Autumn Light

by Pico Iyer

  His form of Buddhism couldn’t be more different from the ones practiced in Japan; he’s always urging—to little avail, perhaps—his Japanese audiences to forgo their chanting and backbreaking meditation for a more analytical grappling with the central texts of Buddhism, of the kind Tibetan masters, much more philosophical, enjoy. In truth, Tibetan monks probably perform more chants more ritually every day than their Japanese counterparts do, despite their official commitment to logic and science; besides, I’ve been in Japan long enough to see its freedom from abstraction and theories as its deepest liberation.

  But what I get from his teachings, as someone who’s too averse to distinctions to believe myself a Buddhist, is the sense of a knife cutting swiftly through projections to get to some sensible core. When someone comes to the Dalai Lama with a physical complaint and asks him to lay on healing hands, he says, “No, no. Much better to go and see a doctor!” When someone shares a grief with him, he looks at that person with an old friend’s kindness and says, “Please, try to look at it from a wider perspective.

  “If I have some problem in my life, or something like that,” he goes on, “then, if I can see only that, it really looks impossible. Nothing I can do. You have to take a global perspective.” All of us are intertwined, in his understanding, which means that everything is more subtle, less isolated than we think. So often what joins us all are the challenges that everyone must face.

  This morning, amidst the long line of petitioners who file into his hotel room, we see some immaculately dressed Japanese dignitaries, with two Tibetan monks among them, who shuffle into his suite, four of them balancing a huge architectural model of a Buddhist center they’re hoping to create.

  The Dalai Lama greets them with warmth, welcoming them into his space and inviting them to sit down beside him. But he barely stops to look at the model, which must have taken large reserves of time and money to construct. “Instead of a Buddhist monastery,” he says briskly, “maybe build a general learning center,” from which everyone can benefit. And don’t place it in some beautiful rural location, he goes on. Make it close to the city, so people can visit easily. A learning center “for the general science of mind,” he concludes. “That would be of benefit for the whole world.”

  Being Japanese, the wealthy donors in suits and expensive silk dresses say nothing. But I sense this is not what they expected. In meeting the most visible Buddhist on the planet, they may have forgotten that his most recent book was called Beyond Religion, and stressed the universal values that lie beyond any one tradition.

  As they start, hesitantly, explaining their vision of treasure rooms and meditation halls, he says, “No need, no need! This”—he warmly slaps the thigh of one of the monks beside him—“this is your treasure!” People so often get caught up in forms, he suggests, even though it’s the core, the heart of the practice, that ultimately matters.

  “I’m not much interested in architectural plans like this,” he admits at last, having outlined his vision of a place of education devoted to the propagation of basic kindness and understanding, with nothing explicitly Tibetan or Buddhist involved. “It’s like a toy, or something like that. When I was a child, I liked to play around with things like this. But those days are gone.”

  * * *

  —

  Then, as we take an elevator with him down to the lobby and walk out into the crowds gathered to take pictures of him, to seek blessings, to press books or white ceremonial scarves into his hand, I remember the last time Hiroko met him in Dharamsala. She’d fallen into the habit of going to spend every spring in a little guesthouse across from the Dalai Lama’s home, sometimes waving to him as he was being driven out towards a meeting across the world, sometimes waiting at 5:00 a.m. to find a seat for one of his teachings.

  One day, on her seventh spring there, he sent for her, and she met him between meetings.

  “My parents are getting old,” she said, “and I don’t know what to do exactly.”

  “Spend time with them,” he said. “Don’t spend it here!” You’re your own doctor, he might have been saying; you don’t need to run out of the hospital to consult a doctor in a faraway land.

  Many times when a wealthy petitioner asks him for a blessing, he says, “You are the only one who can give yourself a blessing. You have money, freedom, opportunity to do some good for someone else. Why ask me for what’s in your hands?”

  “Karma means action,” he reminded Hiroko. “Not praying for blessings or good health, but working for them. You make your own karma every moment.”

  * * *

  —

  Now, as we head out into the sunshine—the northern hills of Kyoto are a blaze of russet, burnt umber, orange, under late-autumn skies of depthless blue—we’re ushered into a backstage room of sorts, before an afternoon conversation between the Dalai Lama and a celebrated novelist.

  There are only four of us in the space: the Dalai Lama, Hiroko and myself, and a Californian monk from the Dalai Lama’s temple who’s also in our small traveling party.

  “So,” says the Tibetan, “what is the point of art? What is the larger purpose?”

  Startled, I cite the Sixth Dalai Lama, famous for his poems and songs.

  The Dalai Lama doesn’t look very interested.

  The monk mentions Milarepa, the mystic who composed poems in a cave.

  The Dalai Lama looks dissatisfied.

  In his way of thinking, looking closely at reality is the only thing that matters, not all the ways we make embroidered designs around it.

