Nicholas Vreeland ’72

A photograph first put Nicholas Vreeland ’72 in contact with the Dalai Lama.

In 1979, Nick traveled to India to work on a book about the country’s costumes. One of his stops was Dharamsala, in the foothills of the Himalayas, home to the Tibetan government in exile. There, he began photographing Buddhist masters who had escaped to India in 1959, after the Chinese invasion of Tibet. He eventually photographed the Dalai Lama, whose staff was impressed by his camera and asked Nick to photograph the Dalai Lama’s first visit to the United States. “I realized that no one had seen a photograph of mine—just the big camera,” recalls Nick.

Nick had learned about Tibetan Buddhist culture in the early 70s, when visiting his godfather, an Indian diplomat who was eventually posted in Sikkim, then a semi-independent country between Tibet and India. But it wasn’t until he finished his formal studies and traveled for a year through Latin America that he began the inner search that led him to Buddhism.

In 2012, at the request of the Dalai Lama, Nick was appointed the abbot (head) of the Rato Dratsang, originally a 14th-century monastery in Tibet but now reestablished in Southern India. Nick’s appointment marked the first time a Westerner was chosen for such a high honor and such a central role in Tibetan Buddhism. The New York Times called Nick the Dalai Lama’s “point man” in the United States.

The Dalai Lama encourages Nick to bring some of his Western perspective to his role as abbot. “His Holiness recognizes that for the survival of the Buddhist monastic tradition, it is essential that we become what he calls 21st-century monks—able to navigate the modern world with knowledge of it while not becoming overwhelmed by it,” explains Nick. When he joined the monastery, Nick was likely the only monk who believed the earth was round. “Though I was not able to convince the doubting monks that the earth was round by debate alone, I was able to show them Copernican concepts using one light bulb for the sun and the shaven head of a monk as the moon rotating around the skeptical monk as the earth. It was quite effective,” he says.

Nick splits his time between the Rato Monastery and the Tibet Center in New York. He says a personal challenge “is to maintain some control over worldly pulls. New York,” he adds, “is a good place to practice self-discipline.”

Read Nicholas Vreeland’s full interview with David Porter ’72 in the Spring Groton School Quarterly.
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