The Open Road

by Iyer, Pico

  Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that the Fourteenth Dalai Lama is famous for his laughter, the sudden eruption of almost helpless giggles or a high-pitched shaking of the body. Seen from the vantage point of one who meditates several hours a day, traveling to the place where everything is connected, much of our fascination with surface or with division seems truly hilarious. Quarreling over money is a little like “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” in the Christian metaphor; it’s like taking a ten-dollar bill out of your right-hand pocket and then, after a great deal of fanfare and contention, putting it in the left. Talking about friends and enemies is a little like holding on to this hair on your arm and claiming it as a friend, because you see it daily, and calling the hair on your back an enemy, because you never see it at all. Talking of how you are a Buddhist and therefore opposed to the Judeo-Christian teaching is like solemnly asserting that your right nostril is the source of everything good, and your left nostril a place of evil. The doctrine of “universal responsibility” is not only universal but obvious: it’s like saying that every part of us longs for our legs, our eyes, our lungs to be healthy. If one part suffers, we all do.

  Simple, you may say, but “it takes more courage than we imagine,” as Thomas Merton wrote, “to be perfectly simple with other men.” And from this basic proposition flow many other truths, as naturally as the fact that 2 + 2 = 4 tells you that 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 = 8. Of course you will want to forgive others, in the same way you will want to stop punching your own side. Of course you will look in terms of the larger good, the wider perspective (the word “wider” is a favorite of the Dalai Lama’s), because a hair may be cut off tomorrow, but the body as a whole can keep functioning no worse than before. There’s no great need to mourn the loss of that toe-nail; the foot as a whole is still moving and, besides, at some point every part of the body is going to grow old and die.

  This mention of an extended sense of kinship, even identity, is as global, as ecumenical, as loving your neighbor as yourself. But where Buddhism differs from other philosophies is in saying that the architect, the administrator, the guardian of this whole body is not Allah or God or the swarm of deities of the Hindu pantheon; it is a network of which we are part (that is a part of us). That is why the Buddha did not speak of “praying ceaselessly,” as Saint Paul did, but of “striving ceaselessly.” Buddhists do not (or need not) seek solutions from outside themselves, but merely awakening within; the minute we come to see that our destinies or well-being are all mutually dependent, they say, the rest naturally follows (meditation sometimes seems the way we come to this perception, reasoning the way we consolidate it).

  If you believe this, human life offers you many more belly laughs daily, as the Dalai Lama exemplifies. Why run around the world, to Lourdes or Tuscany or Tibet, when in truth the source of all your power, your answers, lies right here, inside yourself? Why give yourself a hard time and proclaim your own worthlessness when in fact the keys for transformation are within? Why despair, indeed, when you can change the world at any moment by choosing to see that the person who gave your last book a bad review is as intrinsic to your well-being as your thumb is?

  To understand the Dalai Lama, or any serious, full-time follower of the Buddha, especially if (as in my case) you come from some other tradition, perhaps it’s most useful to see him as a doctor of the soul. The Buddha always stressed that he was more physician than metaphysician; when you find an arrow sticking out of the side of your body, he famously said, you don’t argue about where it came from or which craftsman fashioned it—you simply pull it out.

  A practical, immediate cure for suffering and ignorance is what he offered; when asked about the existence of the soul or other lofty philosophical questions, the Buddha customarily said nothing, as if to suggest that such disquisitions were beside the point when a patient was lying on his deathbed and you had the chance to help him. As Somerset Maugham, the onetime medical student and lifelong traveler who had a rare gift for entering other characters, put it, the Buddha “made only the claim of the physician that you should give him a trial and judge him by the results.”

  The Dalai Lama, always so faithful to his source, often uses the image of medicine, as he did when receiving his honorary doctorate at Christ Church Cathedral in Vancouver, and tells people that there is no “right” religion for anyone, though some find Buddhism helpful, some Christianity, the way some patients choose radiation therapy, some chemotherapy, and some, perhaps, Chinese herbs. Besides, as he told an interviewer in 1989, “we have enough religions. Enough religions, but not enough real human beings…. Don’t let us talk too much of religion. Let us talk of what is human.”

  Like any doctor, he’s not concerned with pressing on strangers his view of the universe; the important thing is diagnosing what the problem is and suggesting a possible cure. If there’s no problem, then, as he often says, he can go home; there’s no need of a house call. Ideally, he prescribes the kind of preventive medicine that might be called meditation or philosophical training. But, however charming or lovable or intelligent he is, a doctor’s presence is only as good, really, as his ability to heal our pain.

  If someone asks the Dalai Lama about a problem in her sexual life, he is likely to say, as many a doctor might, “That’s out of my domain. You’ll have to consult a specialist.” If he is about to join in a discussion with an abbot in Nara and he spots a girl sitting in a wheelchair nearby, he will instantly break from his discussion the way a physician, if suddenly there is a car crash outside, will leave his dinner companions and see if he can be of help. Though trained in the technical and complicated history and implications of disease, his job is to take that recondite learning and translate it into simple, concrete instruction for his patients. The most important thing we ask of a doctor is that he not hide the truth from us, out of kindness or sympathy, not dress it up in euphemisms or periphrases, but just tell it to us straight, so we know where we stand.

