Do you know the way to San Jose?

Tuesday last week, Melanie and I took a vacation day, got up early and fought our way through traffic to San Jose to the Convention Center.

We were there to see and hear his Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet at the San Jose Convention Center. 

He spoke on the Eight Verses for Training the Mind (see them here) to a crowd of 12,000 people. Actually, they weren’t a crowd, they didn’t have a crowd mentality. When the Dalai Lama took his place at the front of the stage, there was an awesome silence and intense concentration from the audience that lasted for two hours. I don’t remember even hearing anyone cough. It was definitely not like a revival meeting. Melanie and I sat pretty far back. The DL on this throne looked about an inch tall to us from there. Luckily there were screens throughout the hall so everyone could see. 

When I told my brother I’d gone to see the DL, he paused for a minute and asked, “And why was that?” My brother never knows, I might have become a Buddhist recently. My answer: Because I could. And because Melanie was driving. And it seemed like it was something a person should do if there was an opportunity.

It was an interesting experience. The DL is elderly and his English is a little hard for me to follow, though he has a top-notch interpreter who knows just when to prompt him with the appropriate word here and there. The 8 Verses are things we all know, especially those of us who have occasionally studied self-improvement. Most of us are too preoccupied with our own mundanity to practice them faithfully, but it's good to be reminded.


I was surprised to learn that there is a fairly large contingent of Tibetans in the Bay Area. Many of them showed up in their colorful native clothes. Most of the Tibetans I saw resembled Peruvians more than Asians. Aside from the Tibetans, the group reminded me of the Waldorf school parent group. Melanie has been to Tibet and has friends there. We felt at home, for different reasons.


At the end of the program, a person from the DL's staff gave a financial accounting. He said "this is how much we made --, the expenses were this much --; we are dividing the profit 3 ways," and then he named the 3 organizations who would share in them. I wonder if this ever happens with Christian televangelists? I thought it was great because I'm always one of those people who is mentally counting the number of folks in the audience and multiplying that by the ticket price. I'm not knocking Christians, by the way, but some of those dudes who claimed to represent them on TV over the years have just been ridiculous. Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker come to mind. Our pet turkey was named after Tammy Faye.


Melanie and I left the Convention Hall feeling calm and peaceful. The last message from the DL was to leave our mundanities behind. We got into the elevator with an older lady on a walker who was accompanied by her daughter. The daughter turned to us and asked, "Did you see James Bond?"


"Which one?" Melanie asked. I was thinking Sean Connery, she was thinking the most recent one, the young guy. 


"Pierce Brosnan," the daughter answered. "We were sitting right behind him."


"Where were you sitting?" Melanie asked.


"In the handicapped section," the daughter answered. "It was at the front of the room, just behind the celebrities."


Melanie punched me on the arm. "Next time, you're bringing your walker!"


Our mundanities had not taken long to catch up with us.


We knew the way to San Jose, but got lost on the way home and ended up in San Francisco. That's OK, it's always nice to see SF on a sunny day, and when you're just passing through and feeling mellow.


I truly admire the Dalai Lama, and it's obvious he's very dear to the Tibetan Buddhists. I was glad we saw him. I'm usually baffled by things related to any organized religion, though, and my sense of mundanity is hard to overcome.


Can anyone tell me why this beautiful Buddha, whose picture we were given, seems androgynous? And why is it wearing lipstick?