The Dalai Lama Comes to Kaohsiung

Early this week, the Dalai Lama arrived in Taiwan to address the devastation of Typhoon Morakot a few weeks ago. A lot of international news sources have been running the story since China is understandably pissed that the Taiwanese government allowed him a visa.

Although it was kept under wraps until the last minute, the Dalai Lama actually appeared in Kaohsiung on Tuesday morning and led an enormous prayer service in the Kaohsiung World Games Stadium, and Katie Beth and I managed to slip in just before the arena security starting turning people away to avoid fire code violation. From what I've heard, around 17,000 people were in attendance, though security cordoned off a few tiers of seating that were behind the impromptu stage, flanked by a pair of giant video screens. A tremendous percentage of the Taiwanese population identifies as Buddhist or Taoist, or even some nebulous combination of the two. We were in the back of the stadium, at the highest level, literally standing for the duration, but we were able to see close to four hundred Buddhist monks seated on the ground level, men and women both, all with shaved heads and differently styled robes.

When he finally came out, the Dalai Lama himself was very nonchalant about all the formality. He audibly laughed when some stage hands tried to move a small table out of his way and it promptly fell to pieces. At another point, when the camera cut from his translator back to him, the crowd suddenly realized he had just put on a huge red visor. As explanation he said, in English, "Um. . . very strong lights," while gesturing to the ceiling. The crowd found both of these events hysterical.

Since his speech was in Tibetan, Katie Beth provided commentary on his Chinese translation, and only a few points really stuck. He often returned to the point of connectedness, and stressed that everyone present should pray for the typhoon victims regardless of their race and regardless of their religion - there's no one unaffected by another person's suffering.

Afterward he led the crowd in a very long series of chants, he in Tibetan and everyone else in Chinese. I managed to sneak some recordings, if anyone can give me advice on how to post audio files on here. I also hope no angry Buddhists take offence, I just figured I wouldn't ever get the chance to record the Dalai Lama again.

If you're interested, the New York Times article is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/28/world/asia/28taiwan.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=taiwan&st=cse

And the Al Jazeera article, here:
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia-pacific/2009/09/20099135742336272.html