From the heart of Asia, a wish that rises like the wind

As he prepares to leave for Pakistan, where he will sign a Memorandum of Understanding between Mountain Wilderness International’s Asian Desk and the government of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, establishing a framework for cooperation, Carlo Alberto (Betto) Pinelli finds time for an intimate and symbolic gesture. The Italy-Tibet Association asked him to share a thought for the Dalai Lama’s 90th birthday. Betto Pinelli, who is the same age as the Tibetan spiritual leader and is one of the founding fathers of Mountain Wilderness, responded with the light, affectionate and visionary tone that has always accompanied his writings and his endeavours. What follows is a personal memory, suspended between spirituality, travel and destiny, which takes us back to 1964 in Dharamsala, where the young Dalai Lama shared, amid smiles and metaphors, a vision of the world that still resonates today.

“Imagine all those born on 6 July 1935 as an endless array of small glasses placed on a huge table. The Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara (or Cherezig) chooses to reincarnate in one of them. Imagine that his descent is like a rushing stream of water destined to fill my glass to the brim. If by chance your glass was very close to mine, a few splashes would also reach you and make you almost my brother.”

This beautiful metaphor was told to me with a laugh by a young Tibetan monk, my age, who had recently taken refuge in Dharamshala, India. It was 1964 and the monk’s name was Tenzin Gyatso… he was the Dalai Lama. I had gone to visit him with two friends at the end of a mountaineering expedition in the upper Swat, the ancient and mythical Uddiyana of Buddhist texts, crossing the border between Pakistan and India with some difficulty. The few photos that remain show the Dalai Lama, aged 29, alongside a young man who at the time was called Luigi Mario but who later became a Zen monk and took the name Taino San. The person holding the small camera is me. Unfortunately, the film has been lost.

A few years earlier, I had graduated with a thesis on Greek Buddhist art in Gandhara. When I enrolled in humanities, I instinctively chose Oriental studies, unaware of the coincidence with the Dalai Lama’s date of birth and, of course, long before hearing the metaphor of the glasses. Every now and then, I think that perhaps a tiny drop of Avalokitesvara’s karma has discreetly crept into the folds of my DNA, secretly guiding many of my life choices.

So much so that in two days, despite my age, I am leaving for Uddiyana, the original homeland of the missionary Padmasambhava, who in the seventh century set out to convert the people of Tibet to Mahayana Buddhism. Once there, he took the name Guru Rinpoche. In this spirit and with this in mind, I send my best birthday wishes to the great and enlightened “small glass”, in the hope that I am also sending them to myself, in some minor way.

You can view the original text in Italian here: Mountain Wilderness Italia