Excerpt
SUMMARY: The Dalai Lama had long kept up a demanding schedule, crossing the globe for speaking engagements until doctors recently told him to slow down. Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro sits down with the 80-year-old spiritual leader to discuss his hopes for spreading peace and winning autonomy for Tibet, as well as why he says he’s not sure there’s a need for a next Dalai Lama.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): As Pope Francis visited the East Coast a few weeks back, another world religious figure, the Dalai Lama, was in Minnesota, where doctors at the Mayo Clinic advised him to cut short his own tour of the U.S.
Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro recently sat down with the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism at his exile home in India.
A version of this story aired on the PBS program “Religion & Ethics Newsweekly.”
FRED DE SAM LAZARO (NewsHour): Until doctors recently told him to slow down, the 80-year-old Dalai Lama had kept a breathless pace. In just a few weeks last summer, he was at a music festival in England, a presidential library in Houston, and a sold-out stadium near Los Angeles.
There is perhaps no world figure today with a more diverse face of fans.
Why are you so popular globally? Why are you a rock star?
DALAI LAMA: I don’t know. I never pay attention about that, why people praise me, why, why.
CROWD (singing): Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: And he said he’s not concerned about another matter that is many minds, who will succeed him, or, as he’s increasingly said in recent years, whether anyone will.
DALAI LAMA: Many people showing interest about the institution of Dalai Lama. For me, not much interest.
(LAUGHTER)
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: That’s significant. Like the familiar laugh, his role as Dalai Lama — the world’s best known Buddhist leader — has been central to who he is, the reincarnation of Dalai Lamas going back six centuries, leader of a fabled once-upon-a-time country high in the Himalayas.
He fled with U.S. help to India in 1959 after a failed uprising against Tibet’s annexation by Mao Zedong’s revolutionary People’s Republic of China.
Today, at his home base in Dharamsala, India, he still keeps a full schedule. It begins early each morning as a diverse crowd lines up for a chance to meet him.
Many are from the tens of thousands of Tibetans who followed him and settled in India, where the Dalai Lama set up a secular Tibetan government in exile and later took on a mostly ceremonial role.
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