 Welcome. Well, my heart soars when I look out and see standing room only. Thank you all for being here. This is wonderful, and it will be a wonderful lecture. Before we begin, I just want to say a couple of thank yous to our proud co-sponsors. The Sponber chair in ethics, Florence Amamoto, the Office of the Provost, Mark Braun, Paula O'Loughlin, and Darren Goode, and Dean in his capacity as the Hanson Peterson Chair in Liberal Studies. And thank you to all of you for being here. This is what will make it special. I also want to acknowledge some sadness in the philosophy department. Our colleague George George Caracas passed away last week. And we hope that if there is a heaven that George is up there enjoying it as George would. That's all I'll say. And I'm very pleased and proud to introduce my colleague Dean Curtin, prolific scholar, intrepid world traveler, combined bring you this lovely talk, The Art of Happiness a Year with the Dalai Lama. Dean Curtin. So just let me very quickly add my thanks. This is a phenomenal turnout and very diverse. Some current students or graduated some time ago, friends, colleagues, I really appreciate that you came. When I was preparing this talk, it gave me an opportunity to think back to, when did I get interested in Tibet? And I was pretty surprised. I think I was age 15. And what happened was at age 15, I used to hitchhike across the United States where there were a group of friends. And we'd go mountain climbing together. And a lot of times we'd end up in Wyoming at Jenny Lake Campground in the Ranthita National Park. And we'd collect there because it was the closest campground to the really big mountains to Ranthita and the Miltita and so on. And it was still as a very small campground. And so what we'd do is every 10 days, you could reserve these sites for 10 days. The 11th day, 8 in the morning, we'd be up at the ranger cabin. And somebody else had reserved for another 10 days. And we stayed there the whole summer. And we really were not very good climbers. But when the really good climbers, the really phenomenal climbers came through town, they had to stay with us because we had the campsite. And it's amazing to me. I remember Ivan Shenard, for example, who owns Patagonia. Nobody knew him. He was really the classic dirtball climber back then. And he'd show up in an old BW van. And he had a blacksmith shop in the back of his BW van. He'd pull it out on our campsite. And he'd make climbing equipment and sell it. And that's how he financed his climbs. It was pretty amazing. I particularly remember a phenomenal British climber, Chris Bonnington, who showed up. And he was talking about an expedition he was leaving on for Nepal. And I always loved the mountains. And everything he said about the mountains has caught my imagination. In particular, a trip he'd made to Tibet. Tibet at this time was still pretty much the forbidden kingdom. The Dalai Lama had come out. But he wasn't very famous. And Chris used to tell us these stories about this amazing land up behind the Himalayas, where there were yogis who could levitate off the ground. At 15, that really impressed me. You just levitate. Or Tibetan monks who were specialized in running hundreds of miles at night in a meditative state across the Tibetan plains. There were stories of lines of them just running hundreds and hundreds of miles without stopping. Well, that caught my imagination. And my climbing skills never got me there. But I was really lucky to get a job at this college in southern Minnesota. And my students allowed me to get there over and over. And sometimes people ask me, how many times have you been to India? I've lost count, maybe 40, maybe 45. I don't know. I'm obsessed with the place. And so I've taken students to India for 35 years. And most recently on a January term course called Buddhist India. And it's basically like a course I teach here. And I'm teaching right now, except it's on site. So when we read the Four Noble Truths we're right there on the grounds at Sarnath where the Buddha gave the Four Noble Truths. And when we talk about the Buddha's enlightenment, we sit there among all the pilgrims that had Bodh Gaya where the Buddha reached enlightenment. And so I'll stand cemented to this. I need to talk like this, right? Oh, great. This is going to be an unnatural act up here. Loran, can you tell me if I drop out? So as a result, my faculty colleagues know the pressure we have to find speakers for students when we travel. And as a result of going to the Buddha's sites, ending up in Dharamsala or McClellan's where the Dalai Lama lives, I ended up knowing a lot of people, a lot of people, all parts of society, from the prime minister to the Karmapa, to the hermits living in caves, political prisoners. And when I had a sabbatical coming up, I approached a friend of mine, Geshe Laktor, who used to be the translator for the Dalai Lama for 16 years. And he was transferred and became the head of the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, which is the main academic unit for Tibetans. And I explained to him, I have this book going, and I'll be here on sabbatical. And the book is partly on Western philosophy, partly on two Indian Buddhist philosophers in the garden of Shantideva. These are the two Indian philosophers who are most interested in the Dalai Lama and Tibetans. And so I said, I'd like to come here and talk to you during my sabbatical, but I'd also like to contribute something back to Tibetan culture. And I remember telling him, well, it makes no difference what it is. I'd be glad to sweep floors if that's what's needed. And he kind of smiled, and he said, well, I knew you were coming, and I thought of you last week when I was together with His Holiness. And His Holiness looked over to me, and he said, Laktor, I'd like you to make sure that Western philosophy gets translated into Tibetan. And so he looked at me, and he said, well, would you like to be in charge of that program? And it took like a nanosecond of reflection. And I said, I'm your guy. I would be delighted to do that. So those are two of the three projects I was involved with, the book, the translation project. And then I got involved in a third project, which, in a way, ended up being my favorite. I was asked to design and teach a course at the Tibetan University near Bangalore on the Dalai Lama's book, Beyond Religion. And so I had the chance to teach young Tibetans, the age of you students, except young Tibetans who are recent refugees from Tibet, and basically all managed to escape, hike over the high Himalayas, and down into India. So I'd like to, in a minute, talk about each one of those experiences. And I did meet His Holiness. And I realized that's what I'd really like to hear about is what the Dalai Lama likes. Before lunch into that, I'd like to show you some slides. And some of these slides are just pictures I like. Basically traveling through India, just a set context. Some of the Buddhist sites that I take students to, some of the university that I teach at, and a bit from Duransala or McLeodgane's where the Dalai Lama lives. This was the view from my window every morning from my apartment. And basically I lived on the last foothill before the high Himalayas. Just behind that peak, there are peaks about 18,000. And then they go up to about 24,000. I realize a lot of times we're not exactly up on our India geography. So maybe I'll step away. Basically, oh, this used to work. What? It works. Oh, OK. So here's the capital, Delhi. Some of the slides at the beginning, I'm going to show you are from Rajasthan. It is the big desert in the west of India and up into Pakistan. Saifur is usually the bottom of the main city of Rajasthan, but also up this way. When I talk about teaching at the university, here's Bangalore in southern India. I'll also say a little bit about teaching at the great monasteries. Basically, the great monasteries of