When he was 6 years old, the Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi began having visions of a mysterious mountain peak, and of men with shaved heads wearing robes the color of sunset.
“It was as vivid as if I were watching a scene from life,” Priyadarshi wrote in his 2020 book, Running Toward Mystery: The Adventure of an Unconventional Life.
When he was 10 years old, he ran away from boarding school to try to find this place; he took a train to the end of its line, then onto a bus, going wherever it went. It went to a Buddhist monastery in Rajgir. Priyadarshi recognized it from his visions.
The son of a prominent Hindu Brahmin family, Priyadarshi stayed on at the monastery, over the years studying traditional Indo-Tibetan and Japanese Buddhism and counting among his teachers His Holinesses Sakya Trizin and Drikung Kyabgön Chetsang; His Eminence Kushok Bakula Rinpoche and Samdhong Rinpoche. He was trained in secular Buddhism as well, and went on to receive his bachelor’s degree as an Integral Honors Scholar in philosophy, physics, and religious studies with minors in international relations and Japanese. He did his graduate work in comparative philosophy of religion at Harvard University.
“Teachers come and go on their own schedule,” Priyadarshi wrote in Running Toward Mystery. “I clearly wasn’t in charge of the timetable and it wasn’t my place to specify how a teacher should teach.”
That roster of teachers, in whatever way, shape or form they came, grew to include Mother Teresa, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and the Dalai Lama, who ordained Priyadarshi himself.
Now, Priyadarshi — an innovative thinker, philosopher and polymath monk — is president and CEO of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
It is this sweeping array of experience that will inform Priyadarshi’s presentation at 2 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy, part of the Week Five Interfaith Lecture Series theme of “Spiritual Grounding for Social Change.”
At the Dalai Lama Center — founded in honor of the 14th Dalai Lama and his call for a holistic education that includes the development of human and global ethics — Priyadarshi oversees a mission that’s dedicated to inquiry, dialogue and education on the ethical and humane dimensions of life. In its mission statement, the center describes itself as a “think-and-do tank,” dedicated to working across disciplines to examine meaningfulness and moral purpose between individuals, organizations, and societies.
It’s a simple but audacious idea, Priyadarshi told The Daily Guardian in 2020, of “nurturing and promoting ethical imagination in our world.”
“Ethical imagination implies that we need more critical thinking and tools to learn about ethics and compassion in our education system, governance system and financial system,” he said. “Therefore, much of our work and programs are directed towards this direction to recognize the relevance of promoting such learnings and tools. We have been focusing on developing innovative tools and innovative programs in promoting conversations around ethical learning.”
