by Iyer, Pico
The Dalai Lama is even in the rare position, for a ruler, of trying to conduct a coup against himself, attempting to give up power as fast as his people push it back at him. At its best, to step into a community based on spiritual and not political values is to enter a world turned on its head, where—this the Dalai Lama’s hope—freedom means freedom from fear and wealth means inner resources. Power, ideally, means self-sovereignty, in the democratic and the inner sense.
As I walked along the streets of McLeod Ganj, therefore, I found myself besieged by whole notions of possibility: Jewish leaders were here to tell the Dalai Lama how they kept a culture going after the First and Second Temples were destroyed, civil rights workers who marched with Martin Luther King were sitting in the drafty rooms trying to see what they could lend to this nonviolent struggle, a new garbage collection system and cleanup operation had been organized by Richard Gere. Once, talking to some young Tibetans about whether to follow their political urges or their leader’s advice, I heard two young people pipe up, and learned they were Mexicans; they had come here in part to ask Tibetans how they might resolve their own differences with an insurgency in Chiapas. Another time, in the garden of my guesthouse, I found myself enjoying breakfast daily with philanthropists and government officials from Germany, Romania, America, here to do what they could to help. In its starriest aspects, Dharamsala is consecrated to the idea that the problems of one place are the concerns of every place, in our ever more linked universe.
The sixth road that sprays out from the central square at the traditional entrance to McLeod Ganj zigzags all the way down the slope, between Himalayan oaks and deodars, past the Anglican church and the “Officers’ Mess” buildings, past tea plantations and terraced fields, over a bridge, and into an open space where, with the help of a local Japanese architect, the Tibetans have built a glittering center called the Norbulingka Institute, whose pathways and reflecting ponds and gold-roofed central temple and flowering trees against the snowcaps are closer to most people’s vision of Shangri-La than anything in congested and noisy McLeod Ganj, forty minutes away by car. Among its pavilions and elegant classrooms, master thangka painters and statue artists and woodcarvers from Tibet pass down their training to new generations of apprentices, many of whom study with them for ten years or more, and out of these workshops come the golden Avalokitesvaras, the intricate mandalas, the woven snow lions that will be sent around the world. Walk to the back of the compound and pull open a little gate, and, after a three-minute stroll beside open fields, you come to the Dolma Ling Nunnery, where two hundred nuns, most of them newly escaped from Tibet, are lunging back and forth in classical debates in the quiet afternoons, taking the traditional form of the monks and making it something more murmurous, less martial.
A little down the road, in Sidhbari, the Karmapa, having escaped from China and arrived in Dharamsala just as Tibetan hopes were beginning to fade, still stays, regarded by many Tibetans and foreigners as a new, young embodiment of Tibet’s prospects, in spite of his restricted movements. And a few hours after watching the state oracle go into his trance one spring Saturday, I came down to this spot to see the Dalai Lama open a new Gyuto Temple, replacing what was for five centuries one of the most celebrated and advanced establishments in Tibet. A Tantric college set up for the equivalent of postdoctoral students of Tibetan Buddhism, Gyuto was—now is—one of the two places in the Tibetan world where monks traveled to the farthest reaches of consciousness and thought, in part by performing austerities barely comprehensible to the rest of us: for nine years in Tibet, each of the monks was not allowed to return to his own room or to take off his robes, and had to live, meditate, and sleep on the same eighteen-inch-wide pallet, using his wooden tea bowl as a pillow. Trained by such hardships, perhaps, the thirty (out of nine hundred) who managed to escape to India were able to continue their meditations when they came out into exile, in dirt parking lots and under trees, finally receiving permission to make and sell Tibetan rugs to keep themselves alive.