Lhasa got relocated to India as a result of what's happened with the invasion of Tibet. And they're basically north of Mysore. Mysore is right in here somewhere. And there are two encampments, huge encampments, of Tibetans, Waila Kupe here and Mungun, which is over here. When I talk about taking students on the Buddhist India trip, we basically started New Delhi. We go to Agra, which is where the Taj Mahal is, so kind of the peak of Islamic culture. We go to Varanasi or Varanasi, which is the main Hindu pilgrimage site on the Ganges. I'll show you some photos of that. Right next door to Varanasi is Sarnath, where the Buddha went after he reached enlightenment, taught the Four Noble Truths. Over roughly about here is Bodh Gaya, the little dusty town where the Buddha sat under the Bodhi tree and reached enlightenment. I'll say a little bit about Vulture Peak, which is up here. After the Buddha reached enlightenment, after he went to Sarnath, and he spent 18 years basically living in this town in Rajgeer, which at the time was the wealthiest town in India, the patronage of King Bimbisar. I live right above there. So basically just over the hill from China or Tibet. And in terms of Tibet, that's it right there. Tibet, it's now on maps considered to be part of China, but it was enormous. Tibet is about 50% to 60% the size of the United States. It was a huge country. OK, so to be clear, I lived in India. I didn't live in Tibet. I worked among Tibetan refugees in India. So just some general travel pictures. That bus is leaning like that to the right. That's pretty standard. The bus itself is jammed in. Guys generally just jump on the sides and the top. Here you can see Rajasthan as a desert. And so that's pretty typical of transportation. As soon as I arrived, the airlines went bankrupt, and I spent a lot of time on buses like this. I also spent a lot of time in train stations. And a lot of people find traveling by train frustrating. I usually find it really wonderful. And one of the ways I deal with it is I take photos of people waiting for trains. And I just love the kind of tactile quality of this and the look on his face. I love this photo. It's like three separate portraits of people in their own little worlds. The traditional woman on the left having a conversation. The guy in the middle who was picked out on taking his photo. And the person on the right, kind of just in his own world. This is a traditional second class car for travel. People kind of make themselves at home. Here he is reading something in this huge mountain of boxes. Something about the traditional women who cover their faces. And this bright-eyed little kid who's traveling with them. I love this. And in India, if you send a package, you take it to a tailor who otherwise makes clothes. And they can make a linen sack that goes around your package. They sew it shut, and they put hot wax on it so it can't be opened until it reaches its destination. So it's an amazing story about labor in India. You never just go to the post office. They treat you with contempt if you came with a box that hadn't been taken to a tailor first. I put this one in for my grandson who was here. This kind of looks like something that should be in E.T. or Star Wars. So there must be some kind of action figure that has this name. This is on the road in Rajasthan. And there are these stalls where you stop. And people like this make drinks out of sugarcane and lemon and spices. It's really good. Really good. There are a few slides here. They're farther out in Rajasthan. There is a group, Hindu group, that lives out in the desert named the Bishnayas. And they're a Hindu subsect. And they're famous for being environmentalists. There was a famous story of the Maharaja who sent his troops out to cut down trees in the desert, which we now would think wasn't a very good idea. And the Bishnayas were the first people to be tree-huggers. In the United States now, we have this term tree-huggers. And these were the first people who protested the cutting of their trees, women in particular who hugged the trees. One woman was killed for hugging the tree. And the Maharaja was so impressed that he said, no more cutting trees in this area where this Hindu subsect, the Bishnayas live. And somebody must be leaning on that. So there are just some remarkable faces in this area. I actually think that this eye color comes from Afghanistan. So I think maybe her family came to India from Afghanistan. That's too bright. This is home of Bishnayi people making chapati. Very simple lifestyles. They still don't eat any kind of animal life. They raise cows for milk, but they don't slaughter them. And it's basically an agricultural society. I just can't help it. I love the gentle look of these children's faces. She's the matriarch of this little village. It kind of sums up their lifestyle to me, the handmade rakes. And on the left is the drawing of a flower. And they have these very simple mud huts, but very prolific artists. Everywhere you go, they've drawn on their walls. Well, that's not the desert. This is old Delhi. And you probably know Delhi is split into many parts now. But traditionally, old Delhi and new Delhi, old Delhi was the old Muslim part of Delhi. It was extremely wealthy back in the day. New Delhi was the British part, basically. And this is a typical small street in the old part of old Delhi. You can get basically push cards through here, but no cars, no motorized rick shots. You can imagine the sum. To me, this is India, with these old aristocratic houses that used to be occupied by wealthy Islamic merchants and Bollywood over the front. That's India, too. And I think some of those are water pipes or maybe gas pipes. And the rest are electrical pipes. A moving place for me. These are the steps that Gandhi took the morning he was assassinated, living in Birla House. This is outside the Red Fort, which was the seat of Islamic power for centuries. And then in the end, the British took over. Let me just say the Muslim architecture is beautiful, and the British architecture is really sinfully ugly. Barracks, basically, in the middle of all is beautiful architecture. I like this photo because here we have all these traditional women, except for one woman who is wearing blue jeans. And the fact that they're sitting together so comfortably kind of makes me think the bonding between generations. It's a beautiful thing. OK, so again, when I take students to India, we start here, and we stop here. You have to see the Taj Mahal. And it really is, I have to say, magnificent. People ask me how many times have I been there? I have been there more times than I can count, and I always look forward to going back. And as much complaint as there is about India, sometimes the government has really improved the Taj Mahal. Delt with pollution. Used to be stalls all over, hawking wares, and so on. It's really a magnificent sight. I'll show you some photos of students. Most of the students here now probably got here after these folks were graduated. But I can see some of the faculty remember these. This is the photo you've seen so many times over the years that Gustavus students go to the Taj Mahal. They dress up, and they're sorry. Where is she? Right here. There she is. I've traveled with Linda Shaw. If you've had a January tour, you know Linda. I love Linda in many ways. And one is that she's totally prepared for travel in India. Let's just count these water bottles. One, two, three, and four, and five, six, seven. Seven and talk the way down there. Way to go, Linda. That's a collection. We got two water bottles a day, and she was not going to let any of them go. And I also noticed, Linda, there's Rama in front right there. He's our guide. When I first started playing Rama, I misunderstood what he said. It turns out Rama is not his name. But for years, all our students have called him Rama because he likes it. So we run into people