According to the Dzogchen tradition of Buddhism, we are all already perfect and complete. But what does this actually mean on a practical level? And if we’re already perfect, then why do we have to practice?

According to Dzogchen teacher Anne C. Klein (Rigzin Drolma), this is the central paradox of the Buddhist path. In her new book, Being Human and a Buddha Too: Longchenpa’s Sevenfold Mind Training for a Sunlit Sky, Klein takes up the question of what it actually means for each of us to be complete, as well as what happens to our humanity when we seek awakening.

In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Klein sat down with Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, to discuss how she has come to understand buddhahood, the difference between wholeness and perfection, and how wholeness honors the variety of human experience. Read an excerpt from the conversation below, and then listen to the full episode.

To start, what inspired you to write this book? In 2007, Adzom Paylo Rinpoche taught [Longchenpa’s sevenfold mind training], and it was my first acquaintance with this teaching. It hasn’t been taught in the West that often, and I really enjoyed it.

[As I was working with this teaching,] I reached back to a kind of koan that I’ve been chewing over since high school when I first heard this idea that you somehow were a buddha, which sounded insane and yet was compelling. Of course, it’s absolutely pivotal to Dzogchen. Adzom Rinpoche will ask new students, “Do you think you could be a buddha in this lifetime?” And it’s kind of a wake-up call: Do I think that? And if I don’t, why not? And if I do, really? So these are things that were on my mind that I wanted to bring forth in some way, and it felt like this was the way to do it.

The theme of wholeness is something I’ve been reflecting on a good bit. What does wholeness mean to an ordinary human being? Because I’m clearly a human being, but there’s a buddha too that’s actually not separate. This is what I’m exploring, and I would say it’s been a continuing exploration.

You write that Dzogchen understands all paths to move toward a natural state of wholeness. Can you say more about this state of wholeness? This state of wholeness is one of the central symbols of Dzogchen. For example, think of the vast ocean. There are waves that are catastrophic, there are little ripples, there is water crashing on the shore, but it’s all unquestionably ocean. The ocean is whole. I think this is one of the reasons humans love to look at the ocean: somehow the usual sense of “me” and “that” dissolves naturally. There’s still some kind of subject-object sensibility there, but it softens. And there’s something about that that we as a species fall in love with. We love that vastness, and there’s actually a very deep yearning for it. [We’re] nourished by the experience of wholeness.

You say that this wholeness is already accessible to each of us, yet Dzogchen also has a very highly structured path of practice. This may seem paradoxical: If we are already whole, then why do we need such structured practice? How do you understand the relationship between wholeness and the path of practice? This is the central paradox of the path. You’re a buddha. You’re told this from the beginning. You also don’t understand that. How can that be? How could you be that which is utterly perfect, the ground of everything in which everything arises? But everything arises in your experience also. Your experience is in some sense the expanse in which everything arises. This is not an esoteric thing: you’re happy, you’re sad, but it’s all part of the domain of your experience.

The mind is of infinite variety, and that’s important to recognize. This kind of wholeness is the ultimate creative space. Everything arises in it and never leaves it. Dzogchen practice helps open our radar to flux and change and lightens up our desire for things, especially “me,” “mine,” to be permanent. Then it takes us through various kinds of permutations using vivid imagery and imagination, allowing things to arise in fullness of color and drama and emotion and then dissolve. It’s seeing that kind of process over and over again in daily practice that really opens us up to the wholeness—to the ground that is actually always there and never shaken because nothing ever happens to it. But in some sense, a lot of stuff happens, and we can’t ignore that. Life is not just looking at the sky. The sky has clouds; the ocean has waves. Wholeness without arisings in it wouldn’t be wholeness; it would be some kind of exclusive zone. Practice is a way to reckon with that experientially.

Right, you say that this completeness is not the same as sameness in that it doesn’t erase difference. So how does Dzogchen honor and celebrate the vast diversity of human experience while also acknowledging completeness? We tend to think that difference has the last word, and this blinds us to the wholeness. But wholeness is not a dead expanse with nothing in it. Wholeness is the open space in which everything occurs, which is boundless and unlimited. Within this state, anything can occur without in any way leaving this unnameable wholeness.

This is central to the Dzogchen approach: nothing ever leaves this state. It’s like the waves in the ocean—they never leave the ocean. The clouds never leave the sky. They arise there, they dissolve into it, they don’t disrupt it. And in some ways, the more clouds and lightning and thunder and rainbows and birds that you can see in the sky, the more you can appreciate its openness and boundlessness. It is often said that for a developed practitioner, the more activated your mind can be, the more you can notice that this wholeness is not getting disrupted.

Variety is like the blossoming of wholeness and creativity. Dzogchen means the Great Completeness, and it’s great because there’s nothing outside of it. Nothing. Not your worst enemy, not your worst fears. It’s all a wave in the ocean.

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In Tibetan, tong means sending or giving, and len means taking. What are we giving and taking? This is such a wonderful practice that we sometimes call self-antidote, self-transformation. We will do taking first, and then we’ll do sending. 

Let’s say you have kleshas, like maybe aversion, hatred, craving, jealousy, ignorance, confusion, or what we normally call suffering, meaning maybe you might feel stressed or depressed, or you might have agitation. When I was young, I had panic attacks, so I used my panic as the subject of my tonglen. Nowadays, we’re having a pandemic around the world, maybe losing loved ones also or getting pain or disease or losing jobs. What we’re going to do here is understand our own problem and be aware of that, and at the same time, we understand others also have suffering. When they have these problems, when they have these kleshas, like hatred, we will never be in peace. Not happy with the panic, of course, not happy with the stress, of course, not happy. You understand about others: whoever is having these kleshas and suffering, they’re not happy. 

So now what are you going to do? Today, this is imaginative labor, of course, and it doesn’t look realistic, but in the imagination, you can do anything. But in a way, it really helps us to develop strength of love and compassion, and it really helps us to build our will to help others. It will develop skills and talents to help others. In a way, it’s helping others. A lot of scientists now say that if we imagine that we are doing physical exercise, we actually grow muscle. Here, we are transforming these kleshas and suffering. Let’s say we’ll do hatred as an example. If we do taking and sending practice with the hatred, then the hatred actually transforms into love and compassion. Without suppressing it, without getting rid of the hatred, poison becomes medicine. Problem becomes solution. It really helps to free your hatred. You will be full of love and compassion. 

We will do this practice together now. First, please keep your spine loosely straight, and please relax the body and the muscles. Be your mind and body together. And as I mentioned in the past again and again, it doesn’t matter whether you are relaxed or not relaxed, peaceful or not peaceful. It doesn’t matter. Just be with whatever is there in your body. Now pause. The feeling of wanting to practice is love. Being with whatever is coming, being with your body is awareness. Accepting whatever good or bad, not rejecting, not controlling, accepting them and being as it is is wisdom. So you have love, you have awareness, you have compassion now in your body. Now, maybe you might have some confusion, hatred, jealousy, panic, depression, whatever you have, some problems that you’re facing. Now, be aware of that problem. First, bring awareness to the kleshas, or the problems in your life now. When you have these kleshas and problems, you’re not in peace, so think about others who are having this problem. They are also not in peace, so develop love and compassion to others. 

