I didn't know until this week how little is actually on the record about what the two of them said. A private audience at the Vatican, 1980, and what survives in most accounts is the fact of it: John Paul II received the Dalai Lama, and then received him again, more than once over the years that followed. The substance stayed in the room, which is more or less what a private audience is for.
So I keep circling the arrangements instead. Someone in the protocol office had to settle the seating — who sits where, whether the chairs match, what you call a man who is a spiritual leader and the head of a government in exile when you write him into the morning's schedule. Someone interpreted; someone chose the room; someone, presumably, opened it and aired it beforehand. None of that got written down anywhere I've found. It usually doesn't.
Those audiences usually happen in the small private library off the papal apartment, and it's a modest room by Vatican standards — a desk, a couple of chairs set at a slight angle so nobody's quite facing the other head-on, and gilt on everything that isn't the carpet. Someone had to decide that angle, too.
Miriam, the protocol office got a far bigger version of that problem six years later, when the same pope gathered leaders from a great many traditions at Assisi in 1986 — months of arranging over who prays where, and in what order, so that nobody was asked to pray in another's words. Hardly any of that survives either.