The Good are Always the Merry

Take a second  and watch the Dalai Lama in this Ten Questions Forum put on by TIME Magazine. At the age of two he was told he was the next Dalai Lama; I mean it’s not like he ran for the office. As a result, he is humble. As he puts it, “Important is, we are same: human being.” Like all of us, he too is just trying to play the hand Fate dealt him.The video has some clarifying text under every other utterance which you turn out to really need. I had trouble understanding  the sentences that don’t  get ‘translated’ in this way,  though some words you can puzzle out, like ‘ hypocrisy’ which he pronounces like Hippo-Chrissie (you know her, kind of wide in the beam? With red hair?)Eight years ago I saw that other much-revered Buddhist monk Thich Nat Hanh, widely credited with convincing Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. to come out against the Vietnam War, which gave the peace movement its start.  He appeared at a giant convention center, a tiny doll-size figure sitting cross-legged on a stage 1,000 yards away. I couldn’t decipher his speech at all; plus, he spoke so slowly! I fell asleep two minutes in and was out cold for a good 30 minutes. But here’s the funny thing: when I woke up, I woke all the way up and understood every single thing he said and remember it still. Example: he was asked what his response would be to a September 11th-like incident like we had just suffered. He said, “If a person seeks to harm me I will go to him and ask in what way I have harmed him.”Back to his spiritual brother here. I note his warm smile and wonder if Jesus had that too, and Elijah, and Mohammed.  I’m thinkin’ yes. Because William Butler Yeats said it in his poem The Fiddler of Dooney: "For the good are always the merry, save by an evil chance,  And the merry love the fiddle, and the merry love to dance."

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Efblggixy1A]