Tenzin Gyatso

By: Joshua Glenn
July 6, 2010

05032009lama

When TENZIN GYATSO (Lhamo Döndrub, born 1935) visited Boston, last year, he spoke at Foxboro Stadium while sporting a New England Patriots cap (shown above). His headwear provided me with the excuse for which I’d been looking to describe His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama as a lowbrow. I did (and do) so with the utmost respect — with a sense of wonder, in fact. Whereas the sympathetic highbrow agrees with your cause or ideology, even if she can’t personally relate to it, at her finest the lowbrow is empathetic: i.e., irrationally compassionate. Whether or not he agrees with your cause or ideology, the Dalai Lama, who fled to India as a teenager after the People’s Republic of China invaded his homeland, feels your pain. Of what other religious leader could you say the same? This isn’t the place to explicate the Dalai Lama’s version of Tibetan Buddhism, or anything else, so I’ll conclude with something that Robert Thurman once told me in an interview: “The amazing and audacious and visionary thing that the Dalai Lama does, and how he got the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, is his insistence that he is going to see a free Tibet in his lifetime by nonviolent means, and that everyone should solve problems by nonviolent means. The Kissingers of this world, and the Deng Xiaopings, laugh at him and despise him. But I have great faith in him, and I believe that what he is saying will come to pass.”

ALSO BORN THIS DATE: Hanns Eisler.

***

Each day, HILOBROW pays tribute to one of our favorite high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes on that person’s birthday.

READ MORE about the Anti-Anti-Utopian Generation (1934-43).

READ MORE HiLo Hero shout-outs.

SUBSCRIBE to HiLo Hero updates via Facebook.

SHARE this post, by clicking on the toolbar below.

Categories

About Josh, HiLo Heroes