[MUSIC PLAYING] SPEAKER 1: I'm very,
very pleased, excited, and honored to
bring to you today Dr. Robert Thurman on his
third visit to Google, where he will be talking
about his new graphic novel about the Dalai Lama,
"The Man of Peace." Dr. Thurman was
the first American to don Buddhist garb in
1962, the first Buddhist monk from the US. He eventually became a professor
at American University. And now is the Jey
Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan studies at
Columbia University in New York. He's a close personal friend
of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, which is the subject
of today's talk, and also the father of
Uma Thurman, who you may have seen in the movies. He's a prolific author. He also hosts a weekly
podcast that you can find from bobthurman.com. And as I said, this is
his third visit to Google. We're happy to welcome him
back and hope that he can come on many future occasions. Without any further ado,
I'd like to introduce you to Dr. Bob Thurman. ROBERT THURMAN: Thank you, Tom. Thank you. Thank you, Tom. Thank you, Tom. That's really very kind. And I love being at Google. And I actually love Google. I always did. I like the way the letters-- the colors of the letters. They're like the
colors of the five-- what we call the five
archetype Buddhas, I call them-- the
dhanyi Buddhas, or meditational Buddhas
in the mandalas, blue red, yellow, green, and the white
is in the spaces in between. So I do-- I love Google. It's good. And I'm sure you all are
daily reminding yourself how you should be
doing no evil, which was one of the founding things. So anyway, I'm
very-- and thank you for inviting me to come and
talk to you all about our latest production of the life of the
Dalai Lama in the graphic novel form. And it's actually a
graphic biography, in fact. But we call it a graphic novel
because we don't want-- in case we were a little
undiplomatic in any element or whatever it was, we
wanted His Holiness to have deniability that it was our
mistake or something if we make a mistake. But I have showed it to him. And he liked it. Actually, I gave it to
him during the kalachakra initiation, the last
one that he did-- which will not be the last
one he will do-- but last one he did in Bodhgaya
in January in India. And my wife called me
excitedly later that day. He was live streaming it. And he would say it was the
preparatory rituals, what's called the self-initiation
rituals where they build up the cosmic mandala, in which
then the ceremony takes place in the following days. And he was doing the-- he was in the ritual. The monks were chanting and
they were making the mandala and the whole thing. And he called me over to him
in the middle of the thing. It's only a few people
in there because it's the preparatory thing. He called me over to greet him. And so I did. And then, I gave him a copy
the book and put it down. And he looked at it. And he went back to the ritual. And it was there on the table
nearby his ritual implements. And so, my wife
called me said, oh, he was doing the ritual
chanting and meditating, and then he looked over
and he saw [INAUDIBLE].. And it was afterwards,
and then he picked it up and he was like looking. And the, he remembered
it was live streamed. And he put it down,
back into the ritual. She was so thrilled. And I was happy. I was a little
worried and nervous because it was not a
thing where precisely-- I did it-- because he
wouldn't show himself. You see, in the book he's
shown in a heroic way because he is a hero. He is one of our
world heroes, really. And even if we
ware not Buddhists, and we don't think of him as
our Dalai Lama [INAUDIBLE] Dalai Lama. And Dalai means ocean or vast. And there was a name
given to the third Dalai Lama by a Mongolian emperor. Although, the Mongolians
had never seen the ocean, that particular one. But the steppe, the great steppe
is like an ocean of grass. So Dalai means huge. And the idea is the ocean
of wisdom and compassion. That's the idea of Dalai Lama. Lama just means guru in Tibetan. But in a way, Tibetan
translation of guru into Lama shows how Tibetans
refined the Buddhist side of ancient Indian
culture, in a sense. It's very instructive
in the sense that guru comes from the
Indian word, Sanskrit word, for heavy, which reflects
the patriarchal nature of Indian society, the
heavy on top of your head like weighing you down. Whereas Lama means someone
you can't get past. It means you can't get beyond. So I always like to say instead
of some sort of heavy weight on top of your head, he's like
a real-- a good guru is really like Tar Baby. You know in the old--
what comic was that? Was that "Pogo" or something? It was some ancient thing. AUDIENCE: Brer Rabbit. ROBERT THURMAN: Brer
Rabbit, that's it. And Tar Baby is
like-- you try to-- Tar Baby is there. And you want to get rid of him. You don't want guru bugging
you and following you around the whole time
and making you do whatever you're supposed to do. And so, you want
to get rid of him. But then Tar Baby
was-- you would grab Tar Baby to get rid of him
and then you'd be stuck to him. You couldn't like-- you
couldn't eliminate him. So you couldn't get past him. So the key point in
the Tibetan thing is they realized that
the teacher is not just a weight on top of your head. And the whole thing is not
just to revere the teacher-- although, they do. But it is to
execute the teaching that the teacher gives you
and become a teacher yourself. So that's what the guru
wants you to do that. And in Buddhism in
Indian civilization, the guru role was somewhat
undermined by the exoteric idea of the teacher as
[INAUDIBLE] what they call, which means a virtuous friend. So the idea of a teacher is
like a friend who inspires you rather than an authority who
sits on top of you, which might have been the norm
in ordinary Indian culture before Buddha's time. He was a bit of a
