Dr. Alexander Berzin: Teaching Tours & Projects for HH the Dalai Lama

At the 1985 Kalachakra initiation that His Holiness conferred in Rikon Switzerland, where I was asked to give explanatory talks each day, I was approached by a Czech refugee. She told me that there were many people in Czechoslovakia who were interested in Buddhism but had no access to the teachings. Would I go and meet with them? Serkong Rinpoche had always gone to teach in remote places where no one else wanted to go teach – like traveling on yak to the Indo-Tibetan border in Spiti to teach Tibetan soldiers in the Indian army. Wanting to follow his example, I agreed to go, despite the potential dangers of being an American engaging in illegal “religious” activities behind the Iron Curtain. 

That initial trip a few months later was very successful and word went around other East European countries that I was willing to go there and teach underground. I was quickly invited and, the next year, I went to almost all these communist countries. It was always risky wherever I went. I remember having to cross the Czech-Polish border on foot and trust that the people who invited me would pick me up down the road. To avoid arousing suspicion, we would change the location of our meetings each day, and sometimes we would have beer bottles by our sides and pretend to be playing cards in case the police came to the door. 

The only place where I got into trouble was a few years later in Cuba. The food situation was very dire there at the time. At some of our meetings, they had only crackers and mayonnaise for dinner. After my second visit, when checking in at the airport to fly back to Canada (Americans were not allowed to go to Cuba and there were no flights from America), two frightening-looking, large policemen detained and interrogated me. One of the people who had attended our meetings had been an informant and had gotten rewarded with a larger ration of food. The policemen had the names of everyone who had come to our meetings and even a recording of one of the sessions. It was bad enough that what I was doing was illegal, but even worse that I was doing it as an American. After totally terrifying me and banning me from ever returning to Cuba, they escorted me to the plane just as it was about to take off. 

As soon as I landed in Montreal, I contacted the Private Office in Dharamsala and asked them to inform His Holiness and ask for his prayers that my students there would not get in trouble. Fortunately, no one got arrested. The next year, when I was in Mexico City, one of the Cubans who had been at my teachings walked into the Dharma center where I was teaching. It was very awkward since it was obvious that he had been the informant, but neither of us said anything. As an artist, he had been additionally rewarded by having been allowed to exhibit his work in Mexico. 

I returned to Dharamsala at the end my extensive 1987 East European tour and, one day, while reflecting on all my experiences when traveling, I got an idea. I remembered Serkong Rinpoche making first contact for His Holiness with Pope John Paul II and thought it might be helpful if I tried to do something similar. With my Harvard PhD, I could be invited to lecture in universities in the communist world and perhaps in other non-Western countries, like Latin America and Africa. In this way, I could make first contact for His Holiness with not only academics but perhaps also with religious and political leaders in these countries. As refugees, the Tibetans did not have proper passports, only Indian refugee travel documents. To get a visa for anywhere, they needed an invitation, and they knew no one yet in these countries. In addition, I knew that the Tibetans needed the support of these countries at the United Nations. 

Over the next years, I traveled extensively around the world forging contacts for His Holiness. I gave talks on a wide assortment of Buddhist topics and on Tibetan culture throughout the communist world, then throughout all of Latin America, the English-speaking countries of southern and eastern Africa, the Middle East and, after the breakup of the USSR, most of the former European and Central Asian Soviet republics – about seventy countries in all. During these tours, I also continued to give lectures at Dharma centers and occasionally at universities in the Western countries and Southeast Asia. Several wealthy patrons and institutions, having learned of what I was doing, offered the necessary financial support. 

I made all the arrangements for these tours myself, using the ABC book of plane schedules at the local travel agency in Dharamsala. This was long before computerized booking. I would usually buy a full-fare, round-trip plane ticket from Delhi to Santiago, Chile, that allowed flights with all airlines and unlimited stops, and I would add 15% extra mileage. The only caveat was that I could not stop at places where the price for the round-trip from Delhi to there was more expensive than from Delhi to Santiago. I would arrange the itinerary and book up to thirty stops. I would always make Prague my first stop and go to a travel agency while there to reissue the ticket, adding the places that I had been unable to include in the original booking. Since the ticket needed to be rewritten by hand, it was always too much work for the person in the agency to look up the fares from Delhi to each additional place and so they included all of them. In that way, I was always able to stop everywhere that I wanted. 