For years they tried to build up their temple again in India, at first not even possessing monastic robes, and at last they were able to acquire some land near Dharamsala, and to spend almost fifteen years developing and constructing a prayer hall. But even after it was completed, it took another seven years to build accommodations for the monks, and even though the sparkling new center now has six three-story blocks, including kitchens, dining rooms, and a guesthouse, it still lacks even a hot water supply. As the Dalai Lama comes down to perform the official opening—many of the monks from McLeod Ganj making their own way down, so the fields and two-lane roads of the valley run red with novices, the group of Australian Buddhists who have provided much of the financing sitting in one corner, smiling beatifically in the white scarves the Dalai Lama has just given them—he does not linger much on the completion of the task; the building, he tells the monks, is only the beginning.
Any building with nothing inside it is worth very little, he goes on; the only thing that matters, ultimately, is the construction of a more durable and living building inside, one that you can carry everywhere and that will withstand the visitations of earthquake and flood and change of government. He is talking to his monks but, as ever, the message reaches the Australians and all the rest of us gathered in the grand new prayer hall as the sun streams through the windows and thousands sit in a festival of red and gold outside. The temple is, at most, a metaphor, a gateway, a vessel, perhaps, for the inner shrine, much as could be said for all of Dharamsala.
The Dalai Lama is, I realize ever more strongly, aiming at a universal lesson, going back, as is his way, to that part of his experience that even we from Japan or California can relate to. And the more politically minded globalists at the scene may note that no previous generation had ever had a chance to see a Dalai Lama, or almost any Tibetan teacher; that in our parents’ generation, only a handful of foreigners could even dream of setting foot in a Tibetan temple of any kind; that this gorgeous new construction is the result of Australian money, largely, and itself a way of transmitting Buddhism, or simple human values, to far-off cultures that previously would have had no exposure to them. With the opening of the temple, he and his followers are at once re-creating old Tibet, hoping to improve upon it, bringing it out into the modern world, and speaking to the displaced everywhere, who wish to re-create their own lost homes in some substantial and enduring way.
But the nature of globalism, as of anything, is to be a reflection of human longing, in all its many forms. And as I look around me in the afternoon of celebrations, it’s easy to feel that the Tibetan leader, with his pragmatism and his hunger for experimentation, reform, a realistic radicalism, is sketching a new kind of vision; but many of the rest of us add footnotes to it, scribble notes to ourselves on it, drop tea on it and blur some of the details, or scrawl ideas across the paper till the original is barely legible.
Put more simply, Dharamsala is as compressed and bittersweet an image of the global village as I have ever seen. All the stuff of all the globe flows into its already overcrowded streets—all the ideas and fears and projections and designs—and it’s never easy to see whether Tibet is getting the better of the outside world or the other way round. At certain times of the year, one of the Dalai Lama’s private secretaries has told me, literally half the population of Upper Dharamsala is Israeli. A whole section of the menu at the Asoka Indian restaurant is in Hebrew, and a clock in a typical international phone parlor shows the time in Tel Aviv. So many young Israelis, just released from their compulsory military service back home, descend on Dharamsala (part of a circuit of laid-back settings and cheap drugs they have set up, from Goa on the beach to Manali and Rishikesh in the mountains) that one celebrated rabbi from New York is now in full-time residence nearby, trying to make sure that not too many of his flock are lost to Tibetan Buddhism.
The streets of the little exile settlement swarm with so many henna-haired Chileans and dreadlocked young Danes, so many Swedish g
irls arm in arm with ponytailed boys from eastern Tibet, and professional drifters with a somewhat glazed look on their faces, that it’s hard to tell sometimes if it is a corner of Bali or one of the islands in the Gulf of Siam. The hand-lettered sign on the piece of cardboard leading to the Third I restaurant (the curious spelling itself a sign of something, some might say) offers “Origenal Tibetan, Israeli, Indian, Chinese, Continental, pizza” and much more, all the way to “Marmite/Vegemite Toast and Mocha Shakes,” and around it, in the hills, signs are painted on rocks in fluorescent blue, as on Ios in 1968, and mani stones are scribbled over with the collected wisdom of the ages: “Be gentle, be kind, this is a long journey” and “U be Bosatsu, I’ll Be the Taxi-Driver Bringing You Home.”
