The Open Road

by Iyer, Pico

  And yet the biggest difference between the two visitors, at this point in history, is simply that they’re standing on opposite sides of the struggles they stand for. Archbishop Tutu’s task is to some extent over; his battle has been won. Thanks to his efforts, and those of Nelson Mandela and many others in South Africa and outside, apartheid has been lifted, and although the violence and danger and confusion in the country may at times be even worse than before, the outside world has done its bit to put power back in the hands of the majority. So when he goes up to the podium, what he says is “Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.” Thanks to those in Canada and elsewhere, he says, South Africa is celebrating its tenth anniversary of freedom a week from now. It’s hard not to glow when such a dignified man offers thanks.

  The Dalai Lama, by contrast, is saying, “Please.” Please help my people in Tibet even though you may seem to lose the support of the world’s largest nation in the short term. Please rise to your highest selves in seeing that responsibility is an assertion of enlightened self-interest. Please try to see that if you think we really inhabit a global universe, then your welfare depends on that of Tibet, as much as its welfare depends on you.

  No one likes to hear a plea, especially from a guest, and least of all from a man she likes and respects; the natural impulse is to look past the plea to the liking and respecting (especially if that man seems so in command of himself and his philosophy that it’s easy to imagine he can help you much more than you can help him). The very fact that the Dalai Lama tells the world he needs it moves many in the world to assume that he must, in fact, be above it.

  And yet, for all these underlying strains, it’s touching to see the Dalai Lama with his old friend and colleague, relaxed, perhaps, and playful, as we can only be when in the company of someone who knows what we are up against and shares our aims. As the TV interviews proceed, I notice how the Tibetan chooses examples that are as unexpected as they are precise: in arguing how force can sometimes be used for the good, he cites the Korean War, which he followed in his teens, suddenly thrown into a full-time struggle with China; and in mentioning how there are practical ways of improving the world, he cites the rivers of Stockholm, where marine life was once dead and now fish are everywhere. Coming to places like Vancouver, I realize, is how he refines and updates his observation of the world.

  None of it is new again, and sometimes that almost seems to be the point: the Buddha, after all, came not to proclaim a new doctrine or to announce a revelation so much as to find and then to remind us of what we all know and hold inside ourselves already. The Dalai Lama knows how to tell TV cameras where to set up by now, and has learned that what they seek from him is sound bites, not ten-minute philosophical disquisitions; but what also strikes me, as I come upon my father’s account of his first meeting, more than forty years before, is how much the twenty-four-year-old monk with the brush cut who’d just arrived in India sounds, in every particular and gesture, like the aging man I’m watching now.

  “He did not claim to be, one never thought he was, perfect or infallible,” my father had written at the time, “but in his company I felt the freshness of immense personal purity.” The Dalai Lama had asked my father searching questions about how he saw the larger world, and he had stressed that it was important to keep talking, even to one’s presumed enemies, because one day they would wake up. “Ageless,” as my father saw him, and able to “assume a variety of poses, utterly without affectation,” he had “his eye on the essentials.”

  As the interview ends, the only other journalist in attendance, a likable and clearly sincere soul who covers religion, offers me a ride into town. “I don’t know how exactly to say this,” he says as we drive through the traffic, every other surface projecting the Dalai Lama’s face, “because I don’t want to believe it, but do you get the impression that the Dalai Lama is not exactly the brightest bulb in the room?”

  He’s a doctor of metaphysics, I think, and a famously accomplished philosopher speaking in a second language; what we’ve seen in his address is the equivalent of Jimmy Connors hitting the ball around with a small boy at a celebrity tennis tournament. If anything, his inclination is to speak at too high and technical a level if he does not take care—as he did this morning—to remain aware of his audience and find the words that will make the most sense to it.

  “It’s funny,” the man goes on (and I begin to see his real concern—gushing about the Dalai Lama is getting tiring for all parties), “there are a lot of people who don’t believe in anything, but they will die just to see the Dalai Lama. It’s almost like they feel if he touches them, if they get his blessing, they’re set up for life.”

