Explore the burning questions that have intrigued humanity since the dawn of time. Who am I? What is the meaning of life? Do I need a teacher or guide? Karen Armstrong & Bob Thurman share their insights on Global Spirit, the first “internal travel” series.

 Question: Why was it important to write a book on the Dalai Lama?

Robert Thurman: I wrote the book because everybody likes the Dalai Lama, and think he’s cute, and they like his spiritual teachings—but they think his nonviolent political leadership is useless, and they think he doesn’t know what he is doing. It’s all so sad, and you got to really fight because that’s the ideology of our militaristic culture; the premise of the book is no, he’s nonviolent leadership, his global leadership is the leadership of leaders and we have to follow that advice now.

If we go on with the militarism, if we go into World War III—which we have waiting on every front—everyone will lose, and those people who are relying on conquest, like the Dick Cheneys of this world, have lost. They are shouting that they have it, they did great, and all this, but it’s just a complete lie and everybody knows it.

The Dalai Lama is the person who walks the talk of nonviolence here. He’s been under genocidal threat and actual action by the Chinese People’s Republic for many years—50, 60 years—and yet although he is very discouraged and he admits he’s sick of them, especially the government and the people he knows don’t have the true information about Tibet, he insists on the nonviolent approach and he insists on bringing China into the family of peaceful nations—not leaving them as the imperialist imitation of imperialism that they are now.

We have been tripling our imperialist behavior in the last centuries in a few decades, and that is just totally destructive to the world. So, the premise of my book is we have to listen to him on the social-political level, as well as the spiritual level—and therefore he really does matter. That’s the premise, and when people have read the book, I’ve had gratifying experiences.

Over the last year and a half, even Tibet supporters, I noticed, will go out and say, “Free Tibet”, and then you ask them, “Do you think it will be free?” They say, “Oh, no. Never be free. It can’t. Too big. China. They have no weapons.” And so, what’s the use of their shouting free Tibet if they’re hopeless?

When they finished reading my book they realize that it’s got to happen. It actually is realistic. What’s unrealistic is to think that everybody is going to conquer everybody. The U.S. is finished. We can go and blow up some more countries but that will just make people more mad with us later, when we really can’t afford to do so anymore. They won’t let us just print any amount of money we want.

Then China just wants to go conquer everything , and Tibet is the place to make a stand against them, nonviolently, preempting the danger of World War III—which will otherwise definitely happen. So that’s my premise, and I emphasize the positive. I emphasized the vision of the watershed of Asia—the water tower of Asia, nourishing 3.7 billion people with water from the glaciers of Tibet, which are melting not just by global warming but by Chinese mismanagement and destruction of the environment—three times faster than global warming. We’ll soon be having them melting and that’s going to dry up the river systems of 3.7 billion people in Southeast Asia, India, Pakistan—all the way to China itself. So that’s my book. That’s the main premise of my book, and then I show explicitly—based on the Dalai Lama’s own statements, his own arguments, his own proposals over 4 or 5 years—what he offers the Chinese and what a bonanza it would be for them to change their policy and befriend a person who is friendly to everyone in the world and who is the most popular.

Last November he was voted most popular man on earth by Harris Poll International Herald Tribune worldwide, including Asia. Of course, not China—they’re not allowed to vote, you know, they are not allowed to mention his name because of the silly behavior of the government. But he is. The Chinese, if they join in liking him and working with him, they would benefit—not lose. They would benefit enormously, and I proved that in the book, and people like it.

Question: Is today’s Dalai Lama particularly important?

Robert Thurman: The one at this time specifically is very, very intensely mattering. I think the future will also mater, but unfortunately, if the Chinese miss this opportunity and the world actually misses this opportunity by not supporting him enough to make the Chinese see that they really must switch their policy, then it will be a lot worse of a mess—really bad.

When the Chinese attack Siberia—which is where it will start, when North China is completely dried up and they want the rivers North Asia—and then the U.S, Russian, Japanese alliance, European-Japanese Alliance goes against them, and there are cyber wars everywhere—and probably nuclear because they will have an unstoppable huge army—it’s going to be just terrible. That would happen, I think, if there is no switch in the next four or five years; maybe in eight, ten years that will happen, in the 2020s because there will be no more water.

People you see these programs say, “Oh, by 2100 we’ll be in tough shape.” We are in tough shape now! It’s going to accelerate beyond people’s imagining; the whole thing, and the Yellow River in North China, the cradle of their civilization, is nearly dried up already, and their headwaters are Tibet. It’s a water tower and it’s where everything is stored, and it flows down there when it’s not the monsoon cycle, and without it Asia is finished, and tremendous distress arises, and upheavals, and migration. It’s beyond conceiving, it really is.

Question: What will happen to Tibet when the Dalai Lama dies?

Robert Thurman: He will die in Tibet, and Tibet will be in the path of being restored. It will have its internal true autonomy, the whole plateau, and the Tibetans, as they have for thousands of years, will be taking care of the environment in that plateau—slowing down the rate of warming. Then, if China is rekindling its Buddhism, which they would have to do if they recognize him, and behaving nicely—they would have to let their own people—that’s 700 million Buddhists—they would be going nuts. They will be coming down about this greed driven, industrialized—wreck your rivers, poison the air and make money, money, money. You can’t eat it. You can’t breathe it. You know, it’s not medicine. Money is a piece of paper, and they will stop that, or they will lessen that, as Europe has to lessen it.

