Cultivating Wisdom in Solitude

For the fourth week of The Rubin Daily Offering, Buddhist monk and Founding Director of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi joins the Rubin’s Manager of Visitor Experience and Interpretation Dawnette Samuels to explore various teachings inspired by deities depicted in the Rubin Museum art collection that can help us find peace in solitude.
In this episode, Dawnette Samuels introduces a sculpture of Manjushri, the bodhisattva of wisdom. Then the Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi offers a teaching and moment of meditation on the foundational mantra of Manjushri, om ara pa tsa na dhi.
The Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi is an innovative thinker, philosopher, educator, and polymath monk. He is president and CEO of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a center dedicated to inquiry, dialogue, and education on the ethical and humane dimensions of life. The Center is a collaborative and nonpartisan think tank, and its programs emphasize responsibility and examine meaningfulness and moral purpose between individuals, organizations, and societies. Six Nobel Peace Laureates serve as the Center’s founding members, and its programs run in several countries and are expanding. Venerable Tenzin entered a Buddhist monastery at the age of ten and received his graduate education at Harvard University with degrees ranging from philosophy to physics to international relations. He is a Tribeca Disruptive Fellow and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.
The Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi’s memoir, Running Toward Mystery: The Adventure of an Unconventional Life, was recently released and tells the beautiful story of a singular life compelled to contemplation, sharing lessons about the power of mentorship and an open mind.
Dawnette Samuels is the manager of Visitor Experience and Interpretation at the Rubin Museum of Art. She is also a trained museum educator and leads tours for a wide range of audiences including K12 students, adults, seniors, visitors with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, and visitors who are blind or partially sighted.