rebel, the Buddha. He didn't do what
his dad told him. He should be a King. He went off to become
enlightened, whatever that is. And his dad did what dads do
when young men, or women, don't do what they say. Locked him up. And sent in some Brahman
priest psychiatrists to try to get him to
shape up to be a King. And so, what he did-- what
rugged individuals do-- he escaped. And ran off into the jungle. Anyway, so Dalai Lama,
that's Dalai Lama means. And then, nowadays, we're in
a time in the world, which you all know very, very well. And actually, your company
is very, very important in this time in the world toward
a successful outcome, which we are going to have. We have to have because we owe
that to the future generations. And also, we'll be
back in future lives. And we don't want to
live in a slag heap, or have to migrate to
a different planet. And I guarantee you,
though, that is the case. I know that many of you are
scientifically oriented. Computer science is a big
thing around here and so forth. I know that. And you may have fallen for
the modern materialist legend that you only live this
once, this one life. But that's one thing that is
at the base of materialism is a philosophical view, which
underlies modern science. But actually, it is the one
thing that has no evidence. It is nothing but a
blind faith belief if you actually think about it. And you know that right
away from your common sense. What is one thing that no
one will ever discover? No scientist will ever discover? What is one thing that we
know for sure will never be discovered? Nothing? How about nothing? Who is going to ever
discover nothing? And is anybody going to give
them a Nobel Prize for that? No way. So the idea that someone is
going to become nothing just by the wetware-- what John Perry Barlow
calls meatspace. It's because the meat level-- the brain, the body-- will cease at some time. But the subtle energy
of consciousness, that that then suddenly
becomes nothing. It's the one thing
in the universe that doesn't have continuity like
the law of thermodynamics, the non-destruction of energy. It's the one energy that
just becomes nothing. And the idea to become nothing
when nothing is nothing. Can you do that? Right? No one can ever do that. So therefore, the
foundation of materialism, which is supposed to be
rational and evidence based, is blind faith. It can't be anything other
than blind faith cooked up by people who were scared by
preachers that if they did this and that they might end up in
hell, which is very unpleasant. It's the most unpleasant
thing you can imagine. But once the future is
open-ended, and perhaps endless, anything is possible. So then naturally,
it's a little scary. Meanwhile, those materialists
have convinced you-- and we can always debate
this in the question period-- that nothingness is real
and discovery and science knows that. Because why? Science went and
put some electrodes on some piece of meat,
brain, like a dead body, and they didn't find any
action going on in there. So? Nobody ever said the mind
was still in the body. The person is dead. So that's not a discovery. The nothing can't be discovered. So it's only
asserted out of faith that you won't have a
worry about your future. The reason I mention
that is primal. That's the foundation
of the Buddhist biology. The foundation of
Buddhist biology-- not Buddhist religion
or Buddhist faith, Buddhist biology-- is that life is endless. And therefore, it
is our duty always to make it better for
ourselves and others. For example, enemy, Wyatt
Earp walks into town. Draws his pistol. And blows away somebody. But from Buddhist point of
view, from the Buddhist science point of view, that
person is not gone. They just are
deprived of a body. And then, they are
really annoyed with you because you just shot them. So they're going to find a
womb in a neighboring town. They're going to grow up
and practice shooting. And they're going
to come get you. So therefore, there must
be another way of dealing with them, like having a chat. Getting to know
them on Facebook. Or maybe I shouldn't mention
that, whatever Google-- Google Chat. Sorry, having a
Google chat with them. Because we're all entangled. In other words, entanglement of
life is endless and infinite. And therefore, we never
get out of the way from the consequences
of how we treat people. And therefore, we should
always treat them better. It's all-- it flows right
out of their biological view. And the biological view is-- and also, Buddha's
time, and actually most of the Asian people, they
were not like the creationists nowadays in supposedly
advanced modern society who are terrified of the
idea that they somehow might be connected to a chimpanzee. And so therefore-- genetically-- And so therefore,
they have these-- they have these
dioramas in San Diego and places where they show Adam. And Adam is, of course,
blonde and blue-eyed, or slightly reddish tinged
with a little bit of a beard. He's lying on the
ground like this. And he has like a
wound in his rib where they popped
out the lady who was supposed to wash the dishes. I mean, come on. It's too silly. Anybody in Buddhist science,
or Buddhist biology, they're perfectly
cool with chimpanzee. And not only do they not mind
being connected to chimpanzee, but everybody realizes
that at some previous time in the beginningless
sequence of lives they personally
were chimpanzees. We've all been chimpanzees. And then, if we behave
like a chimpanzee now, there's a danger we might
gravitate toward the chimpanzee again in the future. And that wouldn't be cool. You could not definitely do a
Google Chat as a chimpanzee. You would just break-- you'd break your Android
when you try to eat it maybe. So this is by way
of introduction of "The Man of Peace,"
the Dalai Lama, who is-- the main thing about this book-- and why do I like
