Fuente: https://indiano.travel/place/dalai-lama-temple/
My name is Sangay Tzondru. It means the Buddha of Perseverance. The name was given to me by Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey, my teacher when a did a course in Buddhism in Dharamsala, home of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan community that had fled from the Chinese over the high peaks of the Himalayas to India.
I was taking a sabbatical from my career as a journalist and lent my scant editing skills to the team of scholars translating the dharma into English. We met with the Dalai Lama every Wednesday and reported our progress over buttery tea and plates of barfi, Indian sweets made from coconut, cardamom and buffalo milk.
With a Tibetan student at Delhi University translating, I made a collection of folk tales that I turned into the book, Stories From Beyond the Clouds. It was published by the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives with funds going to the children’s refugee village in Forsyth Gunj. All the foreigners in Dharamsala helped where they could, building, nursing, teaching.
I played chess at schoolboy level and took on the Canadian chess master. He had two chess sets and decided to give me one, a piece at a time. Every game I lost, I received a black chessman, a white one when I won. When I had accumulated 16 black pieces, the chess master reversed the rules and gave me a white piece every time I lost. He left for Canada after another 16 games knowing that every child in the village who played chess could now confront an English player who wasn’t hard to beat.
I wasn’t adept at sitting cross-legged or stilling my mind in meditation. But I never missed Geshe Dhargyey’s daily lecture and came to see that whatever it is you pursue, it is going to require an acceptance of failure as well as the patience to persevere.
The last time I saw the Dalai Lama, we drank tea English style and I was sure that over the previous 12 months his accent had softened, the syllables evenly stressed, less of a twang, more received pronunciation, like my own. He pressed his palms together and bowed his head. I did the same.
‘Thank you, Sangay Tzondru,’ he said.
I was happy to hear my Buddhist name on his tongue and it occurred to me that where Geshe Dhargyey had detected perseverance as my defining nature, I saw the same quality in the Dalai Lama.
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