who know him, and we call him Rama, and they say, well, he's not Rama. So that's Rama for us. He was great. We got the boy guy at once, and the whole town was closed off by police because the Karmapa was there for security reasons. And it was a long way to pull luggage across these dirty roads to get to our hotel. And so Rama said, this bus is an American bus, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton personally wants you to let this bus in. Up goes the game. We're the only bus in town, so that's a talented guy. We're on to Varanasi now. Varanasi is the most sacred place on the Ganges River. And it's said that this is the only place on the whole course of the Ganges where it turns back north, and it bows to Shiva. Shiva was born on Mount Kailas in Western Tibet, and this is the city of Shiva. And so this is a sacred place because basically the most sacred river is bowing to Shiva. And Hindus really want to come here at least once in life and bathe in the river, and maybe to die here and be cremated just down from this site and have your ashes spread in the river. This sacred site has been operating for probably at least 3,000 years, maybe more. Where's Professor Robert Miller? There he is. Travelled with David. He told me if things don't work out at Gustavus, he's going to be an oarsman on the Ganges River. And he was darn good. You can see he's seriously intent on learning this craft. Every evening there is an evening puja. And it's said this is the oldest continuously practiced religious rite in the world. I don't know how people know that. But at least it's 3,000 years old. As I said, this is the city of Shiva represented by the snake. You can see all the flowers that in the back is this puja that occurs every night. Lots of lights and recorded sound and incense and so on. Who's that? That's Jeff. And who's the other guy? Aaron Hiltner. That's an interesting photo to me because these human-powered pedicabs have been outlawed in India on a human rights basis. But here in Marinasi, they still operate because the last few blocks before you get to the river are blocked off for security reasons. There have been several terrorist incidents. And so this is one of the rare places where human beings still transport other human beings down to the river. There's a friend. I see him every year. Basically those umbrellas in the back, Hindu sadhus, usually in this city devoted to Shiva sit and for a certain amount of money they'll tell you you're a fortune and so on. And so I've known this guy for years. I always get my fortune told, it's never true basically. We're on to Bodh Gaya here. This is where the Buddha reached enlightenment, sitting under that tree or a predecessor of that tree. It's a pilgrimage site. When India became independent, the first Prime Minister, Nehru, basically said to the world's Buddhist communities, if you come here, we'll give you land and you can establish a monastery. So in this one place, you can experience Tibetan Buddhism, Thai Buddhism, Burmese Buddhism, Japanese, Korean, so on. Everyone has usually more than one temple. And people come here, Tibetans in particular in January and do usually month-long pujas. Old 80-year-old women will be told that they need to do 5,000 prostrations here. And they spend their whole month doing full prostrations down to their forehead. In the morning before the sun comes up, I love it, old Tibetan women in particular have their prayer wheels and walk countless times around this tree. That's directly opposite the tree. It's a very ancient Buddhist temple. I often say that's the mecca or the Vatican of Buddhism, that tree and that building. This is the entrance to the temple and the column in the front is a column where the Buddha rejected the caste system. It said that you'll get to nirvana based on your own merit and not the way you were born. People come and offer Tibetan kataks, those white scarves, I'll talk more about those in a bit, basically touching their forehead to the plate that was thought to have been touched by the Buddha. Over the years, my students and I have volunteered at a school just outside of Bodh Gaya called the Sujatha Children's Welfare Trust. This is a free school for poor kids and orphans, basically. Most of the Buddhist sites are in the state of Bihar, which in the Buddhist time was by far the wealthiest part of India. It's not by far the poorest part of India. And I would just say I've been so proud of our students over the years. One year they gave $500 out of their pockets after paying absurd amounts to take one of our trips over there. And we ended up building a roof on one of their new buildings, right? So the generosity of our students to this place has really been astonishing. You recognize them? So the young children greet us. They give us basically the flower garlands. They sing to us as we're walking up to their school. This little fellow recites his ABCs for us every year. Very proudly, full voice, black makeup on those girls that keep problematic spirits away from her. She's just totally adorable, right? So let me give you advice if you give a talk like this, pictures of baby's work. Another one of our students, a pair of women, maybe some remember her. And here's Sarnath. The tall building in the back is a stupa where the Buddha supposedly gave the Four Noble Trues that pilgrims come and do their circumambulations around the stupa. It's very likely some of the Buddha's ashes are in there. They haven't been next to me. Here's some Tibetan women going around the stupa. And the gold leaf above is usually left by Thai Buddhist pilgrims. They come and have this leaf that they pull off and stick on the monuments. And this is Vulture Peak where I mentioned the Buddha lived for 18 years, long time after he reached enlightenment. Basically, his life was, he lived up here on top of this mountain. His closest followers lived in caves just one level below this. He would meditate and then in the afternoon, he would walk down the path that you still walked down with his purple begging bowl. And he would go down to the city below. He would go to three houses and accept whatever food donations they gave him. That's what he'd eat that day. And then he would go preach in the bamboo grove up to 10,000 people eventually waiting to hear him talk. So that's where the Buddha meditated every day for 18 years. That's the Vulture. Can you see it? Yeah, with the beak up to the left. This is in one of the caves below. This is Ananda's cave. Ananda was the very faithful personal attendant, basically, to the Buddha. And it's very interesting. Back then, there was only one way to get up to the Buddha. There was the crack in the rock. And the Ananda's cave was right at that crack. So he was basically the secretary. He decided who got up to see the Buddha. But he was doing prostrations. Okay, now we're in McLeod Gantt. That's where I live. That's where the Dalai Lama lives. Basically, McLeod Gantt is up the hill from Duramsala. Dalai Lama was put there by Prime Minister Nehru in a house that had been owned by the British general who lived there during colonial times. And basically, this is where I live. This hill, that's where the Dalai Lama lives. I can see him out my window. This is his temple. That basically, there's a tent out in the courtyard. It's a really very plain temple, but it could take maybe 10,000 people for this teaching. And so, later on, when I talk about actually meeting him, basically, you start here. You walk up through this forest, through a garden, he loves gardening. And you meet with him on the far side of this house overlooking his face. It was a view overlooking a conger valley. They're not kidding. This is the Korah. You can see right here, it says circumambulate the Korah. In Lhasa, when the Dalai Lama lived there, there was a circuit around his house. This is the circuit now. The Dalai Lama's house is up here. And basically, you