Dalai Lama: Obama could ease positive change
AP[Thursday, April 30, 2009 12:39]
By Jay Lindsay
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CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Hands reached for him, and the Dalai Lama reached back. With a broad smile, he exited a news conference Wednesday clasping the fingers of anyone in reach, offering his blessing, a laugh, and a bit of hope from a leader five decades in exile.
Hope was a theme of the Dalai Lama’s remarks: about the Obama administration, about the prospects for change within the Chinese government and about his own eventual return to his native Tibet, 50 years after his harrowing flight over the Himalayas into India. When the leader of the Tibet’s government in exile was asked if he thought he would ever go home, he quickly answered, ”Oh, yes.” The Dalai Lama took questions Wednesday at the start of a four-day visit to Massachusetts as part of a U.S. tour. Stops at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are scheduled before a public appearance Saturday at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro to help fund construction of the Tibetan Heritage Center, a Boston-area project to preserve Tibetan culture. |
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The timing of the tour, and the Dalai Lama’s message of finding happiness outside material things, was right amid global recession, said Dhondup Phunkhang, a spokesman for the Tibetan Association of Boston, which is building the heritage center.
”It’s good, I think, for someone to have a message that is beyond financial matters and materialistic things,” he said.
The Dalai Lama, a Buddhist monk, is seen as a figure of moral authority in much of the world but deplored by China as a ”wolf in monk’s robes” who seeks Tibet’s independence from China. The Dalai Lama has said repeatedly that he wants only ”real autonomy” for Tibet.
The Dalai Lama on Wednesday described U.S. policy toward Tibet under Obama as ”more or less the same” as under President George W. Bush but added he was hopeful Obama’s open and ”more straightforward” style would spur positive change.
The Dalai Lama said he would like to meet Obama when he visits Washington in October, as he has every president since George H.W. Bush. George W. Bush was the first to officially meet the Dalai Lama, awarding him the U.S. Congress’s highest civilian honor in 2007, a move that outraged China. Bush’s predecessors had ”dropped in” while the Dalai Lama met with advisers.
The Dalai Lama said Wednesday he wasn’t concerned how Obama chose to meet him, a decision with implications for Chinese-U.S. relations.
”It doesn’t matter,” he said, with a wave of his hand and a laugh.
He also said he held out hope that Chinese policy toward Tibet could ease because China must take steps to increase its moral authority if it truly aspires to be a greater power.
”China needs the rest of the world’s trust, respect,” he said.
The 73-year-old Dalai Lama was unequivocal about his belief that one day he would return to Tibet, after fleeing in March 1959 during a Chinese crackdown of a Tibetan uprising. But he said his refugee status had allowed him to meet many people of various places and traditions. He said he’d also learned to find a home all over the world.
”Wherever you find happiness, that’s your home,” he said.
Tags: Dalai Lama, Free Tibet, Namgyal Rapper, Tibet, Tibetan