the Dalai Lama? I've known him for 53 years. I met him in '64. And over these 53 years, what
I can give him credit for-- I can't say that by
studying with him and knowing and being his friend
and studying with his teachers, too, which I did,
that I'm enlightened. Because I still-- I have to check with my
wife how enlightened I am. And I don't quite
get a full pedigree. i don't have the PhD
enlightenment from my wife quite yet. But with my children,
oh wow, not at all. I'm a carpenter. And I built a house in-- I'm building my own house. It started in 1972. And is still not quite finished. And my son made a motto for me,
which fits me as a teacher too, so don't expect too much. And he said my dad's
motto is why do it right when you can do it yourself? And I'm very proud of that. When I tell that to people,
they don't-- some people in more authoritarian societies,
they don't laugh. They're like, oh,
a son is talking like that about his dad. That's terrible. What's the matter with that
dad that he's proud of it? So anyway, but what he has
done for me over these years-- the Dalai Lama--
is he's helped me-- I mean, he hasn't
done it single-handed. I have a really wise
and wonderful wife. And I've got really great kids. And I had some
other older teachers than him, who were also
really good teachers. But he's cheered me up. I am less depressed. And although when you
look at the world, or you watch CNN for a few
minutes, you have really take a nose dive about
what's actually going on as far as being unpractical
and unrealistic and asinine on this planet. Reverting to things
like racisms and things like that that supposedly
were over a long time ago, completely into it. And it's leaders. But I think the people are not. I think the mass of our
people are still good. I find that. The Dalai Lama
helps me see that. He himself-- people are
always surprised about him because the Tibetan
people have suffered a great deal, a kind of
neocolonial situation with their big neighbor, which
is really not their fault. It's just the way the
world system works, the system of militarism and
consumerism, industrializing. We think of industrialization
as an automatic good thing. Like Google, do no evil,
industrial, information, and search and
interconnection of people. And I think it is actually
a very good thing. But any good thing
can be messed up. And the problem
always still remains, if you industrialize
negative mental states-- and the Buddhists would say
ignorant delusion, greed based on that ignorant delusion,
and hatred or anger based on that delusion, and
then jealousy and pride, and they have a whole long list. But those are the main ones. So if you take the two
most important ones after the basic delusion,
you have greed and anger, or greed and hatred. And greed magnifies into
industrial consumerism. And we see what that's doing. It's destroying
the planet climate. Climate change, which luckily
the governor of Florida assures us is not
happening right after Irma. It's not happening. Rick Scott, luckily
thank goodness. And it is happening. And it's very dangerous. And as we're continuing
to add to it very badly. And then hatred magnifies
industrially into militarism. And look at this whole
thing with the two-- I call it the two hairdos,
two hairdo confrontation. Kim Jong-Un with his
dark, little whatever that is, little mountain,
and then the guy with the fox who bit him
on the head, the wild fox. That's not my joke. Somebody made that joke. And they're like going
to do each other in. Meanwhile, they both
need decent hairdressers or be content to be a bit bald. So that's militarism. And huge budget to
militarism, enormous. And it really could destroy us
all in the flick of a switch. But as one of my Tibetan
teachers used to say, if you want to take a
scientific description of a nuclear or hydrogen
bomb, or a nuclear holocaust, you would have all these things
with uranium and plutonium and this and that,
trigger mechanisms, and then all of the e equals
Mc squared, and whatever, the instability of the
atoms, of impermanence of the actual instability, and
the fact that life is something that you have to serve. You can't control
and hold it rigidly. You have to learn
to flow with it. And he said,
however, people don't put in the primary
ingredient of such a thing is hatred in the human mind. It is hatred that
builds up that has to have a war, that builds
up the idea of an enemy that has to be
exterminated, that then goes into the brilliant
mathematics and chemistry and whatever involved to end
up with a destructive weapon, like a nuclear weapon. So hatred is the key
original component. And I don't know what the
chemical formula for hatred is, but it connects the bile in
meat space in the human body as Tibetan medicine will say. And it's very, very
dangerous, obviously. So that's really the cause of
the total disaster of Tibet over the last 65 years. But the good side
of that disaster is that the Dalai Lama has
become well known to the world. And the world has a chance of
being cheered up, including-- the world including China
has a chance of being cheery and cheered up. And so, that's the
virtue of this book. And I did write a
book before this-- before the last time
I visited here called "Why the Dalai Lama Matters,"
in which just in words I depicted the process of
how the Dalai Lama, who-- it isn't a question of whether
he really is that or not. Non-Buddhist people--
non-Tibetan people even-- they may be Buddhists,
but they don't necessarily believe the way the Tibetans
believe about the Dalai Lama. But still, the fact that there
is a form of world belief system that they believe that
the equivalent of their Jesus-- to use the Christian thing-- is still here. The Christians with the
rapture thing and they're waiting for him to come back. And meanwhile, they're playing
golf and they have this-- they have a Baptist church
