For six days in July 2008, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama delivered historic lectures at Lehigh on entitlement and well-being, drawing crowds to Stabler Arena that spanned generations and continents. The spiritual leader of Tibet, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, taught Tsong-kha-pa’s Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment: The Lamrim Chenmo. It was his first visit to the Lehigh Valley and his most extensive teaching on the classic Tibetan Buddhist text in North America.

“I am just one human being,” the Dalai Lama told his audience. “Among six billion human beings, I’m just one of them. We all six billion human beings share one planet. We all survive under one sun.”

In a lead-up to his visit, Tibetan Buddhist monks painstakingly created a sand mandala in the Linderman Library rotunda, then immediately dismantled it to illustrate the impermanence of life.