A few days ago the Dalai Lama came to our town. He spoke in a huge indoor stadium, and about 20,000 people and I attended. The experience had some whimsy about it: near the auxiliary parking, in a field, stood about ten llamas wearing sashes bearing the motto Free Tibet.
I had read a book of lectures by this man long ago, and I had the impression that he was moderate, sweet-tempered and evidently modest and humble. I'm not sure I knew more. And after hearing him talk for an hour, and answer questions for half an hour more, I don't think I know more.
I came prepared (and hoping) to find a hero: a person of simple origin who had acquired great skill and learning and a warm spirituality, and who perhaps could help me find my way out of a dark wood where the right path was murky. Much of this perhaps--but no hero.
The grandest thing he said was 'I don't know.' A questioner had said that her husband had killed himself from an overdose of drugs, and she was left alone and devastated, and she wanted to know how she could deal with her emotional pain and overcome it. The Dalai Lama--whose face was shown on large TV monitors so the whole audience could see him up close--looked...consternated and then sad, and then he said 'I don't know.'
If there was one moment when I could have loved him and found my hero, it was then. What other clergyman faced with an example of suffering and urgent hope of the sufferer to make sense of her experience and transcend it, would say 'I don't know'? Perhaps a religious scholar faced with the complexities of a problem of ritual or business ethics could begin a response with a statement that he did not know. But rarely a pastoral one, a teacher. Our clergy must know. And from this need they often enough emerge...pompous and banal.
Well this clergyman did not know, and he was sad and frustrated when he recognised it. But then the profession of clergyman took over, but at least with humility. He went on to something like--you could make a diligent effort to be compassionate to other people. You can consider that your tragedy has already occurred: you cannot change it, but you can change how you think about it. And you can change your life to absorb the tragedy somehow.
Somehow. He may not have used this word, but it was implied.
So he was not a hero. Instead he showed he is a wise man.
In my life as a lawyer, and in my personal life (and they are not so far apart) I fairly often encounter people who are consciously suffering. (It is not for me to tell people I think they are suffering, but not consciously.)
It occurred to me, probably from something I had heard elsewhere, to suggest to one such person, a woman who had once been very attractive, but had mistreated her skin with much sun and many chemicals, and her body with various illegal substances, that she volunteer at the homeless shelter, perhaps just to help serve one meal a week. Or more if she found she wanted to do so.
I wish I could say that my advice did wonders. She didn't take it, and she spiralled downward. This was years ago, and I don't know what has become of her.
Saying 'I don't know' is at once banal, and made the Dalai Lama a kind of hero. A humble one.