and then a Catholic church. They're trying to make the
best of a difficult situation. And often, the
institutions actually add to the difficult
situation by forgetting what their job really is, which
is to serve their followers not to own them. And then, they
become competitive, the religious institutions do. But point is that the Jesus
figure in the Buddhist thing is [INAUDIBLE],,
the Savior figure. And he's always there. So that's irritating. You have those books,
"What Would Jesus Do." What would Buddha do? Well, they write a book like
that and you think, well, I should be nice. But I don't feel like it today. So luckily, Jesus is not here. And later I can make peace
and I can confess and repent, and same with Buddha,
the Buddhist thing. But if Jesus was right
there, well, you'd be a little more under
pressure, wouldn't you? So you would have
to try to be better. Because the person
is right here. So it's a culture like that. And in a way-- therefore,
Dalai Lama reminds us, being a worldwide
celebrity that he is-- in those Reuters,
International Times, Gallup poll, or whatever they
are, polls, worldwide polls, Dalai Lama always
is up in the top 10. Sometimes he's neck and
neck with Angelina Jolie. Sometimes he's neck
and neck with the Pope. Sometimes he's--
the particular Pope. Some of the popes were
not so high on the list, but the present one
is very, very high. And he always wins
that, which is amazing. Did any of you see the
John Oliver little thing on "Last Week Tonight," or
yesterday or whatever it is. It's some time thing. He went and interviewed
the Dalai Lama. And there at one point
early in the introduction to the actual interview
in India that he did-- which it's on YouTube. You'd love it if you see. It's very funny and very nice. And shows the personality
of the Dalai Lama. And they asked some
people in Times Square or something, what do you
think about the Dalai Lama? And they said, oh, he's great. He's nice. They would go like that. And then they said,
well, what does he do? Or where is he? I don't know. They had no idea. But somehow they just like him. But the reason they like him is
that he is this super celebrity authority. And yet, he says
peace is possible. And we are going to
have it, actually. And yet, he's been
in a situation where his people
have been ethnocided, and are still being
ethnically cleansed, you could say, trying to
cynicize, assimilated, which won't work, actually, ever. It hasn't worked in 55 years. And it's not going to work. But anyway, they're still at
it, some old-fashioned people. Just like in our country,
some old-fashioned people think the Pentagon
is going to save us and another $100
billion, $200 billion bunch of aircraft carriers
or something, which is completely silly. As you guys know, you can
hack an aircraft carrier. And it'll take its own
gun and shoot itself in the foot, which would
make it sink, as you know. you guys know better than
I do that sort of thing. So it's silly why we are
spending all that money. It's completely asinine. Instead of hiring
some good hackers and going out and finding
anonymous and having them work for the good guys. It's ridiculous. But anyway, they are still
in charge of this scene, even though the people are
not really wanting that. And it takes the Dalai
Lama-- like, in my case, when I'm so upset about Iraq
invasion or something like that-- which I really was. Not to mention the coup
d'etat that kicked out Al Gore, who was Mr. Cute,
earth in the balance, let's save the-- "Inconvenient Truth," who
should have been our president. Remember he was our
president in exile for eight years while we-- while Darth Cheney
wrecked the whole place and wrecked the
Middle East totally into the mess that it is now. And when I was upset like that,
Dalai Lama pointed out to me, well, it's too bad
it went like that. But was it a big mistake? Sure. But will it have
a real bad effect? Sure. But 100 years ago,
all of the people, in the beginning of the
1900s, the 20th century, the world's people
more or less expected that some warriors would
win something, somewhere, and that would decide
how the world worked. So the war was look at as
the ultimate arbiter of how the structure of things. And British colonial,
the British empire was just coming to an
end, Victoria, just the end of the 19th century. And the people all
agreed that they had to have that because
that's how things are decided in the world. Whereas at the end
of the 20th century, even though there's still
all this ridiculous arms trade that is a really
huge economic thing-- and we hear about
terrible things in Africa, Liberia, and the
children soldiers shooting everybody and
horrible atrocities and things. But we don't really
hear about the arms dealers who flew
in seven helicopter loads of the Kalashnikovs
and machine guns, et cetera to create
a horrible disaster, so they could run in and grab
a lot of diamonds and things like that. We don't hear what the
real reasoning of that. Otherwise, people
might be having fistfights in the street,
some uncontrolled people. But they wouldn't be doing
these blood baths that they do. So I'm saying he pointed out to
me that the people in the world don't agree. Everybody knows subliminally-- I think really in
1945 we learned it at the misdeed of Truman. I can't forgive Truman, not only
because when I meet sometimes some Japanese people
and they hear Thurman they think it maybe is Truman. And they give me a certain look. Not only that, but
also that OK, he wanted to show there was
an atom bomb existed. But he could have dropped--
it would have been bad for the fish-- in Tokyo Bay. But he could have dropped
the first couple in the bay. I just never can
forgive our country for dropping it on all these
little ladies in kimonos who really could care less about
evil [INAUDIBLE] and so on. It wasn't their fault.
