Running Toward Mystery

A revered Buddhist monk shares lessons about the power of mentorship and an open mind, bridging the spiritual and secular worlds. The Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi was born in India to a prominent Hindu Brahmin family. At the age of six he began having visions of a snowy mountainous region in which men with shaved heads, in robes the color of sunset, wandered about. "It was as vivid as if I were watching a scene from life," he writes. At the age of ten, he ran away from boarding school to find this place, taking a train to the end of the line and then boarding a bus to wherever it went. Strangely enough, he ended up in the Himalayan mountains at a Buddhist monastery that was the place of his dreams. His frantic parents sent scouts to find him, and after two weeks located him and brought him home--and yet he continued to have visions and feel a strong pull to a religion he had never heard of as a child. Today he is a revered Buddhist monk and teacher who heads MIT's Dalai Lama Center and works to build bridges among communities and religions. Running Toward Mystery is Tenzin Priyadarshi's account of his journey as a seeker, but at the book's heart is the importance of mentorship. He describes the roles of the many remarkable teachers he met along the way, including the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, and Pope Benedict XVI, and others who appeared at the right time to impart much-needed lessons. This is both a mystical account of a life and a down-to-earth memoir by a remarkable man who set out to find meaning and make a difference.