A Spanish Zen student with a shaved head is playing the didgeridoo on a rock and talking of the Indian in Rishikesh who sells didgeridoos along with tablas and tepees; the strung-out girl beside him is getting antsy because three shy Indian high school boys on a spring holiday want to come and say hello. I walk into a café in the idyllic village and ten or fifteen foreign pairs of eyes stare up at me from a series of pillows placed on the floor around a low table, crazy acid music blasting through the space and its denizens looking as if they’ve been on a very long trip indeed. Humus, Benotti Pie, Salom-la-Malka (“Everything with Extra Love”) are all on the menu; also “Mountaineering Equipment.”
To many a young Tibetan, each of these figures represents a new life, another world, a way out into a world of abundance and possibility not conceivable in Lhasa or in Dharamsala; and because the little settlement has become such a collection of foreigners of every kind, people converge from all over India to get their share of yen and euros. Yoga teachers from Goa and Kerala set up shop in the little guesthouses, offering classes on rooftops every morning and afternoon; vendors of wisdom of every stripe sell teachings that do not sound much like Buddhism at all—“GOOD NEWS,” says a flyer outside the Dalai Lama’s temple, and goes on to tell of a rinpoche possessed of “supernatural powers” who, here for the Dalai Lama’s teachings, is ready to make his special powers available to the world. Legless mothers and lepers and urchins who crowd around you on the dusty footpaths, hands extended, come all the way across South Asia to beg for money, and some of them, longtime residents tell me, have been in the same little spot for twenty-five years or more, crouching by a slippery path each day, sleeping every night on a cold ledge beside the road, and sending remittances, often quite handsome, home to their families in the south. As I go for a walk one bright day while the Dalai Lama is offering his teachings, I see a sign that says a German woman and then a Tibetan were robbed and beaten as they took a shortcut through the trees; an Indian woman comes up to me, waving a hospital invoice; a Tibetan with a sweet, shy smile stops me and announces that he needs three dollars to have a tooth pulled out.
I could be walking through a Buddhist text, on suffering and need and decay and illusion. One day I find a list of sample sentences that a volunteer teacher, no doubt well-intentioned and idealistic, uses to help her native Tibetan students with their English.
“What is your favorite fruit?” and “Are you a disciple of anyone?” “Who is the nephew of Tsong Kha Pa?” and “How many years did Gandhi spend in prison?” And, in what comes to seem the inimitable lingo of McLeod Ganj, itself a hybrid name bringing together one nineteenth-century lieutenant-governor of the Punjab, David McLeod, with the Hindi word for neighborhood, “When we are mindful, deeply in touch with the merest moment, our understanding of what is going on deepens, and we begin to be flooded with joy, peace, and love.”
One bright spring day, the slopes around Dharamsala beginning to light up with flowers of red and foaming pink, marigolds around the temples, primroses and buttercups, I meet a young Tibetan man whose dream is to become a writer. He was born in Amdo, in eastern Tibet, he tells me, but his father took him to Lhasa as a boy, and there he did what most twelve-year-old Tibetans in Lhasa do. “Lots of alcohol, play snooker, going to prostitutes. I never went to school or did job. The Chinese make it very cheap to buy beer, whiskey. Everything is cheap. So we do not like to go to school. We ask our parents for money and if they do not give, we steal from their pockets.” Illiteracy in Tibet, he says, is running at 80 percent.
When he was fourteen, he tells me—and I wonder how many foreigners he has told the story to before, in his good English, knowing what it is worth, perhaps polishing its details—his father suddenly decided (because of those twelve-year-old’s temptations, I surmise) that his son should go to Dharamsala. The boy joined a party of fifteen, as the youngest in the group, and, he says, “after seven days, people forgot they were from different places, different provinces, different worlds. It became really like a big family.” As in a dream of exile. But after they got to India and freedom, the twenty-five-day ordeal behind them, the dream began to shiver. He became a nomad in a different key—Dalhousie, Mussoorie, southern India, Delhi. He didn’t have credentials, English. He went to Tibetan schools, learned something, but still he didn’t have what the world accepts as qualifications or a diploma.
“My dream is to be translator and guide,” he goes on, “to work with foreign people”(to become a foreigner himself, I imagine).