They were completely subjugated by a
fascist government. And why drop it on those people? I think that really was
something sad, personally. I don't know how you feel. But the point is
the minute happened, what was the subliminal
message around the world? Subliminal message
around the world was that your own
atoms are filled with limitless energy that
could completely pulverize you in a split second
if they were caught in a certain kind
of chain reaction. So suddenly, people's
sense of I'm so solid and my possessions are solid,
and my land, and my nation, and everything is
nothing is solid. Everything is fluid. It's like surfing in
California, life is. You can't pin it down or
you'll be trashed by a wave. And I think subtle impermanence
entered unconscious of the entire planet,
I really think so. A lot of people in
denial, of course, of what has entered
their unconscious. But I'm not saying everybody
is aware of that like that. But from that point on, who
has won any war anywhere? Has anybody? People always say about
the Dalai Lama, well, he's so cute and nice. That's why I have written the
recent several books about him, including this one. He's so nice and sweet. I love to see him. Hear about the Dharma. It's really great. But his political
thing, it's impractical. Nonviolence? How can that work
internationally? And how can you get
free and save people from being pushed around by
authoritarian governments by nonviolence? That's really silly. Even nowadays, we have
the wonderful resistance that went to Washington
at inauguration. The pussy hat march, I love it. It's so great. The women showing
determination and getting out there, but happily. That march was happy. People were cheerful and joyful. And then, yet some
of them, there are some people on quote
"the left," who are antifa. They wanted to break some
windows and throw some rocks. And they want to counter
violence with violence. That's really stupid. In fact, the FBI used to send
people, in '68 in the riots-- Herbert Hoover used to
send agent provocateur, the oppressive force, will
send a violent protester in a nonviolent
situation to discredit the protesters and
the resistance, the democratic resistance. So for the resisting people
who want sanity in the country and in the government
and lack of overcoming the injustices and
the inequality, for them to do violence, is
just going to get discredited. So the point is now
the people in the world realize that war is useless. They don't want it. They want daycare centers. They want education. They don't want
mass incarceration. They want education. In South Carolina, they don't
have many schools and colleges and so forth. And they have bad schools
for the black population. And they have tons of prisons. And they rush into
high school classes and try to plant some pot
or something on somebody, or some crack, and then
haul them into prison, so they won't be able to vote. It's just an attempt
to re-establish racist, Jim Crow and so forth. And they have done it
successfully, seemingly. But nobody really wants this. The mass of the
people don't want it. But the minorities
are hyperactive because they're not happy. And they're blaming
their unhappiness on the wrong causes. And of course, the people who
are causing the unhappiness, certain oligarch
types, purposely do that to divide the people
who they are oppressing. That's a standard strategy. So then I get really upset-- to get back on message-- I get really upset. Oh no, he's invading Iraq. It's all going wrong. It's terrible. We're not going to have
a century of peace. And the Dalai Lama
reminds me that, yes, the leadership is all
crazed still, Putin, Trump, whatever, whoever you have. But the people don't want it. It's just they don't do
what the people want. And we now are like that
in supposedly the bastion of democracy. 70% of the people
want Medicare for all. But they, oh, that's impossible. Oh no, we can't do that. The owners and their
contributors say no. They're not going to do what
their constituents want. That's a definition of
non-democracy, right? But the masses of
people are there. And we will prevail the
Dalai Lama reminds me. So he cheers me up. So I don't get despaired. If you think that it will
never work, you'll despaired. And that also is one of
the causes of the problem. How many people voted
in the last election? This one that has
gone so badly awry. How many people voted? Less than 70, right? I think 62 or something, was it? Is it 460? And of those,
hundreds of thousands were disqualified by
interstate crosscheck, by various mechanisms within
the 30 Republican states where you have Republican secretaries
of state who count the votes. As Stalin famously said, it
isn't just a matter of how many and who votes and what they
vote for, it's who counts them. He was quite aware of that
because he was counting them. And he somehow kept
winning in spite of sending half the intelligent
people to the Gulag. So he cheers you up. So this book is to cheer you up. I'm sorry, if I've made
you gloomy by talking about the mess, I Apologize
because the whole point is to be cheered up. You have to face it. You have to resist it joyfully. You joyfully resist. You will succeed. You happily resist. You will succeed. I gave talks at
Occupy Wall Street. I gave a couple of talks. And they liked it. And they were going like this. And I was explaining
to them that actually down there with their
drum circle and this and that-- well, they weren't
very well-fed and so forth. And they were a little
bit cold at night and they were sleeping in
garbage bags and things. But that's like camping out. But the people upstairs
in the comfortable rooms in the leather chairs
who were scared of them, and also scared of the
market going this way, and lose a billion
dollars in three minutes and whatever, those people
were just as stressed out, if not more so. And they shouldn't hate them. The people they were protesting
against, they shouldn't-- we've had-- 18th, 19th century,
early 20th century, we had a lot of violent revolution. And always the
violent revolution turns out that the people who
get to the top by violence are then more oppressive than
the previous ones who maybe were born into being on the top
and learned a little noblesse oblige, maybe, some,
not all of them. I'm not saying that. But it gets worse and worse,
in other words, by violence, as Buddha, Jesus, [INAUDIBLE],,
Confucius, everybody has said that for thousands of years. And Socrates said so. [INAUDIBLE] And we're still not listening. But the people ought to listen. Nobody here wants
a war with anybody. Nobody at Google, I'm
sure, wants a war. And we are a majority of people. We don't want a war. They can get in and
they can do fake news and they can get
some Russian hacker to put some news
about this and that, Hillary Clinton is