can walk around his house and his temple. It's wonderful in the morning because particularly old Tibetans go with their prayer wheels and walk around the circuit. On the left are prayer flags. Tibetans print mantras or prayers on the flags. They hang them. And when the wind blows, the idea is the prayers are blowing all over the mountains. Gigantic prayer wheel. This is one of my favorite faces in the Cloud Gorge. Tibetan women, it's amazing. They make it around this thing. So I do it three times a day. But it is also a social event. And it's just lovely to see these people talking together. There's also this, you've probably heard. There are 122 Tibetans who have self-immolated in the last few years in protest of policies in Tibet. And they're very much remembered in the Cloud Gorge. When somebody self-immolated, it was very clear what had happened. I'd come back to town from the mountains and it was just very clear from the tenor of people's emotions. It's generally a very happy town and you could tell something had happened. And this, this is the Karmapa or sorry, this is the Panchen Lama. There are three main leaders in Tibetan religious culture, the Dalai Lama, the Panchen Lama and the Karmapa. And the story briefly was that the previous incarnation of this child was imprisoned in China for 20 years in the hope that he'd basically denounced the Dalai Lama. They led him out back to his hometown of Shigatze and 24 hours later he publicly denounced the Chinese instead and the next day he was dead. They poisoned him. And so this is the reincarnation. They basically took him when he was six. He is 24 years old now. They've announced that he's in Beijing but nobody has seen him since he was age six. And it's particularly important because one of the two religious figures who basically authenticate the next Dalai Lama is the Panchen Lama and Ling Rinpoche who's a young reincarnation who lives in a monastery in South India. So it's very clear that they have this child because they hope that he'll basically certify their own Dalai Lama, right? That the Chinese are gonna have their own candidate. Okay, so finally just some faces. I love this guy. He lives in a retirement home just down the hill. He is completely sightless. And he comes up every day. He's held vertical steps and he sings traditional Tibetan songs for anybody who wants to listen. This is an aristocratic woman. Tibet had a strong aristocracy and the aristocrats looked different from the more common people. I've talked to her frequently. She asked that I never use her name because her husband has been in Tibet for the last 50 years. She hasn't seen him and she doesn't wanna do anything that might make his life more precarious. Here were my other neighbors. They love my house on a flat roof. They were there constantly by the hundreds. I got along with them okay even though they ripped out my electricity regularly and banged on my roof at three in the morning and broke my windows and tried to come through my windows. I had a neighbor, the infamous Victoria who she liked to have things under control and she'd give me bowls of rocks that tell me to throw them at the monkeys. I knew not to do it. Monkeys take names, they know who you are. And one day Victoria came out of her house and the gigantic male dominant monkey jumped on her back, scratched her, she went down to the Forest Service and said, you need to go shoot that monkey. And the Forest Service said, madam, we don't shoot monkeys, this is a Buddhist community. We can give you a permit, you can hire a hunter and they'll shoot it for you. Well, when she did, she hired a hunter and when the Buddhists found out there was such a protest she had to let that sucker go even though he was really obnoxious, right? Monkeys are sexist, they don't jump on men, they jump on women and children. Very often, I lived down a donkey trail, I didn't live on a road. I'd get down there and there'd be a Tibetan woman and a baby and they'd say, the monkey just jumped on us, can you walk into town with us? I was super hero. As they'd leave me alone. Some of my other favorite people, there are hermits who live out in the mountains outside of Dharamsala, spend their whole lives out there. Misconceptions about hermits, these are people who are basically working on their graduate degrees. Once you've had complete training in the monastery, if you're really gifted, then you'll spend years by yourself in a cave or in a pot. This is the Tibetan children's villages. The Dalai Lama supports a series of 19 schools all the way from preschool to graduate school. If you're Tibetan, you get to go to school free. This is the main TCV school in Dharamsala. That's their motto, come to learn, go to serve. There was the 50th anniversary of the founding of the school while I was there. And they had a gigantic festival out on their sports field. This is typical of living here. There are these adorable children and they're carrying posters of Tibetans who are self-emolated. But in the end, they're still happy. This little kid in the middle who's just singing his brains out. It's just so typical. When we're there in January, most of the students are on leave and the only kids that are left are the little preschool lunch kids. And they have this window between two rooms and they love climbing through this window and jumping into our arms, basically. He's ready to jump. Eric Sam was one of our students. David Pettersen. Here we are with my friend who runs the library, basically. He was the translator for the Dalai Lama for 16 years, basically grew up in the Dalai Lama's household, now he's head of the translation unit. So he's the main person I worked with. Here he is outside his office on the balcony with the Himalayas behind, talking to our students. Here's a photo. I'll talk about the translation project I'll talk about the translation project. This was the inauguration ceremony for the translation project and basically I had managed to bring a whole library of Western philosophy books and we're distributing those. The funny thing that happened here was there was one book, Mill's Subjugation of Women and the guy in the middle was saying, oh good, we're gonna have some feminism and the woman on the right said, how about some female authors? This is one of my favorite people there. This is the former prime minister of the government in exile. He also built the Tibetan Monastic University, Sundan Rinpoche. When the Dalai Lama stepped out of politics and they had a democratic election, he was drafted. He kept saying, oh philosopher, don't go for me. He got 89% of the votes. He told me I did everything I could think of to make myself unpopular so I'd never get re-elected. He got 97% the second time. He just stepped down two years ago. Here we are with the Karmapa. Again, there are three main figures in Tibetan Buddhism, Dalai Lama, Appanchen Lama, Karmapa. He was born in Tibet, broke out, came across the Himalayas, he's 28 years old now and he's basically being trained to be the leader of Tibetan Buddhism in the interim after the Dalai Lama passes on. This is one of my favorite people. Ani Peminsang, she is Tibetan nun. She was imprisoned in Tibet for the crime of having a photo of the Dalai Lama. She spent 30 years in jail. She was tortured every Tuesday for 30 years. They wanted her to denounce the Dalai Lama. She refused to do it, she beat them. They let her out. She walked over the high Himalayas at age 78. She lives in Dhramsala now. We go knock on her door. She comes bursting out with that smile. The only English she knows is I love you. You know how some people are great huggers? She's the greatest, right? I just go there to get hugged by her basically. If she can be happy, we can be happy. Here's somebody else I want to talk about. This is the Dalai Lama's oracle, Necham oracle. I'll talk about it in a bit, but he's in a trance here. He's famous because when he goes