A Note from the Editor: I’ve had this idea for some time. People have been saying to me “The Dalai Lama is interested in technology, and he occasionally makes remarks about the Internet and how its communication aspects hold great hope. Doesn’t the Dalai Lama have a blog?”
Well, no he doesn’t have a blog. Arising at 4am every day to practice, he begins a full day of study, meetings, speeches, and sometimes travel. At the age of 72, he claims to be “semi-retired” — he has recently turned over the secular governance of the community to an elected set of officials, but he seems more active than ever! How is this active man going to have time to write blog entries?
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| The XIVth Dalai Lama |
Then it hit me that if you search the web for entries related to the Dalai Lama you find dozens of recent entries every time His Holiness travels. They include both “professional media” accounts and accounts by uncredentialed folks (like us, without a press pass) of his travel, his message and the inspiration he leaves behind him wherever he goes. So in a very real sense, “we” (all of us) are writing his blog for him.
Blogs tend to have a pretty informal tone to them, and what I was looking for was an inspirational tone. Early this year, in San Francisco (California, USA), I was listening to His Holiness the Dalai Lama speaking to an auditorium filled with thousands of listeners (he begins “Dear Brothers and Sisters”) — and I reached the conclusion that there’s no time better than the present to start.
So here it is — a blog that will track the activities, ideas and works of His Holiness the XIVth Dalai Lama — where we can create posts that will be interesting, thought-provoking, informative and respectful. And we can address the many facets of this leader.
The term blogging refers to the creation of an on line (web-based) journal, narrative, or “log,” each of whose entries is time-stamped and displayed in reverse-chronological order. We’re starting now. And we’ll provide some history on side pages, but basically the blog starts in April, 2007 and goes from there forward.
If you’d like to contribute your own writing, you can do it several ways. First, you can blog (at your own blog) and then send us a trackback. Second, you can blog and then let us know and we can include you in our articles. Or you can let us know that you’re interested in having us carry some of your writing. We’ll have articles written by our own contributor-base, and we’ll also direct you to posts by others, in other places on the web, where you can see other contemporaneous accounts. As primary editor, I hope you’ll enjoy it, learn from it, and be inspired to work for peace.
—The Editor