The longest lecture tour I made like this lasted for fifteen months, non-stop, usually going to two or three cities each week and almost always staying with local people in their homes. I developed great flexibility to adopt to the customs, climate and food in each place, ranging as widely as from Tasmania to Iceland, Siberia to Tahiti, Zimbabwe to Bolivia, and so on. Having a fixed meditation routine each morning, no matter where I was, gave me stability as I traveled at this dizzying pace. There was always a familiar head space to go to in my morning practice.

People whom I happened to meet on these travels and who, unbeknownst to me, had the right connections, offered to make the necessary arrangements for me to meet with the prominent spiritual leaders in their countries. In this way, I was able to make first contact for His Holiness with the head of the Eastern Orthodox Church, Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople. He lived in a palace on a small island off of Istanbul and had just assumed this high office. I was the first Buddhist he met. He was very informal and told me that shortly he was going to meet a Japanese Buddhist delegation. He asked what he could read about Buddhism to help him prepare, and I recommended one of His Holiness’s books. 

I went on to initiate a Buddhist-Muslim dialogue for His Holiness. Thinking of the shared nomadic background of the Buddhist and Muslim populations of Central Asia and the future development of this geopolitical region, I lectured and met with scholars at universities in not only Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, but also in Egypt, Jordan and Turkey. Students I met told me how they longed for knowledge of the outside world and, as a clear indication of that, over three hundred attended my lecture at Cairo University. It was quite ironic being from a Jewish background and teaching about Buddhism to a Muslim audience.   

I also met with religious leaders of native traditions in South Africa, Bolivia and Brazil. I met the traditional spiritual head of the Zulus in a hut in Bophuthatswana, one of the ten homelands for black South Africans during the apartheid period. He was a massive, regal-looking man who had been an artist. My host told me that a hoodlum gang had broken both his thumbs so he could no longer paint and had necklaced him with a tire filled with gasoline, ready to burn him to death. Incredibly, the kerosene failed to ignite, and he was able to escape. 

Sitting stiffly in an uncomfortable-looking iron chair when I met him, he told me of the Zulu myth that, in ancient times, travelers from outer space had visited and taught them the science of calendar-making. He wanted to know if the Tibetans knew anything about such things. I explained to him a similar account found in the Kalachakra teachings, as Serkong Rinpoche had once told me about. He was keen to pursue this topic further. 

Not all the meetings were fruitful. In La Paz, Bolivia, the Aymara Indian leader told me about their summer solstice celebration and wanted to invite His Holiness for it. But because the ritual required a llama placenta, Dharamsala diplomatically declined the invitation. Similarly, when the Candomblé priest I met in Rio de Janeiro told me of their practice of animal sacrifice, I did not even suggest a meeting.

After each tour, I briefed His Holiness and submitted detailed reports to his Private Office and Department of Information and International Affairs outlining the history, customs, religious beliefs and so on of each place I visited. For instance, at a possible meeting with the Zulu spiritual head, it would be considered impolite to look at him and for him to look at you. Traveling to all these places also gave me the opportunity to pursue my childhood aspiration to gain universal knowledge of people’s ways of thinking.

Eventually, His Holiness was able to visit many of these countries, and shortly thereafter, his representatives began to establish Offices of Tibet in these various regions. At present there are thirteen of these offices. Somewhat like embassies, they manage bilateral relations with the countries in their region as well as with the European Union and the United Nations. 

The interest in having a visit by the Dalai Lama increased greatly after he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. As a result, the new friends I had made around the world arranged meetings for me with ministers and other high government officials in their countries. Through these meetings, I was able to help arrange visits for His Holiness to Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Hungary, for all of which I served as liaison and translator. I also helped arrange his visits to the Baltic countries and South America, but did not accompany him to either. 

The most memorable event during all those trips was translating for His Holiness when he taught President Vaclav Havel basic meditation methods to help him and his staff deal with stress just one month after the fall of communism. With Havel and his staff dressed in sweat suits, they all sat on cushions on the floor, including His Holiness. During this visit, when His Holiness learned that the oldest synagogue in Europe was in Prague, he expressed great interest in visiting it. When we went there, the Saturday morning service was in progress. When His Holiness asked me to explain the service, I was extremely thankful for my Hebrew school training.