  “Exactly what he tells them not to think.” A true Buddhist, he’s always saying, more than anyone has no faith in either blind piety or personality. Trust and respect might almost be described as the opposite of undiscerning faith. And yet I know exactly what my new friend is talking about. At this stop—at every stop—on his global travels, people will tell me excitedly how they were “meant” to bump into the Dalai Lama, how they caught his eye and saw he was talking only to them, how he disclosed the meaning of the universe or read their souls just by looking at them, as if he didn’t have many other things, much more pressing, on his mind. When we hear him talk about projection and delusion, we do not, most of us, have to look very far to find examples.

  When the Dalai Lama first arrived in exile, he was, inevitably, an innocent in the ways of the modern world and its latest technologies; but as I watch him go through his schedule in Vancouver, I notice how much he’s learned to adjust to the times. The first time I saw him in the New World, at Harvard on his first American tour, in 1979, he seemed still like a figure from another planet, spinning out philosophical discourses that almost none of us could follow; when I attended press conferences of his in New York in the 1980s, only a handful of journalists would show up, and nearly all of them would be Tibetan.

  I think of how he told my father, more than forty years ago, that when the spiritual aspect of Tibet was being stressed, it was necessary to talk about the political—and vice versa—and how “we need to translate spiritual and religious truth into a political and social forum,” and I begin to see how carefully, with his habitual empiricism, he’s schooled himself in the language of the world, not changing his fundamental positions but constantly finding new ways to make them approachable. After he arrived in India, his first priority was organizing all the Tibetans who flooded out with him and setting up a Tibet outside Tibet. But then, old friends say, he threw himself into his studies and went on extended retreats as he could never have done in old Tibet, turning the neglect of the world to advantage, and very quickly the fresh-faced student in his twenties grew into a much more poised and electric figure.

  It was as if he learned how to speak to the world by stepping away from it and then, with fresh purpose, began to engage with it anew. In 1967 he made his first trip outside India and China and Tibet, to the Buddhist nations of Japan and Thailand; six years later he undertook his first journey to Europe. After he finally received permission to visit the United States, six years after that, he initially visited Tibetans, but slowly extended his pilgrimage to take in newspapers, politicians, the houses of Congress, and, ultimately, the White House.

  As he found that those who listened to him were less likely to act on his discussions of the situation in Tibet than to follow his more general moral prescriptions, he started shifting his emphasis to ethics (while always trying to meet leaders privately in every country, to talk about Tibet). More recently, having found that charm opens doors but does not always win real-world assistance, he has seemed to be speaking more and more from the strong and even wrathful aspect of his being, as if to clean out the house before he leaves it, and replacing the image of the jolly smiling traveler with something much more focused and unsparing.

  When he went for a lunch with the New York Times, he startled (and perhaps opened up) his hosts by
going over to chat with a waiter; at a moment of great ceremony with François Mitterrand, he began talking to some bodyguards he remembered meeting many years before. And in Dharamsala itself, whenever I went to see him, I would notice that the figures before me in line might include a frightened Taiwanese student (since the Dalai Lama is especially keen to keep his door open to those of Chinese descent) or a ragged pair of backpackers (who can inform him about Tibet).

  And yet for all of that, it’s impossible, as Buddhism would suggest, to control the perceptions that other people have of us, and it’s very difficult, as experience tells us, to get the better of the media.

  I remember one book I encountered in which the CEO of a large company, clearly a sincere man eager to do something useful with his power, engages the Dalai Lama in a series of discussions. Early on, speaking of leadership, he suddenly asks the Tibetan monk whether he feels closer “to John Lennon, the dreamer, or to Gandhi, the politician” (the Dalai Lama’s answer, in the translated version I read, was transcribed as “?!”). The man perseveres, and gets him to read out the lyrics of John Lennon’s anthem “Imagine.” The Dalai Lama, asked again and again what single role he chooses for himself says, “I don’t know.”

