Dalai Lama to speak at UW-Madison

Nobel laureate Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, will present a free public lecture at UW–Madison’s Kohl Center May 13.

The speech, “The Buddhist Sense of Love and Compassion,” will be the most accessible public event during the Dalai Lama’s three-day visit to the Deer Park Buddhist Center in Oregon.

The lecture will begin at 6:30 p.m. Free tickets will be available to UW–Madison students, faculty and staff beginning April 4, and to the general public April 11, at the Kohl Center Box Office, (608) 262-1440, and the Wisconsin Union Box Office (608) 262-2201. There will be a limit of four tickets per person.

According to Robert J. Bickner, professor and chair of South Asian Studies, the Dalai Lama’s lecture will afford a rare opportunity to see living history.

“He is a humanist recognized the world over as a force for peace,” Bickner says. “He has lived through extreme disorder, yet still advocates dialogue as a method of resolution.”

Following the 1959 takeover of Tibet by China, the Dalai Lama fled to India, where he established a Tibetan government in exile. The ensuing decades have seen him work to preserve Tibetan culture, not only within the international Tibetan community, but to broader audiences as well. For example, filmmaker Martin Scorsese currently is in Morocco filming the Dalai Lama’s 1962 book, My Land, My People.

The Dalai Lama also is renowned internationally for his scholarship, excelling particularly in geography, mathematics and science.

He has made two trips, in 1981 and 1989, to the UW–Madison campus, a world center for scholarly study of Tibetan Buddhism. Bickner hopes the upcoming visit will attract attention to Buddhism as a subject of scholarly inquiry.

“He embodies one of the most actively developed Buddhist cultures on earth,” Bickner says. “Buddhism is not well-known or studied in the West. the Dalai Lama’s visit will offer a window into one of the world’s oldest ‘wisdom’ (model for living) cultures, and could help us learn more about living effectively in a pluralistic society.”

For more information about the Dalai Lama’s visit, contact Penny Paster at Deer Park, (608) 284-8311.