eating human flesh, or god knows what
they wrote out there. But ultimately,
we'll clean that up. That won't happen. And we'll have this thing. So here what we see
is this young boy, who was a peasant's
son, right in the border between Mongolians, Tibetans,
and Chinese, with some Turks also, some Muslim
Turks in there too, a really pluralistic fringe
area of northeast Tibet, or northwest China, how
China would call it. And he's born right
there, which was perfect because his predecessor, in
previous incarnation, the 13th Dalai Lama, had visited
Mongolia and Beijing when the British invaded between
1904 and 1908 and 1909. And he realized that's a
frontier, Tibet's frontier with the other Asian people. And that's the first Dalai Lama
who met a lot of foreigners and began to realize about
the modern nations system. And also, the industrial
militarism being a great danger to his country. And also, the fact that Buddhism
was not everybody's world view. And so, he began the process
that then this present Dalai Lama has done, where
he has become-- he's made this
teaching of world peace through inner peace,
which is his slogan. And his common human
religion of kindness is another one of his slogans. And those are ancient
Buddhist views. Some Western
religion scholars say Buddhism was the first
missionary religion because Buddhism spread in many,
many cultures and countries. India itself was many countries. It was never one country. It was subcontinent with
many languages and things. And then, it spread
all over Asia. And it went and leaked
to the west Asia also through Iran and so on. Manichaeism, which was a
version of Christianity, they considered Buddha
one of their ancestors not just Jesus-- Buddha Zoroaster and Jesus
with him, and Manichaeins. And that had an influence
even on Christianity. So it had-- it spread a lot. So they say it's
missionary, but it wasn't missionary in
the sense that it never had a crusade forcing people
to become Buddhists by force. It never did that. They've had wars. And they've been bad Buddhists. But they never did
it for Buddhism. They just did it for-- people did it not
being Buddhist, which is a difference,
which is a little bit of on the plus side. And basically, Buddhism
always moved with commerce, with merchants. Because it wasn't into
the military thing. It was into trade
and people engaging. Buddha himself was a traitor
to the military class, which he should have
been a conqueror in. And he favored the
merchant class, actually. His main supporters
were merchants because shifting the
acquisition of wealth from military conquest
to merchant trade is a huge step
forward in history. Because the great thing about
the preference for merchants is you have your customer there. You try to make a good deal. Then you come back the
next time and they bring up something else
you can trade for. And wealth is generally
being created at both ends. And then there's a little
negotiating that goes on. The problem with
the military one is you kill your customer
right away and take everything. And then, there's nothing
to trade with the next time just whatever you can do. And that's short term. It's a bit too short term, the
piratical version of commerce. So Buddha did that. And tremendous wealth arose in
Asia in those days, therefore. And that's why
the Europeans were so bent on conquering
Asia, actually, if you know the history. And that's why also
they succeeded. Chinese invented
gunpowder, but they did not use it in warfare until they
were invaded by people who did. But they invented it. They invented the compass. They had ships that
were 10 times bigger than Columbus' ships. And they went to the
New World and to Africa. And they brought
elephants and things back. And those were
trans-people actually who did that, interestingly. The ones who made those
ships were eunuchs. They were kind of
trans, but there were a large bunch of them. And they were more
creative and intelligent than the regular Mandarins. And then, their
program was scrapped. But the point is they didn't
try to settle down or expand, like the Europeans,
and commit genocide on the native people, et cetera,
or enslave the African people. They didn't do that. So therefore, the
people who were conquered in centuries
of colonialism were the more civilized people. Some day people will
write history like that. That's what I think. They don't now. They think that European
were superior because they were the better bullies. But that's really-- we don't
think that on the street. If there's a mafia who comes
down and protection racket, we don't think they're superior. But we might be scared
of them and pay. But we don't think they're
superior or more civilized, not at all. So point is we've reached
a point in history where we've
outsmarted ourselves. We can't win wars. What we get is endless
terrorism because we obliterate whole countries if
we really fight them like Iraq. And then all you get
is chaos and terrorism. You don't get Iraq-- Cheney lied to us all. And said we would get oil. It would pay for the war. It would pay for the invasion. Remember? But then once Iraq had
a new Shiite government, they wouldn't give us
a decent oil contract. The French, the
Russians, the Chinese got all the good--
and the British and so forth, the Italians--
got all the good oil contracts, not us. Because they were angry
with us, naturally. We wrecked their entire
place, their whole country. So that's why war is
no longer possible. And Dalai Lama
reminds us of that. And therefore, it cheers us up. And it shows his
whole adventure. Nixon and Kissinger,
I don't shy away from. There they are. Oh, it's 45 minutes? OK, so anyway, it ends now. And one of the things I
wanted to show everyone, which I like to
show, is on page 265 I have the story of Xi Jinping. One of the roots of the
Dalai Lama-- my optimism-- Dalai Lama doesn't really put
so many eggs in this basket, but I do. Xi Jinping, you see him there. And here he is here. And this picture is the
19-year-old Dalai Lama in 1954-- or rather this is the present
Dalai Lama remembering being the 19-year-old Dalai Lama,
when he was a good friend-- one of his good friends
in the Chinese government elite at that time, Communist
elite, in the beginning of the Communist
PRC, was a man called Xi Zhongxun, who just happened
to be the father Xi Jinping. And Xi Jinping himself
was born in 1953. So he was one-year-old
at that time. And Xi Jinping's father
worked with Hu Yaobang-- for those who know anything
about Chinese history-- who is distinguished
in the Tibetan mind by having decided that
from 1951, or '50 when the first invasion began
by the Red Army, to 1980 they had made a
terrible mess in Tibet, the thought reform,
class struggle, attempt to occupy, cutting all
the trees in the eastern part, and so on. Never mind. I won't go into detail. But they made a terrible mess. And destroying
