I’ve never been to Dharamsala and I’ve never met the Dalai Lama, but my sister-in-law Asha has. While speaking to her on the phone last weekend, I asked her about her recent audience with one of the world’s most well-known spiritual leaders (who, by the way, will be speaking at Radio City Music Hall here in New York later this month). I was hoping to find out whether he had offered some words of wisdom that might pertain to the cultivation of a happy home.
As it turned out, his talk that day was focused on sports. Asha had been invited to Dharamsala—which means “spiritual refuge” in Hindi and has been home to the Dalai Lama and his exiled Tibetan government since 1959—by the owner of the Punjab Kings XI cricket team to observe a match. The Kings XI were playing the Deccan Chargers in a quarter-finals competition in this north Indian city that week, and the audience with the Dalai Lama had actually been granted to the cricketers, but Asha was also welcomed to listen to the discussion.
Although sportsmanship was the topic of the day, I asked Asha what the Dalai Lama said, keen on extracting some pearl of wisdom that might be as relevant to a regular person like me in my everyday life as it would be to elite athletes in a sports competition. She told me the Dalai Lama said that his own sporting activities were limited to a single game of badminton when he was a child and a ping-pong game he once played with the Chinese communist leader Zhou Enlai, so he couldn’t really talk much about sports. But he could talk about peace of mind, which, he said, is essential to seeing reality clearly no matter where you are or what you’re doing. This seemed like reasonable enough advice to me, and according to Asha, the Dalai Lama said regular meditation is the key means to experiencing peace of mind. The odds of following through on meditating regularly would increase, I thought, if I had a dedicated place in my home for practicing it as Asha does—even a dedicated cushion would help!
When the talk was over, Asha told me she was overwhelmed by the urge to jump up from her front-row seat and say something to the Dalai Lama. When she arrived on the stage face to face with him, she told me the words that spilled out of her mouth were “I love you.” The Dalai Lama grabbed her hand, held it tightly, and then gave her a big hug. This photograph of her and the great spiritual leader and the owner of the cricket team was taken just after this warm exchange occurred and appeared in the local newspaper the following day. Just after she emailed me a scan of the image, I showed it to my husband. The Kings XI happened to have lost that particular match, but the photo, and the charming story behind it, brought a smile to our faces—and, incidentally, a very happy feeling to our home.
I daydream frequently and reflect from time to time, looking at ducks on the pond outside our living room window, for example. But I don’t think I’ve ever meditated. Is there a U.S. philosopher/writer on meditation?
Interesting question, Merriam. I’m no expert on philosophy, but I believe Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and others from the American Transcendentalist movement drew, in part, upon Vedic thought in developing their ideas on an ideal spiritual state that is realized through an individual’s own intuition.