Private Audience with His Holiness
The Dalai Lama at His Home in India

In March of 2004, Ananda College students and faculty were granted a private interview with His Holiness the Dalai Lama at his home in Mcleod Ganj, India. Our college students had been studying his life as part of our World Cultures & Consciousness class. The opportunity to meet a living saint, one who has lived through the atrocities of Chinese torture of Tibetan monks and nuns, was an event we felt honored and humbled to experience. Remarkable to us was that despite all that happened to Tibet, His Holiness remained compassionate towards the Chinese government.

It was the first study abroad trip to India for our new college. Before visiting McLeod Ganj we had spent time doing service projects at Mother Teresa’s missions of charity in Calcutta, visited a Sikh community in Delhi, and were expected to spend several days at the Hindu pilgrimage spot of Rishikesh, in the foothills of the Himalayas.

The high security around His Holiness was a bit intimidating. We were screened and searched and given our protocols. The irony of all this fanfare is that the Dalai Lama is charming, down-to-earth and extremely kind to each of his guests. He laughed and joked with students and was genuinely interested in our trendy American youth culture.

We all knew a lot about the Dalai Lama before we met him, and we’d meditated and visited the nearby Tibetan Museum right before our visit, to help deepen our experience with him. We had several questions to ask him, ranging from “what was the funniest experience of his youth” to “what advice would he give young college students for avoiding the materialistic pitfalls of American society?”

His Holiness roared when he told us about his visit to Chairman Mao in China when he was just a teen. We all laughed too, he had that joyous effect on us. He seemed serious and concerned when he told us that as a spiritual college we should go around the world and visit other religious groups and nationalities, to experience how they live and think.

We’ve taken his advice to heart, and to this day Ananda College takes an annual trip abroad to experience other cultures and their saints and sages as part of our curriculum.

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