Monday, May 12, 2008
Sixty-five thousand people -- students, professionals, hippies and the just plain curious -- flocked to New York to hear the Dalai Lama. But did they find anything meaningful beyond a sunny day, a picnic lunch, and a guest appearance by Richard Gere?
Sep 22, 2003 | Sara was still sound asleep on Sunday morning in her Upper West Side apartment when her phone rang and shattered a perfect state of divine, peaceful bliss. She picked it up. It was her sister, Rachel, calling to offer her another perfect state of divine, peaceful bliss.
"Do you wanna see the Dalai Lama?" Rachel asked.
"Uh," Sara mumbled, "I don't know."
Rachel had spent much of Saturday night in a weed-induced philosophical frenzy, raving on and on to her friends about the history of communist China and Mao and the imperialist takeover of Tibet and all the other kinds of good, deep stuff that third-year Columbia students like herself are supposed to be passionate about. Rachel wasn't about to let her sister sleep through ... this.
"It's the Dalai-fuckin'-Lama, man!" she yelled at Sara.
So just after 10 a.m. they grabbed a couple of friends and piled into a cab and headed down to the park entrance on East 90th Street. Except that the line to get in already snaked down the avenue and into the 70s, before whipping back up until it finally ended at 96th Street, which is where I find them when I arrive after 11.
It just so happens that Sara is an old friend of mine from college in Michigan whom I haven't seen or spoken to in about a year. Considering the mile-long line of people waiting to get into the park, it is an extraordinary coincidence that I locate Sara in the throngs, a meeting I can only attribute to the miracle of karma. With the Big D.L. himself set to speak in less than an hour, to me this means one thing, and one thing only: God wants me to cut.
"Dude," Rachel says, peering at me from behind a pair of silver, mirrorlike shades. "You can totally cut. It's the Dalai Lama."
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I first read about this massive spiritual shindig in two articles in the New York Times, both of which talked in somewhat derisive tones about what a pop phenomenon D.L. has become in America. This is the Dalai Lama's first talk in Central Park since 1999. In the meantime, he's written a few warm and fuzzy books, even had a self-help-style bestseller, "The Art of Happiness." You can find the picture of the red-robed, bald-headed, bespectacled monk on everything from Free Tibet literature to advertisements for Apple Computers.
But it wasn't until I saw his mug on the cover of this week's Time Out New York -- "Dalai-Rama! Start chanting: The Dalai Lama's coming to town!" -- that I realized this guy's for real. If he's significant enough to be featured in the same magazine as Heather Graham and the city's "new superclub," he must have something good to say about the meaning of life.
Like most other people, I can't really explain who the Dalai Lama is, or what exactly he does, but I know he's some kind of spiritual big dog, the 14th reincarnation of some, uh, guy or something. And not only was he plugged on the cover of Time Out, but there was a whole page devoted to him in the Chill Out section of the magazine, and really, who among us couldn't use some hard-core divinely inspired chilling out these days? I figured, what the hell, why not go?
So I'm standing in the gargantuan line with my fellow dharma bums. Throngs and throngs of people, plenty of piercings, plenty of dreadlocks and tie-dye and tattoos, plenty of paisley bandannas wrapped around sweaty white, middle-class foreheads, young and old. There are also gaggles of Tibetans milling about, the women in foot-length traditional dresses, some shiny and metallic, some faded and soft, the men in loose-fitting slacks and shirts bearing delicate designs, or perhaps draped in magenta robes like the D.L. himself. There are a lot of Caucasians dressed like the Tibetans, too.
The line still isn't moving. Rachel and I decide to go for another blessed cut, this time to the front of the line. We slip by a cop and make our way with hundreds of other people who decided to transcend the rules. Solemn chants boom over loudspeakers and fill the air as we and a dozen robed Tibetans twist our way through a tangle of weeds and wild plants.
Event volunteers wearing official Dalai Lama Tour '03 shirts direct us to the front of the line. Apparently, cheating a little bit is OK as long as your ultimate goal is seeing His Holiness.
"Oh, I want one of those shirts," Rachel sighs.
Through the trees we finally see the Promised Land, guided by a beacon of bright blue porta-potties that stretch across the green grass like tiny sacred shrines to the God of Human Waste Disposal. Our path opens onto a hilly field that is blanketed with, well, blankets, and about 65,000 people sitting on them, munching on picnic lunches, laughing and chatting with each other, making hats out of newspapers to protect their heads from the sun's rays. There are lots of very average, very normal-looking people here, the kind who eat cornflakes for breakfast instead of granola, who prefer lunch meat to hummus, and who enjoy washing their bodies, hair and clothing on a regular basis. But there's also plenty of the other kind.
Or, as Rachel puts it, "Look at all the hippies!"
Yet as I look over the masses of people who all traveled here for a common cause -- even if they're not sure what that cause is -- I can't help thinking that this must be close to what Gandhi or Jesus inspired. What we tend to forget is that beyond their specific messages, the great gurus of the past were able to connect to the average Joe on a very visceral level. That's what made them so subversive to the ruling powers. Reading the Bible, you quickly find that most people who went to hear Jesus preach didn't really know a thing about his philosophy -- they were just curious. They wanted to be cured. In some way, on a spiritual level, so do many of the people who are in Central Park.
Then I see the stage. It's flanked on either side by twin giant televisions like something out of a U2 concert, and I realize that things have indeed changed since Jesus' time. Sure, technology is a convenient way to get important ideas across. But how much of this is just spectacle? Just meaningless titillation? Would Jesus have used giant TVs to broadcast his message? Would he have allowed corporations to use his image to sell products? What would Jesus do?
Thankfully, he's sitting right behind me, so I can ask him. I turn around and talk to Jesus, actually Jordan Smith, a senior in college, and a guy who looks an awful lot like the Son of God. Smith made the pilgrimage here with a group of spiritually minded people from Drew University, a small college in New Jersey. In fact, he is so spiritual that he actually lives in a co-op-like place called "Spirituality Home," for -- not surprisingly -- spiritual people like himself.
He majors in religious studies, specializing in Hinduism, but says his spirituality is something that can't be easily defined or measured. "I was raised Presbyterian," he says. "I still feel a connection to Christian scriptures, but to other holy works too. Spirituality is just one of those things you have to feel inside."
This is the first field trip the people of the Spirituality Home have made in quite a while. The D.L. was important enough that many -- but not all -- of the residents woke up at 7 a.m. for the long haul to New York. Smith sits cross-legged next to another resident of the home, Kelly Mundell, a senior who does not resemble a biblical figure.
"There are a lot of people who just couldn't make it," Mundell said. "We woke them up and they were like, It's just not happening."
Mundell herself would've been sleeping in her holy bed at Spiritual Home now, but she felt this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the Dalai Lama, even though she seems to know less about him than I do.
"I read one of his books for a class," she says wistfully. "I don't remember what it was."
"'The Art of Happiness,'" Jesus gently reminds her.
"Right," she says.
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