by Pico Iyer
But what I also remember from that moment was that, even as the world was feting him—congratulatory telegrams and faxes pouring into the rec room downstairs—he couldn’t let himself off the hook. “Sometimes,” he confessed, “I wonder whether my efforts really have an effect. I sometimes feel that unless there is a bigger movement, the bigger issues will not change. But how to start this bigger movement? Originally, it must come from individual initiative.”
The only way, he concluded, was through “constant effort, tireless effort, pursuing clear goals with sincere effort.” Every time he left a room, he said, he tried to switch off the light. “In a way, it’s silly. But if another person follows my example, then a hundred persons, there is an effect. It is the only way. The bigger nations and more powerful leaders are not taking care. So we poor human beings must make the effort.”
Meeting him now, I find him a lot more businesslike than he was in those days (and, of course, much more fluent in English); when TV crews come to interview him, he knows how to advise them on where to set up their cameras (and when we begin talking, he is quick to point out that my tape recorder is moving suspiciously fast). He’s not less jolly than before, perhaps, but he does seem more determined to speak from the serious side of himself, as the years go on, and Tibet draws ever closer to oblivion. Where he used to greet me with an Indian namaste, now he does so with a handshake, though the Dalai Lama does not so much shake your hand as rub it within his own, as if to impart to it some of his warmth.
As we talk, though—every afternoon at two, for day after day—he takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes; his aides say that in recent years, for the first time ever, they’ve seen him exhausted, his head slumped back in his chair (this the man usually seen leaning into the conversation, as if to bring to it all his attention and beady-eyed vigor). He doesn’t have much time for spiritual practice now, he tells me—only four hours a day (his duties increasing as he becomes a more senior monk). He still likes to do “some repair work, of watches and small instruments,” and he still loves tending to his flowers. One of the longest and most animated answers he gives me comes when I ask after his “four small cats.” But these days the only real break he can take comes in listening to the BBC World Service, to which he cheerfully confesses himself addicted.
This is the tendency of an engaging, still-boyish character alight with curiosity; but it’s also the confession of a man whose duties are almost entirely tied up with the dealings of the world, on a minute-by-minute level. One thing the Dalai Lama is not is otherworldly. He can explain in precise detail why the Tibetan cause is weaker than that of the Palestinians, or how globalism is, at its best, advancing a kind of Buddhism in mufti. His references nearly always come from the day’s most recent news, and he watches everything—from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the tragedy of Rwanda—both to see how it illuminates some metaphysical theory and to see what other kind of teaching it can impart. Exile has allowed him, he will tell you, to become a student of the world in a way that no earlier Dalai Lama could, and to see a planet that previously he, and the Dalai Lamas before him, could glimpse only through the parted curtains of a palanquin. The best aspect of his traveling is that he can schedule meetings with scientists and psychologists and Hopi leaders, all of whom, he believes, can help him refine his understanding of his own tradition. Buddhists can and should learn from Catholics, from physicists, even from Communists, he is quick to tell his startled followers—and if the words of the Buddha (let alone of the Dalai Lama) are not borne out by the evidence, they must be discarded instantly.
This is one reason why he seems much more interested in asking questions than in giving answers, and much more comfortable as a student (which he’s been, in the context of Tibetan Buddhism, most of his life) than as a teacher. It is also why I would say his sovereign quality is alertness: watch the Dalai Lama enter a crowded auditorium, or sit through a long monastic ceremony that has many others nodding off, and you will notice him looking around keenly for what he can pick up: a friend to whom he can unself-consciously wave, some little detail that will bring a smile to his face. Alertness is the place where the slightly impish boy and the rigorously trained monk converge, and though the world at large most responds to his heart—the pleasure afforded by his beam and air of kindness and good nature—the specific core of him comes no less from his mind, and the analytical faculties honed in one of the world’s most sophisticated metaphysical technologies. It’s not unusual, I’ve come to see by now, for the Dalai Lama to remember a sentence he’s delivered to you seven years before, or to complete an answer he began ninety minutes ago, while lacing up his sturdy mountain boots. Sometimes, in large gatherings, he will pick out a face he last saw in Lhasa forty years before. Once, as we were talking, he suddenly remembered something an Englishman had said to him twenty years before—about the value of sometimes saying “I don’t know”—and asked me, searchingly, what I thought of it.