The country I visited the most frequently was the USSR and then, after its breakup, the Russian Federation. Starting in 1987 and ending with Covid in 2020, I visited once or twice each year. Although I quickly learned the Cyrillic script and many Russian words, I never actually learned the language. Many people, however, assume that I know Russian because of my Russian-sounding name and the fact that I edited the English translation from Russian of Nikolai Kuleshov’s Russia’s Tibet File: Unknown Pages in the History of Tibet’s Independence. I was able to do this by being inventive as I had learned in the Sinology research seminar at Harvard. When there was a passage that made questionable sense in English, there are enough English cognates in Russian that I was always able to find my place in the original. Then by using a Russian dictionary, I could identify when the translators had chosen the wrong translation when a word had several meanings. I used the same method for checking questionable Tibetan translations from Sanskrit.

In Leningrad in 1989, I gave the first public talk on Buddhism that was given in the USSR, and no one was arrested afterwards. Andrey Terentyev, the Russian Buddhist scholar and organizer of the event, described it as a major turning point in the story of Buddhism in the USSR. Word spread and, after that, Soviet Buddhists no longer felt it was dangerous to meet openly in groups. Various groups began to apply for official registration. Subsequently, in 1990, through Terentyev’s connections, the Moscow office of the Central Buddhist Board of Buddhists of the USSR hosted me to give public talks on Buddhism in the capital. Although the Board was under the surveillance of the KGB, they wanted to assert their independence. Again, there was no trouble. 

The Board also sent me with Terentyev to the three traditionally Buddhist republics in the USSR – Buryatia and Tuva in Siberia and Kalmykia by the Caspian Sea – and to Mongolia. It would give me the opportunity to learn about the present situation of Buddhism all these ragions – it had been mostly destroyed under Stalin – and to report back to His Holiness to assess what he could do to help with its revival. While in Tuva and Kalmykia, I delivered the first public lectures there on Buddhism since before the repression. 

The most extensive project I worked on in the USSR was with the Soviet Ministry of Health. It was to help organize and coordinate the use of Tibetan medicine to treat the nearly one million victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Natalie Lukyanova, the Director at the Center for Traditional Medicine at the Ministry, met with me during the 1990 visit and requested me to arrange help from the Tibetan Medical and Astro Institute in Dharamsala. No other system of medicine had worked until then. In the spirit of perestroika, she arranged for me to give a set of five open lectures on Tibetan medicine and Buddhism at the Ministry itself. 

A few months later, I visited with His Holiness’s personal physician, Dr. Tenzin Choedrak, to conduct a clinical trial on a group of patients. It was extremely successful. As the number of potential patients was so large, we would need to find sources for the herbal ingredients of the medicines in the Altai mountains of Siberia, build a factory to produce the medicines and start a medical school to train a sufficient number of doctors. Boris Yeltsin, now Chairman of the Supreme Soviet (the Parliament) of Russia, was behind the project and provided us with all the buildings and resources, while Lukyanova and I organized everything. Our doctors even treated the members of the Supreme Soviet, who were suffering from extreme stress at the rapidly changing political scene. 

Sadly, after the dissolution of the USSR at the end of 1991, the project had to be abandoned. The Chernobyl disaster had affected people in the Russian Federation, Ukraine and Belarus, but these three countries did not want to cooperate with each other. Each wanted their own project, and that was impossible. Despite this setback, this experience of organizing such a massive project gave me the training and confidence to organize the massive project of the Berzin Archives and Study Buddhism.     

[For more detail about these travels and this medical project, see Dr. Alexander Berzin: My Activities in Eastern Europe & the USSR 1985 to 1992]

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, I continued to help with the revival of Buddhism there. For example, when the first group of teenage boys from Kalmykia came to Dharamsala before moving to Drepung Gomang monastery in South India to become monks and study to be able to teach back in Kalmykia, I looked after them. For the few months before they left for Gomang, they crowded into my shack several times a week where I helped prepare them for their life ahead. They had never been away from home, everything around them was alien to them and they had no idea of what awaited them. Some were as young as twelve and needed fatherly assurance that it would all be all right, which I was happy to provide. 

Over the years, His Holiness asked me to do what I called “Mission Impossible” tasks for him. These included bringing him a West African Sufi leader with whom he could compare methods for developing compassion, organizing in Mongolia the publication of the first translations of Buddhist teachings into the modern colloquial language, and meeting with academics and scholars of Buddhism at the universities in Beijing to discuss Buddhism. His Holiness foresaw that I would be able to fulfill his requests because it turned out that all three were easy to arrange.

