DALAI LAMA IN OREGON : Will China retaliate?

His Holiness the fourteenth Dalai Lama, the man considered to be the manifestation of Chenrezig, the Boddhisatva of Compassion, the leader of millions of Buddhists, and the head of state of a state that is and isn't a state, exactly, has the sloping shoulders of a halfback and the headlong bowlegged shamble of a bear. His gaze is intense and his crewcut is so short that you want to rub his head as soon as you see him up close, although this is frowned upon by tradition and the very tall State Department agents who hover near him at all times, the Dalai Lama being the head of a state and all.

The Dalai Lama used to be a boy named Lhamo Dhondup, from the little town of Roaring Tiger in Tibet, but when he was two years old he was "recognized as the reincarnation of his predecessor," as the Tibetans say carefully, and when he was four years old he assumed the throne of temporal and religious power in his nation. A few years later his nation was gone, eaten by its immense and hungry neighbor, and the boy who used to be Lhamo Dhondup fled across the mountains to India. Ever since he has been on the road, talking and teaching.

Recently his travels brought him to Oregon, where he sat on a cushion at the visitors' end of the basketball court at a Catholic university and addressed an audience of people of every religious stripe imaginable, including a Zoroastrian couple, a gaggle of rabbis, two long rows of priests, an abbot, a dozen nuns, and a man who said he was the head lama of his own sect, which did not yet have any other members, though he had hopes.

Before his holiness entered the arena proper he was ushered into a holding room at the university, a room where its athletic heroes are enshrined with mammoth wall plaques. "Who are these famous people?" he asked. "Football stars, mostly," he was told. "Ah, America," said his holiness.

"Too much ideas and ambition make you mad," he said to the president of the Catholic university. "That's why a university with a spiritual context is a very good thing. A warm heart is more important than anything, isn't that so?"

"I couldn't agree more," said the president of the Catholic university.

Once inside the basketball arena his holiness bowed to all in sight and they bowed back, and the crowd stood silent and reverential for a long moment. The absolute silence of thousands of people is a stunning thing. Then he mounted a little platform and folded himself onto his cushion and began to rock back and forth gently for two hours, during which time he talked pretty much continuously, in English for a while and then for a long time in Tibetan, his patient and gentle-voiced translator trying to keep up with his holiness's thought, which was quicksilver and ranged far afield.

"Whenever I give a large teaching, I always make clear that it is safer to follow your own traditions, rather than change to another tradition," he said. "There's less confusion. Here in the West I do not think it advisable to follow Buddhism. Changing religions is not like changing professions. Excitement lessens over the years, and soon you are not excited, and then where are you? Homeless inside yourself.

"I will switch to Tibetan now, thank you. Sometimes when I speak in English, not only do I confuse you, but I have no idea what I am saying.

"Love and compassion are common to all faith traditions. Compassion for all sentient beings made by your creator, this is integral to Christianity. Christians strive to fulfill the wishes of your creator, and the primary wish of your creator is love, is that not so? The Buddha and the Christ were similar men: ascetics, men used to hardship and not to luxury, men of perseverance and effort, extraordinary teachers. And indeed such hardship and ascetic practice are common to all the great spiritual teachers of the world. Yet now we seem to believe that our intellectual progress has advanced us past the great teachers of the past; we seem to believe we are superior to the simple teachers of long ago. But this is a mistake on our part."

At this point a small girl ran up to one of the State Department agents, who bent down from her great height to listen, and then the agent smiled and gently shook her head no and the girl ran back to her seat. The agent said later that the girl had asked if she could speak to the lama alone now.

His holiness had a great many other things to say and he said them at great length, even devoting nearly an hour to explicating the single line, "all things arise from their causes," which seemed painfully clear to a number of people in the audience before his holiness was quite done worrying it to death, but finally the Dalai Lama's two allotted hours in the gym drew to a close and so did his peroration.

"All things are transient," concluded his holiness suddenly, and there came a great silence. He rocked back and forth on his cushion. "Things change moment to moment, things are impermanent. We worry over the past, we anticipate the future, and we barely perceive a shred of the passing moment. But all of us of every faith tradition possess the possibility of pure light, is that not so? The question of who we are is very much open."

Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, and the author most recently of Credo (Saint Mary's Press).