Dalai Lama, an exceptional life, between smile and wisdom

Piero Verni is the author of the volume «The smile and the wisdom, authorized biography of the XIV Dalai Lama of Tibet», just released in bookstores by Nalanda publisher. Updated edition, enlarged I would say almost doubled compared to the previous ones published respectively in 1990 and 1998.

Also the author of many other books, essays, articles and documentaries, Verni is a character. For many of our generation even a myth. He went through, living them to the full, the great political and spiritual movements of the last century to finally arrive at the “fatal” meeting: the one with Tenzin Gyatso, Kundun, “the Presence”, the Dalai Lama of Tibet.

We have known each other for forty years and in all this time we have shared projects, travels, documentaries, initiatives, exhibitions and much more linked to Tibet, its history, its culture and above all its human and political events. Interviewing a fraternal friend is a difficult undertaking because it is necessary to free oneself from all affective conditioning and from the fact of being able, in many cases, to foresee the answers and unconsciously gloss over issues that for the reader may instead be of great interest and stimulus.

We are in his house surrounded by greenery and overlooking a Lake Maggiore today with gray waters that reflect the arc of the surrounding mountains with snow-white peaks. We have time and with a knowing look we begin this chat for “third parties”.

Piero you were in Dharamsala, the seat of the Tibetan government in exile and the Dalai Lama as early as 1972. What were you looking for?
“No, I knew practically nothing of both the Tibetan culture and the Tibetan drama. In India I had been uneasy towards the society in which I was born and raised … unease which had produced a desire for elsewhere, we could say absolute elsewhere, which in those years was well represented by India and the adventurous journey by land with which it was reached starting from Europe. In my case from Milan. Like so many other guys who were lucky enough to be young in the late 60s and mid-70s of the last century, I was curious to see, meet, learn about other worlds, other lifestyles and other societies. Once I arrived in India, I had left in a minibus with three traveling companions, we went to Dharamsala to look for two of our friends who had not given any news for months and who were rumored to have become monks of the Dalai Lama. Character almost unknown to me and completely shrouded in mystery. In Dharamsala I didn’t find them but I met the Tibetan world. His women, his men, his spirituality. And I was fascinated. Those people had recently been thrown across the Himalayas by a terrible thrill of history. They still lived as in Tibet and they appeared to me as a sort of Native American tribe. Long hair, tan skin, silver and turquoise jewelry. Speaking, often with gestures and facial expressions, with these people I learned of the Tibetan tragedy and I met a fragment of the “Civilization of the Roof of the World” ».

When did you first meet the Dalai Lama? And do you remember what you felt?
“I met the Dalai Lama a few years later, in 1980 and was able to have a short private interview with him. Fortunately for me, the first of many others. In the meantime I had begun to attend the first Buddhist centers opened in Italy, France and England. I began to receive teachings from some lamas and to study the first texts of Tibetan philosophy and spirituality. So, as it were, I arrived at the meeting with the “Presence” quite prepared. Despite this, however, the impression he made on me was very strong. To sum it up in a few words: I had the impression that that monk who had come from afar was the concrete representation of what he was saying and transmitting. The man before me was not just a great scholar who spoke of lofty and complex philosophical concepts. He “was” what he taught. Between his words and what I grasped about him there was no hiatus, division, detachment. I immediately had the impression that the wisdom, the philosophy, the compassion he spoke of were one with his experience as a human being ».

Were you already working on the biography?
“No, that project took shape a few years later but surely the” karmic “seeds were sown in that conversation which took place on an enchanted afternoon in the remote May 1980”.