Dalai Lama thrives on his ‘sense of insignificance’ in the cosmos
Donna Jacobs
Actor Richard Gere gets up early enough for 45 minutes minimum of morning meditation. Some mornings, that means a 4:30 a.m. wakeup.
The actor, who graduated from high school in Syracuse, New York, as a gymnast and trumpet player, says it has given him “a relaxed, stress-free life.”
“It helps me set my motivation for the day,” he says. “Buddhism is a system that I find totally reliable. It’s an ancient tradition: It wasn’t invented 10 years ago.
“Almost all forms of meditation are a form of looking at the mind. At the start, you are almost amazed how much noise is going on there,” he told the German news magazine Der Spiegel last year.
“You have no idea how much monkey stuff is going on, how cluttered it is. You look at that and you’re acknowledging what the mind is, you’re taming it, and when you have done that, you have learned the power of concentration.”
Meditation, which empties the mind and sense of self, works to tame ego and release it to its legitimate tasks — and, he says, to happiness.
“That I was going to disappear was a positive thing to me,” he has said. “I would be negated and there would be no more pain because there would be no me.”
He discovered Buddhism in the late 1970s when, during a disabling depression, he discovered meditation.
He later met the Dalai Lama, who became his teacher and influenced Gere’s personal campaign for Tibet’s independence from China. He set up a Tibetan cultural centre in New York City — Tibet House — in 1987 and has since established the Gere Foundation to help Tibetan refugees fleeing Chinese suppression. He has called for a boycott of the Beijing 2008 Olympics.
The Dalai Lama (meaning “Ocean of Wisdom”) is the political and spiritual leader of Tibet’s government-in-exile in northern India. China invaded and occupied Tibet in 1950. He fled in 1959 and set up the government-in-exile. The Chinese denounce him as a secessionist.
Today, the Dalai Lama is in the middle of his visit to Ottawa, where he will meet with Prime Minister Stephen Harper, whose government made him an honorary Canadian citizen on Sept. 9, 2006.
Before arriving here, the Dalai Lama visited the U.S., where he made headlines around the world when he was feted by U.S. President George W. Bush and honoured by Congress. During one appearance, he held the hand of a beaming Gere while leaning on Bush.
“It’s not often that you meet a truly great man,” Gere has said of his teacher. “He’s the real thing; no one else comes close. The Dalai Lama has an enormous, amazing impact. It’s rare to be in the presence of someone who wants nothing more than your happiness.”
Married to actress-model Cindy Crawford from 1991 to 1995, Gere remarried, to Buddhist Carey Lowell, the Bond girl in Licence to Kill, and they have a six-year-old son named after both grandfathers — Homer James Jigme (meaning “fearless” in Tibetan) Gere.
The Dalai Lama is up at 3.30 a.m., showers and then prays and meditates until his 5 a.m. walk.
“If the weather is fine, I go into the garden,” he told U.S. journalist Ron Gluckman, who, in 1996, shadowed the Dalai Lama for three weeks of humorous, spontaneous and candid conversations.
At 5 a.m., the Dalai Lama explained, “the stars provide a special feeling — of my insignificance in the cosmos, the realization of what we Buddhists call impermanence. It’s very relaxing.”
If it’s raining, he uses a treadmill for 10 minutes. His typical 5:30 a.m. breakfast is hot porridge and tsampa (barley powder), bread, jam and tea. He often listens to BBC radio.
From 6 to 8:30 a.m., he continues spiritual exercises. From 9 to 11 a.m., he studies Buddhist texts. From 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., he eats a vegetarian lunch (though he is not necessarily vegetarian on his travels).
Now 73, he limits audiences with visitors, staff and media to three days a week, between 12:30 and 4:30 p.m. He returns to his home for 6 p.m. tea. From 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., he prays and meditates and goes to bed at 8:30 p.m.
Years ago, he’d snatch time at his workbench to “fiddle with some broken gadget,” said Gluckman, and as a youth, took apart cars and movie projectors and reassembled them — with varying degrees of success — without instruction manuals.
Gluckman described the Dalai Lama’s mountaintop cottage as sparse, with a desk holding sentimental gifts and a yellow plastic bug-shaped pen holder. The view, though, is fabulous — of high mountains that must remind him of the homeland he hasn’t visited in a half-century (but still believes he will live to visit again).
His wardrobe, equally sparse, consists of sandals and worn leather Oxfords and two robes. “I have to have two,” he joked. “Even the Dalai Lama does laundry.”
Born Tenzin Gyatso to a peasant family, at age two he was discovered as the 14th reincarnation of the Dalai Lama. A Buddhist regent, seeking a vision to guide him to the successor of the 13th Dalai Lama, found a clue in a vision of a rooftop.
The many teams he sent to scour the country found the house roof and inside, they met a toddler.
The child not only asked for the rosary around one dignitary’s neck, but passed tests, including choosing from objects that belonged to the 13th Dalai Lama. Each Dalai Lama is considered a reincarnation of the divine Bodhisattva of Compassion sent to Earth to reduce suffering of each living being.
After China invaded Tibet in 1950, his regent handed responsibilities to the 16-year-old.
Despite exile and admitted occasional anger at the Chinese, this ever-humorous man, who giggles his way through speeches and conversations, was delighted when the Chinese bestowed another title upon him: “serpent’s head.”
“That’s good,” he laughed. “Really, if the Chinese had treated the Tibetans like real brothers, then the Dalai Lama might not be so popular. All the credit goes to the Chinese.”
Though the Chinese dispute the figures, the Dalai Lama says the Chinese government has killed 1.2 million Tibetans and has destroyed 6,000 temples and religious sites.
In presenting the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize to the Dalai Lama, the Nobel committee summed up his goals: Peace in Tibet and “earnest negotiations” between Tibet and China, an end to the Chinese government’s massive relocation of ethnic Chinese to Tibet, restoration of Tibet’s fundamental human rights and democratic freedoms, and a halt to China’s use of (uranium-rich) Tibet for nuclear weapons production and the dumping of nuclear waste.
In his Nobel acceptance speech, the Dalai Lama paid tribute to the student demonstrators brutally crushed a few months before in the uprising in Tiananmen Square.
“The spirit of freedom was rekindled among the Chinese people, and China cannot escape the impact of this spirit of freedom sweeping many parts of the world. The brave students and their supporters showed the Chinese leadership and the world the human face of that great nation.”
The Nobel Prize has brought him international fame and travel. It also forced him to face his fear of flying. Having conquered it, he now uses all forms of travel — including air — to meditate.
Donna Jacobs is an Ottawa writer; her e-mail address is donnabjacobs@hotmail.com
