The Dalai Lama sat down in India with his “old trusted friend,” former U.S. President Barack Obama, to discuss promoting peace in a world “torn by strife and violence.”
The 82-year-old Tibetan spiritual leader met with Obama at a New Delhi hotel on Friday. He later shared a photograph on Twitter showing them in mid-discussion.
“It was very good,” the Dalai Lama said of the meeting, according to a report by the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA), the official organ of the Dalai Lama’s government in exile. “I think we are really two old trusted friend[s]. I mentioned to him that now time has come for us to promote the sense of oneness among seven billion human beings. It is sad to see there are so much differences among people.”
As CNN noted, the meeting marked the sixth time the Dalai Lama and Obama, both Nobel Peace Prize laureates, have met. The last time was at the White House in June 2016, when Obama was still president.
Kasur Tempa Tsering, a representative for the Dalai Lama, said that during Friday’s 45-minute meeting, the two men “dwelled on various topics pertaining to promoting peace in today’s world torn by strife and violence.”
“To Obama, His Holiness said, ‘You are not only a former U.S. president but you are a Nobel laureate, you are young and you can do a lot. We should fulfill our aspiration for world peace. Maybe my generation will not see the results, but your generation will definitely see the results,’” Tsering said.
The meeting comes about two months after the Dalai Lama expressed concern about the U.S. becoming more “selfish” and “nationalist” under President Donald Trump.
“The present president, in the very beginning he mentioned ‘America first.’ That sounded in my ear not very nice,” he said at a conference in October, according to the Washington Post.
Obama concluded a five-day world tour on Saturday, during which he also stopped in China and France. In India, he also met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and appeared at a leadership summit hosted by the Hindustan Times.
At the summit, Obama appeared to take a dig at Trump while discussing social media.
“I actually have more [Twitter followers] than other people who use it more often,” Obama said, prompting laughter from the audience who viewed the comment as a a jibe against Trump. (As Sunday, Obama had 97.5 million followers on Twitter; Trump 44 million).
“Don’t say the first thing that pops into your head, just have a little bit of an edit function, that’s wise for life generally,” Obama later advised social media users. “You see people getting in all kinds of trouble because they sent out some tweet and then they’re trying to erase it afterwards but somebody’s screenshot it and they’re getting embarrassed.”