into a trance, he has a 50 pound headdress on. His eyes roll up in his head. He starts gyrating. His attendants are following him around because they're worried he's going to break his neck. I've seen this. There he is. You meet him on the street, he's Mr. Normal. You go in and he'll tell you the whole history of the Necham oracle, which started in 1100, so you'd better like some tea, space and drink. This is the Dalai Lama Institute for higher education. This is the Tibetan university where I taught. You can see in a certain sense, I stand out there. This is Sarah Monastery I'll talk about. Again, when Tibet was invaded, the great monasteries of Tibet relocated to southern India. And one of my future projects is I was invited to go teach the monks at Sarah Monastery. They're interested in having a course on Western philosophy. So I'm hoping soon I can go back there. Are we adorable? Yeah. The guy on the left is the head of the Science Meets Dharma program, the Dalai Lama's program to educate monks in Western science at Sarah. And the person on the right is, again, another translator for the Dalai Lama for 10 years. And now he's the head of Tibet House, which is the main cultural center for Tibet and New Delhi. And the guy on the right is the person I team taught with at the Tibetan university. OK, so who is he? In one sense, that's who he is. As a religious leader, he is called to be the reincarnation of Avalokitesh Vara, who is the bodhisattva of compassion. That's why he's important. In Buddhism, we think wisdom and compassion are two ways of looking at the same thing. And he's the incarnation of the bodhisattva of compassion. The story is Avalokitesh Vara was so overwhelmed by the amount of suffering in the world that his head exploded. And Amida Buddha put them together but with 1,000 arms and 10 heads to help relieve us of the suffering. OK, I want to tell you very quickly about a couple of the projects I was involved with. And then I'll get back to his holiness. I was invited to help translate Western philosophy into Tibetan. And the Dalai Lama is interested in this because he's a philosopher. Most Tibetans are philosophers. But in addition, he's very concerned that they've been in exile for 50 years now. No sign they're going back. So how do you keep Tibetan culture alive when you're surrounded by non-Tibetans, basically? And I think his brilliant solution is to both bring outside culture into Tibetan culture. He says Tibetans should be global citizens, but at the same time deepening their own sense of their culture. And so when we translate Western philosophy into Tibetan, he says this is helping us become global citizens. But it's also a sense of appreciating our own culture in contrast to Western culture. Some of the problems, when I first started talking to Geshe Laktur, they're brilliant philosophers. They know nothing about Western philosophy. And so I asked for some advice. I didn't want to be the whole decision-making machine on what their culture gets exposed to. And his helpful response was, Professor, we put ourselves in your hands. So I had to decide what in Western philosophy should be translated. And one of the problems, one of the issues we had early on was that if you're a Tibetan translator, the world looks like this. In Buddhism, we all agree on what terms mean. We may disagree philosophically about that, but we know what they mean. So it's very easy in a way to translate from Tibetan into Western languages, because there's clear definition of terms. Needless to say, Western philosophy is complete chaos. There is no common set of terms. You can imagine trying to figure out Kant's transcendental apperception. So at the beginning, we had this long series of conversations that he thought, OK, we'll just have you write out a dictionary for us, and then we'll just translate everything into Tibetan. We'll be done with this. Not going to happen, basically. So my decision was to start with some criteria, important works from Western philosophy that reflect our culture, but somehow also connect with Tibetan culture. I didn't want these books just to sit on a dusty library shelf. They should also somehow connect with the Dalai Lama. So we translated Plato's Youth for Apology Crito, which is a series of dialogues where Socrates is brought to trial unjustly, he's convicted, he's executed. I think it's obvious why. I think that might be relevant to the Tibetan situation. We translated Nils on Liberty, which is one of the great documents on freedom of action, freedom of speech. Tibetans aren't too comfortable with that book, and they think it takes freedom too far. So there are a lot of interesting discussions. I decided to translate Martin Luther King's letter from a Birmingham jail. For obvious reasons, here's Martin Luther King going into the heart of the race of the South, and he's thrown in jail, and Birmingham's burning, and he's wondering where his fellow ministers are in the middle of this struggle for civil rights. I have to say, maybe you've heard that the Martin Luther King estate has been embroiled in legal problems for decades. And there are two different versions of the letter from Birmingham jail. One's the one he actually sent to the ministers. He didn't copyright it. Another one is one he made minor changes and he copyrighted it like a month later. I wanted to be able to work with the Martin Luther King archives in Atlanta, so I had to get permission to use the official version, which I thought I'd never do. Let me just tell you this. When you call up and you drop the Dalai Lama's name, anything is possible. And they gave us permission to translate that document for free. I actually arranged for Geshe Laktur to visit the Martin Luther King archives last spring. So now we're going to translate more from Martin Luther King. And there's an ongoing connection. The Dalai Lama visits Emory University in Atlanta every year and now he's going to visit the Martin Luther King archives. I'd also mention Hackett Books. One of the problems that we started with was they had no legal right to translate anything at the beginning. And so I approached Hackett Books, which is a great publisher of philosophy in the United States. Great editions, very cheap. And again, I barely dropped his name and they wrote me back literally 10 minutes later saying, we're so grateful that you included us in this project. Please take all our books for free. And in fact, I went to India with three big boxes of their books, which they donated to the Tibetan Library. So that photo there was us giving them hundreds of books that Hackett had donated. OK. Second project, I was asked to design this core course at the Tibetan University, which was started only seven years ago by the Dalai Lama's sister. And it's an extension of the Tibetan Children's Villages System, the school system which the Dalai Lama pays for. It's particularly important because most Tibetans who have been in Tibet in India for a substantial amount of time, they have enough money that they go to Indian universities. And so the university I taught at was a social safety network, basically. It was for Tibetans who had gotten out of Tibet recently. Literally, you can imagine having students your age who spent six to eight weeks walking over the Himalayas being shot at by the military coming out into India with absolutely no money. They don't even speak Tibetan because they are taught Chinese in the schools. They can't talk to each other. They know that when they leave, they'll never see their families again, except maybe an occasional cell phone call. And here they are living together in that dormitory I showed you. It's a community. They take care of each other. They love each other. One thing I've tried to get going at Gustavus, when they come to your classroom, they stop at the door and they ask permission to come in. That's good. I like that. And at the end of the class, each