Background
Gyatso, Tenzin was born in July 1935 in Taktser, Tibet.
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Tenzin Gyatso
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Education
Educated as a Buddhist monk from the age of five. Trained through the traditional scholastic Tibetan education system to compete for the highest qualification of geshe: succeeded in 1959 after examination through rigorous and lengthy public debates.
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Tenzin Gyatso was born into a relatively poor family on the northeastern borders of the Tibetan world. At the age of four, he was recognized as the reincarnation of the previous Dalai Lama. Since the seventeenth-century the Dalai Lamas have been heads of the Tibetan state as well as monks and abbots of their own monastery: they are also commonly spoken of as emanations of or identical wuh the personification of pure compassion, a divine figure called in Tibetan Chenrezik. To date, the Dalai Lama’s main contribution has been to express ideas from a sophisticated tradition in a way which is accessible to the modern West, and to show in his own personality ■to example of someone who is truly trying to live by that tradition. The final goal is one of buddhahood for all sentient beings, the perfection °f wisdom and compassion, the cessation of all suflering. Suffering is the result of not seeing things the way they really are. Wisdom is the opposite of that ignorance. The fundamental mode of ignorance lies in seeing things as having "iherertt existent i.e. existing intrinsically, from their own side. Things are actually only the mtersection points of causal forces, particularly conceptual reification. All things are relative, they are empty of inherent existence. This is the ultimate truth about all things. Things themselves are conventional constructs. Emptiness is the mere absence of inherent, intrinsic, existence and applies to absolutely everything, including itself. There is no inherent absolute reality. Emptiness certainly does not entail complete nonexistence, however. Seeing things as having inherent existence leads to expectations of permanence, etc., which are constantly frustrated. Seeing things the way they really are leads to a letting-go which enhances altruism. Compassionate kindness is also a rational imperative. Central to all this is critical reasoning. The Dalai Lama stresses a spiritual perspective where reasoning has pride of place. This partly explains his interest in scientific research. He has recently offered some counterarguments to a literal identification of consciousness states with brain processes. He has stated that if science shows for certain a traditional Buddhist teaching to be false, then Buddhists should no longer hold it, and he has applied this to aspects of the traditional Buddhist cosmology. On the other hand he has also drawn a distinction between scientific investigation finding something to be false, and scientific investigation not finding something. In the last analysis the Dalai Lama’s concern is the very real practical need to improve life: 'There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness’.
