Insights for Troubled Youths Complete Dalai Lama’s Visit

She’s just 17, but her world swirls with violence. Already, she says, she’s been in more than 20 fights, grieved over a grandfather murdered for money and done four stints in juvenile detention camps--including her current incarceration for counterfeiting money.

He’s 64. He’s won the Nobel Peace Prize, is regarded as the manifestation of the Buddha of Compassion and has traveled the globe with an unwavering message of nonviolence.

For a brief moment in Glendale this week, the disparate worlds of Palmdale teenager Monisha and His Holiness the Dalai Lama of Tibet came together as he answered her plaintive question--”How can I stay out of trouble . . . in this cruel world?”--with a huge hug.

What he told her will stay with her forever, Monisha said later:

“He said I didn’t need fists to fight, I just need wisdom. He told me to find self-confidence in my heart and myself. I had tears in my eyes. My heart was beating, like, wild. He just touches you in your heart.”

The unscripted encounter marked the emotional high point of the Dalai Lama’s weeklong visit to Los Angeles, which ends today. With warmth and wit, Tibet’s spiritual and political leader spoke to educators in Fullerton, Taiwanese activists in Universal City and lawyers in Los Angeles, supporting Tibet’s struggle for autonomy and freedom from five decades of Chinese rule.

In Glendale, he blessed a rare Buddhist icon of sacred art called the Shi-Tro mandala. And before thousands of followers in the Los Angeles Sports Arena, the Dalai Lama on Friday wrapped up a week of Buddhist teachings on enlightenment with a special ceremonial ritual for long life involving the deity White Tara.

The Glendale event on Thursday was most striking in its focus on young people, whom the Dalai Lama praised for their “freshness of mind”--their being more open to positive new directions. Emceed by actress Sharon Stone, the event included 22 youths from two Los Angeles County probation camps and about 50 others from We Care for Youth, a Glendale-based youth service organization, among the more than 900 guests.

There were also several squirming babies and toddlers, who were presented for blessings to the Dalai Lama at the end of the 90-minute program. Seated in a brocade chair, the spiritual leader clasped his hands together and offered them a Tibetan prayer: that their lives be joyful, that they bring benefit to the wider world.

“They must be brought up in an atmosphere of human compassion,” the Dalai Lama told their parents. “Wisdom and a warm heart: These two things must develop side by side.”

(Earlier, however, when asked by a parent of teenagers how to let go of fears about raising them, the celibate monk exclaimed: “Oh. I’m the wrong person to ask because I have no experience!”)

The Dalai Lama also gave a private blessing to the Shi-Tro mandala, a work of Tibetan sacred art representing a bejeweled celestial palace of 100 peaceful and wrathful deities. The project--the first three-dimensional mandala ever built in the United States--represents an offering of peace, a hope for healing and an urgent race to preserve a vanishing Tibetan art. The project is being built by master Tibetan artist Pema Namdol Thaye and sponsored by Los Angeles Lama Chodak Gyatso Nubpa and the Los Feliz Buddhist Center Chagdud Gonpa T’hondup Ling.

Once common in Tibet, only a handful of three-dimensional mandalas remain today after the Chinese destruction of thousands of monasteries, the burning of countless religious texts and the persecution of monks and nuns, according to Tibetan activists.

On Thursday, after the Dalai Lama had departed, Lama Gyatso gave the youths from probation Camps Scudder and Scott a personal tour of the mandala. As they listened intently, the lama explained that the mandala’s center was them, that the deities inside reflected their own radiance and that only mental blocks prevented them from seeing their pure natures.

“You are your own light,” he told the teenagers. “Look into your own self.”

Some smiled and nodded. Others confessed the teaching went over their heads. But there was no mistaking the impact on them of the day’s events.

For Adam, it was the Dalai Lama’s story about a tree. Asked by one questioner if he ever endorsed violence, the Buddhist monk immediately said no, then offered a parable about the most foolish person in the world--the one who cuts off a tree branch he’s sitting on.

“The story made a lot of sense: If you go with violence, you bring yourself down, just like the tree branch,” said Adam, who said he is in custody for bank robbery.

For Harris, the most memorable message was the appeal to reject violence and fight with wisdom rather than fists. It was a new message, he said, to someone raised in a world so violent that he was just 8 years old when he saw his uncle shot to death. Later, he said, he committed burglaries, not because he needed money but “because everybody around me was doing it and I wanted to see if I could get away with it.”

Now, Harris said, “I have to think about the consequences, or I might end up in a place I don’t want to be.”

Monisha, meanwhile, said the Dalai Lama’s words of encouragement have redoubled her determination to stay in school and use knowledge as way to make it in the world.

She got that message--and a hug--from actress Stone as well.

“She told me I could be successful because she could see it in my eyes,” Monisha said with a proud smile. “I’ll never forget these words.”