The Open Road

by Iyer, Pico

  The Dalai Lama, besides, could never write off the world beyond logic entirely when it was that very world that had brought him (and a few hundred other incarnate lamas, down from what once had been a few thousand) to the chair on which he now sat, thanks to the consultation of cloud formations, reflections in a mystical lake, and various dreams. The very system of incarnate lamas, or tulkus, found through such secret symbols just after their birth, might almost have been a careful mixture of shrewd logic and Tibetan anti-logic: its beauty, after all, was in bringing to power tiny boys (and, occasionally, girls) who had had no chance to be corrupted by the world and had no interest at all in self-advancement. Its shadow side was the very fact that by placing two-year-olds in power, it was effectively, for a few years at least, putting real power in the hands of regents and senior tutors, or relatives of the child, who were by no means immune to power brokering and political chicanery. For Tibetans, I was surprised to learn, having a tulku born into the family was not a source of celebration; it was believed that, in worldly terms (and through a kind of complex compensation, perhaps), it usually brought bad luck.

  The Dalai Lama generally, as already mentioned, referred to the Dalai Lama institution as if it were just a set of clothes—of duties and responsibilities and titles—he was born to wear (and he referred to death, engagingly, as equivalent to “a change of clothing”); as his younger brother put it to one writer, “He is a simple man whose job it is to be Dalai Lama.” This separation of the spirit and the container was made evident by the fact that some Dalai Lamas were fat, some thin; some were very mild-mannered, some fierce. The Great Fifth Dalai Lama is generally credited with establishing Tibet as it was until recently (and building the Potala Palace, for example, as a great symbol of church and state in one); yet the Dalai Lama who followed him famously spent much of his time cavorting in the taverns outside the Potala’s walls, shed his robes, and left, before his mysterious disappearance, a set of erotic poems that are beloved by Tibetans but susceptible to all kinds of interpretations.

  Yet, even in this context, things were never so clear, or so easily written off, as I would like. One day I picked up a book concerning Tibet and the Thirteenth Dalai Lama by Sir Charles Bell, the no-nonsense British diplomat who became the first Westerner to grow very close to a Dalai Lama, and who actually stayed for a year near his palace. Bell’s account was as clear and practical as you would imagine of an officer reporting back to headquarters. The Thirteenth Dalai Lama was “singularly frank,” Bell wrote in 1924, and often dismissed his officials so that he could talk to his foreign friend alone (and even seek out his counsel). “His Holiness has always disliked ceremony,” Bell went on, and, in fact, when he was forced into exile in 1910, in India, as China’s rulers advanced on Lhasa, the Thirteenth clearly rejoiced in the freedom he suddenly enjoyed to take walks in the forest and move around as he could never have done in Lhasa. “He is fond of horses,” Bell wrote, “dogs, and animals generally, but especially of birds. And flowers are an abiding joy to him.”

  All this was straightforward enough, and an invaluable source of information about the first Dalai Lama to move out into the larger world and to begin to draw Tibet into modern times. Yet what I found startling, reading it eighty years on, was that in detail after detail, phrase after phrase, Bell’s description of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama could not have been a better description of his very different successor, the Fourteenth. One of the many reasons why I thought there was no call for much physical description of the person and personality of the current Dalai Lama was that it had been given, quite powerfully, eleven years before he was born, by a man who was describing his precursor.

  “He is impulsive, cheerful, and gifted with a keen sense of humor,” Bell wrote of his friend. “His eyes twinkled as he described to me the strategems by which he evaded the pursuit of the Chinese soldiery.” He was “a shrewd judge of character, quick in understanding” and always ready to show his feelings, though “innate courtesy never wavered.” Surprisingly, perhaps, the head of Tibetan Buddhism was not enthusiastic about Buddhism being carried around the world, although he genuinely respected anyone who sincerely pursued a religious practice (and was taken aback, he confessed, by the Chinese he met who didn’t).

  “The God-king is intensely human” was Bell’s conclusion, and got up to meditate sometimes at three a.m., not even breaking from his meditations when traveling on trains. He gave his secretaries fits with his eagerness to make good use of every moment, and he always seemed to hunger for details of the outside world, having the English papers translated for him and following the tense situation in 1920s Germany. At the very least, he seemed to have much more in common with his successor than even a George Bush had with a George W. Bush. The one detail that Bell didn’t include (because he could not know of it) was that, as a boy being taught calligraphy, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama was made to write out the Thirteenth’s chilling last testament over and over, so that, one might guess, he finally had it by heart.

  Even in old Tibet the incarnation system had never been an unambiguous blessing; the finding of new lamas and the protection of them against rival candidates or others with different ideas had never been easy. But like everything in the Tibetan world, it had become infinitely more complex now that the culture was scattered across the globe, and incarnate lamas were being presented in Seattle, in Spain, all over the place. The head of the Nyingma lineage had become the subject of much speculation in the West after he announced that the martial artist Steven Seagal (a generous contributor to his cause) was a high Tibetan incarnation, and then said the same of a four-times-married former psychic from Brooklyn. Besides, traditional monastic search groups looking for new incarnations now had to travel across Tibet and into other countries, with secret faxes sent back and forth and no one sure of whether the new lama would be found in China or Tibet (where he would not be able to see the Dalai Lama) or be born in exile, and therefore unable to meet the vast majority of his people.

  The second-highest incarnation in all of Tibetan Buddhism—one of the main figures responsible for finding a new Dalai Lama—is the Panchen Lama, whose traditional home is Tashi Lhunpo Temple in Tibet’s second city, Shigatse. But the Tenth Panchen Lama had remained in China when the Dalai Lama fled to Tibet, and not even Tibetans were of one mind as to how much he had collaborated with the authorities in Beijing, how much he had used his position in China to try to help Tibet from within. In 1989, a healthy man of fifty, he made a long-planned return to Tashi Lhunpo to inter the remains of previous Panchen Lamas, only five days after saying, outright, that the Chinese had brought more harm than gain to Tibet. Suddenly, only days after his return, he collapsed one morning and died, and rumors of a poisoning began to fly.

  For six years the search for his successor was conducted via a complex series of communications between Tibet and Dharamsala, until finally, in May 1995, the Dalai Lama announced that a little boy had been found in Tibet who was the Eleventh Panchen Lama. As soon as he did so, incensed perhaps that a Tibetan exile was daring to authorize incarnations in Chinese territory, the Chinese came up with their own candidates and, in a divination ceremony at the Jokhang Temple, in Lhasa, that partook of all the ritual they so often mocked (including boys choosing pieces of paper from a golden urn), they announced their own little boy (the son of Communist cadres) as the true new Panchen Lama. The Dalai Lama’s choice, six years old, was placed under house arrest, and has not been heard of since.

  The third-highest incarnation in Tibetan Buddhism—in fact, the oldest incarnation in the philosophy—is that of the Karmapa, the head of the Kagyu lineage. When the Sixteenth Karmapa died, in 1981, a search was undertaken, and two young candidates emerged, each backed by one faction of the previous Karmapa’s followers. One boy was in Delhi, the other (the Dalai Lama’s approved choice) in China itself, though, in the first days of the new millennium, as in a fairy tale, and months after the Dalai Lama turned sixty-five, the fourteen-year-old from China, ha
ving pulled off an astonishing escape, dramatically appeared in Dharamsala. Tibetans by now know that no fairy tale comes without a shadow, or some aspect of the real world, and so while some people embraced him as the new hope of exile Tibet, others wondered how the most conspicuous Tibetan in Tibet could have escaped under the eyes of a Chinese government that was able to intercept even the simplest peasant.

  The Dalai Lama greeted the boy and gave him a place to stay near Dharamsala, since the Indian government, fearing he was a Chinese spy, refused to allow him to take up his ancestral residence in Sikkim. But the confusion perhaps intensified the Dalai Lama’s wish to stress, as he had done since 1969, that there might be no Fifteenth Dalai Lama at all. There would be another Dalai Lama, he always said, only if that Dalai Lama was of help to the Tibetan people.

  Meanwhile, the world of protective deities and spirits, of rival groups within Tibetan Buddhism and ancient enmities that had always cast shadows over old Tibet now came out into the global order. In 1996, the Dalai Lama began, as I’d seen in Vancouver, to tell audiences not to propitiate a particular deity called Shugden, because he felt that it was proving harmful, and that certain of the tenets involved in its propitiation went against the principles of Buddhism and the very tolerance and reason he was trying so hard to promote. In response, the followers of the spirit, gathered in the West around a rinpoche in England who ran an organization he called the New Kadampa Tradition, started protesting the Dalai Lama’s talks (hence the warning that had greeted me in British Columbia), claiming that he was violating the principle of freedom of religion; they even allowed themselves to be co-opted to some degree by the Chinese.

  Again, one had only to tiptoe across the threshold of the dispute to find oneself in a furious, febrile world of curses and threats and almost medieval intrigue. In the letters certain Shugden supporters sent the Dalai Lama’s government in exile (released in a brochure put out by that government), the sentences pullulated with references to “donkey officials” and “poisonous and shameless” rivals. At one point, a package had been sent to a monastery in India containing a knife and the message “We were unable to meet you this time but we hope to get you next time.” A senior monk was beaten up and a barn and granary went up in flames. Then the head of the Dalai Lama’s own Institute of Buddhist Dialectics was found stabbed in his bed, along with two younger monks, apparently cut up as if for exorcism.

  The letters from the Shugden group (and, its members would no doubt suggest, those sent back to them) open the door on a set of spirits not so different from the grinning skeletons and dancing monsters of a thangka. Some of the correspondence I read spoke of “turning the milk sea of Tibet into a sea of boiling blood,” of “eating the three carcases” (presumably belonging to the three who had been killed), and warned of more carcasses to be found soon. There was no talk of calm logic or scientific investigation, least of all of a doctor’s wish to heal.

  One hot day in August 2005 in Zurich, at an eight-day set of teachings on compassion the Dalai Lama was offering, the public-address system suddenly declared—in German, Tibetan, and English—that followers of Shugden should take care not to attend the following morning, when the Dalai Lama was going to be offering some special initiations. Flyers were handed out to the same effect, and the announcement was broadcast again. Then, as he was nearing the end of his daily explication de texte, at four p.m., the Dalai Lama suddenly said, “Today I am going to speak for thirty extra minutes. If that makes problems for you, please feel free to go. But I hope you will not mind my going on a little late today.” The audience, which could never get enough of him—many of its members had traveled across the world for these teachings—was clearly delighted.

  Slowly at first, in long and forceful Tibetan sentences—rendered into German by a scholarly man onstage next to the Dalai Lama (and into other languages by unseen translators speaking into our transistor radios)—the Dalai Lama began to explain why he did not wish any followers of Shugden to attend the special initiations, even if some of them had chosen, in spite of requests, to attend the other days’ teachings. For them to be present during these esoteric ceremonies would potentially impede the progress of everyone else, he said, and even do harm to the person giving the initiations, himself.

  His voice began to rise, and soon he was speaking like thunder. Argument after argument followed as to why Shugden supporters should not come, and his bearing was as wrathful as I had ever seen in public. Occasionally, his words would trail off, and the mild-mannered Swiss professor in jacket and tie by his side would start translating the sentences; then, before the man could continue, the Dalai Lama would start up again, drowning him out.

  The audience laughed at such moments, though not with delight.

  “In no way are the Dalai Lamas attached to the Shugden deity,” the Tibetan leader said, going through history to show how previous Dalai Lamas had spoken of the spirit. “This has been a problem for three hundred and sixty years. I initially was involved with this deity, but then through some analysis, I realized there was some kind of harm in it, some kind of problem. Then I referred this issue to two of my tutors.”