On my next lecture tour, I met a German diplomat to Africa and told him about His Holiness’s wish. He said, “What a coincidence” and then related that he was a friend of Dr. Tirmiziou Diallo, the hereditary Sufi religious leader of Guinea, West Africa and professor, at that time, at Free University in Berlin, Germany. I contacted Diallo and told him of His Holiness’s wish. He wrote back that he would be honored to meet with His Holiness. He was planning a trip to India and had a few free days before beginning an Ayurvedic spa treatment. The dates he would be in Delhi coincided with when I would be returning to India. A few months later, we met in Delhi, and I accompanied him to Dharamsala and to his private audience.  

Dressed in elegant white robes, the majestic African spiritual leader was so moved upon first being in His Holiness’s presence, he began to weep. Without asking his attendant as he normally would, His Holiness personally went to his anteroom and brought back a tissue, which he offered the Sufi master to wipe his tears. Diallo presented His Holiness with a traditional Muslim headdress, which His Holiness put on without hesitation and wore for the remainder of the audience.

His Holiness opened the dialogue by explaining that if both Buddhists and Muslims remain flexible in their thinking, fruitful and open dialogue is possible. The encounter was extremely warm and emotionally touching. His Holiness asked numerous questions about the Sufi meditation tradition, specifically concerning the West African lineages that emphasize the practice of love, compassion and service. There were many things in common that the two men shared. Both His Holiness and Diallo pledged to continue the Islamic-Buddhist dialogue in the future. 

As for the Mongolian mission, in preparation I obtained an East German textbook for learning Mongolian, as I had wanted to study it since my days at Harvard. I tried teaching myself from this textbook, but although I could learn the grammar quite easily, I could not retain the vocabulary. There were no cognates with languages I already had studied and, although the same situation had been the case when I had learned Chinese and Tibetan when I was young, this presented a major obstacle now that I was over fifty. I decided it was not worth the effort to push further. Over the years, I had picked up some Dharma terms in Mongolian and that would be enough. 

His Holiness had asked Richard Gere, the movie actor and patron of the Tibetan cause, to finance this Mongolian project. Gere, who had come to various Dharma talks I had given in the past, then contacted me and offered the finantial support to coordinate the project. Once in Mongolia, I met with Kushok Bakula Rinpoche, the Indian ambassador, who agreed to have some of his lectures compiled and published there. His assistant, Sonam Wangchuk, made all the arrangements and we were successfully able to complete the project. 

For meeting with academics in Beijing, Thurman appointed me as a research scholar at the American Institute of Buddhist Studies at Columbia University – he was its president – so that I would have the proper credentials for the Chinese authorities. His Holiness’s Private Office then suggested I contact Sander Tideman, who at the time was the manager of the Beijing Branch of the Dutch ABN Bank. He later went on to become a Senior Research Associate at Erasmus University. Through his connections, he was able to arrange my meetings with Buddhist scholars at Peking University. It turned out that they were anxious to learn more about tantra, which I explained to them in an academic manner. I, in turn, asked them to share with me their research concerning the Manchu adaptation of Tibetan Buddhism. Through this exchange, His Holiness learned of the sincere interest in Tibetan Buddhism among the Buddhist scholars in China.

In addition to carrying out missions that His Holiness explicitly asked me to do, I also undertook several on my own initiative, one being to bring to His Holiness people whose work would be of interest to him. For example, in 1985, while I was in Switzerland for His Holiness’s Kalachakra initiation, I was able to arrange an audience for Boszormenyi-Nagy who was on a teaching tour with Catherine as his interpreter. His Holiness had never met a family therapist, and I felt that since contextual therapy’s central point was relational ethics, he would be especially interested in learning about it. 

During the audience, which was also attended by Catherine, His Holiness asked about the difference between Buddhist ethics and relational ethics. He was told that while Buddhist ethics are defined through pre-set values, relational ethics are based on a mutuality of caring and on a relational definition of fairness. This means that the degree of fairness or exploitation that occurs in a given relationship needs to be defined through a dialogue in which all the participants need to define what constitutes fair relating or conversely what constitutes an injustice, and each of them needs to show a willingness to respect the point of view of the other as not less valid than theirs. In the parent-child relationship, relational ethics behooves parents to protect their children and refrain from exploiting them. 

