Dalai Lama at Radio City: Mankind Is 'Becoming More Mature'

The Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader and global spiritual celebrity, kicked off a four-day teaching engagement at Radio City Music Hall in New York on Thursday with his usual good humor and an upbeat -- if quixotic -- message for Americans who are angry about the present and pessimistic about the future.

Things are getting better, not worse, the 74-year-old monk insisted to reporters at a crowded press conference, the only one he will hold on the last stop of his current American tour.

"I am optimistic," he said, citing America's post-war reconciliation with Japan and Germany as an example of the inexorable shift toward planetary good will, along with the peaceful fall of Soviet Communism, the growing environmental movement, the new collaboration between science and spirituality, the outpouring of aid after the Haitian earthquake and the Indian Ocean tsunami -- and perhaps even the election of Barack Obama.

"These things are clear signs of human beings becoming more mature," said the Dalai Lama, wearing his traditional maroon-and-saffron robes and speaking in lilting, though somewhat halting, English. "These are the signs [that] we human beings are becoming more sensible and also developing [a] sense of 'oneness' of the entire six billion human beings.

"These are positive. Therefore, these are the sources of my optimism. If these sources are wrong, then please, let me know. . . Then I will change my optimism!"

Many Americans -- and not a few primary voters and Tea Party activists -- might like to set him straight. But such a shift seems unlikely for Tenzin Gyatso, who as a 2-year-old boy was recognized as the 14th reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, then the temporal as well as religious leader of Tibet. Since his forced exile to India following a Chinese communist crackdown in Tibet in 1959, the Dalai Lama has maintained his spiritual equanimity and has increasingly become a kind of guru to the world, and a particularly popular figure in the United States. He draws high-profile support from such celebrities as Richard Gere and a mass following among mainstream Americans who since the 1960s have become more and more attracted to Eastern spirituality.

But the Dalai Lama is also an icon of religious freedom whose desire for a restored Tibetan autonomy and culture has for decades placed him at the intersection of one of the most intractable international problems -- China's emergence as a military and economic superpower, on the one hand, and Beijing's persistent refusal to recognize the human rights of Tibetans on the other.

In October last year, a month before he was to make his first visit to China, President Obama refused appeals to meet with the Dalai Lama when he was visiting Washington out of fear of provoking Beijing, which is extremely sensitive to even the smallest sign of foreign support for Tibetan rights. But as Chinese-American relations soured after Obama's trip, the president in February agreed to meet with the Dalai Lama in the White House, albeit in a low-key encounter with no media or television cameras allowed.

On Thursday, the Dalai Lama insisted that even on that front he is optimistic that the Chinese government and society will eventually achieve a kind of enlightenment when it comes to Tibetan Buddhism. The Chinese Communist Party's openness to capitalism and promoting the middle class, for example, show that the party and Chinese leader Hu Jintao "still has some ability to act according to new realities."

"But harmony must come from his heart, not out of fear," the Lama said of Hu Jintao.

Indeed, the Dalai Lama sounded like more of a socialist than the Chinese leadership. He recalled that in the 1950s he was so impressed by the goals and devotion of Chinese communists he visited on a trip to Beijing that he told party authorities he wanted to become a member.

"Still, I am Marxist!" he told the news conference with a big smile -- and while wearing a crimson Indiana University sun visor, which was close enough to maroon to work perfectly with the Lama's robes. "Some of my friend always ask me, 'Don't mention that. Don't say that'." But, he continued, the "Marxist economy is [the] only economic system where expresses concern for equal distribution. That is moral ethics. Whereas capitalism [is] only how to make profit."

The environmental movement seems to animate the Dalai Lama even more these days. He said that if he were to go into politics, he would choose the Green Party.

"America still, no Green Party," he noted playfully near the end of his media meeting. "But, actually you should start one," he said. "Then, I may join!"

He also had kind words about Obama, and apparently has no hard feelings over the president's snub last fall. The Dalai Lama said he had told Obama how he was meeting with followers of the late Mahatma Gandhi in India in November 2008 when word of Obama's election as president reached them. Everyone broke into applause, and even today, the Dalai Lama said, he finds it a remarkable sign of progress that a country that once considered blacks as slaves, and where not long ago civil rights were routinely denied to African-Americans, that a black man could be elected president.

"So this election not only had repercussions in America, but also in India," he said. "So that's a story."

And with that he smiled again and walked off to the Radio City Music Hall auditorium made famous by the Rockettes -- only the Dalai Lama sat lotus style on a colorful throne and offered dense interpretations on Nagarjuna's Commentary on Bodhicitta to a packed house.

The Dalai Lama had been visiting venues in the Midwest on this trip, promoting dialogue with Islam in Bloomington, Ind., for example, and opening a research center at the University of Wisconsin that will study the neuroscience behind meditation and compassion.

He will spend four days in New York, giving twice-a-day lectures on Buddhist texts and concluding with a public talk on Sunday at Radio City Music Hall called "Awakening the Heart of Selfishness."