Project 5: Two Lamas Meet President Jimmy Carter, and Tour the NE States (Project completed)
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Although only in America for a month, Lama Kuntu Zangpo and Baasan Lama were able to accomplish many wonderful activities. Our friends Scott Engel and Stephanie Sudden organized for them to meet and participate in a brief think-tank with former president Jimmy Carter. The meeting took place in the Carter Center in Atlanta, an institution created in honor of the Carters, and with the purpose of fostering democracy and human rights around the world. Later the lamas also met with former First Lady, Mrs. Rosalind Carter.
President Carter thanked Baasan Lama for his heroic leadership in the 1991 “Movement of Thirteen” that overthrew Communism, and encouraged him to continue in his efforts to sustain democracy and human rights in Mongolia. (President Bush had a few months earlier mentioned Baasan Lama’s contribution to the success of Mongolia’s democracy movement, during Mr. Bush’s brief visit to Mongolia and address to the Mongolian Parliament.)
Our good friend Ven Konchok Norbu, American monk extraordinaire, with the assistance of Stephanie Sudden, then took over the next wing of their tour. Stephanie first drove them to DC, where they had been invited by Ambassador Bold to visit the Mongolian Embassy. The local Mongolian community then hosted them for a week of rituals, sutra readings and spiritual consultations.
In New York they were invited to the Rubin Museum of Art, and given a private tour by Don Rubin himself. Don and his wife Shelley later invited them to their home for dinner and discussions of the traditional Mongolian arts. Dr. Gene Smith, who works out of the RMA, and whose Tibetan Buddhist Research Center has scanned and digitized over eight million pages of Tibetan and Mongolian scriptures, presented them with digitized copies of the Sungboom, or “Complete Collected Works,” of numerous renowned Mongolian writers and saints.
The next day Prof Bob Thurman, of Columbia University, who is also the president of Tibet House, hosted them both Columbia and Tibet House. Bob had been a student of the late great Mongolian lama Geshey Wangyal, so the three of them were able to exchange many wonderful tales.
On their last day in NY the lamas were invited to visit the Nicholas Roerich Museum on the Upper West Side. The great Russian artist, philosopher, adventurer and mystic Nicholas Roerich had spent considerable time in Mongolia, and many of his greatest paintings were created there. Baasan Lama is something of a Roerich expert. In fact, in 1982 he led a Russian expedition through the route traveled by Roerich a half century earlier.
Both Ven Konchok Norbu and Stephanie Sudden accompanied the lamas through much of this tour, as well as to Maryland, where the lamas taught at Jetsunma Akhon Lhamo’s center in Maryland.
They also visited and performed services for the Mongolian community in Philadelphia before returning to Atlanta and back to Mongolia. |
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| Kuntu Zangpo Lama and Baasan Lama with President Carter, Feb 2008 |
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| Kuntu Zangpo Lama and Baasan Lama with First Lady Rosalind Carter, Feb 2008 |
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| Kuntu Zangpo Lama and Baasan Lama with Don Rubin (left) and the great Gene Smith (right) in the Rubin Museum of Art |
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| Kuntu Zangpo Lama and Baasan Lama in Columbia University with Prof. Bob Thurman |
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| Kuntu Zangpo Lama and Baasan Lama with Jo Jagoda, a Nicholas Roerich scholar, in the Roerich Museum, NY |
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