The Dalai Lama’s said to be a buddha, a fully enlightened being. That means he has done the job of ridding his mind of all the rubbish: that means there’s not one atom of attachment or ego-grasping or jealousy or despair or all those things. And he’s perfected wisdom and goodness.
The trouble is for us we feel he therefore must be kind of superhuman or abnormal because we don’t posit such possibilities in our culture. I think he sort of goes out of his way to look like he’s got delusions, to be ordinary like us, because we think he’s weird if he doesn’t.
But it’s fairly evident who he is. The Dalai Lama took on the job of running Tibet at the age of fifteen, when all the drama started. Fifteen years old, can you imagine? Now he’s eighty-nine. For seventy-four years he hasn’t stopped trying to make it better in Tibet.
There he was, the boss of Tibet’s six million people. Look at the nightmare! These Chinese Communists coming in and rampaging through the whole country, killing more than a million Tibetans, still doing it, imprisoning. The monasteries are there, but it’s all just kind of pretend, because the government completely runs everything. Every day, Tibetans are coming into exile, coming to Dharamsala.
Every single day now, His Holiness hasn’t stopped. For seventy-four years, he’s never stopped being optimistic, being buoyant, persevering, being patient, not getting angry, not getting depressed, not getting anxious, never stopping trying to find ways diplomatically, socially, politically, religiously, in every way possible to make things better in Tibet.
Meanwhile, he’s also benefiting the world with all these incredible talks with scientists, these amazing talks with other religions. He never, never stops. And he always appears relaxed, easygoing.
We should ask the question, “Well, that’s interesting, perhaps I could be trying to be like that in my little sad life.” But we don’t join the dots.
We put him on a pedestal: “Oh, that’s just the Dalai Lama. I couldn’t possibly be like that.” Well, excuse me, that’s rude! That’s like when you wonder about playing tennis and you see Roger Federer. And you just keep saying, “Oh, that’s just Roger Federer, that’s just how he is. I can’t do that. No, no, I can’t do that.” But right there, Federer is showing you what you can become: that’s why you ask him to show you how to play tennis from him: to become like him.
The Dalai Lama is showing us what we can become. We should join the dots, learn from it: well, if he can be like this in the face of that amount of nightmare for seventy years, perhaps I can try to find out what methods he used so I can try them.
He’s the proof that it’s possible, that we can do it, too. So very encouraging.