# 49 From USA Today Newspaper October 16, 2007

He's the 72-year-old Buddhist monk who has long been an inspiration for 6 million Tibetans whose religion and culture have been suppressed by communist China, and for 100,000 impoverished Tibetan refugees in India and Nepal. The Dalai Lama, Tibet's leader in exile for 48 years, has become a global symbol of peace and tolerance — and even a pop-culture icon — with celebrity backers such as actor Richard Gere. This week in Washington, the Dalai Lama will be the focus of something else: a game of political symbolism in which U.S. officials — who for years have held low-profile meetings with His Holiness to try to avoid offending China — will embrace him as never before. China is expressing its outrage over the U.S. government's honoring of a man they denounce almost daily as a "splittist" who supports "evil cults." Today, the Dalai Lama is scheduled to meet with President Bush at the White House. Wednesday, Bush and congressional leaders are to present the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize winner with the Congressional Gold Medal — the highest civilian honor awarded by Congress — during a ceremony in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. Thousands of the Dalai Lama's supporters will celebrate on the Capitol's West Lawn. PHOTOS: More on the Dalai Lama's life China, which called on Washington to cancel the events and the "so-called medal," responded Monday by pulling out of a meeting in Berlin this week at which its representatives were to have met with those from the USA, Great Britain, France, Russia and Germany to discuss U.N. sanctions against Iran over that nation's nuclear efforts. Earlier, Wang Baodong, spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, told the Associated Press that honoring the Dalai Lama amounts to "gross interference in China's internal affairs." The medal ceremony is particularly grating to the Chinese because it comes during the meeting of the Communist Party Congress in China. It's just a month after German Chancellor Angela Merkel held an official meeting with the Dalai Lama, despite threats from China that it would prompt disruptions in trade. The Chinese appear to have made no such threats toward the USA, whose markets are crucial to the booming Chinese economy. Still, "this Gold Medal ceremony is definitely the highest-profile event yet between U.S. officials and the Dalai Lama, and that's why the Chinese are bent out of shape," says the Brookings Institution's Jeffrey Bader, who was director of Asian affairs for the National Security Council during the Clinton administration. Congress set events in motion last year when it voted to award the Dalai Lama the medal that has been given to more than 150 people, including George Washington, entertainer Bob Hope and civil rights icon Rosa Parks. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., one of the sponsors of the measure to honor the Dalai Lama, praised the monk for being a key figure in promoting human rights in China, Tibet and elsewhere. For Bush, honoring the Dalai Lama represents a chance to push China on human rights while casting his administration as a champion of such rights, says Robert Barnett, who teaches Tibetan Studies at Columbia University. Because Bush has said he will attend the 2008 Summer Olympics in China — a visit with much public relations potential for the Chinese — "there's not much risk of retribution" from Beijing, Barnett says. At a time when the administration has been widely criticized for its war policy in Iraq, publicly praising the Dalai Lama also "offers an enormously powerful statement of commitment to faith-based politics that's not militaristic or intrusive," Barnett says. "Bush needs to be seen as a man of peace." White House spokesman Dana Perino has rebuffed suggestions that the ceremonies and meetings are an attempt to goad China on human rights or a public relations move by Bush. The president sees His Holiness as a spiritual leader, she said last week, and because the president "always attends a Congressional Gold Medal ceremony, he … will proudly be there to witness the event." Lodi Gyaltsen Gyari, special envoy of the Dalai Lama, hopes the medal might "wake Chinese leaders up and make them understand they are dealing with a man with widespread international love and respect. They can't get away with attacking him. … China wants to be a global player, but it behaves like a spoiled child." Gere, a Tibetan Buddhist and chairman of the International Campaign for Tibet (ICT), an advocacy group, says the Chinese lobby in the USA "did not want this medal or ceremony to happen … so it's a testimony to our Congress and the president that they stood up to this." Buddhism's enlightened being Born Lhamo Dhondup in a Tibetan hamlet, he was renamed Tenzin Gyatso at age 2. That's when Tibetan Buddhist leaders recognized him as the 14th incarnation of the Dalai Lama, the Bodhisattva of Compassion — an enlightened being in Buddhism who postpones his own nirvana to serve others. He was a teenager when the Chinese invaded Tibet in 1950 and barely 20 when he traveled to Beijing to meet Chinese leader Mao Zedong for fruitless negotiations. By 1959, after a Tibetan uprising was crushed by the Chinese, the Dalai Lama escaped to Dharamsala, India, where he established his government in exile. "When we met in 1962," he was "a little nervous, and very stressed to have more than 100,000 refugees under his authority in exile in a very poor country and responsibility for 6 million more Tibetans being tormented by the Chinese," recalls Robert Thurman, professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism at Columbia University. "In those days, when we talked about Buddhist questions, he would deflect my questions