We Are All Brothers and Sisters: Platform for a Human Future
I FIRST MET THE DALAI LAMA in 1970, in Dharamsala, India. Along with two friends, I was privileged to have an audience with him that lasted well over two hours. In those days, it was quite easy to arrange such a thing: we simply stopped His Holiness’ assistant, Tenzin, on the street and asked if we could make an appointment. Tenzin took a notebook from his shirt pocket and asked, “Can you come tomorrow at three o’clock?” “Yes! Yes, we can. We’ll be there!” was our gleeful response.
The three of us were college students from the States, happy for the freedom to meet the Tibetans and study with them. His Holiness the Dalai Lama, on the other hand, lived under a serious burden: he and almost one hundred thousand other Tibetans had been forced to flee their homeland and become refugees in India after the final Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1959. The leader-in-exile of the Tibetan nation and people, he was concerned with the survival of their religious and cultural heritage. He was only thirty-five years old then—but he evidenced to us no indications of his burden.
His Holiness was much taller than I had thought him to be, his voice and laughter deep and rippling. When we began to do prostrations, he quickly put an end to that formality:
