Oblates of Shantivanam

A Perth Convergence (1992)

The invisible lines of my global journey converged once more in 1992, right back on the soil of Western Australia. The Dalai Lama was scheduled to visit Perth, and I found myself on the executive committee tasked with financing and orchestrating his historic tour.

But I wanted something deeper than a standard public lecture series; I wanted to bring the East and the West into a direct, unmediated collision of mystical minds.

I resolved to bring my mentor, Father Bede Griffiths, out from his ashram in India to renew contact with His Holiness face-to-face. I was honoured to personally fund Father Bede’s international passage, accommodation, and expenses. Providence, however, rewrote the ledger. Public interest exceeded anything I had expected. The Perth events generated enough income to reimburse my expenses and leave a substantial gift for Bede's onward journey and the ashram's work among the poor. In those days, I sent the ashram’s portion, as Fr Bede suggested by the old-fashioned Postal Order and alerted the brothers there by a yellow paper telegram.

So in 1992 Bede and I met with the Dalai Lama at an impressive Perth hotel. His Holiness rushed towards Bede, embraced him warmly, and then ran his fingers through Father Bede’s white beard so that it flew in all directions. Bede looked completely astonished, while the Dalai Lama laughed with obvious delight. The assembled lamas seemed thoroughly amused.

Then, before the gathered retinue, His Holiness invited questions. Bede immediately, as though impelled by some inner urgency, asked: “Your Holiness, would you share some of your wisdom about Dzogchen, please?” 

It was an enormous question. His Holiness smiled, acknowledged it graciously, and responded briefly before moving on so that others might have an opportunity to speak.

After the audience had ended and people were beginning to disperse, the very senior and venerable, Samdhong Rinpoche approached Father Bede. Making a deep bow in the Tibetan manner, he said with complete sincerity and a radiant smile, “Father, you are a very great man.”

Bede seemed momentarily at a loss for words. He thanked Rinpoche quietly. As the Tibetan party moved away, he remained standing there for a few moments. I could see that he treasured the kindness of the gesture, yet it altered nothing in him. He was, I observed, the very picture of peace and equanimity.

But the ultimate justification for the visit took place inside a penthouse suite of a central Perth hotel on His Holiness’ last day in Perth. The Dalai Lama, ever gracious, intensely curious, and facing a looming departure flight later that afternoon, had expressed a deep desire to meet with Father Bede before leaving Western Australian soil. The Dalai Lama welcomed us warmly. Almost immediately, Bede began speaking about the recovery of the mystical dimension of Christianity. His Holiness listened intently.

I had placed my little cassette tape recorder nearby, and Bede's words from that afternoon remain with me not merely in memory but in his recorded voice. Father Bede’s opening statement immediately set the profound tone for the exchange. With his characteristic, quiet humility, he looked at the exiled leader and remarked, “It may very well be that the sufferings of your people, painful as it is, could become the very means by which Christians recover the mystical dimension of their own faith.”

His Holiness paused, his surprised eyes showed he was visibly struck by the sheer boldness of the assertion. He became very still. 

Father Bede elaborated, sharing with absolute honesty how countless Western Christians, entirely disillusioned by rigid dogma, cold intellectualism, and institutional mechanics, routinely sought spiritual nourishment at his ashram in Tamil Nadu. He articulated how Tibetan Buddhism, with its unyielding stress on rigorous contemplative practice, represented a living mystical tradition that could offer vital guidance to those yearning for deeper interior meaning. He spoke of the many especially younger people who came, describing how many who had grown up in the Church, had actually felt lost for years, disillusioned by its seeming failure to find some sense of meaning in their spiritual lives. “The young don’t reject the Church or Christianity,” he said softly, “but they can’t find God in it anymore.” His Holiness listened intently, never interrupting, never offering immediate answers. Father Bede spoke gently, with the conviction of someone who had listened to many who walked this path many times before. “The young are not alone in this,” he began again. “Many Christians feel this way. They don’t leave because they’ve lost faith; they leave because they are seeking God—seeking the living experience of God, not just doctrines and rituals, though these have their place. The Church can sometimes feel to these young people like it’s lost that sense of the divine presence.”

