The Dalai Lama had a good excuse: His doctors told him to rest.
So the 80-year-old Tibetan spiritual leader canceled last fall’s long-awaited appearance at CU, promising to reschedule.
True to his word, he did, and his arrival is near: On June 23, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama is expected to make his first visit to Boulder in nearly 20 years.
The one-day visit will include a morning session for CU students and an afternoon session for the general public. Both events will take place on campus at Coors Events Center and will be live-streamed online.
Dylan Robinson-Ruet (Anth’19), a sophomore from Arvada, Colo., went to extremes last fall to make sure he would behold the Dalai Lama in person: On the September morning tickets became available, he was the first person in line — at 3:30 a.m.
“You only live once,” he said then. “I figured, what do I have to lose but a few hours of sleep?”
This time he didn’t have to go anywhere: More than 4,100 free tickets were distributed by CU Boulder to interested students online.
“It was much easier than waiting in line for six hours,” said Robinson-Ruet, who is spending his summer interning for U.S. Senator Michael Bennet’s re-election campaign and working at CU’s environmental center.
Robinson-Ruet is eager to hear about the Dalai Lama’s life, about Nepal, Tibet and Northern India and about peace.
“His message of peace transcends any and all factors,” he said. “All genders hear his message, all nationalities hear it, all political divisions hear it.”
The Dalai Lama, who resumed his regular travel schedule March (and met with President Obama at the White House June 8), has visited CU-Boulder once before, in 1997, when he addressed a sold-out crowd at Macky Auditorium.
His return to Boulder is the culmination of more than two years of planning by the CU-Boulder student government, the CU-Boulder Cultural Events Board and the Tibetan Association of Colorado (TAC).
In February 2014 members of those groups traveled to a Dalai Lama appearance at Santa Clara University in California. During a brief meeting with him there, they proposed a Boulder visit, receiving a tentative commitment. A visit was subsequently scheduled for October 20-21, 2015.
But in September the Dalai Lama arrived in the U.S. for a medical evaluation at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. His aides did not specify an illness, but a return visit to Mayo a few months later was for a prostate treatment, according to his website.
Doctors recommended rest and the Dalai Lama returned home to Dharamsala, India. Tickets for the CU event were refunded.
The upcoming visit will include two sessions, at 9:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m., and his teachings will be rooted in the promotion of compassion, wisdom, tolerance, self-discipline and religious harmony, according to the Tibetan Association of Colorado.
The first session, “Eight Verses of Training the Mind,” is open to the public. The second, “Educating the Heart and Mind,” is open to students, faculty and staff, with a limited number of public tickets, which have sold out.
On average, the Dalai Lama travels to the U.S. about twice a year and usually reserves time to visit universities, according to Telo Tulku Rinpoche, an honorary representative of the Dalai Lama with the Tibet Culture and Information Center who helped bring the Dalai Lama to CU.
Said Rinpoche last fall, “He enjoys interacting and meeting the youth as he feels the younger generation is our future.”
For more information about the Dalai Lama’s visit to campus, visit colorado.edu/dalailama.
