In The Observer, UK, Randeep Ramesh travels to McLeod Ganj and finds that the Dalai Lama’s commitment to peace is being tested – both by China and by Tibetans who want decisive action in the face of escalating violence:
When the Dalai Lama sat down yesterday (March 22) with Richard Gere and Robert Thurman, father of actor Uma and US professor of Buddhism, it was supposed to be for a few hours contemplating sacred art and silent meditation.
But with Chinese troops smothering the protests in Tibet with brutal ease, the 14th Dalai Lama, an incarnation of Avalokitesvara, the Buddha of Compassion, found himself pondering not celestial peace but bloody violence.
Like almost everything the 72-year-old does, who he meets and what he says in his lopsided English are picked over and pulled apart. Gere and Thurman founded Tibet House, in New York’s hip Upper West Side, which serves as a cultural mission for the ‘occupied’ nation of Tibet. Their headline-grabbing appearance will no doubt deepen suspicions in Beijing that yesterday’s event at the Delhi Foundation for Universal Responsibility was politics masquerading as religion.
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