  Then, suddenly, he starts talking about his work with his people and says, “This makes me very sad.” He has “neither power nor country,” he says, “but I can’t help it—I feel responsible for all these Tibetan refugees who have such a close connection with their country.”

  He can’t be what the interviewer wants, he might be saying, and he isn’t always able even to be what his people ask of him. He’s human.

  As the stay in Vancouver draws to an end, all the curiosities that attend almost every foreign trip of the Dalai Lama’s, and make some outsiders look askance, begin to mount. Elegant women in off-the-shoulder dresses and men in well-pressed Nehru suits gather outside a downtown theater for a Peace Concert, pushing their way past the homeless people curled up in bundles on the sidewalk in the rain, only blocks away from where crack addicts are selling themselves for pennies. A multicultural chorus of kids in rainbow T-shirts bursts into a specially written chorus—“Om Mani Padme Hum, Dalai Lama Hum”—and then begins singing, “Prayer flags in the breeze, /Floating laughter…” while images are projected on giant screens on both sides of the stage of the man and his monks (although floating laughter has not been the distinctive characteristic of Tibet in the last fifty years). Only a few hours later, the three Nobel laureates show up again, soon after dawn, at Christ Church Cathedral downtown, to receive an honorary degree from the other large university in town, Simon Fraser; the nineteenth-century cathedral, otherwise closed for restoration, is specially opened up for this convocation.

  A great procession of grizzled Marxists, beaming Bengalis, First Nations leaders in pigtails, rectors and ministers and city councillors proceeds up the nave, and in the midst of the global parade comes the visiting trio, the Dalai Lama dressed in a long red gown, an odd blue cap perched on his head, yellow tassels hanging down from it, so that he looks a little, unfortunately, like a jester from a Shakespearean comedy. (The photographers will again have no problem filling their front pages.) A “Kyrie Eleison” sounds from an upper gallery, and as the dignitaries move forward, pace by pace, a stylish Iranian man beside me in an elegant suit and tie extends his palms out, movingly, in the classic Islamic gesture of petition and worship. “I hold before you an open door” is the apt motto of the cathedral.

  Again, as the day before, each of the three is given five minutes to speak, and the Dalai Lama, aware that he is now in a place of worship, and not a university, says, conventionally enough, “Of course, to myself, Buddhism is best. But this does not mean that Buddhism is best for the world. No! Each person, each individual can find the best. Like medicine. You cannot say, ‘Just because I take it, it is the best medicine.’ For some people, Christian is best, because it is most effective.” When I asked him once about the biggest surprise in his life, he mentioned, admiringly, how the new pope, Benedict XVI, had stressed that in the Christian tradition, “faith, reason must go together.”

  The word “practice” that Buddhists use, I think, as he says that “meeting with people from other traditions has deepened my own practice,” suggests the notion of hard work and discipline (practice makes less imperfect)—and of getting ready for a final exam (in this case, perhaps, death). And the use of the word “way,” like the “carry” he loves to deploy, offers the sense of different roads, all leading, perhaps, through wildly different paths, to a somewhat similar destination.

  Much as Tutu said the day before, he ends, “With an honorary degree, I do not think this person is something special. I am nothing. But the activities—maybe there has been a small service.”

  Then Tutu himself comes up to the microphone and delivers the most heart-shaking, roof-rattling speech I think I’ve ever heard. He begins, again, with thanks, his voice growing soft and softer, so the audience leans in toward him, draws closer, as he says, “Thank you, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” He teases the audience for being nice and quiet—Canadian—and passes a hand across the crowd to turn its members, he says, into Africans, who love to sing and dance. He teases himself and says, a wicked gleam in his eye, that inviting him up to a lectern in a beautiful church is temptation indeed for a man who loves to deliver sermons.