Now, when you breathe in slowly, at the same time, take others’ problems into your own kleshas or problems. Let’s say you have hatred. Take others’ hatred or problem into your own hatred. When you breathe in, slowly breathe now and take all the others’ hatred as dark smoke and dissolve it into your own hatred. Now, slowly breathing in, wish that they may be free from hatred. You can do that now according to your own speech. Take others’ hatred in your own hatred and wish that they may be from hatred and the suffering from hatred. 

Not only can you practice this with hatred, but you can practice with any other kleshas: craving, doubt, pride, jealousy, panic, depression, stress. All of this becomes love and compassion. Hatred becomes love and compassion. Panic becomes love and compassion. Stress becomes love and compassion. How nice. When you do that, all of this becomes love and compassion, and in that moment we accumulate virtue. We accumulate merit. We accumulate wisdom. This is wonderful. 

Now, we’re going to focus more on sending. We will send this virtue, the virtue by taking others kleshas and suffering, and we send this virtue to others. So now slowly breathe out, and while you’re breathing out, send this virtue as bright light and dissolve to other beings and wish that they may have happiness and the causes of happiness. Now you can do as your own speech. 

When you send your breath together with your happiness to others, when you breathe in, wish that they may be free from suffering, and when you’re breathing out, send your happiness to others. When you breathe in, wish them to be happy or wish them to be free from suffering. Breathing out, send your happiness, your virtue. Breathing in, wish that they have happiness and are free from suffering. Now, please feel your body and relax your mind and body together. 

This is the practice of taking and sending. The tonglen practice is finished. Can you really take others’ problems and kleshas to you? Actually, this is what we call impossible, and as the Buddha said, “Everybody has their own karma. We cannot change others’ karma.” But if we practice in that way, what happens? We can develop the strength of our love and compassion and, at the same time, accumulate good karma or virtue. That may become causes to help others. So, in a way, we are helping others indirectly. 

♦

Excerpted from a guided meditation for Meditation Month 2022

The post Self-Transformation Through Tonglen appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In Tricycle’s first issue, writer Spalding Gray interviewed the Dalai Lama, covering subjects like doubt, fear, and dreaming. Since then, the magazine has featured a number of teachings from His Holiness that range from introductions to the Buddha’s teachings to advice for countering stress and depression. In honor of his 88th birthday today, here’s a collection of the Dalai Lama’s teachings from Tricycle’s archives.

***

A Brief Teaching on the Purpose of Meditation from The Dalai Lama’s Little Book of Wisdom
“Buddhism explains that our normal state of mind is such that our thoughts and emotions are wild and unruly, and since we lack the mental discipline needed to tame them, we are powerless to control them. As a result, they control us. And thoughts and emotions, in their turn, tend to be controlled by our negative impulses rather than our positive ones. We need to reverse this cycle.”

An Introduction to the Buddha’s Teachings and Their Place in Tibet 
“Buddhism has flourished for centuries in many countries, but it was in Tibet that all three paths, the Shravakayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana, were preserved completely. . . Moreover, Tibetan scholars never ignored the practice aspect, and experienced practitioners did not neglect to study. This seems to me a very good way of doing things.”

Why the Inner Enemy Is the Most Dangerous One
“One of the best human qualities is our intelligence, which enables us to judge what is wholesome and what is unwholesome, what is beneficial and what is harmful. Negative thoughts, such as anger and strong attachment, destroy this special human quality; this is indeed very sad. . .A person gripped by such states of mind and emotion is like a blind person, who cannot see where he is going. Yet we neglect to challenge these negative thoughts and emotions that lead to near insanity. On the contrary, we often nurture and reinforce them! By doing so we are, in fact, making ourselves prey to their destructive power. When you reflect along these lines, you will realize that our true enemy is not outside ourselves.”

A Brief Teaching on Equality
“It’s true that in specific circumstances where you have the ability to alleviate the suffering of another person or to protect another person from suffering, there is, in that sense, an inequality. One person has a capacity that the other person does not. But there is no such sense of inequality, no feeling of superiority, in the actual mode in which compassion views the other sentient being. . . The other being for whom I feel compassion is just like me.”

Advice for Countering Stress and Depression
“If the situation or problem is such that it can be remedied, then there is no need to worry about it. In other words, if there is a solution or a way out of the difficulty, you do not need to be overwhelmed by it. The appropriate action is to seek its solution. Then it is clearly more sensible to spend your energy focusing on the solution rather than worrying about the problem. Alternatively, if there is no solution, no possibility of resolution, then there is also no point in being worried about it, because you cannot do anything about it anyway. In that case, the sooner you accept this fact, the easier it will be for you.” 

This article was originally published on July 6, 2021

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In the Indo-Tibetan textual tradition, the four seals (Skt. caturmudrā, T. phyag rgya bzhi), or dom shyi in the Tibetan oral tradition, are the four necessary characteristics of a view or teaching to mark or certify it as Buddhist. These seals mark our views as Buddhist, as opposed to taking refuge in the three jewels, which makes us Buddhist through precepts. Tibetan monastics memorize the four seals in their teenage years in a short formula:

All compounded things are impermanent.

All contaminated things are dukkha (unsatisfactory).

All phenomena are empty and selfless.

Nirvana is true peace.

Several sources attributed to the Buddha, including The Questions of the Nāga King Sāgara (Sagara­naga­raja­pariprccha), mention these four statements. They are closely related to the three marks of existence—impermanence, dukkha, and nonself—that play a quintessential role in the Pali and the Sanskrit traditions of insight meditation. Although the last of the four gives hope for an eventual end to suffering, we must initially grapple with the first three seals.

The Tibetan word for a follower of Buddhism—nangpa—means “insider” and implies that we only truly live in the fold of the Buddhist worldview when these four seals start to permeate our perception and become its natural element. The real challenge is not understanding the four seals conceptually but applying them to our existence, with all our multifaceted identities, challenges, dramas, dreams, and aspirations. We should measure the four seals against the fabric of our daily life to see with greater clarity all the individual threads and knots that make up our lives and then let them dissolve in an ocean of spacious, liberated awareness. Easier said than done, of course.

