We were there before sunrise at Borobudur. The sky was just beginning to lift, a thin line of light forming behind the hills, the air damp and still, the stone holding the cold of the night. You could feel the age of the place under your feet. That is where I photographed Tenzin Priyadarshi, standing among the ancient stupas, hands together, looking upward as the first light moved across the temple.
Tenzin’s life begins far from here, in India, where he was recognized at a young age by His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama as a tulku, a reincarnate lama within the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. That recognition placed him inside a lineage stretching back centuries, but it did not confine him. He entered monastic life early, immersed in the demanding intellectual training of the Gelug school, a system built not on belief but on disciplined inquiry into the nature of mind and reality. Debate sharpened through logic. Meditation refined over years. Understanding tested rather than assumed. You feel that training in him, in the way he pauses before answering, in the clarity of his thinking, in the absence of any need to perform.
He did not remain within the monastery walls. He stepped into the modern world and carried that depth with him. At MIT, he founded and directs the Center for Ethics and Transformative Values, an unusual presence in a place defined by technical acceleration, yet a necessary one. The pace of innovation has outstripped our ability to fully understand its consequences, and his work sits inside that gap, bringing Buddhist philosophical frameworks into conversation with neuroscience, physics, and cognitive science. Not as belief systems, but as ways of investigating experience. He asks questions that often go unasked in technical environments. What is the intention behind what we build. What are the downstream effects on human well being. What does responsibility look like in systems that scale globally.
He also serves as president of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values, focused on cultivating ethical leadership among younger generations. The emphasis is grounded. Not abstract ideals, but how people act under pressure and how they make decisions when tradeoffs are real. What stands out is how integrated it all feels. The monk, the scholar, the institutional leader. No visible separation.
At Borobudur, that continuity felt clear. The temple rises in stages from a square base through ascending terraces toward open circular space, a massive stone mandala. As the sun came up, light moved slowly across the reliefs, revealing details that had been invisible minutes before. Tenzin spoke about pilgrimage not as travel, but as attention, a way of placing yourself inside a question and staying there long enough for something to shift. Standing there, it felt less like observing a monk in a sacred place and more like witnessing a person fully aligned with the work of understanding.
In a time defined by speed, he represents a commitment to depth. A belief that ethics is not secondary to progress, but central to it. A reminder that the systems we build will always reflect the clarity or the confusion of the minds behind them.