Then, we’ll be on the good path; in other words, a switch over will occur. I call it the Obama Dalai Lama Revolution—peaceful revolution. If this happens, everything will be fine.

So, I’m not in a panic like he’s going to go any minute. He’s only 74, and he can last another couple of decades easily, but even that won’t be necessary because human beings, when under the gun, can do amazing things. I know people in Central Europe, in Hungary, in Czechoslovakia—Lech Wałęsa ,these guys—nobody believed they could be free of the Russian domination without violence, but they just said no and they stood up, and that will happen. It’s going to happen everywhere. That’s our new age. It will happen definitely before the Dalai Lama dies, and he will be a leading hero of that event worldwide.

Muslims, Christians, Atheists, seculars, everyone will think of him as having helped turn the tide. He was the one who reacted to 9/11 writing George Bush a letter: “You know, of course, Mr. President, that violence never helps a violent situation, and I’m sure you’ll have a wise response.” Unfortunately, he didn’t, because of the manipulation by whatever. Poor fellow.

But The Dalai Lama shows us how hopeless that approach—trying to conquer everybody—is. He does show us that.

Question: The “East meets West” paradigm has been around for awhile. Has Eastern thought improved Western lives?

Robert Thurman: Definitely, it has—although I think that’s the wrong way of putting. There is also the integration of Westerners into Eastern thought. The Western way of life has been revealed to anybody with eyes to be self-destructive, actually—which means it isn’t actually intrinsically the Western way of life.

We have Plato. We have Socrates, who advocated a vegetarian diet—not eating meat and so on—back in The Republic. He advocated that, and he said if you eat too much meat, people will be sick, and you’d have to have a lot of doctors. Twenty-five hundred years ago, I was so amazed and now—you know.

In Asia, they didn’t try to eat 30% protein and get cancer and all these diseases of our diet, and our way of living, polluting our environment. Industrialization is not actually a genius invention—it is self-destructive. It’s like cancer, actually, on the planet—planetary cancer.

What cancer is random growth of cells: healthy strong growth without regard to the host, so it then becomes self destructive. Industrialization is big growth, destroying the host—which is the planet.

Economics is a demented science. It’s not just dismal, it’s demented, because the resources in economics are free, and the waste disposal is free. Then, it’s just how much money you’re making: there is your domestic product. That’s silly because, obviously, the resources have a cost, a tremendous cost, and the waste disposal has a huge cost too. That has to be factored in, and if it was there would be very different decision making in our industrialization. We have to get into a more holistic, well-lightened vision.

Asia was thousands of years ahead of us with nonviolence. Jesus was teaching us and many rabbis, rabbis other than Jesus, but nobody was listening—particularly not the Roman Emperors. But the Asian people, their rulers, did more listen to the Buddhas and the Lao Tzus and the Confucius’s, and so they are much more into nonviolence, and have been for much longer. Therefore they prospered and thrived; Columbus was trying to get to India because they were more prosperous 500 years ago.

We have to realize that we’re not actually the center of the universe. The Mediterranean is not the center. It’s peripheral, and we have to learn to live more in harmony with nature. Men have to live more in harmony with women and stop driving around in their tanks. It’s just useless. We’re making progress, but the rear guard action—Michael Dukakis in the tank and Dick Cheney has in his wheelchair, his bionic wheelchair, or whatever it is, George Bush and his little fighter plane. We have to overcome that childishness, we have to live more organically and normally, and we have to control our government.

Question: What is real happiness and how do we know when we have it?

Robert Thurman: Actually, we don’t know when we have it. That’s the great thing about it. Real happiness is that which comes up right out of your own self when you let go of striving for happiness—peak sexual experience, peak meditative experience, delicious food, friendly conversation: when you forget about yourself and how unhappy and miserable you are. The drive is to do something, eat somewhere, then somehow your cells and your system and your mind and your brain—which is very sensitive, ready to perceive aesthetic experience and have a great time—is reaching out and realizing that the universe is a place of blissful energy. That’s when you’re really happy, and you don’t know it because you don’t pay attention to that. You’re engaged in what you’re doing. It could be just a conversation with a loved one; quality time. A brief two seconds between making money or running here and there— that’s what real happiness is, and you don’t know it because you don’t pay attention to it.

The minute you try to know it, and say, “Oh, how happy am I. How much high quality is this time,” you’ve immediately evaluated it. And then it is not good enough; now I have to leave 5 minutes from now, so now that ruins the next 5 minutes because I’m going to be leaving after five, and then I will start weeping instead of enjoying being together.

So the key to happiness is loving people, enjoying your life, not worrying about a lot of things, letting your mind not live in a fantasy that’s life is going to be better, and appreciating what’s in the moment. It’s a very lovely paradox. Life is very paradoxical.

Question: Why do we fall into cycles of negativity and defeatism?

Robert Thurman: We fall into the cycles of negativity because of our ignorance of what’s really going on. That ignorance is not just personal, like we didn’t learn enough in school. It’s like the ignorance handed down in our cultures telling us, “Well, you’re worthless,” especially in the West.