Looking deeply into our existence will not be unsympathetic toward our conventional reality, where we see ourselves as beings of different backgrounds, genders, cultures, sexualities, and generations. It was this duality of relative identities and universal truths that I, as a queer practitioner and ex-monastic, experienced quite powerfully when interpreting teachings on the four seals given by one of my primary mentors, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche. Though he spoke about the four seals in a general way, his talk left room for profound personal reflection on how the roles and labels I have serve as an illustration for the material. In our conventional identities, we see the first three seals with greater precision.With that understanding, we then use the fourth one to see the flip side, sometimes described as the indivisible union of emptiness and luminosity that transcends conventions yet remains inseparable from them.

The First Seal: All Compounded Things Are Impermanent

Hearing that impermanence pervades all compounded things is challenging, not because it’s untrue but because it is true. If the world has cut us deeply with rejection—like it so often does with queer individuals—how can we accept that even our few loving connections will be taken away? How can we accept the inevitable separation from the body we’ve used to find those connections and with which we’ve worked so hard to make peace? We viscerally shy away from knowing that every relationship, even our life, will end.

Despite the resistance, we know that the threads holding the pieces of our lives together will inevitably snap, something new will form, and then again be replaced with another configuration of matter, energy, and awareness. It’s not easy to feel and know this without some sense of grief, but contemplating impermanence is supposed to bring about a level of sadness—a disappointment in our hungry grasping at permanence, in our inability to be like Queen Elsa in Frozen and simply “let it go.”  

I can only tolerate impermanence because I deliberately and continually remind myself of the naturalness of change. Like the changing of the season, my own life will endlessly go through cycles of change. I can find solace in the naturalness of it all and keep rolling along, however clumsily. Although this may seem like a simplistic understanding of the first seal, it is, perhaps, “good enough,” as Lama Thubten Yeshe used to say. Good enough to keep my vulnerable queer heart afloat: not yet radiantly enlightened, but certainly still alive.

The Second Seal: All Contaminated Things Are Dukkha 

Why does being in the world cut so deep? Why do our interactions with others often continue to slice our hearts like a sharp razor, even when we earnestly try to do our best? Our minds and the minds of all sentient beings are contaminated by primordial ignorance (avidya) and therefore accompanied by multiple types of dukkha or unsatisfactoriness. 

This contamination is not about violating the decrees of a higher authority or about systems of social oppression, which ultimately also stem from the fundamental polluting agent of ignorance. This ignorance—that which contaminates us—is our shared tendency to reify: to draw a thick line around ourselves and other phenomena, or subject and object. Living under the influence of this habit, we all construct thick walls and then harm each other and ourselves in endless cycles of attachment and aversion. 

The Third Seal: All Phenomena Are Empty and Selfless

Our attempt to overcome this contamination brings us to the third seal, which invites us to recognize all phenomena’s selfless and empty nature: the lack of independent existence. Since this truth goes strongly against our habituated perceptions, people often misunderstand this truth, which leads to additional harm for marginalized communities, adding insult to injury. It is too easy to say, “Everything is empty, so your queerness (race, gender, immigrant status, traumatic past) doesn’t matter.” Even though such a comment (perhaps well-meaning) tries, unskillfully, to point out the emptiness and grasping, it’s hurtful in its dismissiveness, reveals more about the speaker’s unchecked privilege, and in attempting to avoid the extreme of grasping, can also fall into the opposite extreme of nihilism.

Indeed, we are not merely our marginalized identities—but acknowledging those identities is essential, both in terms of our dukkha and as tools we can use to serve others. When doing Buddhist visualization practices—so beloved in the Indo-Tibetan lineage, where they form an integral part of Vajrayana practice—we keep the rules of the meditation intact: each Buddha figure appears in its color, with the correct number of arms, faces, and eyes. Arya Tara’s green form is visualized as green, and Medicine Buddha is imagined as radiantly sapphire-blue, without qualms about their unusual appearances or claims that the form is irrelevant. Things do not collapse into utter nihilistic chaos, even as they arise against the background of emptiness. So, why would our conventional roles no longer matter in the relational realm? I have repeatedly heard from my teachers of Madhyamaka philosophy that emptiness does not mean nothing matters. Since everything is empty, everything matters. Embodying the perfection of wisdom on the bodhisattva path by finding the balance between the relative and ultimate —between “I am definitely and defiantly queer” and “The empty self is not inherently queer”—requires a lifetime, or multiple lifetimes, to fully master.

The Fourth Seal: Nirvana is True Peace

Fully embodying the wisdom of knowing emptiness is nirvana. However, for many of us, the possibility of nirvana is merely a working hypothesis and something to be gradually tested through practice. So, how does the fourth seal provide peace right now? Is nirvana simply a promise for the distant future, like one day going to Heaven or one of the Buddhist pure lands?

Some Western teachers insist that all we have available are discrete moments of insight, which can never remove our underlying fallibility, no matter how meaningful. While the Indo-Tibetan tradition (or “Nalanda tradition,” as the Dalai Lama prefers to call it) that I’ve been trained in does not disagree with the persistent nature of our fallible traits, it does envision a complete potential transformation that transcends this life, even if it takes numerous lifetimes to achieve. Knowing which of these interpretations is correct requires carefully examining our reductionist and colonial conditioning, assessing our assumptions about the nature of consciousness, and, perhaps, a few encounters with realized practitioners of the highest caliber.

While all of that is underway, a beautiful element of the Great Perfection (Dzogchen) and Great Seal (Mahamudra) traditions is that they readily offer meaningful glimpses into our ultimate radiant nature. Gained through qualified guidance, careful preparation, and practice, these glimpses aren’t the same as full realization or nirvana but still provide essential insights. Je Tsultrim Zangpo, from the Dzogchen lineage, compares these insights into our pristine awareness to rays of light. Following the ray to its source, we arrive at the sun of complete freedom and experience the fourth seal in its full form.

Tenderness is an inseparable quality of our true nature.

This journey to the fourth seal is not only about exploring the qualities of awareness—at least not emotionally, since our hearts might hunger for more—but also about how tenderness is an inseparable quality of our true nature. The Dzogchen tradition teaches that our ultimate nature has three primary qualities: emptiness, luminous cognizance, and all-pervading spontaneous compassion. 

My limited conceptual understanding of spontaneous compassion (stemming from both emptiness and luminosity) had a powerful transformative effect on my practice and my way of being in this world. A few years into my decade-long monastic training, one of my primary teachers reminded me of the connection between the more effortful practices of the four immeasurables (brahmaviharah)—love, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity—and the spontaneous, effortless warmth of our pristine nature. That reminder (less than a sentence in a short email) made me think: how can I work towards greater levels of trust towards this loving nature, which, in my case, manifests through the lens of my queer identity and has perhaps been obscured by all the heartbreak experienced so far? This question inevitably brings me back to the practical application of the four seals—a way of holding my mindfulness on them so they can transform my experience.

