By Jennifer Lloyd
When the Dalai Lama solicited questions from the thousands of visitors during his recent visit to Pasadena, Calif., one of the six he selected was posed by three students from Seattle’s Hazel Wolf High School.
It was a complex question, so complex that the Dalai Lama spent 30 minutes answering it — so complex that he returned to it later, citing specific religious quotations to help answer the question.
Over the course of the conference, held April 13-15 at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, about the “60 Stanzas of Reasoning,” the students say they frequently were confused, philosophically challenged and spiritually stirred.
Their question posed to the Dalai Lama: “How can you have the self-confidence to be selfless without being an individual and still know that you are doing the right thing?”
Tuesday night at the private school in Seattle, two of the students and their teacher presented what they had learned to fellow students and parents.
Robin Jacobs, a soft-spoken 10th-grader, sat with her arms folded in her lap during the presentation, her hair in a ponytail, her feet in socks with teddy bears dressed as Santas. She tried to encapsulate the Dalai Lama’s response.
“He said that you must first have compassion for yourself, and then you can have compassion for others,” she said.
Phillip Collins, an 11th-grader with long legs and braces on his teeth, further explained: “Through honoring your existence, your hobbies and desires, you should also honor all others’ existence and their hobbies and desires.”
“I’ve never done such hard thinking in all my life,” their teacher, Morna McEachern, said of the Dalai Lama’s teachings.
To prepare for the trip, the students (including 12th-grader Daichi Hirata, who is in Pennsylvania for an internship and was not at Tuesday’s presentation) studied the Dalai Lama’s autobiography, “Freedom in Exile,” for a month, and discussed the work during their lunchtime with other students at the school.
When their teacher chose three students, none of whom are Tibetan Buddhists, from the group of 12 who had been studying the book, Jacobs and Collins were late to the meeting.
“They almost missed the Dalai Lama for being tardy at the morning circle,” McEachern said.
Before the conference, the students looked up some of the text that would be covered in the lectures.
“We got completely confused, which sort of prepared us for the next couple of days of being completely confused,” said Collins.
Jacobs and Collins joined in Buddhist chants without knowing the language. They also met and questioned Buddhist monks, including a mandala painter and a healer. They discovered why Tibetan monks leave their right arms bare (because it’s a centuries-old tradition).
According to the students, one monk said, “I can tell you’re American teenagers by your clothes. It’s the style. You can tell I’m a Tibetan monk by my clothes. Every 500 years or so, we change our style.”
The Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso, born in Tibet, is 68 and recognized by his followers as a reincarnation of Avalokitesvara, known as “the Buddha of Compassion.”
Though he spoke Tibetan during the conference and used an English translator, the Dalai Lama also speaks English. According to the students, at one point the Dalai Lama was laughing and told the translator to explain his laughter.
“His holiness says I forgot to tell you why he was laughing. He says, ‘Here I sit on a throne and I’m supposed to explain what all these things mean to you, and right now my head is spinning in circles.’ ”
Jennifer Lloyd: jlloyd@seattletimes.com
