Atlanta Visit - Day Four

Monday Oct. 22nd

We started the day off early (9am) by going to Emory University so 'Mama Jamhands' could get some work done. I occupied my time by going to the Michael C. Carlos Museum located on Emory Campus.

The Museum is housed in a distinguished building by renowned architect Michael Graves. The Carlos maintains the largest collection of ancient art in the Southeast with objects from ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Near East, and the ancient Americas. The Museum is also home to collections of nineteenth- and twentieth-century sub-Saharan African art and European and American works on paper from the Renaissance to the present day. It was pretty impressive for a museum on a college campus.

Also present at the Museum, in correlation with the Dalai Lama's visit, was the Buddha in Paradise Exhibit: A Celebration in Himalayan Art. The exhibition was a display of sixteen Tibetan thangka paintings inspired by the theme of the Buddhist pure lands, or Sangyey Dakzhing, all created between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries. This was very nice to see up close but my visit to this exhibit was cut short due to the arrival of a class field trip full of loud junior highschoolers.

After the museum, we went out for lunch and then picked up the MARTA and headed to Centennial Olympic Park in Downtown Atlanta for another lecture by the Dalai Lama. On our walk from the rail station to the park we were able to check out Philips Arena, the Georgia Dome and the CNN Center.

The Dalai Lama's lecture was entitled Educating the Heart and Mind: A Path to Universal Responsibility. He began the lecture talking about his recent installation as a Presidential Distinguished Professor at Emory University*. He seemed to relish the honor, repeatedly referring to himself as professor and laughing, "As a professor of this university, I think you should listen to me!" He then joked that he's a "lazy person" who won't assign much homework. "I will most likely be a hopeless professor!"


Later, in his address to a crowd that had to reach to more than 10,000 people, the Dalai Lama called the U.S. the world's "greatest, most powerful" democracy and said it should send more members of the Peace Corps, instead of soldiers, to other countries to spread democracy peacefully. "The concept of war is outdated," he said. "Through war, through violence, you cannot achieve what you want."


You can view the entire lecture here. His Holiness begins speaking at about the :47 mark after yet another long list of introductions from Emory Faculty and Atlanta Government Officials.

At the :51 minute mark he gets a few more laughs by correcting one of his introductions saying, "while you introduce me, in the subject of which I study, you also mentioned 'medicine' ... that I don't know. I know how to take medicine but the technical and philosophy side, I do not know!"

A picture gallery of the event can be viewed here.

His lecture was preceded by two musical performances, a Tibetan Music Group and a Jazz Trio.

*Earlier in the day, the Dalai Lama was installed as Presidential Distinguished Professor at Emory University in a vibrant ceremony including music, readings, and academic ceremonial traditions. Following the formal installation, His Holiness delivered his inaugural lecture as Presidential Distinguished Professor entitled "Reality as Interdependence," based on Je Tsongkhapa's rten-'brel bstod-pa, "In Praise of Relativity." I was not able to attend this ceremony since it was limited to Emory Students, Faculty and Staff only. The ceremony and lecture can be viewed in it's entirety here.