The four seals interpenetrate each other in our lives and can become a powerful emotional support system if we let them. For that, an excellent place to start is the fourth one: in seeking peace, let’s start with the promise of peace (nirvana). Let’s imagine that our ultimate nature is, as Dzogchen teaches, empty of inherent existence, radiantly cognizant, and boundlessly compassionate. When can that boundless compassion manifest and be strengthened? When we face change (first seal) and the knots of our contaminants—our afflictions—make us hurt ourselves and others (second seal). What helps us undo those knots? Deeper and deeper levels of knowing that things are not inherently existent. Understanding that things are, in the words of Suzuki Roshi, “not always so” can help us face life’s challenges with more compassion and respond in more wholesome ways.

Systems of oppression, acts of violence, the roughness of the fabric of existence, and even change itself can leave us aching, but by reflecting on the four seals, we can see what lies at the root of both pain and the tendency to create pain. Understanding the source of our suffering, expressed in the second seal, we seek the medicine of emptiness and find peace by experiencing our true nature.

Developing a trusting confidence in our true nature—our basic goodness—has been emphasized by many notable Buddhist teachers whom I’ve had the fortune to meet. This confidence does not come through simply telling yourself that “I’m a radiant magical being” or being reminded by others. It unfolds when we gradually realize the first three seals so that all of us—queer or not—can gracefully accept change, compassionately deal with our afflictions, and constantly remain aware that all things are radiantly empty. To whatever degree these four qualities seal the fabric of my life, I feel that my practice and existence—as an individual and a part of my communities—have been meaningful.

⧫

Watch a guided meditation from Michael Lobsang Tenpa on the second of the four seals below. 

The post Sealing Our Queer Life appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

On the morning of Wednesday, April 19, upward of 400 Tibetans congregated for a “Truth Rally” outside CNN’s New York City offices. They were demanding a public apology from CNN to His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan people for what they argue was misleading reporting of a good-natured interaction with a young boy at the Dalai Lama’s temple in Dharamsala, India, in February. Detailing their grievances on an information sheet that was distributed at the rally, protesters asserted that CNN misled the public by airing only a heavily edited video clip of the interaction, failing to examine cultural context, and excluding crucial facts and informed voices in the conversation—namely the voices of Tibetans. 

On April 10, CNN broadcast a television report headlined, “Dalai Lama Apologizes After Video Goes Viral: Clip shows spiritual leader asking boy to ‘suck his tongue.’” CNN anchor Julia Chatterley introduced the clip by pointing to the tension between the “outrage” across the internet and the widely-held view of the Dalai Lama as a “joker.” CNN reporter Vedika Sud then emphasized the “‘severe backlash” against the Dalai Lama that had spread on social media since the viral clip emerged. She read the response from the Dalai Lama’s office and called attention to the office apologizing for his words, not his actions. She added, “Clearly for a lot of people across social media this is more than just teasing. It has upset huge sections of people on social media, on Twitter, that have called it, like I said, absolutely disappointing, absolutely disturbing, and absolutely inappropriate behavior by the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.”

A collective of four Tibetans organized the protest in response: Dr. Tenzin Mingyur Paldron, a trans artist and educator; Chemi Youdon, the founder of a nonprofit Tibetan nanny agency; Tenying Yangsel, a housing justice organizer; and Chonyi Gyatso, a youth educator. Their overlapping experience in trauma-informed education, intersectional activism, and youth empowerment converged at the common place of providing resources and accessible tools to the community and media.

Tibetans of all ages and ideological backgrounds traveled from their offices in Manhattan, homes in Jackson Heights, Queens, and school drop-offs around the city to protest the damage they said established news outlets like CNN inflicted on their community. They gathered in song, prayer, and chants, declaring that the “truth would come out.” Most people held one of three protest signs: the white dove, symbolizing peace; Four Harmonious Friends (Tib. Thunba Punshi), symbolic of living harmoniously; or the three wise monkeys to communicate the teachings of right speech to the media. 

An organizing principle of the demonstration was a request for global accountability for disregarding the voices of Tibetans, a community that has endured genocide and continues to experience colonization and exile.

“We’re asking people to listen to us, and people are choosing not to listen to an entire community,” said organizer Chonyi Gyatso. 

According to the organizers, Tibetans have experienced increased acts of daily discrimination and hate speech since the April 10 report. “The media has caused an extreme amount of pain to our community, and it’s at a daily level,” said youth educator Tseten Tsering. “There are kids in New York City having to sit in classrooms hearing terrible and vilifying comments about His Holiness.” 

“What happened to cultural sensitivity? What happened to talking?” Paldron asked. “This video came from the Tibetan community. The journalists could have asked more questions to the Tibetan community. What makes them believe they don’t have to interview a single person from that community to know what happened?”

In its address to CNN, the group provided resources mapping its stance on how the media participated in the misrepresentation of the Tibetan people and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. These resources include:

1. Voice of Tibet’s post-event interviews with Dr. Payal Kanodia (a trustee of the Indian M3M Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the real estate company M3M Group) and her child on YouTube and Instagram
2. Radio Free Asia’s post-event interview with the child and his grandfather, Basant Bansal, M3M chair
3. The unedited video of the interaction with cultural context provided by Jigme Ugen, a Tibetan American (unedited video starts at the 15-minute, 15-second mark)
4. A video of respected educator and engineer Sonam Wangchuk of Ladakh, India (“Ice Stupa Project”) explaining the cultural context of the interaction

Younger protesters considered the demonstration an opportune time to renegotiate their relationship with the Western world, which upholds the dominant narrative on Tibet and the Tibetan people. A student who wished to go unnamed said that the current Tibetan experience is widely misunderstood thanks to “static” portrayals of Tibet that have created “damaging, unrealistic expectations” of the Tibetan people in popular culture. She and other protesters feel that the media imposes a one-dimensionality on their contested identity as exiled people. “I encourage Tibetans to consider the harm of these outside characterizations and reflect on the power dynamics at hand,” an environmental educator named Yuthok added. 

A Tibetan Equality Project member who also wished to go unnamed stressed: “We are a diverse people. We all have different perspectives on different issues. We’re not one single hive mind, right? We all have different ways of thinking, and they might clash with each other. But if there’s one thing to say, it’s that this issue is so upsetting in its lack of nuance that people from all ideological backgrounds within the Tibetan community have come together and unified.” 

The controversy surrounding the Dalai Lama is informed by perpetuated histories of Orientalism, argued some protesters. “No one would care if people didn’t have such high expectations of what Tibet is,” the Tibetan Equality Project member attested. “His position in the public eye doesn’t allow him the space to exist in his humanity. I feel like a lot of the West think of him as some sort of higher deity or being and that’s why their expectations are so high. He’s a human being and he’s an old human being.” 

Protesters emphasized that Tibetans’ affinity toward the Dalai Lama varies across generations. Many shared how the Dalai Lama’s central position in the Tibetan cultural landscape feels like a “familial bed of comfort and safety” for Tibetans across the diaspora whose nationless identity is shaped by fractured narratives of home.