Jesus’ wonderful teaching is, “The kingdom of God is within you, and there’s a special providence with the fall of every sparrow. Relax, look at the flowers in the field” –all this beautiful stuff. Thousands of rabbis in Jewish history were teaching the same beautiful vision; he was a rabbi after all, Anglos should remember that. Now, that’s been distorted into, “You’re worthless and only God is great.”

You look what Jesus had to do for you, and you therefore get out and make some money or do something, thinking that you’re so worthless. Then, there’s a couple of scientists supposedly liberating us from that, and then of course there’s the threat of eternal damnation in hell by this “friendly” god.

Scientists say you just die, you’re thirteen cents of cheap chemicals. Basically, we’re totally worthless, and therefore we want to justify our existence; we rush off to be famous or make money or do something else—even to be a martyr, to do something for someone in some sort of resent-breeding and not helpful way. We have to wakeup from that, and develop our critical wisdom and intelligence.

Question: What is the difference between spirituality and religion?

Robert Thurman: Spirituality is love and compassion, as far as I’m concerned; meaning that you are not just being rationally stuck within what you think your body is wired to. You’re going into a deeper area of your mind where you are asserting your free will. You’re choosing to be friendly and compassionate with people whether or not they irritate you, or whether or not they’ve done something to you. You‘re nevertheless choosing some sort of extraordinary—it shouldn’t be extraordinary really—response or outreach to people. Spirituality really is touching; you let go of your self-protective and defensive controls, and what you tap into is the nature of the universe, the flow of energy interconnecting things. Then, you naturally feel like interconnecting. Spirituality is where you let go, therefore, of your narrow control of identifying yourself just as your body: “I’m holding on to my chair;” this kind of thing.

That is, of course, the heart of religion too, but unfortunately religion has this other component where it goes into something instead of what the sociologist might call “pattern transcending activity” or “mental activity.” It becomes a tool of the state and society, and their conventional culture, to control people. To say, “you have to do this,” and “you need that ritual, obey this rule.” It stifles people and spirituality, and in the name of it people will kill each other, and they’ll hate people who don’t have the same belief instead of being loving and friendly. They will misinterpret or they will allow the priesthoods to misinterpret the teachings of the great founders—who are truly spiritual, and who said, you know, “Don’t behave like that”—and they start behaving like the Roman Catholic Church.

The Catholic part is great: universal. The Church of Jesus is great. But the Roman part is the Roman Empire from Constantine, and it’s a dominating thing, and it’s conflicting even for the priesthood, and of course many of the priests were still saintly and wonderful, when they are more great mystics. They were better before the Protestants made then try to be more social, but to compete with them they too much adopted the stance of the Roman Empire is the problem. Religions do that. Buddhism too. It becomes a control mechanism rather than a liberating mechanism.

According to esteemed Tibetan scholar and Woodstock resident, Robert Thurman, “Our town should be in the lead in turning America away from a self-defeating war economy to a green sustainable economy, and so the conversion of the Woodstock plant of Rotron from war component making to purely peace-product manufacturing is of vital concern to all Woodstock taxpaying citizens, including myself.” 

From Woodstock Peace Economy introducing the Woodstock Forum: Building a Peaceful, Just and Sustainable Economy, August 15-19, 2009.

Related: Two Opportunities to Learn Peacemaking

GLENN: In the 1960s, it was the dream of many young Americans to trek off to the East and renounce the world of selfishness and acquisition. You did exactly that when you became the first American to be ordained a Tibetan Buddhist monk — by the exiled Dalai Lama, no less. Yet only four years later, you returned to the United States, put aside your sandals and Afghani pants for a coat and tie, and never looked back. Why?

THURMAN: After being a novice and then a monk for four years, I decided to follow the bodhisattva path (although I do not consider myself a bodhisattva), which is to seek enlightenment for the sake of others, to serve others. But being a Buddhist monk was not a suitable position, at that time, from which to command people’s respect, to engage them intellectually, or teach them, because everyone thought that an American Buddhist monk was somehow defective. There wasn’t then, and still isn’t, a real social understanding of the place of a monk in Western society. The academy is the monastery, if you will, of modern secular society, so my quitting being a monk and returning to become a professor was just a natural adaptation to America’s social reality.

I was also influenced shortly after I returned to the United States by The Vimalakirti Sutra, an ancient Buddhist scripture that I was hired to translate from Tibetan. Vimalakirti was not a monk, but an enlightened layperson who emphasized the notion of “nonduality,” which means that one doesn’t create artificial distinctions between the everyday world and some exalted state. In other words, you try to live out your nirvana in the world, not in the monastery.

GLENN: Your translation of Vimalakirti’s teachings is complex. We learn that you should strive to be neither affected by passion, desire, or hatred, nor to be free of them; you should live neither in control of your mind nor indulging it; you should be an ordinary person, yet be somehow extraordinary. But how does one function like that in the day-to-day world?

THURMAN: It is very complicated. I remember when I proudly gave a published copy of my translation to my original teacher, Geshe Wangyal, and he said, “Oh, the Vimalakirti Sutra. Are you beginning to study that?” And here I had just spent forever translating it!

