By Lucille Davie
Joburgers will have the chance to soak up the wisdom of the Dalai Lama of Tibet in early November when he pays a visit to Soweto and gives a talk.
The Dalai Lama will be in the country from 3 to 9 November and will give a talk entitled “The role of cultural heritage and arts in the development of free societies” at Vista University in Soweto on Saturday, 6 November. His visit is being hosted by the African Cultural Heritage Trust, a 20-year-old organization set up to actively conserve and promote Amasiko/Ditso or indigenous African culture and heritage, in South Africa.
He will then inaugurate the Gauteng provincial finals of the Zindala Zombili National Traditional Dance and Music Festival, in which finalists from 43 regional competitions will be competing.
On his third visit – others were in 1996 and 1999 – to South Africa, the Dalai Lama will spend most of his seven-day trip in Johannesburg. He holds a press conference at the Westcliff Hotel on 4 November, and later that day visits the Lam Rim Buddhist Centre in Vrededorp, as well as addressing business leaders at the Lesedi Cultural Village in the Magaliesberg.
On 5 November he will visit the CIDA City Campus and chat to students. That evening he leaves for Durban, where he will conduct Buddhist teachings on the “Six perfections and mind transformation”, until 9 November when he returns to India.
The Dalai Lama, Tibet’s 14th with around 80,000 devotees, left the country in 1949, when China invaded and illegally occupied Tibet. He now lives in Dharamsala in India, known as “Little Lhasa”, the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile. Lhasa is the capital of Tibet, a country in the middle of Asia with the world’s highest mountains, consisting of 2,5 million square kilometres inhabited by six million Tibetans and 7,5 million Chinese.