Still, “a lot of people think that the Tibetans have blind faith in the Dalai Lama, and it’s insulting because [they’re] saying that an entire people are not thinking critically for themselves,” remarked organizer Chonyi Gyatso. “It’s an insult to our intelligence, and I’m pretty sure that’s racist.”

However Tibetans regard His Holiness, protesters made clear that the outsized recognition of the Dalai Lama across the rest of the world as synonymous with Tibet means that any attack on him is deeply felt. As Chonyi Gyatso put it, “When people are talking negatively about the Dalai Lama, it does feel like an attack on me being Tibetan.” 

Although most Tibetans at the Truth Rally had spent the week “crying, sleepless, with loss of appetite,” as organizer Chemi Youdon described it, protesters spoke to the palpable sense of unity and relief to be in community, even as passersby yelled slurs from across the street. 

“Seeing everyone come together this early in the morning, in the cold, is inspiring. My heart feels lighter after having the space to let out what I was holding inside, including all the frustration,” Yuthok said. 

Throughout the three-hour demonstration, ten self-elected community members sported red bandanas on their sleeves to spotlight their role as community stewards, directing traffic across the busy intersection and translating across cultural and linguistic barriers. Others distributed snacks and water bottles between the clusters of young children, elders, and domestic workers, largely nannies, attending the rally. Everyone else was singing in harmony to the Words of Truth Prayer (Tib. Den Tsig Mon Lam).

Across the many intersecting identities present at the Truth Rally ran an undercurrent of belonging, supported by what Paldron named as “trust in each other.” The protest served as a compelling reminder that when interdependence and community care are prioritized, people have an extraordinary capacity to transcend mental and physical obstacles. 

“Don’t expect external remedies to give you peace of mind,” urged Tenzin Choeyang, an elderly, devout practitioner in the community. “You have to rely on what we’ve always been taught in our culture and religion: to realize that what we need is within us.”

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The recent controversy surrounding His Holiness the Dalai Lama has been a sharp reminder to Tibetans of the precarity and powerlessness of the life of a refugee. It’s not a lesson we needed. Ours is the inheritance of loss and dispossession. As a people, we know what it’s like to lose our land, our home, and our inheritance, to be robbed of our language, our culture, and our future. Stripped thus of any protective cover, we are completely exposed to human nature, vulnerable to the kindnesses and cruelties of the people around us. In our host nations, this vulnerability puts intense pressure on us to be the perfect refugees. Tibetans have risen to this challenge: we have been the great refugee success story. The Dalai Lama has not only been one of the greatest moral leaders that the world has ever seen, he has made the world a genuinely better place with his teachings and his presence. In other words, he has been the perfect refugee. Until last week.  

At a public event in February at Tsuglagkhang Temple in Dharamsala, a young Indian boy approached the Dalai Lama onstage. The boy asked for a hug. It seems to me that this was probably in the program and scripted. What happened next was not. The Dalai Lama did not know what the boy meant. English, which he started learning in his twenties, in exile in India, has been failing him in his older age, as our stranger languages do. His aides explained the boy’s request to him but it wasn’t enough. Then the Dalai Lama’s secretary, his nephew Tenzin Taklha, tells him that the boy is asking if he can give the Dalai Lama a “hug.” Tenzin Taklha says the word “hug” to His Holiness in English. Traditionally Tibetans didn’t use the hug as a loving social gesture; we touched our foreheads together in a forehead kiss or forehead bump. 

The Dalai Lama gives his assent and says, “First here” pointing to his cheek. The boy gives him a kiss on his cheek. Then the Dalai Lama says, “Here” pointing to his lips. The Dalai Lama gives the boy a kiss (a peck) on his lips. People clap. The Dalai Lama laughs, and others laugh as well. The Dalai Lama then tells the boy, “Suck my tongue.” I know how it sounds but he clearly didn’t mean it literally; he’s being playful and familial. Both smiling, young boy and old monk, they touch foreheads. It is a genuine moment of connection, of love and compassion. 

This innocent interaction has now been perverted beyond belief with the help of Chinese whispers, clickbait charlatans, and well-meaning furious first responders of the internet blinded by moral panic. This last group, the only one acting in good faith, has applied their hypersexualized lens to an innocent exchange, criminalizing a social gesture as sexual and manufacturing a crime where there was none. I’ll be honest. I watched the maliciously edited video first, and even though I understood in my bones that the Dalai Lama meant nothing sexual, that anything approaching violence and abuse would be anathema to this icon of peace, I felt uncomfortable. But later I watched the original longer clip and all I felt was grief. The original video has a quality of innocence that is entirely missing from the manipulated video that’s being shown, with the boy’s face blurred out in a performance of protection.  

For that’s what this blurred-out video is doing, performing protection rather than enacting it. And it is this very performance that heightens the impression of wrongness, because of course the blurred face invites a tautology; this child’s face is blurred, so he must be a victim, and therefore there was a crime. It also obscures what actually happened; the Dalai Lama and the boy both stick out their tongues, but there is no tongue action, only a simple forehead touch. This manufacturing of crime, this false allegation—of child sexual abuse, just about the most horrifying accusation there is—has been an unforgivable smear and slander against the Dalai Lama; an unthinkable violence to the boy and his mother, who are being told that contrary to their experience, he was violated and abused; and a new trauma to the Tibetan people.

This was a public event for both Tibetans and Indians, and there were plenty of people on stage, including the boy’s mother and his grandfather. Each and every one of those people on stage and in the audience are being told that they did not experience their reality in the right way. That the furious first responders of social media, who were not there, who saw only the out-of-context clips maliciously edited to manipulate and incite outrage, know what happened. But what they know is a gross misreading of what actually happened. We have created a sort of palimpsest of our own basest instincts, out of the very real acts of sexual violence that we have suffered and the sexual exposures that we have seen, and misconstrued and misread a completely social gesture as sexual. And the accusation has become a judgment. 

Some have even wondered what might have gone on over the years behind closed doors. There’s been nothing. For two and a half years in my twenties, I worked as special assistant to the Dalai Lama’s representative to the Americas at the Office of Tibet, US. I worked all US visits during that time and was part of his staff entourage on the East Coast. It’s one of the great blessings of my life. Once I traveled with him cross-country for almost a month and I got to know his other staff very well. They had worked for the Dalai Lama for years, in some cases twenty or forty years. They knew him intimately, behind closed doors, away from the cameras, and they loved and revered him. No one, unless they are profoundly pure, can inspire and sustain that kind of devotion for decades. And for all that the Dalai Lama has been scrutinized for by the international press since the ‘70s, for Tibetans, the Dalai Lama has been the focal point of our worship, and our watch, for over eighty years. 