  A doctor is not presumed to be all-powerful. He has a private life, we know, and though his part in our life is to give us the fruits of his specialized training, we do not expect him to be an expert when it comes to playing tennis or taking photographs or being a father. “If you have come here with expectations of the Dalai Lama,” I heard the Dalai Lama say before a large public audience in Switzerland, “you’re likely to be disappointed. If you think the Dalai Lama has special powers, you’re wrong, unfortunately. If I had healing powers”—he broke into a series of coughs—“I wouldn’t have this sore throat right now.” A doctor has sides of his life that are not covered by his training, but at some level every doctor is on twenty-four-hour call for life.

  Like any doctor, the Dalai Lama tries to remain abreast of all the latest discoveries and breakthroughs in the field, and travels constantly to interfaith meetings and labs around the world. Often, even on social occasions, he is asked for his advice—as we, when meeting a doctor, may say, “I’m sorry to bother you, but my cousin’s wife has this pain…”—and he has to be careful not to offer advice in those fields where he’s not qualified. To a physician who takes seriously the Hippocratic oath, the notion of a celebrity doctor is a little comical. He may have a good bedside manner, he may be called in on TV shows as a pundit, he may have published many books, but all he is doing, really, is applying a knowledge that is universal, outside of him, and available to anyone who works in the same field. When he retires, another doctor comes along and, generally, offers us the same diagnoses and prescriptions (not least because medicine is an objective science where diagnoses are arrived at through empirical tests, records of famous cases, and statistical probability).

  Most of all, a doctor has to be clear-eyed; he cannot avert death forever—sooner or later he will lose many of his patients—and all he can do is to try to ensure that every day is spent as fruitfully, as happily as possible. He doesn’t care, ideally, whether his patient is a backpacker or a head of state (the diagnosis is the same); and he isn’t concerned about surface
issues (asked how he feels about discos around the Potala Palace, the Dalai Lama always answers, instantly, “No problem”). The words he will use—and this, too, perhaps sounds familiar—are “beneficial,” “useful,” and “positive effect,” generally qualified by the wise disclaimer “generally.”

  One day I was talking to the Dalai Lama about his ceaseless traveling around the world meeting with politicians (the most frustrating part of his job, he said, because “the problem is so big that even if these leaders sincerely want to help, they cannot do anything,” and yet not to meet with them was to achieve nothing at all). “To me,” he said, “I treat every human being, whether high officials or beggars—no differences, no distinctions.

  “But newsmen, reporters,” he went on, maybe because he was speaking to one at the time, “always ask. They consider whether I meet the prime minister or not the most important issue! At some point, I get quite fed up. I am Buddhist monk, I am a follower of Buddha. From that viewpoint, it’s nothing important. It’s much more important, one simple, innocent, sincere spiritual seeker—that’s more important than a politician or a prime minister.

  “So,” he said, of newsmen, “I feel it is a reflection of their own mental attitude. These reporters, usually they consider politics as something most important in their mind. So meeting with a politician becomes very significant.” For himself, “meeting with public, ordinary people, at least there’s some contribution for peace of mind, for deeper awareness about the value of human life. When I see some result, then I really feel, ‘Today I did some small contribution.’”

  On a recent trip to South Africa, he said, he had met Nelson Mandela and a man regarded as the mentor of Mandela, in Soweto. He wanted to visit a typical home in Soweto but understood it might not be easy, so he waited in a car while an official found a home that was interested in meeting a visitor from Tibet.

  One such house was found, “and it was really a human family, a human home: very friendly, very clear. Very innocent. I asked about their livelihood, their difficulties, their education—everything. And also the murders, the crime. Then later one person joined, I think better-educated, and he expressed to me sadly that they feel—the South African black person—that the potential of their intelligence is inferior to that of the white. Then I really felt sad.

  “And then I argued, or explained, ‘This is a wrong concept. You should not feel like that. All human beings have the same potential, the same potential of intelligence. Here we need self-confidence.’ Now, I explained, the main thing about my own situation is that the Chinese attitude to Tibet—they always look down on Tibet as inferior, backward. But when we Tibetans have the opportunity, we even carry better than Chinese. So there’s no basis to believe you’re inferior.

  “And then, after a lengthy explanation, all his face changed. Then, with a tear, he told me now he believed what I said. ‘Now my attitude has changed.’ He feels more confidence, he told me. And I really feel a great sense of achievement: one person, one simple person, in his late thirties, I think. Till that day, deep down he feels, ‘We are poor, we are inferior, we have less potential.’ With this kind of mental attitude, there’s no chance of making competition. And without competition, you can’t progress. And I think genuine mutual trust must be built on the basis of both sides’ self-confidence. Without that, if one feels inferior, how can you develop mutual trust? Very difficult.

  “So, therefore, after changing his mind, I really felt, ‘Now I made one contribution.’”

