BOSTON – The Dalai Lama, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning spiritual leader of the Tibetan people, is scheduled to visit Massachusetts for the first time in five years this September.
The Dalai Lama is scheduled to bless a new Buddhist temple in Medford that has become a center for the area’s small Tibetan population, participate in a conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, meet with faculty and students at Harvard University and address thousands of people at the FleetCenter.
The Dalai Lama has maintained a busy travel schedule teaching Buddhism and trying to highlight the plight of the Tibetan people, many of whom were exiled after a 1959 revolt against China. His Sept. 12-15 visit to Boston is part of a wider U.S. tour that includes San Francisco, Bloomington, Ind., and New York City.
”The Dalai Lama certainly is trying to represent the plight of the Tibetan people, and wants to keep that alive, but he also comes very much as a Buddhist teacher who quite enthusiastically wants to contribute to the larger conversation about ethics and religious values by contributing Buddhist perspectives and ideas,” Janet B. Gyatso, president of the International Association of Tibetan Studies and chairwoman of Buddhist studies at Harvard Divinity School, told The Boston Sunday Globe.
There are a growing number of Buddhist communities in greater Boston. During the Dalai Lama’s last visit to the area in 1998, he drew about 7,000 people to Brandeis University. He also visited the area in 1991 and 1995.
”He attracts sellout crowds regardless of where he goes because of his charisma,” said Frank J. Korom, an assistant religion and anthropology professor at Boston University. ”People like to see his smile and they just like being around him, because he exudes this aura of niceness.”
The highlight of his time in Boston will be a two-day conference at MIT with scientists who have been trying to quantify the effects of meditation by monitoring Buddhist’s brains.
”The focus of this meeting is to explore avenues for collaborative research between science and Buddhism,” said Adam Engle, the chairman of MIT’s Mind and Life Institute.
The Dalai Lama, 67, is believed by his followers to be a manifestation of the Buddha and reincarnation of 13 previous Dalai Lamas. In 1959 he led about 80,000 Tibetans in exile in India.