Again, the irony here is that the mindfulness he’s cultivated in meditation—on retreats, and at the hands of pitilessly strict teachers—is what has helped him in his travels; spiritual training—this is one of the lessons of his life and his example—has constant practical application in the world. Much of the time he’s speaking to people who know nothing about Buddhism— who may even be hostile to it—and he’s mastered the art of speaking simply, and ecumenically, from the heart, stressing, as he does, “spirituality without faith—simply being a good human being, a warm-hearted person, a person with a sense of responsibility.” Talking to his monks, he delivers philosophical lectures that few of the rest of us could begin to follow; speaking to the world, he realizes that the most important thing is not to run before you can walk. The title of a typical book of his mentions not “enlightening” the heart but, simply, “lightening” it.
In a sense, he’s turned his predicament to advantage in part by learning about Western religions, and meditation practices in other traditions, as earlier Dalai Lamas could seldom do. And he’s also had to deal with a worldwide stampede towards a Buddhism for which the world may not be ready (to such a point that, more and more as the years go on, he tells Westerners not to become Buddhists, but just to stick to their own tradition, where there’s less danger of mixed motives, and certainly less likelihood of confusion). Listening to him speak everywhere from São Paulo to Chicago, Philip Glass says: “The word ‘Buddha’ never came up. He talks about compassion, he talks about right living. And it’s very powerful and persuasive to people because it’s clear he’s not there to convert them.”
Pragmatism, in short, trumps dogmatism. And logic defers to nothing. “Out of 5.7 million people,” he tells me one day, his eyes glittering with the delight of a student immersed in one of Tibet’s ritual debates, “the majority of them are certainly not believers. We can’t argue with them, tell them they should be believers. No! Impossible! And, realistically speaking, if the majority of humanity remains nonbelievers, it doesn’t matter. No problem! The problem is that the majority have lost, or ignore, the deeper human values—compassion, a sense of responsibility. That is our big concern. For whenever there is a society or community without deeper human values, then even one single human family cannot be a happy family.”
Then—and it isn’t hard to see the still-eager student playing his winning card—he goes on: “Even animals, from a Buddhist viewpoint, also have the potential of showing affection towards their own children, or their own babies—and also towards us. Dogs, cats, if we treat them nicely, openly, trustingly, they also respond. But without religion; they have no faith!” Therefore, he says triumphantly, kindness is more fundamental than belief.
Yet the deepest loss of all in the Dalai Lama’s often bright and blessing-filled life is that all the friends he’s made worldwide, all the presidents and prime ministers he’s won over, all the analytical reasoning with which he argues for compassion and responsibility have not really helped him at all in what is the main endeavor of his life
: safeguarding the people of Tibet, and sustaining a Tibetan identity among a scattered population, six million of whom have not seen their leader for two generations, and the other 140,000 of whom have not, in many cases, seen their homeland. Many of those who see him flying across five continents in a year (in business class) and delivering lectures to sold-out halls don’t realize that he’s working with a staff drawn from a population smaller than that of Warren, Michigan, and with a circle of advisors who’d never seen the world, or known much about it, before they were propelled into exile.
Within the Tibetan community, he remains as lonely as ever, I think. His people still regard him, quite literally, as a god, with the result that even young Indian-born Tibetans who are fluent in English are too shy to offer their services as translators. And as fast as he tries to push democracy onto his people—urging them to contradict him and to make their own plans regardless of him—they push autocracy back onto him: most Tibetans believe everything the Dalai Lama says, except when he says that the Dalai Lama is fallible. None of this has been made easier by the fact that he is clearly his country’s main selling point, so that it can seem as if the destiny of a whole people rests on the shoulders of one decidedly mortal man.