What he was saying, of course, was that I would be finding new insights in that work for years to come, and he was right. As I understand Vimalakirti, he says that yes, there are all these amazing, miraculous, beautiful esoteric realities, but that they are all right here, right now, in the most ordinary things and events. It’s really a very Zenlike idea that we should strive to be aware of the immediate situation and not be dualistic, not seek nirvana somewhere out there. Nirvana is not a place, necessarily, but rather a selfless, open way of being in the world.

GLENN: The way of the bodhisattva boils down to two things, in my understanding: an awareness of “nonduality,” or what’s called sunyata, the “voidness” or emptiness of the self and all other things, on the one hand, and compassion for all creatures on the other. I’d like to return to the idea of compassion, but first I’d like to ask whether you think that it’s dangerous to teach people that the self and the whole universe are somehow void.

THURMAN: That is a very important question. The Buddha himself was, according to the great scholar Nagarjuna, very worried about teaching people about sunyata, about emptiness, since people might misinterpret it as nihilism, become confused, lose all their morals and ethics, and go around doing very negative things. But the Buddha lived in another time. In those days, people were very spiritual and lived in relatively simple societies, where everything had a traditional meaning attached to it. In this environment, the idea of sunyata was potentially very damaging. Today, however, everyone is a nihilist already. Everyone starts off with very materialistic ideas that they have no soul, no mind, just a brain floating there, with random chemical mutations determining everything. They start out in that place the Buddha worried sunyata would take people.

But voidness or emptiness is not the same thing as nihilism, by any means. The teaching of sunyata simply says that nothing exists independently, that everything and everyone depend on everything and everyone else for their existence. This teaching, rather than being a danger, is the one hope for a safeguard and a cure for today’s nihilism.

GLENN: But the Dalai Lama refers to these sorts of teachings as the “secret” teachings, because the idea that you can be enlightened without having to retreat from all the passions and activities of everyday life is a very dangerous one, especially for people who haven’t first trained, as you did. Vimalakirti, for instance, was a real man of the world, a successful businessman, a swinger, not a monk, and his example might lead others astray, right?

THURMAN: Absolutely.

GLENN: I can’t help but wonder if someone like Richard Gere, one of the founders of Tibet House New York, who recently told US magazine that he considers himself to be a sort of monk living in the world, might not be in danger of going astray as a result of being in such close contact with a person who champions such a complex form of Buddhism. Not to mention the other “celebrity Buddhists” who have become associated with Tibetan Buddhism, people like Philip Glass, Harrison Ford, Lou Reed, Paul Simon, Laurie Anderson, Edie Brickell, Oliver Stone…

THURMAN: First of all, I didn’t make that much progress as a monk. I learned a lot more after coming back and having to deal with the nitty-gritty. It’s comparatively easy to be a monk in a quiet monastery, but the bodhisattva tries to engage with all the noise of the world. As far as “celebrity Buddhists” go, I can’t judge them individually, but I think celebrities are in a very interesting position. They’ve already achieved great fame, success, and wealth, and they’ve realized that those things alone don’t bring happiness; that, in fact, they can be a real pain in the neck. They have fewer illusions than the rest of us, who still imagine that worldly success is going to solve all our problems. And many of them have looked to Buddhism, which — whether it is Tibetan, Japanese, or whatever — urges you and helps you to look inside yourself for treasures and pleasures, rather than depending on some sort of external success for ratification.

Also, Richard Gere has some Tantric initiations, and he does some meditations and prostrations and so forth, but I don’t think he considers himself a great Tantric yogi or anything, or pretends to be one. I’m sure if you asked any of these celebrities point-blank, “Do you do any esoteric thing?” they’d laugh and say, “No, no…” What someone does in Tibetan Buddhism is not levitate or whatever, but try to be more humble, try to be generous, try to be tolerant of things that are irritating, a little bit, day by day. That’s where they measure their real progress.

Finally, I don’t teach people high Tantric teaching. The reason I write a bit about them is that I like everyone to know that such amazingly sophisticated things are there in the Tibetan inner sciences. But if someone wants to really study Tantra, if they’ve done some serious preliminary practice, I would refer them to His Holiness the Dalai Lama or to some other real guru.

GLENN: Then you don’t consider yourself a guru?

THURMAN: I’m not a real guru, I’m an academic professor. I may be what they call a kalyanamitra, a spiritual friend of some of these people, offering advice now and then if I’m asked. But I don’t try to take up the role of serious guru. In fact, part of choosing the professor’s or the academic’s life pattern has to do precisely with avoiding getting into the guru game with people. If I had stayed a monk, I would have had to have disciples, which gets you involved in the complications of being a guru, having people develop various kinds of transference toward you and dependencies on you, and I didn’t think that was healthy for them or for me. I was helped in the decision, of course, by my wife Nena, who always insisted on maintaining that I not get deluded about there being anything exceptional about me! She’s been a great spiritual friend of mine, and had the foresight to encourage me to pursue more mainstream academic pursuits. We’re on a pilgrimage together as much as possible.

GLENN: I’d like to get back to compassion. In the Mahayana tradition compassion is seen simply as the logical outcome of the deep understanding that all things and people and events are “void,” or interdependent. Because, logically, if you harm others when your existence is inextricably bound up with the rest of the world, then you’re also harming yourself. Your book The Politics of Enlightenment: A Handbook for Cool Revolution builds a whole politics of “engaged Buddhism” out of this idea of compassion. But it’s a very paradoxical idea: How can someone be simultaneously indifferent to the world and altruistic?