6,000 monasteries, killing lots of people. And so, Xi Zhongxun, and Hu
Yaobang, and Jiao Xiyang, who people have more
heard of, those three were trying to
make a nice policy. And that was a period of
relaxation of four or five years in the early
'80s in Tibet when they started rebuilding those
monasteries that tourists now visit. Because otherwise they were all
flattened before the Cultural Revolution. But then more so during
the Cultural Revolution. And then, he was
busted by Deng when Deng got older and
hardened about it and decided he
had to crush them. And he didn't want to-- especially he was frightened by
the Soviet Union melting down and losing because [INAUDIBLE]
in the Baltics and all this. So he said Tibet should
be like Lithuania-- Estonia, not like
Latvia and Lithuania. In other words, we
should be filled- we should settle
totally colonial settle Tibet, which has
not been possible anyway because of the altitude. But he wanted to do that. And so, that's Xi
Jinping's father. And that's Xi Jinping,
one-year-old baby. And he's getting a
blessing from Dalai Lama, but not officially because
those are the early time of the Communist thing. You can't ask for a
blessing, except from Mao. That's the only guy who
can give you a blessing. But still, he's getting
a blessing, of course. And he really-- they
were great friends. And the Dalai Lama
gave him a gold watch that somebody had
given Dalai Lama. And the family kept that
gold watch until today. So the Dalai Lama is
musing about that. Isn't that interesting. And now, he had no contact. He doesn't know him at all. But he said now that guy is the
president of the country who I want to talk to, now, him,
whose dad was my friend. And I want explain
to him that we really do want to be in a union. And we really want to
be of help to China. And we want to help rekindle
the spirituality that will make you happy. And please let us do that
and stop this nonsense. Those guys who are
doing the old crush the natives type of routine. And then, here, when he first
gets in 2012, he authorizes-- well, I don't know that
for a fact, but I assume-- this lady, who is the
head of the leader-- one of the deans of the
leadership school in Beijing. And her specialty is
the minorities policies. But she's a dean of that
school, important school. And she gets authorized to
say, this is silly, this thing. Dalai Lama is so bad. He's a wolf in sheep's clothing. He's the head of the snake. We have to destroy
him, blah, blah, blah. No one should talk to him. No one give him a visa. Oh, it's going to
ruin us if he goes and has a cackle with
a weird president. Never mind. I won't get into that. And we should take
him at his word. Tibet wants to be of help. They want to contribute. But they want their
local autonomy like it's promised in
our Chinese constitution. And they want to have
their Buddhism, which should be allowed. And why not? And then, they'll be happy. We talked to their Dalai Lama. He's our friend. And he'll be our
goodwill ambassador, which is my theory about them. So she makes that statement
like a trial balloon. Then the old guard people in
the Politburo and other places, oh, never are we going to-- they go back to the old thing. And this one, this a
guy called Xue Chin, who used to be head of
the United Front Work department at that time
dealing with minority. And he starts
shouting at the media. But she doesn't lose her job. She is not busted. She is not put in the
next cell to Liu Xiaobo. She still has her
job and she's fine. So that means she
had authorization. But then there's these two
question marks about him. So this is why this
is [INAUDIBLE].. I don't want to saddle
Dalai Lama with this. It's fantasy. But I expect it. And actually, I promise-- this is my last thing. I know we're going
to do questions. But I promised Xi Jinping,
like I promised Hu Jintao, but he didn't-- when my earlier
book "Why the Dalai Lama Matters"-- I promised, gave him 100%
guarantee, get his own Nobel Peace Prize should
he change this policy and start being nice not just
to the Tibetans, Tibetans, Uighurs, Mongolians,
Manchus, and another 52 different types of people
who are actually not Han Chinese people. They are other kinds
of cultures and people. To have a truly multinational,
multi-ethnic, pluralistic, wonderful, federal
Chinese union, so I promised him the
Nobel Peace Prize. Like a EU of Asia, imagine that. What a power that would be. And then, Taiwan is solved. Hong Kong, they are all
happy to be in union. One country, many systems. No problem. What is this everybody has-- I don't know if
you guys know this. You don't know that
in Google probably if you haven't been to Tibet. In Tibet, which is 1,500
miles west of Beijing, they have to be on Beijing time. So at certain times
of the year, the sun doesn't come up till 10:00 AM. It's ridiculous. They won't allow
time zones because it might be out of control. Everybody's not
on the same time. That's the guys in Beijing. That's really silly. Don't you think? It's like we'd have to
be in California here you'd have to be on
Washington, DC time. So it would be really weird. It wouldn't work out. So anyway, but it ends-- then
after that, it's a sad scene. Tibet is still in this
lockdown situation. So then we have
an epilogue where it shows the Dalai Lama
fulfilling his life's mission of promoting basic
kindness and human values worldwide, of getting
the world religions-- and he includes secular
humanism and materialism. He's much more polite than
I am about materialists. Secular humanism consider
it like a world religion. Scientism we call it
in religious studies. And so, we have Carl Sagan
and David Bohm there. We should have had Einstein,
but we couldn't remember. He's not alive now. Sagan isn't either, but
the Dalai Lama knew him. And they were all friends. And we won't have
any religious wars, like the one that people
think is happening. And actually, Buddhists
badly are doing in Burma. I'm so sorry. That's a disgrace. And we don't defend it and
rationalize it in any way. And this is Tibet as a garden
of the medicine Buddha. That blue Buddha,
he's blue because he's looking out at human sickness
and it makes him blue. And he wants to heal it all. And he has-- he's
holding a healing plant. And he knows that the
plant world has a healing-- plants want to heal us. They take all our
nasty carbon dioxide and they give us back
oxygen. They really like us, the plants. They to talk to us and heal us. They're very important. And then here is
his vision of Tibet when China wakes up to the
asset that Tibet really is, the global asset
that it really is. Not just for some
uranium under the soil, not just for bottling its water
or cutting down all its trees, or making a desert
out of its steppe by grazing the wrong