He has also been the focal point of an endless Chinese watch, of course. Remember that time it came out that the Dalai Lama’s office was being hacked, almost certainly by the Chinese, for months and for years? A Private Office staff told me that they could literally see the files being copied and sent across the ether. That the Chinese were spying on the Dalai Lama in his office and his residence, and clearly had access to everything. If there were any skeletons in the Dalai Lama’s closet, the Chinese government would have celebrated Halloween every day. 

In fact, they have been sharing this maliciously edited video all over Tibet. But in an unexpected turn, Tibetans on the plateau are rejoicing over this video, because they are finally able to see their spiritual leader whose image has been banned for the last half-century. This underscores how little the Chinese government knows Tibetans, and also the fact that many cultures do not share the same sexual vocabulary. When I was growing up in Dharamsala, young men and young women held hands not with each other but with their friends. There was nothing sexual or romantic about it. And any sort of sexual or romantic kiss in public was verboten in the traditional Tibetan culture—it was simply unthinkable. The problem with the Dalai Lama is that after a lifetime of adapting so much to exile, he has still not adapted himself completely to the tyranny of Western norms.

This was the Dalai Lama’s mistake. But after all, the refugee can never be perfect. His very state is a state of being in the wrong. Throughout history, the refugee, the exile, has often been a scapegoat. 

In particular, the burden of perfection is a problem that has bedeviled Tibet from the beginning. Our problem was not being an independent nation in the right way, or not being invaded in the right way, or not engaging in nonviolent protest in the right way. What I slowly learn is that these issues are only raised in cases where there’s no will to act, only the faintest half-hearted impulse toward justice that’s quickly squashed because it’s more convenient. 

The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott talked about the “good enough mother,” the mother who fails her child in manageable ways so that the child can learn. The perfect mother, after all, is an impossible illusion. So I ask, why can’t the Dalai Lama be a good enough refugee? Why can’t he fail us in manageable ways? After all, we fail him often enough, and this latest failure is one of epic proportions. Can we relieve the pressure on each other to be the perfect refugee, the perfect exile, the perfect immigrant, the perfect person? Can we just fail each other in manageable ways, and can we forgive each other for being human?

The post Opinion: Can We Allow the Dalai Lama to Be a Good Enough Refugee? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

For the past forty years, Ken McLeod has worked as a translator of Tibetan texts and practices. With his new book, The Magic of Vajrayana, McLeod takes a more personal approach, drawing from his own experience to provide readers with a taste of Vajrayana rituals. Through practice instructions, evocative vignettes, and stories from his own life, McLeod offers a practical introduction to many of the rituals that may seem obscure to contemporary Western practitioners, including protector practice and guru yoga.

In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with McLeod to discuss how rituals can take us to the edge of the unknown, what we risk when we ignore the presence of gods, and how Vajrayana helps us uncover the clear, empty knowing that is always present in experience. Read an excerpt from their conversation below, and then listen to the full episode.

What is Vajrayana, and what is a vajra? Vajra is the name of a weapon. It is the thunderbolt associated with the Vedic rain god Indra. The story behind it is that at one point, a pernicious titan, who was deeply protected by magic, had overthrown Indra. Indra called upon the other gods to help him defeat the titan. The gods saw that because of the magical protection, the only way that they could do so was to come up with a totally new weapon. They prevailed upon a sage, who had been born a sage for seven lives in a row, to give up his life so that they could use his bones to make the weapon. The sage, understanding the situation, agreed. The gods fashioned a vajra from his bones. With the vajra, Indra was able to destroy the titan and bring order back into the world.

Now, this thunderbolt crops up all over the place. It’s virtually the same thunderbolt that Zeus, the Greek god of thunder, holds. Its property is that when deployed as a weapon, it destroys whatever it is thrown at and returns to the hand of the owner unchanged. As such, it is a very suitable metaphor for the clear, empty knowing that is at the heart of all Buddhist practice: when you touch that clear, empty knowing, all afflictions, reactive patterns, and confusions are dispelled, and nothing changes that clear, empty knowing.

The term yana can be translated either as vehicle or as path. It is something that takes you from one place to another. So Vajrayana is the path or the vehicle of clear, empty knowing. Another word that is often used here is tantra, which is also an implicit metaphor. In weaving, tantra means a thread that runs continuously through the cloth and goes back and forth as it is woven. You could translate it as continuity, I suppose. This clear, empty knowing is present in every experience in our lives. We aren’t always aware of it or don’t always touch it, but it’s always there. And so the word tantra means the path of that clear, empty knowing which is always present in experience.

So how does Vajrayana practice create the conditions for the shift into this clear, empty knowing? Well, that clear, empty knowing is always present, and most people have touched into it at points in their lives. These moments are usually fleeting or very temporary, and often we don’t recognize them as such. Athletes, when they are exerting themselves very strongly, sometimes have the experience of moving into a kind of timeless awareness which they call the “zone,” where they’re able to do extraordinary things because it seems like time has slowed down or even stopped. Sometimes people confronted with an accident are able to move into that space. When someone close to us has experienced a tragedy and we’re just with them, we might have the experience of being with that person not as one, but not as two either.

In that clear, empty knowing, the separation that we ordinarily experience between subject and object is no longer there. You’re just present in—and you might even say you are—the world you experience. Vajrayana creates the conditions in which we can move into that kind of relationship with the world. In fact, the Vajrayana tradition is known for having many different methods for precipitating, eliciting, stabilizing, or uncovering that clear, empty knowing.

You say that in practicing Vajrayana, you may have to sacrifice a part or all of your life to practice. What do you mean by that? What are we giving up? If we look at the life of the Buddha, he grew up as a prince in a kingdom. He encountered old age, illness, and death, which shocked him to his core, and he also encountered a sadhu, a religious mendicant, who seemed to be at peace. To the young man, he couldn’t imagine how you can be at peace in a world shaped by old age, illness, and death. That puzzle so puzzled him that he left his wife and child and his royal position and embarked on a spiritual quest. That was a sacrifice. And that question, I think, is the heart of Buddhism: How do we live at peace in a world or in a life shaped by old age, illness, and death? It’s actually a nontrivial question. I know people who have sacrificed their family or their children or other things very dear to them for material gains.

Whatever we pursue, we’re going to give up something. And I think we need to take very careful stock of what we really want in our lives and what we are prepared to give up to pursue it. Those are very important decisions. For whatever reason, and I don’t have an answer to this, something called to me about spiritual practice or mystical practice. I encountered, as many people do, very, very considerable difficulties in it. And I don’t regret it. Because in a small way, I feel I’ve come to understand how to be at peace in life shaped by old age, illness, and death.

You also write about the importance of submission in Vajrayana practice, which you define as living practice in whatever life brings to you. Can you say more about the power of submission? I think it is when we submit to what our life actually is rather than always striving for it to be something different that we come to understand something very profound about the human condition. [When I became sick,] I was forced to accept that: “OK, this is my life. I have this illness, I have this imbalance, I have these problems, and they’re probably never going to go away. What do I do with that?”

