dalai lama

I got to see the Dalai Lama. Big Kid had a couple of tickets and was going to go with K. But then her LOVE group was going, so K got to go with me. The Bell Centre is cavernous. The number I heard in attendance was 15,000. That's alot of hockey fans - I guess. I wouldn't know cause hockey tickets are too fucking expensive. But I shouldn't swear. I'm talking about the Dalai Lama here.

The event was organized by the Tibet-Canada committee (from whom the tickets came and the reason why we were in the second row centre - best seats i've ever had for anything) and you could see the entire Tibetan community was here. And vibrating. The MC was Laure Waridel, founder of Equiterre. She could barely contain herself on stage and more than once broke down.

How does one refer to the Dalai Lama when using third person? His Holiness? Well, His Holiness's entrance was preceded by two Tibetan dance numbers. There weren't always enough boy dancers, so they simply drew moustaches on a couple of girls and presto, faster than you can say transgendered! the male contingent was rounded out.

Then, without much fanfare, the Dalai Lama took to the stage, his hands in prayer and bowing humbly. He sat with his two translators, one Tibetan who helped him sort through the occasional word, and the other a French monk who periodically recapped everything in French. The headset microphones gave them repeated glitches at first, but they joked through it, eliciting hearty laughs and applause from the audience. The Dalai Lama eventually threw his off and made do with a hand-held, and then a standing, microphone.

He began by announcing that he wanted to speak "not as a monk, not as a Tibetan, but as a human being." He went on to talk loosely about what he considered ailed us as people and as a society: we are too self-centred (people who over-use "I" and "me" too much are headed for a heart-attack); we are overly concerned with external beauty; we are greedy bastards, destroying the world because we want more and bigger.

What we need is compassion. Compassion is not just "niceness", it's not just accepting what comes along the way without a fight. Rather, it is recognizing what is good and important and then fighting for it.

He got the greatest round of applause, a spontaneous outburst really, for his mention that parents must "provide maximum affection for your children and spend more time with them."

Questions had been solicited earlier (through a website I think) and they were read out and posed. One of them asked how best do we teach and love our children. He said we must inspire their brain and nurture their heart. He said, "a brain without heart can be disaster. A heart without a brain is nice, but," rolling his eyes in a fine comic beat, "no progress."

His entire presence was laconic, funny, casual, and irreverent. It was refreshing to feel that this was not about his ego, but truly about the message. A simple message. I felt the entire Bell Centre was craving this simplicity. We already knew it, but we like to hear it coming from someone with as much spiritual and international credibility as the Dalai Lama. He said he felt positive about the future. That there was no question that the 20th century was an era of war and bloodshed, but in the hundred years of its span we went from blindly showing up for battle, to gathering in the millions to protest war.

There are many different types of smiles, he said. The diplomatic smile, the artificial smile, the sarcastic and superior smile, the money and power smile. But by practising a secular ethics (for those of us who do not practise an institutionalized religion), and by always travelling in the direction of compassion, we might sometimes remember the real reason to smile. And that is the best smile of all.