Cataract Charity Chronicles #15

Volunteering at the Dalai Lama's Tibetan Charity Hospital 1977

Charity Cataract Chronicles-25 years

Chronicle 15: Cutting my Teeth on Medical Charity Work: There are no more deserving people than the Tibetans

In 1977, the Direct Relief Foundation asked me to work as a General Practitioner at the Delek Hospital in Dharamshala.

I lived in a room at the hospital and ate in the mess hall for the Dalai Lama's refugees who resided around his home in exile in the foothills of the Himalayas. The stories that I heard from the monks who accompanied the Dalai Lama on his flight from Chinese-occupied Tibet still make me cringe.

The Dalai Lama was the most generous and welcoming man I have ever met. I had previously seen him at his home in 1971 with a group of 18 students. I had such a positive experience with him then that I immediately said “yes” when out of the blue Direct Relief asked me to volunteer.

As an active and invited volunteer physician, I had extraordinary access to him. For instance, I had the remarkable privilege of having a private interview with him in his living room with just a translator present.

After many discussions, he gave me one of the most inscrutable answers I have ever heard in response to my query about the relative merits of studying in California with a Japanese Buddhist teacher or waiting for the arrival of an English-speaking Tibetan Buddhist teacher.

To answer my question, he gave me a Zen “koan”-like response: “I think the Tibetan view of emptiness is bigger.”

That answer was prescient; I had written my Willams College Senior Thesis on the central Buddhist concept of Emptiness.

What a turnabout answer! How could something without form, emptiness, have

comparable dimensions to another tradition’s view of emptiness???