I think one of the most important things, at least for me, that this leads to is a humility—you don’t control your life. I don’t take anything in my life for granted anymore. If good fortune comes, I’m grateful for it, but I don’t take it as something that is my due. And if difficulty and pain come, then, well, that is what my life consists of. How can I be in that experience completely? Because it is only by being in such experiences completely that we can find the clear, empty knowing that I referred to earlier. It is our resistance to what is arising in our experience that prevents us from knowing that clear, empty knowing.

The post “You Don’t Control Your Life” appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

To begin a session of practice devoted to exchange (tonglen), we should adopt the seven-point posture and spend a few minutes concentrating on the breath. Once the mind is stable, we meditate on compassion, wishing that all beings be freed from suffering and the causes of suffering. Then, as we breathe in and out naturally, we consider that, with the in-breath, we take on others’ suffering, visualized as a dark cloud. The compassion that then rises up in us transforms this cloud into light, which, with the out-breath, spreads to all beings—a great light that dissolves their mental obscurations and fills them with peace and happiness, just as if we had switched on a light that instantly clears away all the darkness in the world.

We can make use of all kinds of situations to practice exchange. When we are by the sea, we can think of all the countless beings living in the ocean and practice tonglen. Of course, the creatures under the sea might not look very similar to us, but our minds are basically no different. Their present form is the result of their previous actions. Like all the beings in the universe, they want to be happy and are afraid of suffering. Alas, the bigger fish feast on smaller ones, while the tiniest fish live off the flesh of the bigger ones, and both are preyed on by humans. They live in a state of utter uncertainty and fear. We should make a wish that we take on all their mental and physical suffering and give them in return a compassionate stream of light.

If we are passing through a city, we can think of all the people living in it and of all the beings, visible and invisible, who inhabit it and practice exchange.

When we apply ourselves to helping others like this, it simultaneously erases the negative actions imprinted on our basic consciousness. Assiduous training eventually even makes it possible to erase such imprints in other beings.

At the moment you breathe in, do not let the fear of not being able to take on all that suffering make you hesitate. The thought of enlightenment is sufficiently powerful to transform everything. It is this thought, therefore, that you must call up with all your force. Such love is present in every single being. Even the fiercest predators are sensitive to the fragility and suffering of their offspring, and they will go through any danger to protect and feed them.

Such deep kindness lies dormant in each one of us; it is simply a question of awakening it. It is the most powerful ally in transforming suffering into freedom.

You may find it surprising to think of human beings, animals, and other forms of life as similar to us mentally. But I am comparing them from the point of view not of their appearance but of their basic nature. The way in which each being appears depends on the physical form it takes and on the limits that form imposes. Every time a being takes on another body, it is like a traveler changing hotels—one day they might find themselves in a humble inn, the next in a luxury hotel. The external conditions might vary, but the traveler does not change. In the same way, beings may be reborn in one or other of the six realms of existence, but their innermost potential does not change.

The mirror of our present life reflects our previous actions and our future life will be the reflection of our present actions. This is why it is so important to teach everyone nonviolence. It is the only certain way, in the short or long term, to obtain peace for ourselves and others.

You might be wondering about the relevance of training in something like exchange. Isn’t it a waste of time to spend a few minutes, or even hours, of our everyday lives practicing this? Not at all. This training will enable us, in the first place, to make sense of our life, and later it will turn out to be a valuable asset at the moment of death. Of course, death is not a subject that people like talking about. But since we have been born, we will inevitably have to die one day. And on that day, only the spiritual training we have done during our life will help us find freedom.

At the moment of death, the consciousness leaves the body, with only the resultant karma of past actions as baggage. Just as our shadow follows our body, the results of our beneficial and harmful acts follow our consciousness. At the moment of our passing, if our minds are completely impregnated with kindness and compassion, the experience of death, and all the conditions of our future life, will be completely transformed. That is why this passage is so crucial and why it is important to make such thoughts habitual throughout our present life. As a result of training in tonglen, at the moment of death such thoughts will naturally come to mind.

The practice of exchange will thus be a great help during this perilous journey. Moreover, we can apply it when a relative, friend, or pet is at the point of dying. By assisting dying people at the critical moment, one can really rescue them. At the moment the consciousness leaves the body and starts to wander in the intermediate state, one has to be capable of taking on their suffering and, in exchange, filling them with the light of happiness.

Around the time of death, the mind goes through experiences comparable to those in a dream. When we are sleeping, the body is motionless, while the mind continues to function and goes through many different experiences. Just after death, the body is left lifeless, but the mind continues to experience all kinds of events. The first perceptions are related more to memories of the life one has just left. This is followed by a period in which one has premonitions of the life to come. All this is experienced on the subtle, mental level.

In the old days, almost everywhere it was traditional to care for those who were dying. Nowadays, there is a cruel lack of care. Most people do not want to think about death at all, and to help someone during the hours before and after death is often quite beyond them. Either they do not have the time, or they simply don’t know what to do. Many people think that a priest is the only person in a position to do what is necessary to care for those who are departing. But in fact, each of us can develop the ability to help the dying by having positive thoughts and praying, because all beings without exception share a common basis—the buddhanature.

On a daily basis, practicing exchange immediately makes it easier to communicate and quickly defuses conflicts. Unfortunately, we are all too inclined to complain when things get difficult, always blaming other people—our father, mother, boss, neighbor, government, or society in general. Wouldn’t it be more intelligent to turn this habit around and ask ourselves if we are not in the wrong? Aren’t we partly responsible for everything that happens to us? This way of thinking has at least one advantage: instead of thinking of ourselves as victims, we are free to work on ourselves and take steps to change the situation.

⧫

Excerpt from Awakening Wisdom: Heart Advice on the Fundamental Practices of Vajrayana Buddhism by Pema Wangyal, translated and edited by the Padmakara Translation Group © 2023 by Association Padmakara. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO. www.shambhala.com

The post Breathing in Suffering, Breathing out Happiness appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

When I first heard about the Dalai Lama’s recent encounter with a young boy, my heart dropped. At first, I couldn’t bring myself to watch the video. I thought about what the boy must’ve experienced, and I knew this would be devastating for the already vulnerable Tibetan community.

I’m a doctoral candidate in Buddhist studies and masculinity studies at Northwestern University and a practicing Buddhist. I speak Tibetan and have lived, researched, and practiced in Dharamsala, where His Holiness the Dalai Lama lives. Throughout my life, I’ve deeply valued the Dalai Lama’s impactful work for peace, nonviolence, religious tolerance, and environmental justice.

The idea that the Dalai Lama had harmed a child conflicted with everything I knew about him, but I also knew the incident required serious examination. Since the news broke, I’ve been reflecting on what happened, and I’ve decided that it’s important to unpack its nuances for an Anglophone audience in a measured way.

