japan and we were climbing a steep slope where there was a small tibetan temple and as we were walking up suddenly a young woman stepped forward and said dalai lama i need to talk to you, and of course the bodyguards sprinted away and we continued decline and the dalai lama went to sit in the temple quietly for about ten minutes and as we were sitting there we could hear her shouting and shrieking out side. in the minute he said with outside the temple to descend the mountain he called the security to him and said please bring her to me and he just stood about 3 inches and cradled her face in his hand, looked into her eyes and more or less said i'm your friend, don't worry. don't be so frightened, we have more in common than apart and we are both really humans dealing with the same struggles and so of course that was a remarkable lesson because i think when most of us here hecklers all we want

to do is run in the opposite direction but it was a very small and practical way of his speaking for a human face-to-face contact and dialogue and looking for common ground which of course is what he's trying to do in the microand when i talk about him in a global perspective as i suppose i am doing now i see him as one of the ways in a chorus of voices that may represent one of the greatest possibilities of the century where more and more leaders are realizing the neighborhood and therefore constituency and responsibility is the entire globe. for example bill gates who used such determination and resourcefulness to make money using the same determination and resourcefulness to give it away you see desmond tutu who went through all the sufferings of apartheid and then set up his truth and reconciliation commission bringing what he learned from that experience to places like northern ireland and you see even donner roe -- bono

of the music group u2 -- as a kid in washington, d.c. that distance has dissolved in to that extent we can't just look at a new president attending school who's policy at least as he was running for president seemed about dissolving the essence of us and them and seeing every situation not just as it looked to this country but also as it looked from indonesia and hawaii and every point and was telling that all of us lose if we see the personal the other side of the street as an enemy and i think we are speaking word for word the kind of things that done the or the dalai lama were talking about. as i said i am eager to get to

the dialogue with eric so i will wind this up by saying i think for most this in this room when we hear or think about the dalai lama we probably see that beaming face looking down at us from a billboard or the person often on larry king live or the person on our neighbors computer as a screen saver riding he is used more as a screen saver than any living being and always is great and it's easy to forget of course 90% of his life and his mission are really concerned with his people in tibet and in exile mostly in india so i spent three recent springs living just across the road from him going to see him a lot and also going to talk to the increasingly impatient tibetans whose voices we've heard more and more of infil last 18 months raising that completely understandable human cry, which is how can we

be asked to practice for parents and nonviolence when the country is being raised to the grout and parents are being in prison and cousins are being killed and the dalai lama hears that as acutely as painfully as anyone but remembers his first mission is to protect tibetans and chinese for further suffering. and as i watched this dialogue play out i began to feel unexpectedly because i didn't know about that side of his life so much that what he has done with his exile community is one of his and wearing achievements, which is to take these people who never left lower than 15,000 feet who knew next to nothing about the outside world who spoke no english and to give them so stable a new life around the world that even the economist which is not the most dustin of magazines calls it as far and away the most successful

refugee community on the planet. and one thing that i found out when i was researching my book was that the very first was the dalai lama said when he completed that flight that i had been listening to as a little bleak and finally set foot in india were to his younger brother and he turned around the minute he left in tibet he said now we are free. quite amazing words. as we see he lost the people that he was going to rule, he lost his destiny, but he but seeing loss as opportunity realizing he could do many things in exile that would have been next to impossible for him to do had he been in lhasa. he could offer new opportunities to women and bring science and to his curriculum. he could rescue tibet from the centuries-old isolation and probably most important, he could bring democracy to his people for the first time and so his very first year in exile are now the time he was meeting my

father in 1960 he was drawing up a constitution for the first time in tibetan history with a whole calls allowing for the dalai lama's impeachment and now he set up a democratically elected government which is why he said that he's retired because political authority officially rests with his prime minister and not with him. and now of course his first priority as i was saying was insuring his people would have a lasting hold in the world on till they could return to tibet but i think as with many things he's offering a much larger lesson because this is the age of exile by some accounts. there are 200 million displaced people across the globe but i can see many people in this room living in homes different from the world they grew up in and countries very far from the ones they grew up in and i think in some ways the dalai lama was addressing the palestinians and kurds and the laws of possible nomads and telling us that even if you have lost your comments will as long as you keep your