  To recall that the Dalai Lama is, as much as anything, a man trained to heal specific infirmities (of ignorance and the suffering that arises out of it) is to recall that the man himself is not all-important: he stands for a body of teaching that can be advanced and applied by many other hands; he stands, most of all, for the sense that each of us can play a significant part in healing ourselves. A doctor’s paradoxical wisdom, often, is to make himself redundant; do thirty minutes on a treadmill, he says, eat salmon and avoid fatty foods, have an apple every day, and all being well, you won’t have to see me again. Indeed, in the Buddhist context, a doctor (of philosophy, say) is not just telling people that they can heal themselves but also reminding them that, if they wish, they can read the medical textbooks themselves, and go to the source of all knowledge about the self. The wisdom being imparted has little to do with the mortal, fallible being who’s imparting it, and, indeed, the more it has to do with him, the less reliable it is.

  Many of the great doctors in history have distinguished themselves and come to inspired diagnoses in part by seeing the connectedness of things, the way a problem in the head may affect the performance of the body, or how what you put in your mouth can alter the acid in your stomach. The body is a single organism in which one push here may have a strong effect there. So it is, too, the Dalai Lama says, with the world—and our very concerns about it are all intertwined, impossible to solve separately. It’s no good offering people peace, he suggests, if those same people lack food and water; and it’s no good offering them food and water if our forests and rivers are polluted. It’s no good, even, to clean up our environment if we’re still polluted within. In short, the solution to all our problems, economic, environmental, political, spiritual, can only be addressed by going back to fundamentals, the change of attitude that can create a change in everything the attitude inspects. Reforms on the surface make no difference whatsoever.

  This stress on the powers within us is part of what makes Buddhism so hopeful, even if some observers, noting only the absence of God from its worldview and the mention of suffering (or, as it has been better translated, “discontent”), call it “fatalistic” or pessimistic. After all, it’s hard to change others, but nearly always possible to change ourselves. It’s all in our head, as a doctor might say, though in this case “it” refers not only to a problem, an illusion, but also, as a sequel, to a possibility, an ability to cut through illusions. “In a sense, a religious practitioner is actually a soldier engaged in conflict,” the Dalai Lama said at a New Jersey monastery on one of his first trips to America. But the practitioner’s enemies are “internal ones. Ignorance, anger, attachment and pride.” The devil, as many Christians note, is not something outside of us.

  Indeed, the beauty of Buddhism, as the Dalai Lama might see it, is precisely that it is not exclusive or rarefied; much of what it is showing us is exactly what people throughout the centuries have told us, whether they call themselves Vedantists or Muslims or nothing at all. “They that be whole need not a physician,” as Jesus famously says in Matthew 9:12. Epictetus told us, centuries ago, that it is not pain that undoes us but our response to it, the way we let it keep lingering in the mind. Confucius, an exact contemporary of the Buddha, spoke in exactly the same terms as the Buddha about the virtue of moderation, the need for detachment in a world of constant change, the truth of interdependence, and the way we must care for the larger whole. Gandhi himself, a Hindu sometimes described as a “Christian Muhammadan,” said that his mission was not “to deliver people from difficult situations” but, rather, to show that “every man or woman, however weak in body, is the guardian of his or her self-respect and liberty.” To call these truths Buddhist, the Dalai Lama is often quick to imply, is as strange as calling the law of gravity Christian just because it happened to have been formulated by the Christian named Isaac Newton.

  I puzzled all this out, the way I might once have tried to unriddle a complicated mathematical equation, and felt that I was coming at last to a beginner’s (and outsider’s) view of how Buddhism made sense. And then—quite fatally—I went to see Ngari Rinpoche, the Dalai Lama’s younger brother, again, and all the understandings I’d come to were just a source of mirth to him.

  “We’re really such a tiny speck in the universe,” I pronounced as we sat out on his terrace in the spring sunshine, overlooking miles and miles of the Kangra Valley receding down below. “Hardly more than a wisp of smoke.” Secretly, I was proud of myself; I’d begun to gras
p something of the Buddhist distinction between the false self, which we construct, and the true self, which is just a stream of energy within a network of such streams. I put down the book on self, reality, and reason in Tibetan Buddhism he’d lent me the previous week, to show him that I’d read it.

  “Why?” he said, almost jumping out of his chair. “Are you telling me I should be a vegetable—like the Zen monks in Japan? We need some conceptual thought, if only as a monitor to keep ourselves honest.”

  “Another person, you mean?”

  “Surveillance.” He stopped for a moment. “Something to watch over the mind that’s about to disappear.”

  I didn’t say anything in return; he’d caught me off guard, just as I thought I’d got my head around an elusive truth.

  “Look at it the other way,” he said calmly, as if laying down a law. “Perhaps we are the center of the universe. The problem if you see yourself as a speck is that you lose all self-esteem.”

  I thought of the Dalai Lama’s heartfelt story about the man in Soweto; I thought, too, of the Tibetans all around me, who regularly said that they were nothing and should leave all power in the hands of the Dalai Lama.

  “If you are proud and likely to argue,” he said, “then you need to realize that the self is nothing. If you are lacking in self-esteem, then you have to think about your potential, how much power you have inside yourself.”