and every one comes up to the front and they thank you for the class. I like that. So again, I taught the Dalai Lama's book Before Religion. And I'll talk about that in a minute. That was one of the things that he was very interested in. OK, so who is the Dalai Lama? Very quickly, Dalai Lama is 78 years old. He was born in Amdo Province, which is northeast of Lhasa in Tibet. When he was three years old, three years old, he was discovered as the Dalai Lama. The previous Dalai Lama had given indication that the next one would be found in Amdo. Three years in, they were worried. They had no further signs. And so his senior tutor, Ling Rinpoche, went up to a sacred lake. And visions appeared in the lake. First the three letters in Tibetan for Amdo. And then the image of a yellow house with a Chinese gable and two boys planning out in front. So they secretly went to the northeast, came over a hill. There was the house, there were the two boys. They go down secretly. Ling Rinpoche takes out prayer beads casually. The three-year-old boy says in the Lhasa dialect where she doesn't speak, why do you have my prayer beads? They leave, they come back the next day with two sets of identical objects. One the previous Dalai Lama's bell, perfect copy, so on. In every case, the kid picks out the object that was borne, owned by the previous Dalai Lama. They think they've got the right kid. They start hightailing it back to Lhasa. The local Chinese general catches on to this. He's after them. They bribe him with what I'm told today would be the equivalent of a hundred million dollars to let the Dalai Lama go. They get him to Lhasa. They train him very quickly as consolidated power in China. And starting from 1949 on, starts to have designs on taking over Tibet. When the Dalai Lama was a teenager, he went to Beijing. He met with Mao, said that Mao's skin was waxy. He thought maybe they could get along. After 10 days, however, Mao just leaned over and he said, you know young man, religion is the opiate of the people. And from that point on, the Dalai Lama knew that things were not gonna go well. By 1959, Lhasa had been completely controlled by the Tibetan, the Chinese army. The army, the general, invited Dalai Lama to come meet with him, to come along with no attendance. Up to this point, the Nenchen Oracle, who I showed you had been saying, don't go, don't go, you have to stay here for your people. When he heard this, he thought, well, if you go, we're never gonna see you again. So overnight, the Nenchen Oracle was saying, go, you have to go right now, don't stop. So he left, walked over the Himalayas into India. He was greeted by the Prime Minister, Nehru, who was very fond of Buddhism. He was given a home for a year in Hussuri, which is a hill-town north of Delhi. And then after that, since 1959, he's lived in the Cloud Gorge, where he lives now. Middle 60s, the Cultural Revolution starts almost every single Buddhist monastery in Tibet is destroyed. Estimates around one and a half million people have been killed in various ways, starvation, torture, imprisonment, so on. The Dalai Lama has, in the meantime, become, I would say, the preeminent religious figure in the world. He's won the Nobel Peace Prize. He won the Congressional Medal of Honor. He sees himself as a bodhisattva of compassion. He is grateful. I'm convinced that the life he's had has been a life in service to other beings, other sentient beings. He said that if he comes back, if he's reincarnated, he's gonna have a convention five years from now and see whether people think he should come back. If he comes back, he's coming back as a woman. Why? Because Abhulakiteshvara is a bodhisattva that can be male or female. In China, Kuan Yin is female, right? I won't go into this, I'm kind of running out of time, but the Dalai Lama is very interested in gender. Equality, and this is one way that he has to control to really flip things over in Tibetan culture. He gets up at four and he meditates. He has an elliptical machine in his bedroom, and he exercises. He listens to the BBC every morning, and he brushes his teeth two times. If you listen to him in Tibetan, he's always telling Tibetans to brush their teeth. I don't know why. I know his two translators far better than I know him, and it's pretty amazing. Laktvar, again, worked in his household for 16 years. He says, look, I'm much younger than the Dalai Lama in better shape than he is. He completely exhausted me. We'd fly to Australia overnight, he'd meditate, he'd get up in the morning, he was perfectly fine, he'd do 50 press interviews, and I'd have to translate for every one of them. He'd have teaching sessions, morning and evening. I was completely exhausted. He said, I've never been so happy as the day he transferred me out of his house over to the library. But if you ask Laktvar, he's got this personal collection of thousands of photos. The Dalai Lama would say, here, Laktvar, take a picture of me and Nelson together, right? And I won't tell too many of these stories, but one of my favorite was I've always heard that the Dalai Lama kind of isn't too close to President Obama, but he's very close to President Bush. And I could never understand that because their politics are not matched up. So here's the story. Obama is just that Obama's not really warm, basically, that's all. But with the second President Bush, the story was they met, President Bush had this gigantic tray of chocolates that he brought out. And the Dalai Lama says, I was looking like this, trying to decide what to eat, there were hundreds. And he looked up at President Bush and said, do you have any suggestions? And President Bush just jumped in to help him, like, these are really good. And so they talked for an hour about chocolate. They wanted to, the Dalai Lama just liked it. He was kind of a disarming person. So their relationship is based on chocolate. Okay, so what's it like to meet him? Let me be clear. He meets people all day long. He's the most social human being on the face of the earth. We're not great buddies. I would be the world's greatest poser if I stood up here and said, oh yeah, we're good buddies. But he was really interested in the three things that I was doing, and he was keenly interested in curious. So as you saw in the slide, you go up through the woods. You are met by his personal secretary who controls everything. Usually it was interesting. I'd wait through several other appointments and I'd basically be the last appointment in the day. I think, because he wanted to talk about what I was doing, he thought it was interesting. You go in and you present a contact, the white scars basically like this through your hands. He blesses it and puts it back around your neck. Traditional Tibetan reading is you touch foreheads. He touches, he holds your head, and touches his forehead to your forehead. You sit down next to him and he holds your hand. I have held hands with a domino. And I guess the thing that impressed me the most was, we think of him as this happy grandfather, and he is that, he's incredibly infectious, laugh. What impressed me was the intensity of his focus on this random guest who showed up before him. He looks into your eyes. We all agree his English is getting worse as he gets older and my Tibetan is not getting much better. But he was really interested in what I had to tell him. And he was just there. I've never seen anybody connect like he does. Imagine his life. It's one meeting after another. He's a bodhisattva. He has to connect to people just like that. And I've never seen anything like it. He just immediately has your trust. So for example, he was very interested in what I was teaching at the Tibetan University because, again, I had done this at the request of his sister, his younger sister. I was teaching his book. Basically, he argues that religion sometimes causes more harm than good in the world today. What we need is a form