to his own teachers. But we would have very long, wide-ranging conversations about democracy, physics, chemistry." Over time, Thurman says, he saw the Dalai Lama "progress to brilliance." For years, the Dalai Lama — who teaches inner peace as the road to world peace — tried to persuade China to allow Tibet to be a free nation. In 1987, he gave up the idea of independence and set the more modest goal of a "zone of peace," a place of free ideas and worship within China. "Our approach is not to seek separation, despite the past history," he said Sunday at the end of a public talk before nearly 6,000 people at Radio City Music Hall. Although to the world's eye he is the symbol of Tibet, the Dalai Lama says he now is "semi-retired." The day-to-day life of Tibetans in exile is administered by an elected government in Dharamsala. So the Dalai Lama speaks of "our approach," rather than of his own. He now says that impoverished Tibet "can benefit materially from remaining within China. We all want modernized Tibet." But after six rounds of talks between his envoy and Chinese officials since 2002, there has been "no sign of improvement inside of Tibet," he said Sunday. "Instead, (China's) attitude became much more hardened. It's sad." China, which has flooded Tibet with ethnic Han Chinese, now seeks to appoint its own lamas as religious leaders, including a successor to the current Dalai Lama. Even so, His Holiness projects unshaken optimism. From the Buddhist perspective, true change can take many years, indeed many lifetimes, he said Sunday: "Eons! Eons!" So, the Dalai Lama carries on with his teaching. The New York talks were part of a three-week tour of the USA. Since he began regular visits to this country during the 1980s, the Dalai Lama has packed lecture halls across the nation for his teachings on Buddhism philosophy and his symposia on sciences of the mind. His one- or two-hour public talks are in English and focus on universal ideas of compassion. Longer, more intense teaching sessions are delivered in Tibetan, with translation. They delve deeply into the challenging precepts and logic of Tibetan Buddhism. The topic during the Dalai Lama's sessions in New York was "emptiness" — the concept that all beings and events are relational and interconnected and therefore have no separate, absolute reality in space and time. "He's a true bodhisattva. He'll give himself to everyone," says Lobsang Tenzin Negi, a former Tibetan monk who is director of the Emory-Tibet Partnership at Emory University in Atlanta, where the Dalai Lama will be invested as a visiting professor later this week. A how-to on ancient wisdom The Buddhist leader's message of harmony also has made him a force in publishing, on the Internet, and in raising funds for his cause. Millions of people look for his aphorisms about love and compassion on the Internet. He has written 72 books on science and philosophy, including a best seller called The Art of Happiness. "A lot of people seek out wisdom from him, seeing him as a sage who can help them in their life even if they don't know a zafu (meditation cushion) from dharma (teachings)," says Steve Waldman, a co-founder of the spirituality website Beliefnet.com. "He casts ancient wisdom in very contemporary how-to, self-help terms." The Dalai Lama also has his critics. His appearance at the 2005 meeting of the Society for Neuroscience drew objections from some who said his philosophy had no place in discussions of the sciences. Covering the Society for Neuroscience event for the Buddhism journal Tricycle, science author George Johnson dryly cited the Dalai Lama's "smile, the laugh, the childlike delight to be standing before so many well-wishers; the seeming lack of pretension and self-consciousness that keeps listeners from noticing or even caring how little he actually says." The Dalai Lama's foray into pop culture has included a brief appearance in a 1998 Apple computer advertising poster under the slogan "Think Different." A CD of the 2003 Concert for Peace and Reconciliation, including a brief talk by His Holiness, went on sale in July. Proceeds go to health insurance for Tibetan refugee monks and nuns, through Gere's foundation, Healing the Divide. To celebrate the honors this week, the ICT is webcasting the Gold Medal events and feting the Dalai Lama at a Washington gala Thursday. The gala's 500-person guest list includes political figures and celebrities such as Pelosi, Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., and film director Martin Scorsese, who will show clips from Kundun, his 1997 film of the Dalai Lama's life story. The ITC is spending $750,000 to underwrite the Washington events outside the Rotunda to try to keep the cause of Tibet in the public eye and help boost other efforts to help its refugees, spokeswoman Kate Saunders says. India is the primary financial supporter of Tibetan refugees; the U.S. government sends about $2 million a year, most of it for education. By next year, Healing the Divide hopes to provide health coverage for about 10,000 refugees who desperately need care. Gere says he has "been around His Holiness and his teachings for 30 years now. He's incredibly generous and forgiving, and his commitment is to help us achieve happiness. You feel his extraordinary compassion." Thurman says the Dalai Lama's attitude toward China is typical of his approach to life: "After 50 years, he's still calling for dialogue, for non-violence and non-confrontation," Thurman says. "He appeals to people's good sense and goodwill. He's convinced most of his people, most of the time, to be non-violent. It's no small accomplishment, considering what other dispossessed, ignored and oppressed people are doing in the world today."

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