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I went to see the Dalai Lama today. He wasn't there.
My friend Finn received tickets from his fiancee for his birthday, and he invited me to go with him to Long Beach to hear His Holiness the Dalai Lama speak on the subject of Secular Ethics and Meditation. But His Holiness evidently was instructed by doctors to remain in Japan an extra day, rather than to travel with a sore throat.
Earlier in the day, during our regular Sunday stroll through the Studio City farmers' market, I ran into another friend, Kyle, a long-time student of Buddhism as well as a practitioner of Vedic meditation. Kyle, upon hearing my plans for the afternoon, said that he wished one day to take me to hear Robert Thurman, a chaired professor of Buddhism in the Department of Religion at Columbia University, and co-founder and President of Tibet House US. As it turns out, in the absence of the Dalai Lama, Professor Thurman was one of our fill-in speakers for the afternoon.
In his talk on the Dalai Lama's ideas about ethics, he presented the postulate that the driving force in mankind is the search for happiness and the avoidance of suffering. His co-speaker, the Dalai Lama's regular English interpreter,Geshe Thupten Jinpa, then went on to report on a recent scientific study done with Buddhist monks in which these meditation adepts were shown a picture of a sad or suffering individual and were asked to feel compassion for that person. An interesting thing occurred: rather than the expected brain activity indicating an empathic experience of sadness on the part of these adepts, their brains lit up in the pleasure centers. They actually experienced joy in their choice to feel compassion for others. Evidently much more than simple empathy was occurring.
There was a moment, as Finn and I were pulling into the parking structure and seeing for the first time the sign announcing the absence of His Holiness, where either of us could have bewailed our bad fortune. Instead, we chose to see it as an adventure. Gee, what's gonna happen now? As it turns out, I learned something, my friend and I got to hang out, I was able to hear Robert Thurman speak far sooner than I thought I would (and he is a tremendous speaker); and, as Mr. Thurman himself pointed out during the question and answer period at the end of the presentation, "You think you're missing His Holiness. Imagine how the people of Tibet feel."
Orange Tree, Studio City
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