Piscataway, USA - The two bald monks, a combined 181 years in age, seemed oddly out of place as they sat in the bleachers of Rutgers Stadium awaiting the Dalai Lama on Sunday.
Draped in saffron robes, the Tibetan men quietly absorbed the vast milieu of ponytails and funnel cakes, blue jeans and baseball caps as some 36,000 people filled the space around them. They still recall the thin crowd of hundreds who greeted their leader on a visit to New Jersey in 1978, four years after they moved here in exile. But since then, they have watched the Buddhist religion bloom.
"Every year more and more people are coming to temple," said one of the monks, Yonten Gyantso, 84, who lives in a monastery in Howell, N.J. "The reason people come to hear his teachings is they trust him. There's a lot of suffering on the earth, especially this year. The teaching is medication they need to heal themselves."
Under a cool, gray sky, the Tibetan leader and 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, rose to the stage and addressed the audience with the disarming humor and message of compassion that has won him a loyal following across religions, cultures and languages. As he has in the past, the Dalai Lama began his speech with a strong dose of humility. "I have nothing to offer, no new ideas or new views," he said, laughing softly and offering his apologies in advance for being too "informal."
"We are living things, like trees and grass," he said looking out at the bright-green football field, and adding, "I don't know if this grass is true grass."
Again and again, laughter competed with applause. Still, he quickly arrived at a serious discussion of political and social conflict, calling war "out of date" and urging listeners to dream of a demilitarized world. "Eventually the whole world should be free of nuclear weapons," he said, but to arrive at external disarmament, people must first learn "internal disarmament," he said.
The president of Rutgers, Richard L. McCormick, presented the Dalai Lama with an honorary degree at the sold-out event, one of several stops on a speaking tour of New York and New Jersey this month. The Dalai Lama, 70, a Nobel Prize winner, has lived since 1960 in Dharamsala, in northern India, where he fled after he was exiled from Tibet.
Emily Vo and Alexandra Caluseriu, both students at Rutgers, admitted they had not known much about Buddhism when they decided, at the last minute, to attend the speech. But hardships around the world this year, from the conflict in Iraq to Hurricane Katrina, had pulled them there, said Ms. Vo, 20, a genetics major.
"It gives a little bit of hope, I guess," she said.
It was also a novel experience for Marianne Speakman, an insurance agent from Iselin, N.J., who was raised a Roman Catholic.
"I'm in this search," she said, a gold cross hanging from a chain around her neck. "It's spirituality that I seek more than religion."
Seventy-five students and teachers from Princeton Day School filed into front-row bleachers well before the event began, led there by a teacher at the school who is a Buddhist.
"His message is so simple, and we've made it way too complicated," said Sybil Holland, 59, another teacher at the school. "We're forgetting how connected we are to each other."
As the Dalai Lama neared the end of his speech, he explored the difference between attachment and compassion - attachment being a selective connection shared by friends, he said, while compassion is an "unbiased" act. The two Tibetan monks, Mr. Gyantso and Japal Dorjee, 97, sat hunched and listening, their eyes closed. Nearby, a former flight attendant, Kathleen Davis, squealed. She had been taking notes on a pink piece of paper and pointed to the words "attachment" and "compassion."
"That's it!" she said. "It's one or the other. I've got the goose bumps."
Later yesterday, the Dalai Lama paid a visit to the future site of Moynihan Station in New York, a transit hub on Eighth Avenue named after Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. During his tenure as ambassador to India and in the Senate, Mr. Moynihan, who died in 2003, became an advocate of Tibetan independence and a friend of the Dalai Lama's.
The Dalai Lama accepted a ceremonial key to the city from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who called him "one of the great spiritual leaders of our time."
Afterward, the Dalai Lama, surrounded by Secret Service agents, ventured briefly onto a crowded Eighth Avenue, where he waved to a cheering throng and sampled a roasted ear of corn from an ecstatic sidewalk vendor, who shouted, "I'm a lucky man!"