Reflections: World Peace through Personal Peace

This is the first part of a four-part series with the Dalai Lama Center's founding director Victor Chan. He looks back at the 2009 Vancouver Peace Summit, a global event that brought five Nobel Laureates and many more world-renowned thinkers and leaders in social transformation to Vancouver to talk about creating a more compassionate, peaceful world.

To open the 2009 Vancouver Peace Summit, the Dalai Lama joined Matthieu Ricard, Mpho Tutu, Eckhart Tolle, Pierre Omidyar and Sir Ken Robinson on stage for a discussion entitled World Peace through Personal Peace. This inspiring dialogue explored how inner transformation can help us work towards building a more peaceful world.

The dialogue began with the presentation of the inaugural Fetzer Prize of Love and Forgiveness to the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The archbishop's daughter, Rev Mpho Tutu, accepted the award on his behalf while he remained back in South Africa recovering from a a back injury.

Victor Chan, founding director of the Dalai Lama Center, had a special backstage view of the session. Here, he shares some of his reflections from the opening dialogue.

On the Fetzer Prize for Love and Forgiveness:
“The Fetzer Institute's mandate is the promotion of compassion and forgiveness, love and kindness. In North American terms, this is quite unusual. Not too many foundations of this calibre focus on this aspect of humanity”

...more....