The Dalai Lama listened intently, nodding his head in rhythmic agreement as Bede envisioned a future where Christianity and Buddhism, alongside the other great world religions, actively contributed to a “new consciousness.” This emerging consciousness, Bede explained, would successfully transcend the limitations of the mechanistic rationality and dualistic thinking that have dominated Western thought for centuries, fostering a far deeper awareness of the inter-connectedness of all life. 

I was grateful simply to be there and listen.

The Eight Passionate Thoughts

By the time our hour-long meeting began to draw toward its close, what had started as a brief, formal encounter had evolved into a deep dialogue that neither man seemed eager to terminate. The Dalai Lama expressed a palpable excitement—not only for Father Bede’s highlights on mystical theology, but specifically for our discussion on how current technological systems have evolved from a dangerously mechanistic science. His Holiness remarked on how these rapid advancements often ruthlessly exploit nature with absolutely no regard for the broader implications of how species and delicate ecologies are threatened. This perspective made immense sense to His Holiness, who recalled with sorrow the widespread, systemic destruction wrought by the regime's over-exploitation of Tibet's mineral reserves and vast forest resources.

Encouraged by the warmth of His Holiness’s response, Father Bede continued to elaborate on the troubling global situation we face today—our ongoing struggle to balance the material conveniences enjoyed by a wealthy minority against the disastrous, bleeding consequences of global injustice and environmental degradation.

The Dalai Lama acknowledged the pervasive ignorance and greed that fuels these crises, and Father Bede reached back into Late Antiquity for the figures I had loved for years. He cited Dionysius the Areopagite:

The way of knowing God that is most worthy of Him is to know Him through un-knowing, in a union that rises above all intellect.

And he came back again to Dzogchen — the question he had put to His Holiness at the reception a few evenings before. Whatever I could read in the Dalai Lama's face at that moment, it seemed to me a kind of fondness for his old priest friend. [The tape is scratchy at this point.]

Our audience had originally been allotted ten minutes. Ten minutes became twenty, then forty, and eventually more than an hour. From time to time His Holiness's secretary appeared at the door, plainly anxious about the approaching flight and the rest of the day's programme.

Each time, the Dalai Lama waved him away.

Bede then drew his attention to Evagrius of Pontus, the desert teacher: "If your spirit still looks around at the time of prayer, then you are no better than a man of affairs engaged in a kind of landscape-gardening." And he laid out Evagrius on the eight passionate thoughts — the logismoi — that impede a person's spiritual advance: gluttony, impurity, avarice, sadness, anger, acedia, vanity and pride.

Those ancient desert definitions lit something in the Dalai Lama. He leapt out of his seat and plopped down on the lounge beside Father Bede, took Bede's hand in both of his, and with his eyes dancing said:

Well, you know, Father, I never knew Christians could think like that!

Father Bede took to Tibetan Dzogchen rather eagerly in his last years. In his aerogramme letter to me of 14 November 1992 he wrote, “I am very keen on Dzogchen as representing the most profound tradition in Tibetan Buddhism, recognising the reality of all external phenomena, but seeing them as integrated in the whole, the one Reality, which is ‘empty’ of all limitations, but yet embraces all in its transcendent unity. For a Christian this is the oneness of all creation and all humanity in the mystical Body of Christ, the New Creation, which is also Sunyata and Nirvana and Nirguna Brahman and Tao and Al Haqq in the Muslim tradition. This is also the unity of the Trinity in Christian faith. Each tradition sees it in a different way, [unreadable].”

Then in a letter dated 14 December 1992, he wrote that he’d given a talk on Dzogchen to Tibetan Buddhists in Bangalore where he made the point: “Essentially it is the recognition of the ‘primordial state,’ — the state of being and consciousness in which all the multiplicity of creation is contained in the non-dual reality of the Godhead . . .”

Though he was eighty-six. And I have wondered since whether a man that close to the end recognises a description of what is about to happen to him.                                                     But anyway, later, after the farewells were made and the entourage had left for the airport, Father Bede and I walked away from our prolonged interview with His Holiness at the hotel and into the Perth afternoon. He turned to me, his face lined with a deep emotion, and said softly: