The Open Road

by Iyer, Pico

  For myself, as someone born in the West and trained in some of the higher universities of skepticism, I often found it very difficult to follow the philosophical complexities that were his bread and butter. But as I looked around me in the streets of Dharamsala, or traveling to Yemen, to Bolivia, I sometimes did begin to see that discontent was the only reality we knew, and such possibility as we found would have to come out of it. As I sat at my desk, day after day, I really did find that everything was a product of my inner weather, the page that seemed so radiant yesterday looking dead and lusterless today. And as I thought about how I might better get on with the people I knew, my circumstances, I saw that everything really did depend on how I looked at it: call someone a friend, or turn to her better side rather than her lesser, and something useful might result.

  One day, a little like my new friend Christian, I noticed that in the midst of a long disquisition on Tibetan history, the spiritual and temporal leader of the Tibetans had caught (before I did) the fact that my cup of tea was empty. I recalled that the person who had most vehemently challenged the prices charged for a Dalai Lama teaching was, in fact, the Dalai Lama. And I remembered that it was he who had once brought up to me the instance of his endorsing the later deranged Japanese cult leader Shoko Asahara—which was proof, he said, that “I’m not a ‘Living Buddha’!” Something changed in me each time I left his company, even as I was telling my friends, heatedly, that humans never really change.

  Below what we think we are

  we are something else,

  we are almost anything.

  —D. H. LAWRENCE

  THE MYSTERY

  One day in Dharamsala, I woke up and went out while it was still dark. Dogs were running up and down the settlement’s muddy gullies and steep slopes, and along the narrow mountain road that winds down toward the valley figures could be seen moving quickly in clusters—Tibetans, I soon saw, loaded down with white scarves, and the outlines of monks. I followed them down through the darkness to the scramble of largely dilapidated buildings that mark the government in exile and its library—“Voice of Tibet (Voice for the Voiceless),” said one door, and “Tibetan Torture Survivors’ Program,” said another. Then I was at a small temple, between the yellow-walled library and the valley below, where a long line of mostly ragged pilgrims was snaking around the outside corridors.

  I could have been in Tibet again, so unglossy and atavistic was the scene: toothless old men in cowboy hats made for the high plateaus, and women whose eyes seemed innocent of towns, unused to being in any buildings save ones like this. The long, winding trail of petitioners and nomads grew longer every second, while the blue-black sky across the valley began to pale, and the youngest monks of the temple, boys of seven or eight, began laboring past, carrying huge gray buckets and great swinging kettles, out of which they dispensed cups of Tibetan tea and clumps of rice.

  Very promptly, at a few minutes before seven a.m., the large, gold-studded red doors of the temple swung back and the few foreigners in attendance (and almost no Tibetans, for some reason) were let into a small chapel, thick with the smell of melted butter and the usual, everyday furnishings of incense sticks protruding from cans of Coke and Fanta bottles. Maybe eighty or so in all pushed into the close space—the president of Kalmykia and his entourage seated cross-legged at the front—and only one Tibetan couple joined us, as wild-eyed and raw as the others. Very soon—I couldn’t help but notice—the woman was howling, rolling her eyes around and falling about in convulsions, while her husband, seemingly unconcerned, sat by her side as if this happened every day.

  At the stroke of seven—things weren’t always so punctual in Dharamsala—a side door opened and one of the temple’s monks came out, with a few others in attendance. He looked to be an unusually mild and gentle sort. He stood beside the raised throne at the center—everyone was silent—and as he did, three attendants started affixing to his body layers of clothing, covered by a rich gold silk brocade, and attaching to his chest a circular mirrored breastplate, ringed with pieces of amethyst and turquoise. A silver quiver followed, and a three-foot-long silver sheath and sword; then a kind of harness, seventy pounds in weight (I would later learn), was placed on him, and a huge headpiece weighing thirty more pounds. The unwieldy figure—less a man, he now seemed, than a piece of walking regalia—was placed on the throne and strapped in, as it appeared: the odd impression was of an astronaut being prepared for a long and dangerous journey, less into outer than into inner space.

  Then nothing happened. The quiet-faced monk sat where he was, absolutely still, his eyes closed, and for ten minutes or more—the whole room was silent—you could almost see him descend into himself. It was like nothing I had ever witnessed, as if we were watching him go down and down, into the inner reaches of the well that was his soul. It was as if he was gathering himself, collecting force, and disappearing before our eyes as he returned to whomever he was beneath the surface.

  Then, without warning, the strange figure jerked back. He started moving of his own accord, convulsively; three monks raced in to grab and steady him, and he lurched to his feet and began shaking back and forth. The terrible, implausible impression was of a child in a tantrum, his face crumpled as if a balloon had been punctured. The lips and eyes were misshapen, so it looked as if he were sobbing after being denied a favorite treat. Then the figure began moving around spasmodically and jets of water issued violently from his mouth, the attendants dabbing his cheeks clean while the huge, barricaded presence shook himself out of their control.

  The Tibetan woman who had been falling back onto the hard floor as if in a faint and shaking her head furiously was now reaching new levels of transport, rolling her head around and letting out bloodcurdling shrieks, audibly becoming someone else as the state oracle was set again on his throne and people began lining up to jostle past him and receive a blessing from the shuddering form. The hysterical woman was the first to come before him—was she possessed? was this a kind of fit?—and then the whole crowd pressed forward, every person extending a white scarf toward the figure on the throne and lingering for a moment or two before the clenched, puffing face, out of which still came jets of spit. Somehow, in his derangement, the man offered reflexive blessings to each white scarf that went past, and dropped little handfuls of brown seeds into every passing hand; then he stood up again, abruptly, and clattered through the hall, out onto the sunny outdoor terrace, where he sat down on his transported throne, in full view now of the great assembly of Tibetans, and began muttering words as bodies pushed and shoved about him.

  The other monks took up positions around his seat, two crowding very close to relay what he was saying, while a third stood at attention and scribbled furiously, covering page after small page. The dictation seemed to go on and on, for ten minutes or more, and then, suddenly, the great caparisoned group stumbled back into the chapel and the great doors closed behind them. Whatever the deity who oversees Tibet wanted to convey through his human medium had been delivered.

  The Dalai Lama uses his oracles (of which the most prominent is Nechung, whose trance we had just witnessed) as he might his left hand, he says, and he uses his Cabinet as he might his right, balancing visible and invisible worlds—the conscious and the subconscious realm—much as the Middle Way would suggest (though he also admits that he regards the medium who speaks for Tibet’s protector deity as his “upper house” and his regular political counselors as his “lower,” perhaps because the oracle speaks for a wisdom that is beyond the human, and beyond the reach of human meddling. It was Nechung, after all, who told him when he was only fifteen that he had to assume temporal power early, as the Chinese advanced into Tibet; and it was Nechung who told him in 1959 that he had to flee Lhasa—and gave him the route to do so—that very night). The Dalai Lama stresses that the oracle is in fact a healer and a protector, something more than just a spirit that can divine the future, but the fact remains that the spirit clearly lives in a domain very different f
rom that of the lucid, analytical, doctor’s logic that marks the Dalai Lama’s mass public talks around the world.

  Like any being, Tibetan Buddhism has a daylight and a nighttime side, a part that belongs in the public, visible world and a part that belongs to the realm of dreams and premonitions and everything that exists outside the conscious mind. Most of us associate the Dalai Lama with the daytime—waking up before it is light and going to sleep soon after the sun goes down—but when he sleeps, he readily admits, he enters a different part of his practice, one that reaches even into his dreams. As I watched him carry Tibet and its form of Buddhism around the world, I noticed that he always stressed the New Testament side of the tradition, as it were, more than the Old, downplaying the complexities that Heschel described and Job lived out in favor of more elementary and practical principles. He tended to shield the wider world from the esoteric side of Tibetan Buddhism the way one might keep a loaded gun in a locked cabinet, so the kids don’t start to play with it and it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. But that did not change the fact that this more mysterious, nonrational side—the part that existed beyond the realm of mathematical formulas—remained as intrinsic to his practice as logic and debating; you have only to look at any Tibetan temple wall or thangka, swarming with skull-headed beings riding monsters, and copulating deities (the female figure milky white, the male more dark), or look at the mandalas nearby in which all visible and invisible worlds are distilled into a single mystical diagram, to realize that Tibetan Buddhism has taken the nonanalytical side of the tradition, as well as the analytical, to some of its richest extremes.

  One of the conundrums I watched the Dalai Lama face as he traveled around the world was the fact that it was this explosive, esoteric, specialized side of Tibetan Buddhism—full of the “magic and mystery” of which such explorers as Alexandra David-Neel excitedly wrote—that has long been the main source of fascination to outsiders; those who are turning away from the Sunday School traditions of their own faiths do not want to give them up just to receive Sunday School wisdom from Tibet (or, in fact, to receive talk of analytical scholarship and scientific rigor and hard work, as the Dalai Lama stresses). The Dalai Lama carefully unfolded across the globe principles for selflessness and compassion, examples of responsibility drawn from the Buddhist notion of interconnectedness and an emphasis on practicing humanity, as it were, without having to think constantly about religious rites and scriptures. But what many a foreigner in his audience wanted (and perhaps saw, whether he provided it or not) was fire and smoke.

  I once went to my local university library to read up on Tibetan Buddhism, and, not to my surprise, the shelves were crowded with books with titles like Civilized Shamans, Oracles and Gods of Tibet, and Travellers in Space; over and over they served up what could be called the spiritual side of the fairy-tale Tibet we’ve Orientalized for so long, which can be seen as a faraway monk with his back turned to the world, developing inner strengths and charting an interior landscape—the geography of the mind—while the explorers of Queen Victoria were searching for the source of the Nile and mapping the canyons of Afghanistan. And certainly Tibet, like any person who spends a lot of time alone, seemed to have plumbed its inner resources, examined its mind and its dreams, so intensively that the result was what could look to the outsider like genius or madness or, most likely, a confounding mixture of the two.

  Even seven centuries ago, Marco Polo was entertaining his readers in Venice by writing of Tibetan lamas who made a khan’s cup rise to his lips, and even in the last century David-Neel was electrifying audiences by writing of monks keeping themselves warm on the icy Himalayan plateau just through the strength of their meditation, or running for two hundred miles at a stretch while in a trance. The very uniqueness of the school of Buddhism that Tibet had taken to its highest pitch—Vajrayana, or the “Thunderbolt Vehicle”—lay in its extraordinary claim that if you were able to master certain extremely advanced and secret techniques, you could actually attain enlightenment in a single lifetime.

  The Dalai Lama always spoke of daily practice, on and on through lifetimes, of not expecting rewards for millions of incarnations, of not looking for the bright lights and instant powers that some beginners hoped for in the exotic practice; yet even he, when asked, said with characteristic directness that if you meditate for long periods every morning, you can improve your memory and “finally you can develop clairvoyance,” and even he, in his second autobiography, admitted that much in Tibetan life and culture confounded his scientific mind: at one point, he reports seeing a piece of a rinpoche’s skull that had somehow survived the fires of cremation (as Tibetans believe is possible) and on which was clearly visible the Tibetan character representing that rinpoche’s particular protector deity. Whenever I read such sentences, it was as if the human, appreciably accessible figure I saw and touched had vanished in a second behind a closed door.

  For Tibetan Buddhists, as for scientists like Michael Faraday, the world is made up not just of matter but of fields of energy, currents that for Tibetans link what they call “subtle vestures” to “gross vestures,” hell realms, or the land of hungry ghosts, to the world of protective spirits and deities. To the real practitioner, to say it again, all these figures are symbolic: as the Dalai Lama stresses, the beings carrying skulls brimming over with blood, the naked figures entwined around one another, tongues alive, are just unusually graphic representations of the forces that play out inside us and, in some cases perhaps, of the forces we need to summon within to repel the lures of hatred or ignorance or greed. Yet on a remote plateau three miles above the sea, where people live huge distances from others, in a charged, almost otherworldly atmosphere where the heavens seem very, very close and each of their changes and moods has strong and distinct implications on earth, none of the iconography probably seems entirely pictorial.

  That is the other element of Tibet that leads to all the books called Out of This World and Dreamtime Tibet and Tibet the Mysterious; due to its intense and high isolation, and because its monks and scientists of self were developing inner techniques while other countries were working on cars and airplanes, it seems to belong to an earlier time that feels to many of us like an almost preconscious memory, an ancestral wisdom that we have lost (in part through all the great technological innovations we have gained). Until very recently, and even now in places, Tibetans have lived in a domain eerily similar to that of the early Christians, amid what Gibbon called “an uninterrupted succession of miraculous powers, the gift of tongues, of vision, and of prophecy.” Tibetan culture is much closer than our own to the world of Shakespeare, in which every comet or cloud formation is a direct message from the gods (and the king of the day, James I, was celebrated for his book On Daemonologie); Tibetan religion keeps intact a system we nowadays associate with the ancient Greeks or Romans, in which the connection between other worlds and our own has not been broken. It was only a few centuries ago, after all, that murderers in Europe hoped to escape capture by eating meals on the bodies of those they’d killed and housebreakers stole into homes in disguise, bearing tapers made of the fingers of stillborn infants.

  “Below and beyond the conscious self,” as Aldous Huxley wrote, examining the eruptions of hysteria and witch burning that arose in seventeenth-century Catholic France, “lie vast ranges of subconscious activity, some worse than the ego and some better, some stupider and some, in certain respects, far more intelligent.” Almost as a function of not embracing modernity till recently—and in spite of an analytical tradition that can debate philosophical abstractions with any Platonist or positivist—Tibet still seemed to have at least one foot in this other world. Its scientists of the mind speak of seventy-seven thousand chambers of the “subtle body” and eighty-four thousand “negative emotions” in the human sphere (as well as eighty-four thousand “doors of transformation”); Buddhism is always committed to reality, but reality, as Picasso reminds us, is made up not just of what we see but of all that we make o
f it, the dreams and impulses that arise out of it, all the ways an external, visible landscape plays out in an inner, invisible terrain. To be only rational is not, you could say, entirely reasonable.

  After the great debate at Samye, in which Tibet decided to follow the philosophical Indian path more than the pragmatic and more meditation-based Chinese, and especially after Tsong Kha Pa created the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism in the fifteenth century, many Tibetan monks gathered in monasteries that were, among other things, great philosophical laboratories for examining and perhaps extending the ideas of Nagarjuna and Shantideva and the other seminal Buddhist philosophers. Yet equally inevitably, many other monks wandered off across the vast emptiness of the Tibetan plateau, meditated for years on end in caves, and developed spiritual faculties that belong more to the realm of religion than to pure philosophy. The Dalai Lama presents a practical Buddhism that is striking for its sanity, its balance and lucidity, its appeal to common sense as much as to the other senses; but many other Tibetan lamas, for many centuries, have practiced a much wilder and more radical kind of Buddhism that can manifest itself in what has been called “crazy wisdom,” ideas and acts so far beyond the norm that most of the rest of us don’t know what to make of them (and certainly lack the tools to pass any judgment on them).

  Tantra, as esoteric Buddhism is sometimes called, is, according to the Dalai Lama, a very specialized and secret training for death, and the kind of inflammable practice that can be pursued only under very careful supervision and expert guidance. It takes much of what Tibetans see as belonging to the “gross” levels of mind—sex and drink and illusion—and tries to raise them to the subtle, the way, I once heard the Dalai Lama say, Ayurvedic doctors take mercury, which, untreated, works as poison, and use it as a medicine. Far from the talk of compassion and selflessness that the Dalai Lama often gives to outsiders, Tantra celebrates the dangerous fact that the human is not the humane and that transcendence, by its very nature, remains far beyond conventional notions of right and wrong. “To give up one’s concept of being good,” as William James put it, “is the only door to the Universe’s deeper reaches.” Tibet itself is said by its folklore to have emerged from the union of a bodhisattva and a demoness.