of ethics that comes before religion based on compassion. Compatible, he thinks, with all religions but without the politics, basically. And I had taught that book and I paired it with readings in Western culture the things that he was interested in. So just to give you an example, the bodhisattva vow is to all sentient beings that interested me, not just human beings. What does that really mean? That you care about the suffering of all sentient beings. So in Western culture, we have animal rights literature. I paired that with the Dalai Lama's book. He was fascinated. Why? He's not a vegetarian. He should be. He knows it. But he's not, right? So we had very vigorous discussions about that. I paired his book with some readings about gender. One of my favorite stories about him, by the way, he was down in Sarah Monastery teaching in the South. He has terrible stomach problems, disabling stomach problems. In one year, he didn't think he could go on teaching. And he told his attendant, I need a doctor right away. Next morning, there's still no doctor. He's upset. He says to his attendant, I'm really sick. I need a doctor. The attendant says, there are no doctors. He's like, what do you mean? This is the big Tibetan encampment. There has to be a doctor. The attendant says, well, your holiness, there's only a female doctor. Okay, maybe the idea was a female shouldn't see as holy as naked. That's the charitable interpretation. The attendant says, is she a doctor or not? Doctors are doctors. Get her in here now. And when he went back to Duransala, he made a permanent position on his personal staff for female doctors. Totally changed Tibetan views of female doctors overnight. That's basically what he does. So I was interested in that. How do you use your authority as the Dalai Lama for gender relations? Let's see. Maybe five more minutes. He was very interested in the translation project. He thought it was really cool that we were translating Martin Luther King. He cites Martin Luther King and Gandhi more than anyone else. He knows Martin Luther King. His writings very well. I was impressed. Okay, so a couple other ideas. What are his teachings? He wrote this book called The Art of Happiness. And he believes that we can all be happy. That there's a practice that leads to happiness. Just as you can practice being a violinist and you can learn to play the violin, if you practice happiness, you can be happy. Typical Tibetan rational approach. Here goes 60 seconds to happiness. There are afflictive emotions, the kleshas. And there are three categories. There's the category of emotions that we push away in cloud reality, like anger, hatred. There are the emotions we pull toward us powerfully, cloud reality, like lust. And there are the emotions that are based in ignorance. What ignorance of what? Ignorance of dependent origination, right? In Buddhism, there's no computer there now separate from the metal, separate from the people who made it and so on. To understand that computer, you can't understand it by itself. You have to understand how it depends on the originator. That's why we're unhappy. We have three classes of emotions that make us unhappy. Fortunately, like a doctor, there are antidotes. For each one of those, you can take medicine. So, for anger, the antidote is patience. Why? Anger erupts like a volcano. Why do we feel such remorse when we're angry? It's because, so to speak, we're not ourselves, right? We feel remorse because we wish we hadn't allowed that volcano to erupt. So what's the antidote? Patience slows down anger. I tell my students, next time you're caught on the freeway, as I am all the time, in traffic jam, you can either be frustrated and make gestures at other people or you can practice on your anger. Which is better? You get to your destination happy. So that's one example, the art of happiness. A bit more on his idea of the need for a global religion. He's very interested in this. This is his main interest right now. I honestly think from having met a lot of world religious leaders. I won't name anybody. He is skeptical about the ability of organized religions to bring peace. And so he's been arguing that there must be a form of ethics that comes before religion, compassion, human empathy. He argues human beings are almost unique in the length of time that we're pathetically dependent on our mother. That makes us social beings, unlike other beings. He argues before Christianity or Islam or whatever were invented, human beings already had the ability to be compassionate to each other. He's very interested in brain science. Brain science, the discovery that there are mirror neurons that basically are the basis of compassion. That's why he sends his wants to the University of Wisconsin to have their brain waves measured. Okay, so he thinks that we are basically beings who desire to be happy and that we're all the same in this way. He finds being the Dalai Lama a huge impediment. Why? Because people go in and they have this huge event in their lives to meet the Dalai Lama. And all he wants to do is meet you as a human being. He says, we're identical. All human beings are the same. We just want to be happy and not suffer. When you see him talk to 5,000 people, he takes the University of Minnesota cap because he has cataracts and you can't see. Next thing he says is, I'm just a simple muck. I'm exactly like you. When we hear that we think, oh yeah, that was a good rhetorical point. It's not. He wants nothing more than to meet other human beings as other human beings, basically. Why? Because he thinks fundamentally we're all the same. We all seek the same thing. Happiness, right? So let's have an ethic that we can articulate based on compassion. Okay, let me just finish and maybe you'll have a couple of questions. What do I end up with? I do think he's unique. If you talk to people who know, they'll tell you that after he dies, he'll be declared a Buddha. And don't ask me how that happens. And in fact, they don't know. They're the guys who should know. But it tells you something about how people regard him. And I would just say, if there's any truth to this, we live in a world where there's a Buddha. Isn't it worth finding out who he is? The reason I give talks like this are, it's really because I wish people would investigate who he is beyond the level of being this incredibly happy person. Read what he says. Listen to what he says. Take a little deeper. Try to find out what this art of happiness is. How would he get to be this way? Okay, so a couple last things. Richard Leach is here. We're in the back. We've decided to have May Day this year on Tibet. I'm very excited about this, and we're going to have extraordinary people in. If you'd like to help us, you're welcome. There's a committee. You can talk to Richard Leach in the back. I'd also like to, since the provost is here, make a plea for the importance of sabbaticals. You know, sometimes when my colleagues and I go on sabbatical, we hear, did you have a nice vacation? I battled monkeys. We had three earthquakes a day for months. I rode those trains. I've never worked so hard in my life, but I've never had a better year in my life. And I come back rejuvenated with vast new experiences I can explore and share with you. So a word for us sabbaticals. This is what happens to your professors when they go away and they take a vacation. They're valuable. We're really lucky I could stay with us. I would say the last bit of thanks. I was very lucky to have a Fulbright narrow fellowship in addition to the state of the sabbatical. I would really encourage my colleagues and students to investigate the Fulbright program. For faculty, let me just tip you off. There are 60 NEH grants every year, NEH grants. There are 80 Fulbright grants in India alone. India is a full partner with the United States. They are a 50-50 partner. Fulbright is fantastic. Really, everybody, there are