  And then, just as I am thinking he has wrought a spell over us and that I am listening to something like a modern equivalent to Martin Luther King, he says, “‘I have a dream,’ said Martin Luther King. But God has a dream for us, for all of us,” and he extends his message and his voice to the straight, the gay, the lame, the infirm (there are loud claps from some of the queer theorists onstage), till finally it feels as if he has carried us all up to the heavens, and for a brief moment we are not on the ground looking up but on high looking down, as an all-forgiving, eternity-dwelling God might look. For a moment, he has carried us up into a vision of perfection.

  And then his voice comes down again and brings us back to earth, leaving us gently in our seats, and there is a silence across the whole illuminated space. I glance at the friend sitting next to me, shaking my head in silence, and try to look down so he won’t see the tears of exaltation.

  When I walk out into the rain—fervent Canuck fans are cavorting in their team colors among Tibetans and Tibetophiles, many of whom (the daily paper has told me) have driven fifteen hundred miles to hear the Dalai Lama speak—I try to steady myself and put things in perspective. These men are in the inspiration business, after all, and, like any professionals, they’re good at what they do. As Tutu had jokingly implied, a podium, a church, and a microphone are for him as a hockey stick, a net, and some ice might be for a professional Canuck. Again, the main interest of the event to some degree is the contrast in their voices: the Dalai Lama takes us into ourselves, where all the power and the responsibility (for a Buddhist) lie, delivering his words with a settled gravitas. Tutu, by comparison, carries us up and out of ourselves and to where we seem joined in a heavenly choir in what could be taken to be our rightful home.

  Just one week later, though, at a small town two hours from Seattle, I happen to bump into a young teacher whom I had got to know in the basement of Christ Church Cathedral before the ceremony for the honorary degrees. My new friend Christian gives me a copy of an article he wrote about the occasion and says, “You know, it really made a difference. As soon as I got home, I went around and introduced myself to all my neighbors. It’s not like changing the world, but it’s a first step, I think. I’d never done that before.”

  As I listen to him, I realize how little any of my ideas about celebrity and the media have to do with the days that have passed. Really, what I’ve been thinking about was my world much more than the Dalai Lama’s. A pickpocket encounters a saint, the Tibetans say, and all he sees are the other man’s pockets.

  IN PRIVATE

  It’s a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the h
uman problem all one’s life and to find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than “Try to be a little kinder.”

  —ALDOUS HUXLEY

  THE PHILOSOPHER

  Imagine, for a moment, that you are a body (not difficult to do, since in part that is what you are). You have eyes, ears, legs, hands, and, if you are lucky, all of them are in good working order. You never, if you are sane, think of your finger as an independent entity (though you may occasionally say, “My toe seems to have a mind of its own”). You are never, in your right mind, moved to hit your own foot, let alone sever it; the only loser in such an exercise would be yourself.

  Instead, you likely take measures to ensure that every part of your body is healthy. You clean your teeth regularly (the Dalai Lama, characteristically, pulls out a toothbrush even at ceremonial occasions and brushes away, as if everywhere were home). You exercise. You ensure that you get good sleep and try to maintain some control over what you put into your system. At some level, you strive to make sure that your right foot knows what your left is doing; if they’re moving in opposite directions, you’ll fall on your face.

  This is all simplistic to the point of self-evidence. But when the Buddhist speaks of “interdependence” (the central Buddhist concept of shunyata, often rendered as “emptiness,” the Dalai Lama has translated as “empty of independent identity”), all he is really saying is that we are all a part of a single body, and to think of “I” and “you,” of the right hand’s interests being different from the left’s, makes no sense at all. It’s crazy to impede your neighbor, because he is as intrinsic to your welfare as your thumb is. It’s almost absurd to say you wish to get ahead of your colleague—it’s like your right toe saying it longs to be ahead of the left. You can’t say you wish to devastate China, because China is your right eye (and Tibet is your left); different, to be sure, unequal—one may be 20/40, one 20/20—but all part of the same mechanism, fundamentally working toward the same end. Many Buddhists have seized on cyberspace, the ecosystem, on globalism itself as merely a perfect equivalent and metaphor of how they see the world: a complexly linked worldwide web that in classic Buddhist philosophy is sometimes known as “Indra’s Net.”