Dalai Lama’s visit to UMass, colleges confirmed for October

HADLEY — The Dalai Lama will spend three days in the Pioneer Valley in October, giving talks at Smith College, Amherst College and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, it was confirmed Sunday.



Arthur Zajonc, president of the Mind & Life Institute in Hadley, invited his holiness, Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, to come to the area to give talks about how people can teach compassion to others in an educational setting.



The Dalai Lama will speak at Smith on Friday, Oct. 23, at Amherst Oct. 24, and will give a public talk at the Mullins Center at UMass Oct. 25, Zajonc said. The Mullins Center talk will likely begin at either 1 or 1:30 p.m., according to Mind & Life Institute spokeswoman Mary Jo Viederman.



“We were keenly interested in the idea he’s been advancing of secular ethics in education, ethics rooted in humaity and the cultivation of that through education,” Zajonc said Sunday. “We’ve been working at this ourselves through the ‘Call to Care’ program.”



Call to Care is aimed at focusing the attention in education on teaching care and compassion, according to the Mind & Life website. Begun in 2013, the initiative looks at how to teach caring for others by linking it with being cared for and caring for oneself, the website said.



“Deep within each of us there is a capacity for compassion and altruistic behavior, by virtue not of religions and the legal system but by who we are,” Zajonc said.



The talks by the Dalai Lama will look at the ways to approach that ideal through science and philosophy and how to teach and encourage that ethical conduct, he said.



The talk at Smith will focus on education, and working with teachers, trainers and educators in part to work with children.



The Amherst talk will focus on the philosophical and scientific implications of living an ethical life and will be more research-oriented.



The talk at UMass will be open to the public to discuss issues surrounding education and ethical living. Details for all three events are still being finalized, Zajonc said.



UMass officials said last week they were in intensive planning to prepare for the Dalai Lama’s arrival.



Zajonc, who has had a personal relationship with the Tibetan people’s exiled spiritual leader since the 1990s, said the Dalai Lama is one of the co-founders of the Mind & Life Institute and remains the organization’s honorary chairman.



The institute was founded in 1987 as a way for scientists to discuss themes with the Dalai Lama, including destructive human emotions, Zajonc said.



Those ideas are examined from both scientific and contemplative perspectives over multi-day sessions, he said. Such work continues to this day, he said.



“People who come are not believers; they are scientists interested in finding out the nature of the mind and ways we can support its development and mitigate suffering,” he said.



The institute’s first public event was held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge in 2003 and was co-sponsored by MIT’s brain science institute, Zajonc said. The institute’s largest event took place most recently in Boston at the 2014 International Symposium for Contemplative Studies, a four-day event from Oct. 30 to Nov. 2 that attracted 1,700 people, he said.



The event at the Mullins Center is expected to attract 8,000 people, he said.



Zajonc has been president of the Mind & Life Institute for three years, and was the reason the institute moved to Hadley, he said. Prior to taking on this leadership role with Mind & Life, Zajonc was a physics professor at Amherst College for 30 years.



For more information on the Call to Care program, visit www.mindandlife.org/care.



Dave Eisenstadter can be reached at deisen@gazettenet.com.