student Fulbrights. There are Fulbrights for faculty. There are Fulbrights for non-academics for newspaper reporters and artists and so on. So I'm very grateful both to Gustavus and to Fulbright for making this year possible. Okay, I'm going to stop there. Do you have a couple questions? Yeah. Either that's something you mentioned or not, but this one was the most profound experience I've ever had in India. What's the most profound aspect of these travels? No, there are so many things. Of course, the meeting in the Dalai Lama given my beliefs, meeting in the Dalai Lama, who I think is a Buddha, that's pretty exceptional. But meeting the nun, meeting those hermits who live out in those caves, meeting my students at the Tibetan University. Imagine students your age who escaped from Tibet with military firing away at them. They came up on the sides of the valleys and just fire away at people escaping. Imagine at your age knowing you'll never see your family again. Going to this country where you have no contacts, no money. That's real courage. So, yeah, I mean, the Dalai Lama, but boy, I was so honored to teach those students. Okay. Why isn't the Dalai Lama a vegetarian? Well, he should be. I told him he should be. So what does he say about why he's not? Yes. I think he has bad reasons. Traditionally, Tibetans are not vegetarians. Agriculture is terrible up on the Tibetan Plateau. They ate a lot of meat because they had to. His view is that we shouldn't make Tibetans in Tibet be vegetarians or lives are hard enough. But in India, he says that we should be vegetarian. The reason he's not is he tried being a vegetarian. He thinks he had health problems as doctors told him, well, you shouldn't be a vegetarian. I think he got bad medical advice. But for whatever it's worth, he thinks Buddhism means you should be a vegetarian. But anything. Yeah. Could you elaborate on what languages are spoken in the region that you were and the political distinctions between languages? Like, are they mutually intelligible? Of Tibet? Of Tibet and Northern India, like Punjabi. Yeah, I couldn't answer that briefly. But in Tibet, again, it's a huge country. And the various dialects are different enough that if you're from one province, you can't understand somebody from another province at all. I sometimes went down and tutored reason arrivals in English. And they all understood me better than they understood each other because they came from different provinces. Whatever English they had, that was a better vehicle of communication than trying to talk Tibetan to each other. In India, of course, the dialogue is very concerned. How do you maintain your culture when you're surrounded by non-Tibetans? Of course, English is pretty common, especially in the north. But Hindi, Farsi, and there are, what, 130 different languages in India. So, I mean, that's one of the problems in India. What do you speak? When I first started going to India, we'd go to the south where they speak Tamil. I never really learned much Hindi because they don't speak Hindi down there. So, anyway, languages are always a challenge. It's this kind of mixed gift that the British gave to them. They colonized them, but they gave this gift of speaking a common language. So, yeah. So you mentioned that a lot of the subjects amongst are philosophers. And the dialogue I like to talk is a philosopher as well. Does he consider his own teachings like a way of life, like a philosophy or a religion? And how does he classify other religious leaders? How do you make that distinction? Very good questions. Where do we start? He certainly believes that Tibetan Buddhism is more of a philosophy than a religion. Obviously, it is a religion in a way. They have temples and pujas and so on. But when I started this translation project, we went up to his house and I said, you know, in Western culture, we kind of separate religion from philosophy. I understand you want philosophy, do you want religion too? He said, no. Sorry, Rachel. No, he just wanted what we would consider to be philosophy. And why? Well, the Buddha said famously, don't believe anything because I say it. You should examine what I say the same way a jeweler would examine gold to see if it's real. Even the Buddha, you shouldn't believe it just because he said it. The Dalai Lama is always saying, even to Tibetans, don't believe it because you think I'm a god, I'm not. He says, this is his proof. If I was a god, I wouldn't get sick. Every year I go to this place in Minnesota called the Mayo Clinic and they fix me up. That proves I'm not a god. I'm just a human being. So, yes, in some ways it's much more like what we would call philosophy than religion. But it's a philosophy that requires practice, not just intellectual understanding. Buddhism is about what I would call experiential knowledge. It's what you learn in meditation, for example, that you see dependent origination directly. So they're very sophisticated with what we would rudely call philosophy, but it doesn't exactly mean what we would call philosophy. It's rational. It's not mysticism at all. That's why I did the thing about the art of happiness. It's just rational. First you do this, then you do this, then you're happy. But it's like philosophy except it's engaged practice. The geshe as I teach at the big monastery is down south. Geshe has an academic degree. It's like a PhD except it takes 28 years. You never debate a Tibetan geshe. If you ask them, if you disagree about what's in the heart sutra, they'll say, I know it in five languages. Which one do you want? Yeah, David. David, I think you're on the spot. Yeah, you always do. So how about we go back to India one more time for a gait term and go and take students to the Tibetan university? Thanks, David. I'd really like to. And the Tibetan university is in the south. There are these huge teaching monasteries, which as I said they asked me in the end to come teach there, which I would love to do. And honestly, I was scheduled to take students this year and decided not to because of all the earthquakes in Dharamsala. It really got pretty scary. There was a Dutch seismology team that came and said there was an earthquake that was imminent within a couple of months in the range of 8.8 to 9.2. They got the Dalai Lama over six months while I was there. It lived in southern India. So that was my concern. But southern India is so beautiful. And it's warm in January. So I wouldn't take much to encourage me to go there. Is there one last question? Yeah, go ahead. Do you believe your experience has changed your own life philosophy or maybe your teaching philosophy? Yeah. Some people have known me here for 30 years and they'd say I'm a much happier person than I used to be. I was trained in Western analytical philosophy. I had a genius as a mentor and a teacher. He discovered recurgent theory which made computers possible just to give an example. I was really lucky to have the education I did. I was not happy. In the beginning, years ago, when I first started going to Nepal and hanging out in the Tibetan communities, what impressed me was they were happy. They hold arms and they walk down the street and they laugh. And this is despite the fact that not one of them has a family intact. A lot of them have been tortured. They've had lives that are so much more difficult than ours. And somehow they managed to be happy. I wanted to know, what was that about? So really that's what this year was about. I started in the Tetons hearing all these legendary stories, myths about Tibet, and I really wanted to know the real Tibet. Not just the old legends. What are real Tibetans like? What are they worried about? What are they after we get past the Dalai Lama? And it was a profound experience. There was happiness, but there were also 122 self-immolations. It was really all over the map. Anyway, I think we're ready to go home. My thanks for listening. I appreciate it.