The Dalai Lama's Speech

It was wonderful!!

At first, there was no English translation available, which I suspected might be the case. I was there with Etsuko, Hiro, and a friend, Nishida Sensei. Etsuko kindly wanted to translate, but she didn't know a lot of the religious terminology, so after a while, we gave up and I just sat and listened to HH's(His Holiness') contented voice.
About a half hour into the speech, and after accumulating a nice sunburn on my face, we, the crowd, were informed that there was a tent being set up in the back where a Tibetan monk would be translating the speech into English.
Quietly weaving my way towards the back, through the 5500 people in attendance, I found my way to the tent and joined 15 or so foreigners there. The translator monk's English was crystal clear, and his mastery of the subtleties of the religious terminology made his translation utterly understandable. (BTW:I made a mistake before. HH didn't speak about wisdom and compassion; he spoke on karma.)

The Dalai Lama's speech very, very concise. He used technical Buddhist terms(like dependent co-arising, emptiness of self, the five aggregates, etc.) to talk very specifically about views on karma. Without having studying that terminology previously, I think it would be impossible for most people to understand his speech.
Afterward, Etsuko told me she and Nishida Sensei didn't understand much of what he was saying at all. For me, having studied the terminology in the past, I was able to relate to most everything he said. So, although I'd hoped to talk about the lecture with them, I was a little disappointed to find that we couldn't talk about it so much.
Therefore, I was very much surprised that when we met up with Hiro to see that he was carrying a notebook filled with notes and comments from the lecture. Hiro is a very straightforward person, but the hidden aspects of his personality continue to surprise and have an effect on me. As it turned out, Hiro had a good understanding of the speech. He had had a great interest in religion when he was in high school. We talked about the speech for several hours at dinner afterwards.

So, what the heck did the old Dalai actually say? Well, it's difficult to sum it all up in a short space, but, mostly he talked about the different ways one might view the meaning of the term karma. He talked about the different schools of thought regarding religion, namely religions with a creator and religions without a creator. He went on to discuss the importance of exploring many different views on the path of realization of 'truth'. He talked about the divisions in the ways of thinking about karma and then he began to focus specifically on the Heart Sutra, that being the text derived from the actual words of the Buddha. He talked about it from two main views of the text: the first being that of things arising from their own side and things arising from the mind of the perceiver that notices them. Within that, he discussed five levels of realization into the nature of cause and effect. These are summed up by the mantra(chant) near the end of the text, GATE GATE PARAGATE PARASAMGATE BODHISVAHA(Gone, Gone, Gone Beyond, Gone Completely Beyond to the Other Shore, Realization!) (this is my memory of the translation, so please take my words lightly!).
He was able to explain the way to practice each of the five levels of realization, and from there talked about the Noble Eight-fold Path, being the methods for attaining understanding the nature of cause and effect
When the hour and a half speech finished, he thanked us for taking time to see him on a workday, and thanked us for listening to him. He carried the jolliness, 'holy' presence, and air of intelligence that he always seems to have, and although he must be around 70 now, he seemed lively and full of humor.

I was surprised at the clarity of my own mind during the talk. When the speech did finish, I didn't feel an extreme high in the same way as I had in the past after hearing such mind-expanding words. Rather, the same feeling I had months ago of giving up manifested in a positive light of 'letting go'. I do think this has come from some kind maturing of my understanding of cause and effect, and I think that living in Japan has contributed a large part to that change.

p.s. I'm sorry if some of my explanations weren't clear. I must have certainly made some mistakes. Hope some of the *experience* comes through!