kind of animals on it. Yaks will never make a desert. That's why Tibetans
with their yaks are the right people
to be out there. But they are now shut
up by the Chinese. They're not out there
with their yaks. The wrong animals are
there making a desert. A yak never bites the grass. The yak doesn't graze
in agricultural lingo, terminology. A yak browses, like a bookstore. They browse. They lick the grass
and don't disturb the root of delicate
high altitude steppe. So this is Switzerland
of Asia, in other words, China's gem of a healing park. And the top of--
roof of the world, headwaters of all the rivers of
Asia, the water tower of Asia, the great glacier of
Tibet, the third pole, all this kind of thing. And that's medicine
Buddha in the middle. And everybody's coming from
everywhere to have a vacation, and to get healthy, and to go
to a hot spring, and to have herbal medicine, and to
hang out with the yaks. It's really a nice vision. And he's inviting
everybody there. And this is-- of course,
if China was really smart and they wanted to have
some black accounts, a few of the people, they
could have a Switzerland there. They could start
a banking system and write some
good privacy laws. And they'd be in great shape. But anyway, never mind. That's it. Any questions? Because we're
getting to the end. We have a few minutes
for questions. Thank you. SPEAKER 3: So one of the
terms used for the Dalai Lama is kundun, or the presence-- ROBERT THURMAN: Kundun
means the presence. Right, that's an honorific term. SPEAKER 3: I've always
found that mysterious. I was wondering if you
could unpack that a bit. ROBERT THURMAN: Well,
that's the nature of-- well, this relates
to an enlightenment. What is enlightenment? Westerners wrongly think
that enlightenment-- but I stick to the term. I don't so much like awakening,
but it's not wrong either. But I like enlightenment. But the thing
enlightenment means that some probably usually
male guy big light bulb goes off in his head. And then he walks around
acting holy and lights flow out of his head. And everybody goes, oh,
[INAUDIBLE],, yes, you need a Cadillac. I got one for you,
a Rolls Royce even. That's ridiculous
business, authority thing. Enlightenment
actually is defined as someone who realizes
selflessness as a reality check, out of a reality check. In other words, it doesn't
mean they don't exist. Selflessness means that you
are relational-- your self is a relational construct,
which you are constantly either improving or
it's deteriorating if you watch too many
commercials and too much CNN. CNN creates your fear
and anger and despair. And the commercials create
your greed and dissatisfaction. So if you watch
too much of that, your self deteriorates
and becomes more frustrated and discontent. If you watch the Dalai Lama,
if you study, if you meditate, if you think about
peace and love, and Google do no evil
looking through the two O's of the Google, then you get
better and better all the time. So selflessness means there's no
fixed, rigid identity in there. And when you realize
that, then you become interactively
more selfless, meaning loving
and compassionate. That's how enlightenment
is defined. So you might not be
glowing with light because you might be out there
healing someone, or helping them, or making something
that helps them, or even doing
business and really making your customer
happy as business is supposed to be doing,
not just grabbing stuff from your customer. But making them happy
by doing them a service. So the presence, therefore,
comes from the fact that the Dalai Lama is
perceived by people who meet him as having a presence
where when you meet you feel enfolded in a
friendly, loving presence, like a child feels when
they meet their mom. Or a beloved feels when
they meet their beloved, who hopefully loves them. Sometimes that
happens for a while. Although, don't get me
wrong, 50th anniversary we had this summer, me and my wife. So we've hung in there. And she's a saint. I'm just lucky. And so point is the
presence means this is a presence where you become-- you feel like you're in
a positive field, a field of calm, a field of finding
your own inner well-being, which is your inner
happiness-- not just pleasure, but inner happiness. And you feel that the
world is not against you. And you feel someone
who is for you and who is interested in you. My wife once-- one guy once
asked me at a luncheon-- wealthy guy who was
a guru collector-- he said, you've known the
Dalai Lama a long time. Have you ever seen
him do a miracle? He got all excited. And I didn't know
what to say because I have seen a few unusual
things, but you're not supposed to really talk about it. So I'm hemming and hawing. And my wife says,
oh yeah, many times. And I go, what? What is she going to say? I'm like, oh no. And so then, he's leaning
forward in his chair. And she says, I've seen him
in many occasions, very busy, a lot of people around,
everybody wants a piece of him. He's on a tour, or a
teaching, or whatever, and I have never seen him
ever in any of those times fail to give his total
concentration and attention to whomever he was sitting with. And that's a miracle, she says. And the guy goes, oh. He didn't understand. I was really pleased
and I was educated by my final girl, who is she. And that's what-- that's why
the call the presence because in their presence
you feel cheered up. And so what we've tried to do-- thank you for that question. So this book is the
presence of the Dalai Lama. And it makes it more real
that we show the difficulties that he's had not just with the
Chinese, but people like Nixon, with the Brits-- the Brexit people. We're going to simply
secede from the world. Give me a break. Yet he has maintains himself
as our presence-- the presence. And everybody feels
it, but they don't-- even they don't know what it is. But here then, they'll
know what it is. And they will also
realize, which is really key for
our country now, that despair is not an option. And non-engagement, and not
voting, and not participating, and not keeping informed,
and not calling them out is not an option. Also, not doing violence
is not an option either. But being really
actively engaged in making this wonderful
gift of democracy that we have been given, that
has now crumbled and is really finished actually temporarily. It's now money-ocracy. There's no question. It's plutocracy. It's oligarchy. We can still do it. We have a system where
we can still do it. If 80% or 85% engage
fully, as Michael Moore-- Michael Moore is
going to run for-- I don't know. Fashion consultant, I think. I'm not sure. Dogcatcher or president
or senator, but everybody has to run for everything
in a friendly, joyful way, happily, not angrily
and not upset. And that's the
message we all need. And this book will help you. So get the book. You'll enjoy it. Thank you very much.