Thus he’s obviously grateful for the chance to meet foreigners, who will more readily challenge and counsel him—even criticize him—and he’s lucky to have a large and unusually gifted family around him, two of whose members are incarnated lamas themselves. His younger brother Tenzin Choegyal lives down the road, and even as the Dalai Lama claims to be unconcerned about all the complications that arise as Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism go around the world, his kid brother (who shed the monastic robes into which he was born) is outspoken in calling the situation “a hell of a hodgepodge,” and referring to the West’s infatuation with Tibet, and the Tibetans who make corrupt use of that, as “the Shangri-La syndrome.”
Even for those who understand it, after all, Tibetan Buddhism is a vividly charged and esoteric body of teachings, a “unique blend,” as the British judge and Buddhist scholar Christmas Humphreys once wrote, “of the noblest Buddhist principles and debased sorcery.” Its core, as with all Buddhism, is a belief in suffering and emptiness, and the need for compassion in the face of those. But unlike the stripped-down austerities of Zen, say, it swarms with animist spirits, pictures of copulating deities, and Tantric practices of sexuality and magic that, in the wrong hands, or without the proper training, can be inflammable.
The Dalai Lama’s very equanimity and his refusal to be autocratic (even if he had the time) have left him relatively powerless as all kinds of questionable things are done in the name of his philosophy. Unlike their Catholic counterparts, he says, Tibetan and Buddhist groups “have no central authority. They’re all quite independent.” To top things off, three-hundred-year-old rivalries that used to be conducted in the privacy of the Himalaya are now played out on the world’s front pages.
Five years ago, with no help from the Chinese, an unseemly mess broke out when two six-year-old boys were presented as the new incarnation of the high Karmapa lineage, one of them endorsed by the Dalai Lama, the other by friends of the departed lama’s family. One of the most prominent lamas in the West was banned from entering America for many years after a $10 million sexual harassment suit was brought against him; perhaps the most famous rinpoche in the West was notorious for his women, his drinking, and his brutal bodyguards, and left a community riddled with AIDS. Not long ago, three members of the Dalai Lama’s inner circle were found murdered in their beds, the victims, it was supposed, of some complex internecine rivalry.
The Dalai Lama takes all this in stride—he was putting down insurrections at the age of eleven, after all—but the whole issue of authority (when to enforce it, and how to delegate it) takes on a special urgency as he moves towards his seventies. The finding of a new Dalai Lama when all of Tibet is in Chinese hands would in the best of circumstances be treacherous; it became doubly so three years ago when Beijing unilaterally hijacked the second-highest incarnation in Tibet, that of the Panchen Lama, placing the Dalai Lama’s six-year-old choice under house arrest and installing a candidate of its own. (The Panchen Lama, by tradition, is the figure officially responsible for authorizing the Dalai Lama’s own incarnation, and the maneuver suggested that the Chinese may have few qualms about coming up with their own puppet as the next Dalai Lama.)
In response to this, the Dalai Lama has been typically canny. More than a decade ago, he reminds me, he said, “If I die in the near future, and the Tibetan people want another reincarnation, a Fifteenth Dalai Lama, while we are still outside Tibet, my reincarnation will definitely appear outside Tibet. Because”— the logic, as ever, is impeccable—“the very purpose of the incarnation is to fulfill the work that has been started by the previous life.” So, he goes on, “the reincarnation of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, logically, will not be a reincarnation which disturbs, or is an obstacle to, that work. Quite clear, isn’t it?” In any case, he says cheerfully, “at a certain stage the Dalai Lama institution will disappear. That does not mean that Tibetan Buddhism will cease. But the incarnation comes and goes, comes and goes.”
As ever, few of his supporters are equally ready to acquiesce in such lèse-majesté (when I ask a group of Tibetan officials if this one will be the last Dalai Lama, they all say anxiously, “No, no”). And many of them, too, have found it hard to countenance his policy of forgiving the Chinese (he has referred to Mao as “remarkable,” called himself “half-Marxist, half-Buddhist,” and stepped back from his original demands of independence to calling only for an autonomous “Zone of Peace”). The pressure on him to forswear his policy of nonviolence has intensified as the years go by, and Chinese repression comes ever closer to rendering Tibet extinct.
