Richard Gere on TIBET’S GIFT OF LOVE
MELVIN MCLEOD: How did you first make your connection to the Dalai Lama and the people of Tibet?
RICHARD GERE: Well, it’s a long story, as most of these are long stories, but I’ll make it as brief as I can. In my early twenties, I was searching to make sense of myself in the world. Zen was what captured my imagination. I was a student of Zen for many years and had a regular practice that came from that.
When I was in my late twenties, I went to Asia for the first time. My first film was at the Cannes Film Festival, and I took the opportunity after Cannes to go to India and Nepal. That was the first time I met Tibetans, in a refugee camp outside of Pokhara in Nepal.
I was kind of floored by the experience. I felt it was otherworldly, but really it’s not otherworldly. It’s the world. We’re the ones who are otherworldly. We live in a hallucinated view of the world, while I saw that these people seem to be completely centered in the world that they inhabit. It was a different feeling than around my Japanese Zen teachers and fellow students, as incredibly profound to me as Zen was. Something else was going on there.
A few years later, I had a strong impulse to meet His Holiness the Dalai Lama. I didn’t know anything about the political situation—I thought, said, look, if you want to meet the Dalai Lama, he’s not in Tibet anymore. He’s in India.
