What could be called a global movement on behalf of post-identity thinking seems one of the brightest hopes of our new world order and one often advanced by such close friends and admirers of the Dalai Lama as Vaclav Havel and Desmond Tutu. Yet what has made the Dalai Lama’s example particularly striking – and what was perhaps partly responsible for his receiving the 1989 Nobel Prize for Peace – is that he has had to live these principles and put them to the test during almost every hour of his 72 years. He came to the throne in Lhasa, after all, when he was only 4 years old, and he was receiving envoys from F.D.R. with intricate questions about the transportation of military supplies across Tibet during World War II when he was just 7. He was 11 when violent fighting broke out around him in Lhasa, and by the time he was 15 – an age when most of us are stumbling through high school – he was the full-time political leader of his people, having to negotiate against Mao Zedong. After he led Tibet at age 23, when Chinese pressure on Lhasa seemed certain to provoke widespread violence, he had to remake an entire ancient culture in exile.

The result of all this is that he is as rigorous and detailed a realist as you could hope to meet. His life has never allowed him the luxury of talking abstractly wishfully from a mountaintop. He follows the news more closely than many journalists do and cheerfully confessed to me more than a decade ago that he is “addicted” to the BBC World Service broadcast every morning. When he speaks around the world, one of his favorite lines is “Dream – nothing!” or some other expression to stress that instead of looking outside ourselves for help or inspiration, we should act right now because “responsibility for our future lies on our own shoulders.”

Time – March 31, 2008
By Pico Iyer

These and more amazing photos at: time.com/dalailama and time.com/tibet

Eu aspiro que não nos falte essa compreensão; que não geremos sentimentos negativos, que não tornemos nosso coração apertado e excludente. Isso seria uma tristeza para o nosso grande mestre, que é Sua Santidade, o Dalai Lama. Nós não deveríamos permitir que a ação negativa de alguns tornasse o nosso coração negativo também. A maior batalha, a maior dificuldade, se dá dentro da nossa mente, de tal modo que nós possamos nos manter estáveis, lúcidos, sempre praticando as quatro qualidades incomensuráveis de Compaixão, Amor, Alegria e Equanimidade, em todas as direções. - carta do Lama Padma Samten continua em www.caminhodomeio.org/Noticias/conflito.html

Tibet News - www.phayul.com

Tibet Photo News - www.phayul.com/news/photos.aspx

BBC on Tibet - news.bbc.co.uk and search.bbc.co.uk for Tibet, Tibetan monk speaks out and Dalai Lama urges Tibet dialogue

AVVAZ.ORG - Portugues / English / Francais / Espanol

Relato de Beatriz Bispo de Dharamsala, India, onde S.S. o Dalai Lama vive - www.caminhodomeio.org/Noticias/visaogeraltibete.html

S.S o Dalai Lama - pagina em portugues

The Dalai Lama Foundation, an international organization for ethics and peace

"Our problem is that inside us there's a mind going, 'Impossible, impossible, impossible. I can't, I can't, I can't.' We have to banish that mind from this solar system. Anything is possible; everything is possible. Sometimes you feel that your dreams are impossible, but they're not. Human beings have great potential; they can do anything. The power of the mind is incredible, limitless."

Lama Thubten Yeshe
Manjushri Institute, 1977, Currently unpublished
Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive