It’s a great honor to be part of this celebration of His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s 90th birthday, and to speak with you today about the relevance of his spiritual teachings for the 21st century. We can get a sense of what His Holiness considers the most crucial from the three themes he returns to again and again. These are the oneness of humanity, the two focuses of his daily meditation, and his four great commitments. There are many other facets that could be cited, such as his discussions with scientists, but I’d like to focus on just these three themes. I cannot presume to know what His Holiness’s thoughts are about their relevance, but based on what he’s shared publicly, we can infer a few points.
The first is the oneness of humanity – and more broadly, the oneness of all sentient life, across time and space. This oneness is based on the fact that everyone wants to be happy, and nobody wants to suffer. Since the difficulties the world will be facing, such as global warming, will affect everyone, any measures taken to tackle them will likewise affect everyone. To choose wisely will depend on understanding the oneness and interconnectedness of all sentient life.
The second point His Holiness often makes is that his daily practice centers on bodhichitta – the compassionate wish to achieve enlightenment for the sake of all beings – and the view of emptiness, or voidness. Bodhichitta gives people the courage and purpose to work on overcoming their shortcomings and on realizing their potentials so as to be of best help to all living beings. This is especially important in the face of an uncertain future. With a correct view of voidness, people will dispel the misconceptions they have about how they, others and the challenges they’ll encounter actually exist. As a result, they will be able to respond with clarity, insight, and effective action, grounded in cause and effect.
Then we come to His Holiness’s four great commitments, which have defined much of his activity in the world. First is the promotion of secular ethics – namely, universal values like kindness, honesty, and forgiveness – by introducing them into the modern education system. It’s today’s children who will face the brunt of tomorrow’s challenges. They need inner values, not just material ones, to guide their decisions and to build a more compassionate world.
Second is his commitment to religious harmony, both within the Buddhist traditions and among the world’s major religions. His Holiness often says that conflict rooted in religion is outmoded. Real solutions in this century will only come from dialogue, mutual respect, and compromise.
Third, His Holiness is committed to preserving Tibetan culture – its language, medicine, environment, and the Nalanda tradition. Tibetan culture is based on Buddhism, and Tibetan Buddhism is unique in preserving the full development of Buddhism in India, encapsulated in the Nalanda tradition. This tradition, with its rigorous training in logic and debate, is especially important today as a tool to counter disinformation and distortion. The Tibetan language holds the most complete translations of the Indian Buddhist texts. Tibetan medicine provides options where other systems fall short. And preserving Tibet’s fragile environment matters for all of Asia, since its rivers supply water to much of the continent.
Fourth is His Holiness’s effort to reintegrate India’s ancient teachings on the mind, both Buddhist and non-Buddhist, into India’s modern education system. These teachings offer a deep understanding of the mind and emotions, and how to work with them. Teaching this to students gives them the tools to face life’s challenges with awareness and responsibility. Reviving these teachings in India is also a gesture of gratitude, for it was India that gave Tibet this wisdom centuries ago.
His Holiness not only tirelessly pursues these commitments himself, but he also inspires and empowers many of us, including myself, to join him in his efforts. His Holiness’s spiritual teachings are timeless, but his global commitments are especially relevant for our present century. The best present, I think, that we can offer to His Holiness on this auspicious occasion of his 90th birthday is to dedicate ourselves to doing whatever we can to support him in his efforts. His Holiness has shown us the way, now it’s up to us to repay his kindness and to follow his lead.
His Holiness’s vision for the future has been guiding his actions since decades ago. To illustrate this, let me share with you some examples that I either have witnessed, organized or translated for.
Concerning the oneness of humanity, no matter where natural disasters have occurred, His Holiness has made generous donations to the relief efforts. He has also helped at times of social upheaval. For example, he was deeply concerned about the difficulties the leaders and people of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union faced in making the transition after the fall of communism. He travelled to Czechoslovakia at extremely short notice when President Vaclav Havel invited him to come just a few weeks after he took office and to teach him and his team meditation methods to overcome the stress they had at their new responsibilities. Similarly, at the request of Boris Yeltsin’s first deputy, His Holiness sent Tibetan doctors to help the Russian parliamentarians who were also suffering from stress when Russia was starting to assert its independence from the Soviet Union.
In 1990, the Soviet Ministry of Health requested Tibetan doctors to treat victims of the Chernobyl disaster. His Holiness compassionately agreed and sent his personal physician, Dr. Tenzin Choedrak. Unfortunately, despite the success of the pilot trials, the medical project had to be discontinued after the Soviet Union broke up, as Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus could not agree on cooperation. However, this example of compassion in action shows that His Holiness’s main focuses in meditation were never just matters of private practice but always were active guiding principles of his activities. His deep understanding of the voidness of himself and of all that he does is evident not only in his profound teachings on voidness, but also in his ability to remain humble in the face of adoring crowds and to oversee a huge number of projects without getting overwhelmed or stressed.
Regarding His Holiness’s commitment to expanding school curricula to include the teaching of secular ethics to children, His Holiness has initiated the development of the Social, Emotional and Ethical (SEE) Learning program at Emory University. Translated into 24 languages, it has been incorporated into school curricula in more than 41 countries.
His Holiness has always placed strong emphasis on fostering interreligious harmony, his second great commitment. His very first international visits after coming to India were to meet Buddhist leaders in Japan and Thailand in 1967. Over the ensuing years, he participated in numerous interfaith events with many Christian and Jewish leaders, always preferring private discussions of their teachings and meditation methods for developing love, rather than public prayer meetings. In this regard, he invited a group of Jewish spiritual leaders to Dharamsala in 1990. He invited Muslim leaders as well for similar discussions, such as Dr. Tirmiziou Diallo in 1994, the hereditary Sufi leader of Guinea. The audience was very emotional and moving for both sides.
Since then, His Holiness has met with many Muslim leaders and has requested us at Berzin Archives to make the material of our Study Buddhism website available in all major Islamic languages, which we have done. Since misunderstandings often arise from a lack of information, we have expanded on His Holiness’s request and have had our content translated as well into Hebrew and the languages of all the Asian Buddhist countries.
His Holiness’s efforts to preserve Tibetan culture, his third great commitment, also began shortly after coming to India. In Dharamsala 1960, he opened the first Tibetan Children’s Village. In 1961, he wrote My Land and My People and had it translated into English the next year. As a next step, in 1962, he sent the teenagers Sharpa and Khamlung Rinpoches, as well as Geshe Sopa and Lama Kunga, to New Jersey to learn English and become Dharma translators under the guidance of the Kalmyk Mongol Geshe Wangyal.
In 1965 in New Delhi, His Holiness arranged for the first Tibet House to be opened as a Tibetan cultural center and, starting in 1966, for the main monasteries of Lhasa to be re-established in South India. Then in 1967, he inaugurated the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies in Sarnath.
As far as I know, His Holiness began commissioning Buddhist text translations in 1969, when he gave me one to translate with Sharpa and Khamlung Rinpoches during my first audience with him when I had come to India to do the research for my PhD thesis at Harvard. The two rinpoches had returned to India the previous year and I had the connection with them through Geshe Wangyal. We translated the text under the guidance of the Rinpoches’ teacher, Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey. Our work together eventually evolved into the Translation Division at the Library of Tibetan Works & Archives.
To preserve Tibetan culture and house the scriptures brought to him from Tibet, His Holiness laid the foundation stone for the Library in June 1970. Shortly before its opening in November 1971, seeing the benefit of offering Buddhist philosophy and meditation classes for Westerners, he appointed Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey as teacher and the two Rinpoches as translators. He also made it possible for me to join them there in 1972 after completing my degree back at Harvard and to dedicate my life to serving him.
That same year, seeing the importance of preserving and translating the texts of the Nalanda tradition, His Holiness founded with Geshe Wangyal the American Institute of Buddhist Studies at Columbia University and commissioned it to translate the Tengyur, which contained those texts.
Similarly, His Holiness took early steps to make accessible the Kalachakra initiation which he regards as particularly beneficial for the future. One of his Kalachakra teachers, Tsenshap Serkong Rinpoche, trained me to translate it for him. His Holiness soon saw the strong interest that Westerners had in the Kalachakra practice, and so he chose three sadhanas of graded length to translate for their practice. Then, to help prepare people for these initiations, His Holiness personally gave guidelines on what to explain and how to respond to the most frequently asked questions.
His Holiness has been very supportive of making the Dharma available to the world in many other ways. In 1989, he sent me to the monasteries in South India to help prepare the Geshes and monks who planned to teach and translate in the West. This led to a workshop Doboom Rinpoche organized in Delhi in 1994 to help train young Tibetans in the skills needed for making written translations.
For the preservation of the Buddhist teachings among the Tibetans, His Holiness saw that harmony among the four Tibetan schools as well as with the native Bon tradition was utterly essential. Therefore, His Holiness convened a conference of reincarnate lamas and abbots from all five traditions in 1988 to discuss ways in which they could cooperate.
To ensure that the teachings would continue to be preserved in Tibet itself, His Holiness felt that the support of Chinese academics would be of great help. Therefore, to assess the level of interest in Tibetan Buddhism among them, His Holiness asked me to travel to Beijing in 1994 and to lecture there at the research institutes dedicated to the academic study of Buddhism. The professors and scholars were sincerely interested in Tibetan Buddhism, especially in tantra, and wanted to learn more. His Holiness took this as a positive sign for the future.
His Holiness’s commitment to preserve Buddhist culture is not restricted to only Tibet. He also played a crucial role in reviving Buddhism in Mongolia and in the traditionally Buddhist regions of Russia: Kalmykia, Buryatia, and Tuva. He laid the foundations for this revival with visits in 1979 and 1982, and once communism fell, taught extensively there in 1992.
To spur the revival of Buddhism in Mongolia, in 1997 His Holiness commissioned a project to compile and publish Bakula Rinpoche’s teachings in colloquial Mongolian. Up until then, the teachings were only available in classical Mongolian or Tibetan, neither of which laypeople could read. Serving as India’s ambassador to Mongolia, Bakula Rinpoche had become a popular teacher there. His teachings and reforms of monastic discipline have laid the foundation for the present flourishing of Buddhism in Mongolia.
To fulfill his fourth commitment to introduce India’s ancient philosophical teachings into the Indian educational system, His Holiness started by having the study of logic and debate introduced into the school curriculum of the Tibetan Children’s Villages in 2017. Then, in 2023, he laid the foundation stone for the Dalai Lama Centre for Tibetan & Indian Ancient Wisdom in Bodh Gaya. It held its first academic conference in April this year, 2025, to explore possible strategies for bringing such subjects to the Indian schools. Anticipating the need for suitable teaching material for the project, we have had large portions of our Study Buddhism website translated into ten Indian languages.
There are many more examples that could be cited where others have also been enlisted and inspired to help His Holiness fulfill his commitments, like the inauguration of the Mind & Life meetings with scientists in 1987, the inauguration of the Dalai Lama Institute for Higher Education in Bengaluru (Bangalore) in 2008, and the opening of the Serkong Institute in Dharamsala in 2024 to teach logic and debate and how to apply them in the study programs in Western Dharma centers. I hope that, as this century unfolds, our examples will inspire new generations to take further steps to help implement His Holiness’s vision for what will be of best benefit for the future. There is no wiser and more compassionate guide for this than His Holiness, and no better birthday present to him than our actions to benefit others. Thank you.