THURMAN: The concept of “engaged Buddhism” isn’t my term. I believe we first heard it from Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen master. But bodhicitta, the way of the bodhisattva, is exactly as you put it, the joyous and compassionate commitment to living beings born from an unwavering confrontation with the inconceivable profundity of sunyata, or emptiness. It’s an idea that goes all the way back to Sakyamuni Buddha, the historical Buddha, himself. The Buddha never taught escape from responsibility or society; he taught escape from ignorance and evil thoughts and actions. After he was enlightened under the Bo tree, as the legend goes, he didn’t stay there: He got up and tirelessly taught others for the rest of his life.

Thich Nhat Hanh (center) leading a peace march

GLENN: But teaching Buddhism isn’t the same thing as a “revolution,” necessarily. Buddhism tends to be regarded, in the United States, anyway, as a nice therapy, not a force for social change.

THURMAN: Well, you know, the Buddha was one of the few great religious leaders who was never persecuted or executed, because he knew the art of the possible, he was a very effective administrator and strategist. He was a prince, and in those days princes weren’t trained to be comparative literature professors, or poets; if he hadn’t gone over the wall, so to speak, he would have been a general. So he realized that he couldn’t just say, “We’re going to rule India according to the Buddhist ethic, and let’s give up our armies,” and so forth. He would have been crushed. Instead he founded the monastery, this very countercultural institution that exerted a slow and steady influence on many societies over the following centuries. And the sangha, the community, he founded was a sort of nation-within-a-nation in which the principles of individualism, nonviolence, personal evolutionism, simplicity, equal access to enlightenment, altruism, and pragmatism held sway. And if lots of people really started trying to live by these principles, we’d have a revolution on our hands.

Also, I want to point out that these ideals fit in very nicely with what we think of as “American” ideals of freedom, civility, pluralism, altruism, generosity, faith in human development, and individualism. We don’t need to call it a “Buddhist” movement, if that alienates people. The point of my book, which I’m writing all over again, by the way, is to say, look, given the fact that we live in an extremely free society, the idea that we can just sit on the sidelines and criticize everything “they” do is irresponsible, it’s unenlightened, and it’s un-Buddhist. There comes a time when you have to step in and take responsibility. We need to get up off our Zen pillows and mobilize active Buddhist participation in American politics. We need to speak out, we need to engage our opponents in dialogue, and we need to vote for the closest thing we can find to our principles. The Tibetan Buddhist movement in this country is only 15 or 20 years old, but I think it can become a very effective movement, and I think it’s very necessary right now.

GLENN: The “engaged Buddhism” of groups like the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, for instance, is very much an oppositional movement, one that practices protest and resistance, not one that seeks to actually step in and take over American society. And I hardly need to point out that Buddhism has historically tended to support the inequalities and tyrannies of whatever political system it has found itself under.

THURMAN: You’re right. The engaged Buddhists who come from Japan, Vietnam, or China, for instance, have a background in their respective Buddhist traditions, where Buddhism was never anything more than a countercultural institution. So these “engaged Buddhists” are operating, ironically, under a dualistic presupposition that Buddhism can only be a restraining force on a fundamentally corrupt social order they can never really transform. They’re like the human rights activists who limit what they ask governments to do. They say, “Well, we’re just going to restrict ourselves to stopping torture. We’re not going to ask these governments to really allow self-determination, because it’s hopeless, they’ll never do it.” There is this very defeatist attitude that basically says it’s impossible to stop… well, Caesar. It fits in well with the Christian “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto the Lord what is the Lord’s,” you know, because you can never stop Caesar. Caesar is going to crucify you.

GLENN: I take it, then, that you get your inspiration for a “politics of enlightenment” from the history of Tibet. You have often described the preinvasion culture of Tibet glowingly as having been unique in all the world. How so?

THURMAN: As an institution Tibetan Buddhism has had the experience of administering a society along Buddhist lines, not just protesting or whatever. Tibet is the only Buddhist country in history where Buddhism ever became the mainstream culture. In Japan, China, India, or in Southeast Asia, for instance, Buddhism always coexisted with something like Confucianism, Brahmanism, or Shintoism — some sort of native culture that considered Buddhism impractical as far as fighting wars or running a bureaucracy are concerned. The rulers of those countries might very well have honored the monastery at times, but the final control, socially, rested with the king, with his military establishment and his aristocracy. Whereas in Tibet, after a thousand years of that same type of dualistic social structure, where Buddhism was a kind of countercultural restraining influence on the mainstream political entity, in 1642 the citizens of Tibet asked one of their leading monks, the fifth Dalai Lama, in fact, to be the king. Most of the national budget was then invested in the monasteries, which became the training ground for the government bureaucracy. Then, once the majority of single Tibetan males were in monasteries instead of in the military, the country demilitarized. And they developed an educational system connected with a massive monastic tradition that has no replica anywhere in the world. Their gross national product of enlightened persons must have been proportionally higher than any other country ever.