  His junior tutor, however, Trijang Rinpoche, was widely believed to be a follower of Shugden himself. Indeed, there are said to be more than one hundred thousand in the Tibetan community who propitiate the deity. Trijang Rinpoche, the Dalai Lama now said, was to be revered for his great contributions to Lam Rim, or Stages of the Path, teachings. But it was his own job, the Dalai Lama stressed, “to continue the line that the two great Dalai Lamas, the Fifth and the Thirteenth, have taken. And the Fifth actually denounced the Shugden deity as a harmful spirit.”

  On and on the passionate tirade went, like nothing so much as a prosecuting lawyer’s final summation. Some people began to look at their watches. Always he was working for harmony between the schools of Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai Lama said. Yet a Shugden teacher had said that if a Gelug practitioner follows a Nyingma teaching, he will be killed by the Shugden deity. What did this have to do with the clear philosophy laid out by Lord Buddha? And if you looked at the Nalanda teaching, the great work of the Indian philosophers Shantideva and Nagarjuna, which he was explicating now, what did that have to do with propitiating deities?

  It was as if a door had swung open behind him and suddenly one could see something of what this man (a tiny figure at the far end of a huge rock-star auditorium, flanked by two giant video screens that projected his face around the building) was sitting in front of. When finally the Dalai Lama stopped speaking, the eight thousand people in Hallenstadion filed out of the day’s teachings very quietly.

  In the end, I thought, it was probably not so different from what you find in any relationship, even with those you have known for an entire lifetime: at the core there is likely to be a mystery. And all that you know and learn about a person does not take away from the vast amount you cannot and will never know. “Our knowledge,” as Isaac Bashevis Singer, wise chronicler of spirits and golems pointed out, “is a little island in a great ocean of non-knowledge.” In the Dalai Lama’s case, bringing a complex and sometimes secret set of rites out into the world, this was especially true, since so much of what belonged to his tradition could make little sense to another culture. And so he offered a carefully watered-down form of general teaching centered on basic human truths—science plus ethics, in effect—and true to his central contention that at every moment you should try to do some good, but at the very least should do no harm.

  He’d told me once how surprised he had been, on meeting a Christian in Europe, to hear the man say that “the self is a mystery.” And God, too. For someone coming from the Indian philosophical tradition, he said, with its three thousand years of investigating the self, the self seemed eminently knowable, a series of laws and connections that could be investigated as any other aspect of nature or consciousness could. And yet for all of that, the rites or practices by which the mind conducted these investigations, examining the self a
nd even its unreality, involved techniques or customs that to the outsider were at least as mysterious as any other matter of incarnation.

  Often, I recalled, in the years after his death, the Buddha was represented by just the image of an empty throne.

  In order to be remembered or even wanted, I have to be a person that nobody knows.

  —THOMAS MERTON

  THE MONK

  At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a Swiss photographer named Manuel Bauer spent more than three years following the Dalai Lama on his travels around the world, making more than thirty trips in all and recording every moment of his day the way a modern photojournalist chronicles a presidential candidate on the campaign trail. He took pictures of him as he prepared for bed, sitting in his undershirt, and he took pictures of him as he woke up in the morning and began his hours of meditation. He took pictures of him weeping onstage, conducting private ceremonies with his oracles, watching TV bare-chested, and pouring tea for Václav Havel. When Bauer showed his subject proofs of the book to see if any of the four hundred images had violated privacy or inadvertently overstepped some boundary, the only one the Dalai Lama questioned was a picture in which, because of the perspective, it appeared that he was sitting higher than one of his teachers.

  It’s startling, often, for outsiders to hear the Dalai Lama say (as he always does) that he’s had eleven teachers in the course of his life, or fifteen, as he said later, or even nineteen, as one of his more recent interviews had it; many of us from abroad, knowing only that he’s the head of Tibetan Buddhism, are unaware that he’s not even the head of his own Gelug order (merely its highest incarnation). Yet his stress on his many official teachers, his memories of the whips they mounted on the wall in Lhasa to keep him in order, his turning to lamas in the crowd during public addresses to ask them for their more informed readings of a text all work to remind us that he’s a monk.