Hello, Dalai!

I got to hear the Dalai Lama speak at Stan­ford on Fri­day. I was actu­al­ly a few min­utes late because I was walk­ing up from a non-stan­dard direc­tion and so I was trapped on the oth­er end of his motor­cade and the accom­pa­ny­ing secu­ri­ty detail. At one point I was about 15 feet from him.

A few thoughts in no par­tic­u­lar order:

• A stu­dent asked me why in world I would want to hear the Dalai Lama speak since he’s a leader of a rival reli­gion. And then I read an arti­cle describ­ing how some sci­en­tists are hav­ing the same reac­tion to the Dalai Lama’s sched­uled appear­ance at a neu­ro­science con­ven­tion: This merg­er of seri­ous neu­ro­science with a par­tic­u­lar reli­gion is a prac­ti­cal joke because the very recog­ni­tion of the Dalai Lama relies on the belief in rein­car­na­tion,” said Yi Rao, a neu­rol­o­gy pro­fes­sor at North­west­ern Uni­ver­si­ty. (source). I always find it fun­ny when I see a sci­en­tist get­ting all fun­da­men­tal­ist. This is the flaw in that crit­i­cism: to say some­one is wrong about one thing is not to say that they are wrong about all things. Of course I think the Dalai Lama teach­es a lot of absurd ideas. That does­n’t mean none of his ideas are good ones. Plus, I fig­ured I’d prob­a­bly get a ser­mon illus­tra­tion or two out of the mix. I was right, too–check out the next bul­let point.
• The talk was about non­vi­o­lence, and the Dalai Lama is a well-known paci­fist and a recip­i­ent of the Nobel Peace Prize, so I was fair­ly shocked when I heard him say that the jury was still out on whether or not the Iraq war was jus­ti­fied. I am not tak­ing this out of con­text at all–this was in direct response to a ques­tion whether or not war was ever moral. I don’t think the audi­ence knew what to do with that at all. I was laugh­ing pret­ty loud­ly on the inside.
• He has a won­der­ful lack of deco­rum. In the midst of one ques­tion he took off his shoes, rubbed his feet, and tucked his legs under­neath him.
• He con­tra­dict­ed him­self quite a few times, but it could have been a byprod­uct of not being flu­ent in Eng­lish. He was talk­ing about some sub­tle things and he may have used a few words impre­cise­ly.

update 11/7/2005: the Stan­ford Dai­ly just released an arti­cle about his vis­it echo­ing many of my points above (includ­ing the Iraq war thing).