This was fine for His Holiness, but he still did not see the difference between Buddhist ethics and relational ethics, assuming that parents, especially mothers, are always kind and caring toward their children. He had to be told that this is not always the case, and that in certain families, children can even be sexually abused by their parents. His Holiness was so shocked at the idea of incest that it was hard for him to re-instate a conversation. Instead, he moved to ask Boszormenyi-Nagy about his life, and when finding out that he had moved to the United States as a political refugee from communist Hungary, he smiled at him and took his hand, stating, “We are the same.” This is how the meeting ended. This meeting made me aware of the difficulties in translating the work of Western professionals into the world with which His Holiness was familiar.  

In 1987, knowing of His Holiness’s interest in science and the mind, I brought for an audience my old Princeton roommate, Michael Goldstein, now a prominent pediatric neurologist. He came with his wife and three young children, who all attended the audience with him. Using a plastic model of the brain, he explained to His Holiness the workings of each part. I had no idea that the first Mind & Life Dialogues with scientists would take place a few months later.

In 1983, His Holiness had attended a conference on consciousness where he had met Francisco Varela, a Chilean-born biologist and neuroscientist who had a great influence on cognitive sciences, and R. Adam Engle, an American social entrepreneur. Knowing of His Holiness’s interest in science, Engle offered to organize and finance a dialogue for him with groups of other scientists. The first Mind & Life Dialogues, the forerunner of the Mind & Life Institute, took place in Dharamsala in the autumn of 1987 with six scientists, including Varela. I too had the good fortune to attend this historic meeting, as well as several subsequent ones, as an observer. In the evenings after the meetings, during the lively discussions around the dinner table, I would provide the Buddhist background for the scientists when needed. I played a similar role for the meetings His Holiness had with Jewish leaders in 1990. 

Being based in Dharamsala between my foreign tours afforded me the opportunity to attend further meetings. In 1993, I attended the first conference of the Network of Western Buddhist Teachers with His Holiness. One of the main topics was the sexual abuse of students by Buddhist teachers at Western Dharma centers. His Holiness advised making these scandals public if the teachers would not change their behavior when confronted. As a result, Stephen Batchelor and I co-authored the Open Letter on ethical guidelines for Dharma teachers that we issued at the conclusion of the conference. 

At one of the sessions, the topic came up of low self-esteem and self-hatred among Westerners. As had been the case with incest, these were things that His Holiness had never heard of before. His Holiness asked each of us in the room whether we had such negative feelings toward ourselves, and we all confessed that in fact we did. As happened when first hearing about incest, His Holiness was shocked, having never heard of this before. 

In 1994, I made an extensive tour around Inner Mongolia, southern Manchuria and the Dzungar Mongol regions in the north of Xinjiang by the Altai Mountains. The Dzungars are related to the Kalmyks, and a Kalmyk professor I had met in Kalmykia made the contacts for me. His Holiness had plenty of information about the situation of Buddhism in the Tibetan regions of China but lacked information on how that compared with the situation of Tibetan Buddhism among the various Mongol groups. I wanted to inform him on that, as well as on how the situation of Buddhism and Buddhists in general in China compared with the situation of the Muslims. For that, I also visited the Hui Muslim homeland in Gansu and the Uighur Muslim institutions in Urumchi, Xinjiang. The conclusion was that, at that time, the Mongols had far less access to the Buddhist teachings than the Tibetans did, and the Buddhists had far more restrictions than the Muslims had. Many of the Buddhist monasteries we visited in Inner Mongolia seemed like geriatric institutes. We did not encounter any young Mongol monks anywhere we went.

I undertook the long journey, which included Central Tibet, Amdo, the Central Asian Islamic Republics, Mongolia and Buryatia, with Ernesto Noriega, a Peruvian anthropologist specializing in helping native peoples preserve their traditions, and Igor Berhin, a Ukrainian translator of Russian and Chinese. Noriega was staying in Dharamsala at the time, working on a project to document and preserve traditional Tibetan architecture and teach it to interested Tibetan students. He joined this trip to photograph architectural features and details in the monasteries we visited. Berhin had been my translator in Donetsk, Ukraine, which I had visited several times right after the dissolution of the USSR. For most of our time in China, he went to visit his martial arts teacher in Manchuria. 

