| | The Dalai Lama (Tenzin Gyatso) has been in Ann Arbor for a couple of days. My wife was given tickets to this morning's teaching, so we went. Obviously, the call to greater altruism failed to strike a responsive chord with me. The being-and-nothingness and the emptiness of existence and the mistaken perceptions also were not much of a message.
I did enjoy hearing him speak Tibetan, a language which I learned to read some of but never conversed in. I heard a lot of roots, but nothing had any meaning --- which (I guess) is appropriate enough, eh?
The session opened with canned questions from an acolyte translator. (The Dalai Lama speaks English, also, but went back and forth between the two languages.) If nothing is real, how can we know anything? Answer: If you see a coiled rope and mistake it for a snake that is an illusion, but if you see a snake and know it for a snake, that is reality. What is not real is that the snake has no objective reality, just as the water that was put here for these flowers yesterday is in the flowers today but today's flowers are not what they were yesterday. (I know, at that point, I should have jumped up and debated him, but I let it go.)
One teaching I did take away from the two-hour session. (I think I slept through the true enlightenment.) Lhasa Buddhism teaches "dependent existence." While an effect cannot exist without a cause, though the cause exists before the effect, it would not exist as a cause but for its effect.
Lhasa Buddhism teaches a middle path between absolutism and nihilism. It reconciles the contradiction between appearance and reality, which is in distinction to Buddhist Realism, an Indian school that says that we apprehend reality.
As we were leaving a small plane flew overhead with a banner: "DALAI STOP PROTESTING OLYMPIC TORCH." I heard a father tell his son that the Chinese government was paying for it. I found that other planes have flown other banners at other teachings on this tour. "Dalai, stop supporting riots" said one in Seattle, according to google search. Apparently, there are many pro-Beijing Chinese in America now. The teaching in Seattle was marked by anti-Dalai protesters on the ground, as well. (Pro-China, not pro-Objective Reality of Snakes)
Security was pretty tight. Lots of city, university and private cops and I saw one FEDERAL [Something] jersey. No cellphones or cameras. No purses, backpacks or fannypacks, etc. Some people got by. We walked through metal detectors, but my pocketful of Tibetan coins did not set it off.
Near the end, the announcer (western guy in a suit; got us oriented coming in) read the balance sheet. (No kidding!) They took in $588,000 in ticket sales --- "Plus $10,000 more," said his holiness, waving an envelope; he has a great sense of humor, actually. There were more than few laughs through all of the teaching -- and they expensed out about $430,000 in staging ($100,000), advertising ($80,000), security ($60,000), meals and lodging (more than $100,000) and so on for a net of $52,000. The crowd applauded. I am not sure if it was for the cash net per se, the open bookkeeping, or the ROI.
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Sorry...