Before doing so, I want to acknowledge that the Dalai Lama’s actions in the video were downright weird and deeply uncomfortable to watch. He made a child uneasy, and the significant power differential between the two made this episode especially troubling. Simply hearing that “the Dalai Lama asked a boy to ‘suck his tongue’” was enough to make my stomach turn.

However, after watching the video myself—the full 1:59 version, not the widely circulated edited one—I also believe that what transpired resists easy categorization and comparison to instances of sexual misconduct among Western religious leaders, which no doubt leaped to the minds of many readers.

In interpreting what happened, we need to take a slower approach that incorporates Tibetan voices, avoids reducing what happened to a familiar script without thinking holistically about who the Dalai Lama is in context, and elevates the stories of survivors of sexual misconduct in religious settings more broadly.

Western media regularly disregard Tibetans’ own views and interpretations of their community. This story was no exception. Coverage followed a predictable format, with most stories outlining the incident in brief, salacious terms before elevating decontextualized voices of moral outrage.

Some pieces did offer up paltry explanations of Tibetan cultural context, but these often had the effect of furthering the neo-Orientalist presumption that Tibetans are unthinking and uncritically religious while implying that the “secular” West is intellectually and morally superior.

This is obviously not the case. Sexual misconduct is a deeply human problem, tied to hegemonic masculinity and the perverse manipulation of asymmetric power imbalances. It happens everywhere. Recently, both Tibetan men who are survivors of sexual misconduct in monastic settings and Tibetan Buddhist women have been bravely telling their own survivor stories.

In the West, we’ve been inundated with scandal after scandal of priest and youth pastor sex abuse in Christian contexts, which created an opening for a too-easy comparison in this case. One of the many problems with such a straightforward comparison, however, is that this was a singular event in a public setting, which is atypical in cases of sexual predation on children.

Numerous studies have shown that child abuse overwhelmingly occurs over a longer period of time, often in the context of a relationship. Predators typically build trust and then remove children to private settings to commit abuse, which is not what happened in this case.

One of my Tibetan friends observed that shameful desires are rarely, if ever, enacted in a televised setting broadcast to countless viewers; we tend to hide our prurient desires behind closed doors. It’s worth noting that the Dalai Lama has evinced a playful personality consistently throughout his life. In the video, he is laughing and smiling, displaying no embarrassment or shame.

I do not mean to erase or dismiss what unfolded in the video, or to suggest that elderly people aren’t capable of abuse. But I do think that the context reveals clues as to the Dalai Lama’s intention: in my view, this was not a man acting out of a perverse desire, but a non-native English speaker who, in trying to be lighthearted, made a mistake in judgment that crossed vast cultural horizons.  

That said, as generations of gender scholars have pointed out, the long history of senior men abusing their power necessarily raises suspicions about patterns of behavior. A single event can signal a more expansive environment of abuse behind closed doors, and I acknowledge this wholeheartedly. Vigilant attention is necessary to protect children from abuse.

But to me, this video is not evidence of a child abuser driven by a craven desire. True to his longstanding playful character, he was being jocular, following a Tibetan cultural script between grandparents and grandchildren that begins with a hug, moves to a kiss, and ends with a tongue grab. He clearly knows he made a mistake in discernment and has issued an apology. We should not jump from the display of one weird, inappropriate, or objectionable event to the imputation of an entire problematic character.

I also want to highlight the importance of context in interpreting the Dalai Lama and his actions. Countless Tibetans and other Buddhists encounter him as a living Buddha, who has diligently strived over the course of many lifetimes to purge his mind of all sensuous desires (‘dod chags) and attain boundless equanimity. For people who understand him this way, it is unthinkable to consider him as acting out of a craven desire.

When others see this video, however, they witness an elderly religious titan violating the boundaries of an innocent boy. I cannot appeal to Buddhist discourse or Tibetan history to speak to this audience, but I can point to two things. First, the boy’s and his mother’s comments afterward were joyful.

Second, I suggest looking at the strange timing of this disclosure—fully two months after the event, and not by the boy’s family or friends. The Dalai Lama is a highly charged political figure, subject to decades of attack and slander by the Chinese government. It’s worth querying who might have a stake in defaming him—and strategically editing the video.

As a scholar of masculinity and religion, I devote myself to uncovering the ways that male power becomes entangled in practitioners’ sincere religious aspirations, cultivating environments in which men eroticize and abuse that power in perverse and nauseating ways.

Though the recent incident was unsettling, it does not rise to this level. Instead of leaping to the conclusion that the Dalai Lama is an abuser, we could be taking this opportunity to listen to the many, many voices of women coming forward to speak about the pervasive problem of sexual abuse by Vajrayana Buddhist teachers—including right here in the US—voices that are routinely dismissed.

I conclude this reflection with a call for patience. My plea is to look at the Dalai Lama not in the narrow frame of one mistake, but in the wider frame of his countless contributions to the world, with an awareness of how context filters our understanding of events.

The post Opinion: We Need to Think about the Dalai Lama’s Actions Very Carefully appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama apologized on Monday after a video circulated on social media of the spiritual leader kissing a boy on the lips and telling him, “Suck my tongue.” The interaction took place in late February at the Dalai Lama’s temple in Dharamsala, India, with about 100 young student graduates of the Indian M3M Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the real estate company M3M Group, in attendance. 

In the video, a young boy approaches the microphone and asks if can hug the Dalai Lama. The 87-year-old points to his cheek, saying “First here,” after which the child kisses his cheek and hugs him. The Dalai Lama then points to his lips and says, “I think here also” and pulls the boy’s chin and kisses him on the mouth. He then tells the boy “And suck my tongue,” sticking his tongue out, forehead to forehead with the boy. The Dalai Lama then laughs and pulls the boy in for another hug. 

As the video went viral, many condemned the spiritual leader’s actions, calling it “inappropriate,” “pedophilic,” and “disgusting.” Others have decried the criticism, arguing that the Dalai Lama’s actions have been misinterpreted. Sticking one’s tongue out is a traditional greeting in Tibet, according to NPR. 

In response to the backlash, the Dalai Lama’s office issued an apology to the boy and his family, “as well as his many friends across the world, for the hurt his words may have caused.” The statement did not mention the kiss or extended tongue, only that the boy asked the Dalai Lama for a hug. It continues, “His Holiness often teases people he meets in an innocent and playful way, even in public and before cameras. He regrets the incident.” 

The spiritual leader has drawn criticism for public remarks in recent years, including in 2015, when he joked in an interview with BBC that any future female Dalai Lama should be “very attractive.” When pressed about the comments in a later 2019 interview with BBC, the Dalai Lama reaffirmed his belief that a female Dalai Lama “should be more attractive.” His office later issued an apology for the remarks. 

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