“While I was running from Tibet,” Tsering continues, with his engaging, unpracticed smile, “I got to know a girl. We were quite close. It often happens like that on these trips. Even we left the party behind for a while, were separate. But when we got to India, we were separated. I was going to one school, a middle school; she was two years bigger, she was sent to senior school. Two years after, I went to her. Someone I remembered, I never forget. But I was told, ‘She has gone back Tibet.’ So now I don’t know what has happened. Only, she is gone.”
It seems to speak for so many of the separations of exile. But going to Tibet sounds like such a strange thing to me, for a young woman who has risked her life to flee Tibet two years before (and who will face recriminations, perhaps, and a penalized family when she goes back).
It does not sound strange to Tsering: his own brother, having completed the treacherous flight, went back to Tibet after a year and a half. Life is easier there, he explains; there’s less hustle, less need to work. You can get that cheap beer, loaf around; credentials aren’t important.
“Are the Tibetans different in Tibet and in exile?”
“Tibetan people in Tibet are more honest.”
“Really?” This is not what you’d expect of people living under a dictatorship, who have to work around the system or under it for every small thing.
“Sure. They believe in Buddhism, very devout, have much, much faith. They believe Buddha can help everything. Here it is more complicated. We need many books, we are thinking. We are more modernized.”
“You dream of going to other countries.”
“Yes.” The bashful smile; our chocolate cake and Earl Grey tea are finished now. He fingers the loose spot in his mouth where he’s got a sore wisdom tooth. “I want to go to native English-speaking country.”
But he’s been in exile long enough to know that it’s a competitive business; most young Tibetans are clamoring for the few scholarships, interested girls, philanthropic sponsors who offer a way out and into the West.
“Even now,” he tells me (there’s folk music on the sound system of the Moonpeak Café in the mornings it’s Handel and Dylan), “four months ago, I was confused, I had two minds. One, I wanted to stay here, but also I was thinking go back Tibet. Then I thinking, if I go back, my life very easy. I have house, car; but I only help myself. If I stay here, and become a writer, maybe I can do some small thing for other people.” The sweet smile that follows tells me that he knows that this good intention, like most others, is not much stronger than a prayer flag in a stiff wind.
Every year, just after the great celebration of the Tibetan New Year (which, because of the lunar calendar, generally falls in February or March), the Dalai Lama offers a set of spring teachings to rep
roduce Monlam, or the Great Prayer Festival, the highlight of the Tibetan calendar, which used to sweep across Lhasa in the old days. Great thangkas would be unscrolled across the massive white face of the Potala Palace, as many as ten thousand people would assemble to hear the Dalai Lama speak, and for sixteen days law and order would be placed in the uncertain hands of the dob-dobs, or soldier-monks of Drepung Monastery, five miles to the west. In Dharamsala, the teachings are the great event of the year; monks come from Bhutan and Nepal and Mongolia, from Korea and Taiwan and Italy and Tibet itself, to attend them, and laypeople from all the continents make a special effort to savor this great, almost unparalleled dose of the Tibetan leader. The rooms in many guesthouses are reserved more than a year in advance, e-mails fly across California asking for shared taxi rides from Delhi, movie stars wiggle out of important-seeming commitments to pursue what they regard as more pressing.
Every morning, the Dalai Lama comes out of his residence, surrounded by perhaps twenty or so others—senior monks, bodyguards, attendants, the spiritual head of the Mongolians (an ethnic Tibetan, as it happens), men carrying ceremonial scrolls and other objects—and takes a seat in front of his temple. As many as six thousand monks gather around him, many of them seated in a room on the second floor of the temple, able to follow him directly only by turning their backs to him and watching him speak on a TV screen. Hundreds of Tibetans sit on the ground, delighted just to be able to spend a fortnight within sight of their culture’s incarnation. At least two thousand other foreigners also push into the little space, and often the crowds are so intense that they spill out onto lower terraces and rooftops where the Dalai Lama is completely out of view, but his voice, carried on transistors and large radios, booms across the valley.