The Dalai Lama

Video Find of the Day

Tenzin Gyatso, Fourteenth Dalai Lama, will be in Seattle for 5 days in April and we here at Real Change are thrilled. We think His Holiness is neat.

But who is this guy? What is a dalai lama? What happened to the other 13? Could the same thing happen to me?

The Wikipedia article begins with this:

"In Tibetan Buddhism, the successive Dalai Lamas form a lineage of (tulku) magistrates which traces back to 1391. According to tradition, the rarefied mindstream of these tulku take repeated births and embodiment to fulfill their Boddhisattva vow. They are of the Gelug School of Buddhism. Tibetan Buddhists hold the Dalai Lama to be one of innumerable incarnations of Avalokiteśvara ("Chenrezig" in Tibetan), the bodhisattva of compassion."

[We've seen Avalokiteśvara before, by the way. He's the boddhisattva of compassion with the thousand arms and the 11 heads. If you want to know why he has so many arms and heads, look him up.]

There's this video, which has a prolonged interview with the man, so you can get a good sense of him. Of course, the prolonged-ness means it's a quite long video, too. Sorry 'bout that. You could watch it in shifts.

Charlie Rose - The Dalai Lama