After waiting over ten years for permission to visit the United States--a decadehangingon the intricacies of U.S.-China relations--His Holiness the fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet came to the U.S. this fall, completing a 49-day tour of the country last week with a three-day visit to Harvard.

The 44-year-old Buddhist monk's reception here was typical of the enthusiasm that followed him throughout the country. His address on "The Nature of Self" at Sanders Theater last Wednesday drew a crowd of over 1500, and the waiting list for tickets stretched into the hundreds. Over 200 graduate students and faculty members filled his seminar on "Buddhism and Society" given at the Divinity School the next day, and requests for interviews, audiences and autographs innundated him until he left Saturday afternoon for his home in exile in northern India.

When he arrived in New York seven weeks ago, expatriate Tibetan Buddhists, American devotees and interested followers thronged the airport to chant greetings to the Dalai Lama. Through weeks of appearances and talks in eleven cities, innumerable colleges, Buddhist centers and public forums, his welcome remained strong. And although he came to Harvard at the invitation of the Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR), the Dalai Lama's significance as a religious leader here and elsewhere seems to be more than simply academic.

For centuries the Dalai Lama was the god-king of Tibet, spiritual and temporal ruler of an enigmatic Asain civilization hidden among the Himalayas. Today the Dalai Lama remains a spiritual leader for millions of followers of Tibetan Buddhism across the world. But since Communist China took over Tibet twenty years ago, he has become a controversial political figure as well.

From a Western point of view, the Dalai Lama is a deposed king, an exiled leader of the world's last theocracy. Tibet, ringed by the highest mountains on earth, suspended midway between the imposing civilization of India and China, was for hundreds of years a land of mystery, effectively keeping out intruders. In the early 1950s, however, China began to push for the annexation of Tibet. The current Dalai Lama, then 15 years old, was still undergoing monastic training as successor to the previous Dalai Lama and had not yet assumed leadership of the country. After consulting with the state oracle, however, the Tibetans made him head of state to better defend the nation. On a visit to China soon after his inauguration, he was seized, virtually imprisoned, and coerced into signing a treaty giving control of Tibet to China. The treaty supposedly allowed Tibet to retain its cultural autonomy.

In 1959, after almost ten years of pressure, China marched in and declared Tibet a Chinese territory. The Dalai Lama and about 100,000 Tibetans managed to escape. Since then the exiled leader and roughly 70,000 Tibetans have been living in Dharamsala, India, trying to preserve Tibetan culture and liberate their country from the Chinese.

"Culture is something that belongs to the whole world," the Dalai Lama said at this last American press conference here Friday. "Tibetan culture, I feel, is helpful in terms of helping one live daily life," he said, "so I work to sustain it." He added that Tibetans everywhere have been working to preserve their "distinctive culture."

From all reports that surfaced prior to 1959, Tibetan civilization was indeed unique. Occasionally enterprising Westerners who had made it past the Himalayas returned to the Occident telling tales of an amazing land of miracles, where the religious rituals, customs and supernatural occurences were equaled in strangeness only by the pervasive sense of peace and happiness that seemed to suffuse the country's inhabitants.

James Hilton, the author of Lost Horizons, modeled his apocryphal land of "Shangri-la" after Tibet. Heinrich Harrer, a European mountaineer who served as tutor to the Dalai Lama during the 40s, wrote in wonder of a land where one quarter of the adult population were monks or nuns. In his travels through Tibet. Harrer noted that there were no public inns. Tibetans opened their homes to all travelers, he wrote, as if grateful for the opportunity to serve. Harrer encountered niches of subtropical vegetation growing amidst snow-covered montains, monasteries built upon seemingly inaccessible cliffs, and mediums who, in trance, bent swords with their minds alone. Perhaps most significant, however, was his observation that Tibet had no police force, and no standing army.

Although pre-communist Tibet closely approximated a feudal society, with the majority of the population serving as herders or farmers while the lamas, or monks, reigned as the nobility, anyone was free at any time to become a lama. The monasteries provided spirtual education and organized the administrative aspects of government, while the rest of the Tibetans lived mostly in villages, owned their own means of lievelihood, and above all, practiced Tibetan Buddhism.

Buddhism arrived in Tibet during the 7th century A.D. Over the following centuries it merged with many of the shamanistic practices of the native Bon religion to become a somewhat more mystical brand of Buddhism than that practiced in either India or China. A combination of the Theravada, Tantric, and Mahayana achools, modern Tibetan Buddhism blends the idea of seeking personal liberation from the material world through spiritual enlightenment and "magical" techniques with the supreme importance of helping others along the path toward enlightenment in this world.

"Selflessness, switching self and others," is the goal of Tibetan monks in the world, the Dalai Lama said at the Divinity school last Thursday. The emphasis is on helping others find their own way, he added.

The true Tibetan Buddhist monk need not wear maroon robes nor even be Tibetan, the Dalai Lama stressed. The external aspects of religion--the rituals and customs, the surface manifestations-- are peripheral from the true religious standpoint. "The emphasis is on essence," he said repeatedly during his visit. "All religions are basically the same," he added, "we are all seeking to grow spiritually."

According to Tibetan Buddhist belief, the material world is a school through which all souls pass in order to learn the spiritual lessons of sympathy for human suffering, patience, humility, and love. Death, they feel, is simply a release from the illusion of the material world. They believe in each life the soul within its body acts on the environment for a limited time, until, like a lightbulb, the body burns out, allowing the soul, or electricity to flow on. This soul is born again and again in material form, until it has learned all the lessons of the earth. Then it becomes a Buddha, a pure spark of compassion, love, and joy. The cycle of reincarnation completed, the Buddha is free to return to the universal energy source--God, or the Void-- to enjoy the eternal bliss of Nirvana.

Tibetan Buddhists feel that throughout history many souls who approach Nirvana decide to return to earth to help others in times of need. A person who turns down Nirvana to help others is called a Bodhisattva. To Tibetans. His Holiness the Dalai Lama is just such a Bodhisattva. Tibetans consider him a "living Buddha," the fourteenth consecutive incarnation of Avalokita, "spirit of infinite compassion."