Travel at this time in China was not very pleasant. On long train rides, the main food available at the stations was donkey meat sausages. We stuck with the ubiquitous instant noodles. Once, when we were in Inner Mongolia, Ernesto and I hired a taxi to take us to a monastery in the Gobi Desert. We had agreed on the price before we set off, but about halfway there, in the middle of nowhere, the Chinese driver stopped the taxi and demanded double. My tendency was to avoid conflict, and I would have paid it. But Ernesto would have nothing to do with that. After a heated argument with the driver, who would not back down, Ernesto stormed out of the taxi, and I sheepishly followed. Fortunately, we were able to hitchhike for the rest of the expedition and did not get stranded as I had feared. 

While in Amdo, I had a remarkable experience at Gonlung (dGon-lung) Monastery in the Monguor Mongol region near Xining. The monastery was famous as a Gelugpa center of learning. It was the seat of several high-ranking lamas, including the lines of Changkya (lCang-skya), Jamyang zhepa (‘Jam-dbyangs bzhad-pa) and Tuken (The’u-kvan) Rinpoches. The buildings and the scenery seemed very familiar, as if I had lived there in some previous lifetime.

To satisfy my long-held interest in Central Asia, we also visited the main sites along the Silk Route in Xinjiang and through the former Soviet Central Asian Republics where Buddhism had once flourished. Seeing the geographic settings of these oasis cities made their histories come more alive to me. In Khotan I had a similar experience to the one I had had at Gonlung. Khotan lies at the foot of the towering Kunlun Mountains where they dramatically drop down from the Tibetan plateau to the edge of the Taklamakan desert, which lies below sea-level. The ruins were totally deserted the day that I went there. Noriega was not feeling well and had stayed in the hotel, and the Chinese taxi driver had stayed in the car. As I wandered alone among the remains, I strangely felt totally at home. 

Xinjiang at this time still had many traditional elements. Khotan had a colorful local market where farmers and shepherds in traditional dress came down from the mountains to sell their products. From Khotan, we took an overnight minibus to Kashgar. When we arrived at dawn on the outskirts of the city, there was a traffic jam of donkeys carrying local goods to a similar market. 

Our journey was not without dangers. In Gansu, we went to the district where the Yellow Yugurs lived. They were a Turkic peoples who, like the Mongols around them, had adopted Tibetan Buddhism. Unknown to us, the area was restricted to foreigners; it was close to the Chinese space center. When the local authorities discovered our presence, the police picked us up and, after a strong warning, escorted us to the bus station and sent us away.  

After a brief stay in Dharamsala to report about this Chinese adventure, I left for an extensive tour of Africa, to lecture and meet with scholars at the universities in the English-speaking countries in the south and the east of the continent. I found that in most of these countries, AIDS had ravaged the population. In Uganda, for instance, my hosts explained that the average family had ten or more children. But then, because of this epidemic, the parents and some of the children had died. When the cemeteries had become full, dead family members were buried in people’s backyards. The grandparents would then take in the surviving grandchildren, but with several dozen to look after and feed, they were desperate for help. Sadly, unlike the Christian missionaries, I was unable to offer financial support to build orphanages to help relieve the suffering. 

With the African scholars I met during this tour, I focused on learning from them the steps their countries had taken and their effectiveness in re-establishing themselves in their post-colonial period. The experience of each country was different, as I had also witnessed in each of the former Soviet republics I visited after the dissolution of the USSR. I analyzed and presented to His Holiness the lessons that could be learned from the African and former Soviet experiences to help plan ahead for a post-colonial period for Tibet. 

The strategy I used for initiating a Buddhist-Muslim dialogue with the Islamic historians I met at the universities where I lectured in the Middle East and Central Asia was to ask them for the Muslim account of the interaction with the Buddhists in Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent. I mentioned that the British histories presented the early Muslim conquerors merely as religious zealots and destroyers of Buddhism. The British wanted to show how benevolent their own rule of India was in comparison to these early Muslim invaders and to the Moghuls who followed. The Chinese dynastic histories presented an equally biased picture. My hypothesis was that, although there were always some violent religious fanatics, the main driving force of the conquests was economic, as is usually the case for most conquests. Here, it was to gain control of the Silk Route and the lucrative trade in India in order to profit from the taxes. The Islamic scholars corroborated my hypothesis and expressed enormous gratitude for my more unbiased approach. 

