An Open Letter to The Dalai Lama

Nearly four years ago, you sent a message of gratitude and encouragement to the people of Shandaken and Phoenicia for protecting our natural environment. That message of caring, of your interest in the future of our mountains and valleys, was conveyed through this newspaper and was widely appreciated. On behalf of all of us we welcome you back, on the first of what we hope will be many teaching visits to the Menla Mountain Retreat and to our town.
Throughout our lives most of us have known of you and the struggles of the Tibetan people, oppressed in their own land or in exile. This is something we understand deeply from within our own history and traditions. Like people everywhere, we’ve been moved by the compassion you’ve voiced, even toward those who’ve waged cultural genocide against your people. In demonstrating such empathy and in your lifelong work in conflict resolution, human rights, and on behalf of our global environment, you have shown by example that moral authority is real, is earned, and has the power to change our world.
In these years since you first reached out to Shandaken, Tibet House’s teaching center in the Pantherkill valley has become an integral part of our community, joining Zen Mountain Monastery in Mt. Tremper and Karma Triyana Dharmachakra (KTD) in Woodstock as global centers of their teaching lineages. Amongst many other things our community is now, it is also one of the major centers of spiritual practice and religious learning in the world. Like Lindisfarne in Ireland or Mt. Athos in Greece, such places have a long history of providing a beacon of light and hope that’s endured through our civilization’s darkest times.
Perhaps such times are coming again, perhaps not. Or perhaps on the other side of them, as you’ve suggested, is a future too different from the present for us to easily visualize. Regardless, we think it fitting that our well-protected mountains are now home to such an abundance of teaching and learning. Like the wildlife or the quiet of our unbroken forests, it’s part of what makes this the sacred land most every one of us knows it to be.
A few of us, to be sure, have difficulty fully accepting the positive dimension of this abundance. Partly perhaps, it’s because some people’s sense of place or their relationship to the land reflects personal interests more focused on the mundane. Others may be troubled that some traditions new to these mountains are unfamiliar. And a few perhaps, have difficulty hearing the central message of Buddhism: that life - as we all can see - is suffering, but the end of suffering is within our own hearts. Our purpose in life is to search there for the attainment of our own happiness, through the fullest possible awareness of ourselves and the world around us.
The clarity of this message, for those who haven’t considered it of late, is often strikingly simple and forthright. And sometimes people are surprised that it neither conflicts with nor excludes other ways of understanding ourselves and our role here, nor what our own religious traditions have taught us.
As a newspaper we have two jobs: to report what’s happening and what’s not as best we can, and to share with our readers what we see as important about those things. That’s what we do on this editorial page, and it isn’t always about governance or politics. Sometimes it’s literally about the quality of life, which certainly seems to reflect the quality of our thoughts and insights. More than anything and as much as our actions, that’s what defines any community. When a newspaper fails to engage that, if it fails to ask its readers to reflect on those things and act accordingly, then it fails to serve those it intends to.
We believe in our neighbors, our readers, the friends we know already and those we don’t. And we believe our community of belief here is strong enough and secure enough to accept with an open heart the wisdom that joins us, whatever color its robes.
We are not always perfect neighbors here in these mountains. We struggle even amongst ourselves to define what is just and fair to all, we project onto others what we dislike in ourselves and suffer the embarrassments all people do, when we realize we’re doing the right thing for the wrong reason or the wrong thing for the right one. Still, with the grace and forgiveness of those who love us, we try, and in that trying and sometimes despite ourselves, we grow in wisdom and acceptance and humor.
So having said all this, we make the offer to you again: Welcome to the open heart of the Catskill High Peaks. Join us. Share what we have to share: our floods and our sorrows, our music and our children and our joy, the moon rising over Tremper or High Point Mountain, and the clear flowing waters entrusted to our watchfulness.
You have told us that with your passing the world will be entering an age very different than the one we’re living through. We have no knowledge of what will be, only the aspiration to help make the sacred dimension of our lives and our time here as central to our communal life as it is to our private ones. We hope your time amongst us will be gratifying, and that what we still need to learn to live together in harmony, you’ll help us learn.
BP