Dalai Lama | Bob Schwartz

May 17, 2026

Now that you’ve found your mind what are you going to do with it?

Mindfulness is a growing movement and a good one. It continues to help many to improve themselves and their lives, reducing stress, enabling calm, increasing focus, and developing an overall sense of well-being. Much better than mindlessness.

Finding your mind is an essential step. But once you are there, what are you going to do? Different religious, spiritual, philosophical and psychological traditions offer different recommendations, some of which are expressly related to mind and mindfulness. Buddhism is one of the traditions that puts your mind at the absolute center. Once you have found your mind, the next step is to transform it for the better.

The Dalai Lama has frequently taught about Eight Verses for Training the Mind, a Tibetan Buddhist text by Geshe Langri Tangpa (1054-1123). The following is from The Dalai Lama’s Book of Transformation:

GENERATING THE MIND FOR ENLIGHTENMENT

For those who admire the spiritual ideals of the Eight Verses on Transforming the Mind it is helpful to recite the following verses for generating the mind for enlightenment. Practicing Buddhists should recite the verses and reflect upon the meaning of the words, while trying to enhance their altruism and compassion. Those of you who are practitioners of other religious traditions can draw from your own spiritual teachings, and try to commit yourselves to cultivating altruistic thoughts in pursuit of the altruistic ideal.

With a wish to free all beings
I shall always go for refuge
to the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha
until I reach full enlightenment.
Enthused by wisdom and compassion,
today in the Buddha’s presence
I generate the Mind for Full Awakening
for the benefit of all sentient beings.

As long as space endures,
as long as sentient beings remain,
until then, may I too remain
and dispel the miseries of the world.

In conclusion, those who, like myself, consider themselves to be followers of Buddha, should practice as much as we can. To followers of other religious traditions, I would like to say, ‘Please practice your own religion seriously and sincerely.’ And to non-believers, I request you to try to be warm-hearted. I ask this of you because these mental attitudes actually bring us happiness. As I have mentioned before, taking care of others actually benefits you.

Continuing on this path, you will also begin to appreciate the value of human life, how precious it is, and the fact that as human beings we are capable of reflecting on these questions and following a spiritual practice. Then you will really appreciate a point emphasized again and again by many great Tibetan masters: that we should not waste the opportunity offered to us in this life, because human life is so precious and so difficult to achieve. As life is valuable it is important to do something meaningful with it right now, since, by its very nature, it is also transient. This shows how you can bring all the elements of the various spiritual practices together so that they have a cumulative effect on your daily practice.

The Dalai Lama’s Book of Transformation

July 6, 2025

We are passersby (says Jesus) and tourists (says the Dalai Lama)

Whenever we can connect the Dalai Lama and Jesus, we know we are in the right place.

The Gospel of Thomas, sometimes called the Fifth Gospel, is a collection of sayings of Jesus that parallel and supplement the canonical gospels.

It contains this short and simple direction:

Be passersby

This enigmatic saying for me has the depth of any words in scripture.

Today I came across related wisdom from the Dalai Lama, who makes the same point. Just as Jesus is not offering a limited Christian perspective, the Dalai Lama is not offering a limited Buddhist perspective. It is a fact of human life.

Here the Dalai Lama comments on verses from Shantideva’s The Way of the Bodhisattva.

We are all here on this planet, as it were, as tourists. None of us can live here forever. The longest we might live is a hundred years. So while we are here we should try to have a good heart and to make something positive and useful of our lives. Whether we live just a few years or a whole century, it would be truly regrettable and sad if we were to spend that time aggravating the problems that afflict other people, animals, and the environment. The most important thing is to be a good human being.

Dalai Lama, For the Benefit of All Beings: A Commentary on The Way of the Bodhisattva

Passersby. Tourists. Together.

Note: By coincidence—or is it?—this was created spontaneously today on the 90th birthday of the Dalai Lama.

March 10, 2017

The Pope and the Dalai Lama: How Did We Get So Lucky?

In a newly published interview with Die Zeit, Pope Francis talks about many matters. Including his own faith. Asked about whether he ever doubts the existence of God, he said:

“I too know moments of emptiness.”

The current Pope shows us the honesty, humility, humor, wisdom and spirit we would like to see in all our traditions and in all our leaders—and in ourselves. The same can be said about the current Dalai Lama.

You don’t have to be a Roman Catholic or a Tibetan Buddhist to be inspired by these people. And just people they are, according to them, as the Pope reminds us in the same interview:

“I am a sinner and I am fallible. When I am idealized, I feel attacked.”

Pope Francis is 80. The Dalai Lama is 81. They will not live and serve forever, as much as we would be benefited by that gift. It is possible that both will be succeeded by their equal, but we can’t know that.

So let’s enjoy them and be inspired by them while they are here, wondering what we did to deserve this.

December 16, 2013

Is Pope Francis the Leader of the World?

Pope Francis
The Dalai Lama is the most famous Buddhist in the world. His message is powerful, positive and universal. Even with the huge platform he has, his brand of Tibetan Buddhism is a bit exotic for many people, so still somewhat limited. He is also one of the coolest people on the planet. So as much as a basic Buddhist message would be great for the world at large to take to heart, it isn’t about to happen.

Pope Francis is also an outsized moral leader. He is the head of a church with more than a billion followers. And while there are hundreds of millions of Protestant Christians who question whether that church and its Pope can claim Christian legitimacy—and who find the Catholic Church plenty exotic too—you can’t deny the size and scope of the Pope’s Christian community. And if the Dalai Lama is cool, so is Pope Francis; he was once a bar bouncer, which is something the Dalai Lama can never claim.

The biggest argument for the supreme leadership role of Pope Francis is that he is exactly the right person for the right time, acting and speaking on a very big stage. Two of the major characteristics of the moment are that materialism seems to be failing or failing us and that our changing social universe requires some tricky balance between the old and the new, the absolute and the relative.

Pope Francis gets this and sells this from the very foundations of his faith. He has just had to deny that his is a not a Marxist, but proceeded in the same breath to appreciate the work of those who sincerely act in the name of Marxist ideals. It is not just that he seems to have a vision that synthesizes the original Christian communities with the complicated world two millennia later. He sees in the very institution he is charged with running the embodiment of the problems. If the institutional church, the church membership and the world have lost their way, it is not his job to order them around. Instead he just points to a playbook that is to be taken seriously, not selectively and strategically, and advises to live by and as its example. It’s a choice, one he has made, one he hopes others, from the church hierarchy on out, will make.

Whether the Catholic Church straightens out its affairs, whether disaffected Catholics return, whether new Catholics arrive, whether we are Catholic or Protestant or Jewish or Buddhist is beside the point and beside the Pope’s point. It is about being better and getting better. Pope Francis is not the first to say that, not even the first Pope to say it. But his walking the walk in the world of 2013 is different. These are the times that try people’s souls. We seem to have a world leader willing to make that reality both an ancient and modern quest, a quest that may, in the real and not theological sense, save us all.

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