“The Historical Interaction between the Buddhist and Islamic Cultures before the Mongol Empire,” republished in three parts starting with Buddhist-Muslim Interaction: Umayyad Caliphate, is the result of these discussions. To supplement these discussions, I surveyed the secondary literature on the topic available in the 1990s in libraries I visited around the world. The main library I consulted was the Widener Library at Harvard, where I put to good use the research skills that I had learned during my graduate studies there and had honed with the research project on Chinese culture I had worked on in its stacks of books. Over the years, I took extensive handwritten notes on well over a thousand books and articles in a variety of languages on Central Asian history and religions. They form part of the material I later named “The Berzin Archives.” 

During intervals between tours during this period of intensive travel, 1984 to 1997, I also wrote several commercially published books and prepared the manuscripts for several more. \ From my experience in teaching and meeting with students at Dharma centers around the world, I saw that there were several topics that were poorly understood. The most urgent one was the relationship with a spiritual teacher. Applying the lesson Professor Kaufman had taught me at Princeton, I extensively read primary sources on the topic from all four Tibetan traditions and wrote, Relating to a Spiritual Teacher, renamed Wise Teacher, Wise Student: Tibetan Approaches to a Healthy Relationship for its second edition.

Another problem I saw was that many long-term students had reached a plateau in their practice and were not making further progress. They might be reciting a tantric sadhana each day but did not seem to know how to apply the Dharma to emotional problems in daily life, such as in their personal relationships. The conceptual frameworks of the Dharma and of Western psychology were too different. For example, there are no Dharma terms for insecurity, low self-esteem, insensitivity, oversensitivity, and so on. There’s not even a word for emotions. 

Always aspiring to be a bridge between cultures and having had the experience of explaining foreign conceptual frameworks to His Holiness, I wrote Developing Balanced Sensitivity to meet this need. It presents a structured approach to gaining balance in our sensitivity toward our own and other’s feelings and toward the effect of our behavior on both them and us. It provides an extensive training program with twenty-two exercises. Another motivation for developing this program was to work on my own insensitivity to others.

During these travels, I also continued to pursue my lifelong interest in gaining universal knowledge of ways of thinking. For example, I met several times in Zollikon, Switzerland, with the psychologist Dora Kalff, a personal disciple of Carl Jung and founder of sand play therapy. In conjunction with explaining her work to me, she taught me the medieval system of numerology she had learned during her days with Jung. She used it, together with astrology, to get an initial idea of how to approach non-communicative clients. This gave me a different perspective from which to see the teachings of astrology and the numerology-like system of “arising from the vowels” in Kalachakra. They were tools to help fight the internal battle against the “barbarian” forces of the destructive emotions and states of mind.

During these travels, personal tragedy struck my family. My mother slowly came down with Alzheimer’s. She had retired and was living in a senior community in Florida. When, on a visit to see her in 1991 while on tour in America, she started to heat up a cardboard milk container on the stove, I recognized that it was too dangerous for her to continue living there on her own. I accompanied her to my sister’s home in North Carolina for a Thanksgiving dinner and, with her consent, we decided to move her to a nursing home, where she quickly declined. Very soon, she was unable to string words together and, on her own, not even to lie down in bed. Since her general health was good, she still survived for four years until she passed away in 1995.  

I was in Costa Rica when she died, but no one knew how to reach me. My next stop was Caracas, Venezuela where I stayed with my old friends from Dharamsala, Roberto and Elayne Slimak, a wealthy business couple there. My sister knew their phone number and called. I flew up to New Jersey in time to be able to scatter her ashes at the Great Falls of the Passaic River in Paterson, our hometown. It was one of my mother’s favorite places. I had a teaching schedule and plane tickets for the rest of my South American tour and had to return to Caracas immediately after, so I was unable to join my sister to spread some of the ashes on our father’s grave or to join the rest of the family to mourn her. 

What helped me to go back on my tour was remembering His Holiness when his mother died in 1981. It was during a teaching he was giving in Bodh Gaya for which I was the translator. His Holiness shared the news of her passing with the audience, and during the rest of that session, we all recited the “Om mani padme hum” mantra for her. But then, out of consideration for all the people that had gathered from afar to listen to his teachings, His Holiness resumed them the next day. And so that was what I did as well.