More than that, the Tibetans succeeded in transplanting that same cultural pattern into the Mongolian nations, which then became what I call “fully monasticized” and very demilitarized. This was kind of a miracle because the Tibetans and the Mongolians were two of the most ferocious, imperialistic, military nations in the world, and then, just as the rest of the world was gearing up to become imperialists, they turned into very peaceful monks. Both nations ended up being chewed up by the Russians and the Chinese precisely because they were demilitarized, but for three and a half centuries — right up until the Chinese conquest of Tibet in 1950 — the Tibetans were unique, and they continue to be potentially unique. If we can restore the Tibetan culture, they will show us a very meaningful society.

GLENN: Tibet was the inspiration for the mystical, utopian land of Shangri-La in James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon. Are you “Shangri-La-izing” Tibet? Is Tibet really such a worthwhile culture to emulate? It wasn’t a democracy, it was ruled for centuries by feudalistic noble families and then by theocratic monks, it had a low standard of living…

THURMAN: Tibet was never a “theocracy”; Buddhist monasteries are run on the rules established by the Buddha, and disobedience and critical thinking are encouraged in them. But to answer my critics who accuse me of trying to pretend that every Tibetan was an enlightened yogi, and they never even wiped their butts, and they didn’t have robbers and bandits and ignorant people, and they weren’t cruel ever — like it’s all just some sort of fantasy of mine, well, that isn’t at all the case. My thesis is a sociological one that has to do with mainstream social trends. The fact that a great majority of a country’s single males are monks rather than soldiers is a major social difference. Now, many of those monks might be nasty, they might punch people, some of them might pick your pockets, some of them might be ignorant. They might eat yak meat; they’re not out there petting the yaks. So I am in no way Shangri-La-izing Tibet when I try to develop a non-Orientalist way of appraising and appreciating certain social achievements of Tibet, which really tried to create a fully Buddhist society.

But my opponents, who want to adopt the old British attitude that Tibet was dirty, grubby, and backward; or the modernist attitude that it’s a “premodern” undeveloped society; or the attitude of many other Buddhist countries that think Tibet was somehow degenerate because it was very Tantric, and Tantric Buddhism grows out of the degenerate period in India, well… I think these attitudes are mired in the idea that we modern Americans are the most advanced civilization the world has ever seen. I don’t think that’s the case. I consider us pretty barbaric. We’re like the Mongolians before the Tibetans civilized them.

GLENN: You, Richard Gere and several others founded Tibet House New York — which is a cultural embassy of sorts, combining the functions of an educational institution, a museum, a conservation foundation, and a membership community — at the Dalai Lama’s request in 1987. You’ve said that one of the goals of Tibet House is “to make Tibetan culture familiar in every American household by the year 2000.” Is that one way of “civilizing” America?

THURMAN: I think so, but there are various levels on which it operates. We don’t have to convince everybody that Tibet is the unique, ultimate society of the world to try to save it. There are a lot of good-hearted people who’d like to save various Native American cultures and indigenous people all over the world, and if that’s how they have to consider Tibet to want to save it, that’s fine with me. It is my belief that Tibet can become a great school for mind training for people who would come there from all over the world to get “higher” education. Tibet could be a kind of Switzerland, where people would go not only for spas, but also for yogic training of a certain special kind. It would be a very effective institution, if they could develop it.

GLENN: The current situation in Tibet would seem to preclude any such development, don’t you think?

THURMAN: Ever since Mao’s armies invaded Tibet in 1950, the Chinese have engaged in what has been described as a wholesale campaign of genocide and “culturecide” against Tibet. As many as one-fifth of the preinvasion population of 6 million people were killed by famine, warfare, and execution. 130,000 Tibetans have fled into exile, and hundreds of thousands more have been interred in gulags and work camps. Tibetan cultural heritage has been carefully and systematically destroyed: Historic and religious sites and monuments have been razed; the Tibetan language was basically outlawed; much of Tibet’s voluminous philosophical, historical, and biographical literature was burned; and only 13 of over 6,000 Tibetan Buddhist monasteries remain standing. Worse, China’s program of sinicization, an ongoing population transfer into Tibet, has resulted in seemingly irreparable damage to Tibetan culture.

Tibetan culture has survived the Chinese in two places. It has been reconstructed in exile, in the tiny seed community of about 6,000 Tibetans in Dharamsala, the Indian town where the Dalai Lama lives, which is the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile. And it has survived in the hearts of most Tibetans, and in their language, in that even though all the buildings have been destroyed, and the monks, and the education of several generations, their own hearts are still untouched in their basic faith and orientation — they haven’t succumbed to Chinese materialism as a whole.

But I also fear we’re getting to a point now where we’re many generations away from the old education and the old culture, so the memory of that thriving world is endangered. Also, the Chinese are relocating so many people to Tibet and profoundly diluting the Tibetan population.

Tibetans in the US protest Beijing Olympics

GLENN: The Dalai Lama, as the exiled political leader of a very oppressed people, has taken a very peculiar position. He refuses to hate the Chinese. In fact, he has frequently said that we need to get rid of the notion of “enemy,” that we need to transform our enemy into someone toward whom we feel respect and gratitude.