comment foundation or values you haven't lost anything at all even if there is no place called kurdistan as long as kurdish culture, language and traditional relies inside the people than the most important part of the culture is still flourishing. but nonetheless it's a very difficult job of course to try to protect 6 million people he hasn't seen in 50 years and to rally tibetans in exile most of whom have never seen tibet itself. and i will end by saying something i think all of you know already which is that an old tibet's dark and difficult history i think this is the most dark and difficult time of all. people are beating as soon as they are arrested. people are subject to seven years' imprisonment just for calling up their family in this country and telling them what it's like and people are being sentenced to death and closed courts and i think many of you probably know that the dali lama on the 50th anniversary of his exile in march said with unusual

vehemence and unprecedented figure that tibet under chinese rule is hell on earth. i just spent yesterday morning during an event in new york and over and over he was saying my country is going to a death sentence and it's really the equivalent of an intensive care unit. and i think one of the main things he's doing when he says all that is trying to ask anyone who has a chance just to go to tibet. he was saying yesterday don't listen to tibetan propaganda. don't listen to me. don't listen to chinese propaganda. go to tibet and tell us what's happening. give us an unbiased and objective report of what's going on. and again, for a doctor if you can't see your patient or hear the patient's symptoms it is next to impossible to learn how to turn to that patient. so i have noticed over and over he has been telling people if they can and many of you in this room are probably in the position to do so, to visit and tell the truth what is happening and the tibetans are happy or

unhappy and a mixture of the two and he also i met in california about a week ago and was talking to him and he said well i don't expect the world to be concerned about tibet. i don't expect anyone to stand up to china, some say brightly for will force and he said to that is only 6 million people. people are suffering an even worse state than tibet and that is one of the first priorities should be but he said well it's still worth remembering that four of the major asian rivers all start in tibet at the source of tibet and if those rivers begin to be contaminated that affects 2 billion people. also tebet stands between china and india and if it is on stable the largest nations could easily come up against one another. and finally, he was saying all the world now is lucky to be able to enjoy as they couldn't in my parents' day contact with tibetan music and restaurants. and so if tibet is lost

something fundamental is lost by all the fuss. but last, we get to the fun part. so please come eric, let's talk. [applause] >> is their somebody who could help with the microphone -- okay, good. [inaudible conversations]

>> i'm feeling bad now because you've prepared all these questions you've been working on. >> that's okay. always better to have too many questions than to few. can everyone here russ okay? great. so, i'm just curious as a writer and journalist how you go about the task of writing about someone who everyone in the world thinks they know. i mean, you were not writing about some obscure politician somewhere or let's face it, you can say whatever you want because no one is going to check. but everyone has this preconceived notion of the dalai lama, and maybe we feel like we have met him. did that make it more challenging for in a way easier? >> that was the biggest challenge of all. he has been covered by 200 movies and everyday probably new books are coming out by people who know tibet and steeped in

buddhism and know much more about public policy than i ever will. so my only advantage was writing from a position of to let parents. but i thought that actually my background is in literature and i am not a buddhist as i was saying, so i thought as a regular person practicing that most profane of tasks of journalism, but could i see in the dalai lama that perhaps an expert wouldn't highlight and the reason i chose this title, "the open road," as you know but not everyone does, it comes from d.h. lawrence writing about wittman and was important to me to say that these ideas that could seem remote and the launch a far away culture or just the buddhists, there they are in an english novelist, an american poet and our midst. and in some ways i would say to domesticate but be exonerated him and to bring a letter real-life -- also in terms of the los reading of the words that he says. for example he will begin sentences and say generally,

therefore, and that therefore is not by chance. logic is six ackley how he formulates his sentences. he will say something like i am a simple buddhist monk and seems so transparent -- >> is he being a bit coy? i've always wondered that. >> 20 years ago would have said it sounds like modesty of an extreme kind. i felt as i went deeper into it he says when he has dreams and his dreams he sees himself as a monk but he never sees himself as a dalai lama and when he has the images of his past life he is aware of a strong connection but not a deep connection with the dalai lama institution and he says the most important thing is anyone at any time could strip him of the dalai lama lineage or title but no one except himself could strip him of his commitment -- >> he creates his own mortality every morning. >> every morning. >> which is a good practice. >> ad