“In one way, yes,” he tells me, “my position has become weaker, because there’s been no development, no progress. In spite of my open approach, of maximum concessions, the Chinese position becomes even harder and harder.” Last year, all photographs of the exiled leader were banned in Tibet, and monks and nuns continue to be imprisoned and tortured at will, in what the International Commission of Jurists long ago called a policy of genocide. Yet the Dalai Lama takes heart from the fact that more and more Chinese individuals have been speaking out for Tibet (as they would not have done, he feels, if he’d been more militant); not long ago, he gave a special three-day initiation in Los Angeles expressly for those of Chinese descent.
“To isolate China is totally wrong,” he tells me forcefully. “China needs the outside world, and the outside world needs China.” Besides, even China stands to gain from a freer Tibet. “If the Tibetan issue can be resolved through dialogue, and if we remain happily in the People’s Republic of China, it will have immense impact in the minds of another six million Chinese in Hong Kong and, eventually, twenty-one million Chinese in Taiwan. The image of China in the whole world will, overnight, change.”
That is the position he must take, of course, and a skeptic would say, confronted with his stubborn optimism, that it can be a little perverse to celebrate clouds just because they show us silver linings. Yet it’s worth recalling that the Dalai Lama’s policy of forgiveness is not an abstract thing. When he speaks of suffering, it’s as one who has seen his land destroyed, up to 1.2 million of his people killed, and all but 13 of his 6,254 monasteries laid waste. When he talks of inner peace, it’s as one who was away on the road, struggling for his cause, when his mother, his senior tutor, and his only childhood playmate, Lobsang Samten, died. And when he speaks of forbearance, it’s as one who is still publicly called by Beijing a “wolf in monk’s robes.”
As I left Dharamsala, in fact—at dawn, with the Dalai Lama leading his monks in a three-hour ceremony while the sun came up—it struck me that the man has lived out a kind of archetypal destiny of our times: a boy born in a peasant village in a world that had scarcely seen a wheel has ended up confronting the great forces of the day, exile, global travel, and, es
pecially, the mass media; and a man from a culture we associate with Shangri-La now faces machine guns on the one hand, and a Lhasa Holiday Inn on the other, while J. Peterman catalogues crow, “Crystals are out! Tibetan Buddhism is in!” It says much about the challenges of the moment that a spokesman for an ancient, highly complex philosophy finds himself in rock-concert arenas obliged to answer questions about abortion and the “patriarchal” nature of Tibetan Buddhism.
Yet to these twenty-first-century conundrums, the Dalai Lama is aiming to bring a state-of-the-art solution. Tibet’s predicament, he tells me with practiced fluency, is not just about a faraway culture hidden behind snowcaps five miles high. It’s about ecology, since the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Mekong, and Yellow Rivers all have their sources in Tibet. It’s about natural resources, since, “according to Chinese official documents, there are more than one hundred sixty-six or one hundred sixty-seven different minerals in Tibet.” It’s about human rights, and a unique and imperiled culture, and a buffer zone “between these two giants, India and China.”
Most of all, it’s about a different way of moving through the world. Far from turning his back on the strangeness of the times, the Dalai Lama is taking it on wholeheartedly, to the point of working with forces that many of us might see as compromised. (“We’re just fallen sentient beings,” Richard Gere says, touchingly, of the Hollywood community. “We need some help, too.”) If part of the Dalai Lama is suggesting that monks can’t afford to be unworldly hermits, another part is suggesting that politicians need not be aggressive schemers. Compassion, he argues over and over, only stands to reason.
If the Dalai Lama were a dreamer, it would be easy to write him off. In fact, he’s an attentive, grounded, empirical soul whose optimism has only been bolstered by the breakthroughs achieved by his friends Desmond Tutu and Václav Havel. Havel, indeed, who became the first head of state to recognize the Dalai Lama, within thirteen hours of coming to power, has been a powerful spokesman for this new kind of statesmanship. The politician of conscience, the Czech leader writes, need not have a graduate degree in political science, or years of training in duplicity. Instead, he may rely on “qualities like fellow-feeling, the ability to talk to others, insight, the capacity to grasp quickly not only problems but also human character, the ability to make contact, a sense of moderation.” In all those respects, the Czech president might well have been thinking of a canny Tibetan scientist with a surprising gift for repairing old watches, tending to sick parrots, and, as it happens, making broken things whole once again.