THURMAN: It’s a very difficult notion, but the Dalai Lama is saying there that the only way to peace is peace, and that you cannot achieve peace through violence. He is following an age-old tradition that includes Gandhi and Martin Luther King, but he’s also staking out new territory by trying to do this in an international setting, whereas leaders like Gandhi and King were working within their own nations. Also, he is speaking for a tiny minority, 6 million Tibetans, against a vastly superior numerical opponent, which is the huge Chinese nation of 1.3 billion people. All he has on his side are the truth and his peacefulness.

The amazing and audacious and visionary thing that the Dalai Lama does, and how he got the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, is his insistence that he is going to see a free Tibet in his lifetime by nonviolent means, and that everyone should solve problems by nonviolent means. The Kissingers of this world, and the Deng Xiaopings, laugh at him and despise him. But I have great faith in him, and I believe that what he is saying will come to pass. He was really ecstatic in 1989 when the Czechoslovakian revolution against the Russians was relatively peaceful. Hungary, the Baltic states, and all of that unraveling of the Russian empire proved that this sort of thing can happen relatively peacefully, and that it is more effective if it is peaceful than if it is a violent, bloody revolution.

The Dalai Lama always says, “Let’s not talk about Buddhism, let’s talk about the common human religion of kindness.” You cannot make peace with the neighbor by hating the neighbor. The Dalai Lama gets this fundamental teaching from Shantideva, the great Mahayana teacher, who wrote the Bodhicharyavatara, the guide to the bodhisattva way of life, which is the whole yoga of developing tolerance by learning not to hate the enemy — by, in fact, learning to identify the true enemy, which is hatred. Hatred is far worse than any ordinary enemy. Ordinary enemies harm us, but the harm they do is not just in order to make us unhappy; it is also meant to be of some help to themselves. But hatred itself has no other function but to destroy our positive actions and make us unhappy. So therefore hatred is the thing you mustn’t give in to, and hatred is the only thing that you can hate.

THURMAN on TRANSLATION and DEATH
GLENN: I’d like to ask you a question about your profession. Translation’s reputation as a form of literature is low, to say the least. It is too often perceived as merely a mechanical activity, in which one simply finds words from one language that correspond to words from another. But you have been known to say that the hermeneutic — or interpretive — enterprise is the very essence of the Buddhist path, and that the problems of hermeneutics are the problems of life itself. How so?

THURMAN: Well, everything is a matter of perspective and interpretation, right? And so how you interpret things has everything to do with the inner quality of your response to things. Within that, I think that translation is a wonderful exercise in seeing the multiple ways reality can be expressed and analyzed. Different languages carve up reality in different ways. There is an ancient Buddhist symbol of a translator that is a two-headed duck — not a duck, exactly, but more like a cuckoo or something. It has two heads, meaning that it looks into two different cultures and makes a bridge between them. Now, in modern times, translation is not respected. Modern cultures are fairly arrogant and ethnocentric, and think of themselves as higher than anything from the past, or any other existing “premodern” culture. So we naturally think that in translating something, we’re bringing something from some lower realm into our realm just out of curiosity. Since we’re the highest culture, anything we would translate into English would just be for our curiosity. But in the ancient period, and particularly in Tibet, where they had the idea that Buddhist knowledge, which they learned from India, was something of a higher nature, and that to learn about it could elevate a human being, translators were respected, because they had to look into the realm of that higher knowledge and bring it into the lower cultural realm of the target language. In our Dharma communities, though, a translator is a little more honored, because we have the idea that Western philosophy didn’t get it together quite as well as the Buddhist philosophers did.

GLENN: In the introductory chapter to your recent translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, you write that death is “a strong force close to life, a powerful impulse to the good, an intensifier of positive attitudes and actions.” What do you mean by that?

THURMAN: On a very human level, Tibetan culture shares our Western attitude towards death, that it is a frightening and tragic end of life. On a more spiritual level, however, Tibetans have learned that death forces everyone to let go of everything: You let go of your mind, your personality, and your sense of control over reality. And that is what Buddhism teaches, that nothing we think we are, do, feel, or have has any stability. This state of letting go can also happen in moments of great pleasure, like in orgasm, or sometimes when you make a great gift or a great self-overcoming. Heroic acts are done when people let go of their normal self-guarding attitudes; at the moment of death, then, everyone comes into some sort of heroic state. If you try to be aware that life is fundamentally let-go-able, even when you’re not actually facing death, then you can begin to live in a more ‘letting-go’ way. You can become more sensitive in your interactions, more free, and more open. Being aware of death, even rehearsing death in meditation can make your life more rich. The art of dying is as important as the art of living.

from: http://hilobrow.com/2009/07/23/the-nitty-gritty-of-nirvana/

1. It is not true that the world always has to be a mess and vale of misery. It can be beautiful and meaningful, and the human life form is a wonderful opportunity to reach the highest fulfillment imaginable.
2. The Buddha’s Noble Truth of Suffering means that life dominated by misknowledge will always be unsatisfactory, but that is not a final destination; it means that we can develop wisdom to eliminate misknowledge and then live free in bliss and share that bliss with others.
3. War and violence are not at all inevitable. When leaders and their people recognize this precious nature of human life in particular and all sentient life in general, they can definitely improve the nature of a society, can live sensibly and in harmony with nature and with one another. Being civilized means being wise, gentle, loving, and happy, and a society that enshrines those qualities is truly a civilization. There are definite examples of societies that have successfully cultivated a higher degree of gentleness, such as those of ancient India, Tibet, Mongolia, and China in certain flourishing periods.
4. The time we now live in is a unique moment when, due to science, technology, and the teachings of all the great religions, human beings could awaken to their true potential in larger numbers than ever before, and we really could realize the ancient dream of peace on earth, goodwill to all beings (not only humans).
5. Tibet is a special land, the highest “roof of the world”, and it is a shining example of what spiritual heights some members of a society can achieve when supported by a people who, in the main, have limited their greed for wealth and abandoned any admiration for violence and militarism. They once were successful militarists, and they became a peaceful people. They prove it can be done.
6. China has both sides in its history; it reached high points of civilization at times, and at other times it switched back into predatory savagery toward its own people and its neighbors. It was frequently violently conquered and then tended to imitate its conquerors. It is now caught up in imitating the Western ideological imperialism of Marxism, the physical imperialism of the Manchu empire, and the economic not-quite-post-colonial colonialist mentality of the not-quite-post-colonial Euro-American empires. It is also in the process of returning to its own soul, a soul of balance and harmony with humanity and nature, as it relearns its own deep ancient civilizational vision.
7. Therefore, it is not impossible that China, the waking giant, will quit its path of conquest empire and not seek to be a violent superpower, but will instead turn its great strength toward healing the overheated planet. It can listen to the Dalai Lama as one of the planet’s clearest voices of reason, peacefulness, and the wise intelligence we need to overcome the crisis we are in. It can free his people and return Tibet to being an environmental sanctuary, the water tower of Asia, the Switzerland of Asia. In turn, the Dalai Lama, now and in future incarnations, and his capable and creative free people can help the Chinese rekindle their spiritual energies and restore their civilized lives of harmony and fulfillment.
8. It is not that this or that leader will do it just now or just then. No one can be sure. But cultivating the vision of the possibility, how easy it would be, how beneficial to all sides it would be, this is one way of keeping hope alive and creating a powerful resonance that will eventually reach the hearts of those empowered to effect such positive change.
9. In our lifetimes, the Soviet Union withdrew from its imperial behavior and liberated Eastern Europe and even the Ukraine without a shot being fired. The South African apartheid regime gave up that vicious and miserable racist life without any further violence. Who can say realistically that China will not see its enlightened self-interest fulfilled in truly freeing Tibet from its cumbersome occupation and impractical and destructive colonization?
10. Therefore, it is our duty and obligation to cultivate hope. We can free our imaginations from being stuck in the expectation of failure. We can free any enemy from expecting that he or she cannot become a friend. We can follow the Dalai Lama and never give up. We live in hope, as the realistic way to live. We live therefore without bitterness, joyfully and happily, while vigorously opposing violence and injustice. It is our duty to strive to live so happily, that even if someone kills us, we will die happy!

The Sputnik Observatory for the Study of Contemporary Culture operates on the philosophy is that ideas are NOT selfish, ideas are NOT viruses. Ideas survive because they fit in with the rest of life. Ideas are energy, and should interconnect and re-connect continuously because by linking ideas together we learn, and new ideas emerge.

Check out short videos of Bob talking about identity habit, embeddedness, inner heart resonance, transmitting intelligence, and spiritual genes, and explore how they are interconnected with other themes and ideas.

Listen to audio of conversation on Science, Ethics and Religion with Bob Thurman and Danny Hillis.

Preeminent figures in the fields of religion and technology Dr. Robert Thurman and Dr. Danny Hillis engage in a thought-provoking conversation on scientific progress and its impact on society. Robert Thurman has cultivated a worldwide awareness of Tibet through his academic and popular writing, translation of important Buddhist texts, and commitment to finding a peaceful resolution to the China-Tibet conflict. Danny Hillis is a respected figure in the technology community. He is an inventor, scientist, author, and engineer. He holds more than eighty U.S. patents and is the designer of the 10,000-year mechanical clock. This program was presented in commemoration of the bicentennial, in February 2009, of Charles Darwin.

Great writeup on the event by attendee Ali Binazir.

Does the Dalai Lama manage his presence in the media or is he simply a “simple Buddhist monk and reincarnation of a bodhisattva?

See Robert A. F. Thurman, Professor, Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies, Columbia University, and President, Tibet House US, answer these questions in a discussion on Religion, Media and Culture: The Dalai Lama held May 5, 2009 at the Paley Center on Media with Laurie Goodstein, National Religion Correspondent, The New York Times and Steven Waldman, President and Editor-in-Chief, Beliefnet, moderated by Ibrahim Abdil-Mu’id Ramey, Director of Human Rights Division, Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation. This program is presented in conjunction with the The Temple of Understanding, a New York–based organization dedicated to promoting cross cultural and inter-religious tolerance and understanding.

Robert Thurman, professor of Indo-Tibetan studies at Columbia University, said that while the Dalai Lama had managed to perform both a political and religious role, it was his belief that the Tibetan people would benefit from more secular education and taking more personal responsibility. “He thinks that democracy is the best way for this. He has dealt with Chinese autocracy for more than 60 years and he has seen what that has done,” he said. Full article.