  I recall the November day two years ago when all of us traveled up with him to a fishing village north of Tokyo laid waste by the tsunami of eight months earlier. A few miles out of the city of Sendai, we began passing along clean, modern roads lined by nothing but compacted trash, block-long rectangles of smashed cars and refuse. Telephone poles listed at forty-five-degree angles; a solitary chair sat in the open skeleton of what had once been a living room. Buses bobbed on the water beside us. When we pulled up at Ishinomaki—hundreds had gathered along the road there, behind ropes, to greet the famous visitor—it was to see nothing but a flattened landscape, which looked like pictures I’d seen of Hiroshima after the atom bomb. More than three thousand had lost their lives in this village alone, many of them children; nineteen thousand had lost their homes.

  The Dalai Lama stepped out of his car and strode without hesitation to the people, mostly women, who had assembled in the street to see him. Many were sobbing, or calling out, in limited English, “Thank you, thank you.” He held one person’s head against his chest; he blessed another. He touched heads, shook hands, looked deep into one set of eyes, then another, asking, “What do you feel?…Are you still sad?”

  “Please, be brave,” he told them, as the women sobbed and others pushed forwards. “Please, change your hearts. You cannot change what has happened. Please help everyone else, help others become okay.”

  The crowd fell quiet; some of its members nodded.

  “Too many people died,” he went on. “If you worry, it cannot help them. Please, work hard. That is the best offering you can make to the ones you lost. Rebuild your community as your country rebuilt itself after the war.”

  It’s the kind of advice that anyone might give, perhaps, but when he turned around, to walk towards the temple that had survived, gravestones in the foreground tilted crazily over or knocked down entirely, I saw the Dalai Lama take off his glasses and wipe away a tear himself.

  Suffering is the central fact of life, from his Buddhist viewpoint; it’s what we do with it that defines our lives.

  Now, as he gathers his robes offstage, peering down to see how the theater’s sound system works, I think of how, when we went into the temple in Ishinomaki, it was to see the bones of the lost, tidily gathered and placed in brightly colored boxes by the altar, under framed photographs, maybe fifty of th
em in all; in every case, Hiroko explained, there was no survivor to claim the remains, as Japanese custom decrees. “All lose parent,” she told me of the five-year-old boys lined up cheerfully in uniform to shake the Dalai Lama’s hand in the autumn sun.

  After taking his place in front of the altar, the Dalai Lama began to speak, recalling the afternoon he had been told, at the age of twenty-three, that he had to leave his home, as well as his homeland, that very evening, if both of them were not to be destroyed. No time to say goodbye to his friends, no chance to take his small dog. Two days later, as he was crossing the Himalayas towards exile, a new life, he heard that many of his friends were dead.

  * * *

  —

  At the end of today’s session, we return with the Dalai Lama and his bodyguards and monks and secretaries to his hotel, hasten up in the elevator to the top floor and walk at high speed down the corridor with him to his room. His eyes are often red after a long day of events, but his pace never slackens. He’s holding Hiroko’s hand as he moves forwards; as in a physical expression of his teachings, he reflexively reaches for any set of hands to grasp between his own as he strides along.

  Just before we arrive at his door, Hiroko says, “Your Holiness, we must leave you now. But thank you for everything.”

  He’s on his way to Tokyo next day; we have obligations at home.

  “Also,” she says—her voice falters just a little—“I want to tell you: my father passed away this year.”

  Instantly the fast-stepping monk stops. He looks at her directly, deep into her eyes.

  “When?”

  “This year.”

  “What cause?”

  “No cause. He was old. His body was tired.”

  He steps forwards and holds her for a long, long time.

  Then he steps back and looks searchingly at her. “Remember: Only body gone. Spirit still there. Only cover gone.”

  He heads into his room and, at the threshold, turns around to wave at us briskly. “Good night, thank you.” And then is gone as we head back into the golden flares of late afternoon.

  * * *

  —

  All Japan might be holding its breath now, not settling to anything because a friend—the brightness of the warm days—is about to leave and there’s no value in opening a new line of conversation or getting into anything serious. I walk through the suspended day, not quite autumn and not quite not, and follow the summons of the heart-clearing blue down to Susano Shrine.

  The rice paddies are all plowed now; there’s the smell of wood smoke everywhere. An old man is lighting a bonfire under the blaze of trees; an aged pal in rubber boots tramps up to him. Persimmons are orange balls against a rich blue sky, and as I take my leave of the shrine, I remember how Sachi and Takashi reported seeing flying squirrels in this area. Once, a sign reports, the whole forest was a network of shrines across the valley.

  In our apartment, we turn the heater on, and feel too hot, headachy. We turn it off, and have to don thick sweaters. There’s the sound of sniffles everywhere on the bus: people coughing, snuffling, one in every three wearing a white surgical mask, to protect us from germs, or to protect himself from us.

  Last year, at this time…and I decide to kill the thought: Hiroko’s father seemed the picture of health, only to be gone three days after he entered the hospital. Next year…I’ve given up trying to second-guess the world.

  * * *

  —

  “You look happy today!” I tell one of my tall, ex-salaryman friends as he strides into the studio, earlier than usual, beaming broadly.

  “I am,” he announces. “I’m under the influence!”

  The formality with which he announces his drunkenness is irresistible. He usually has a few beers, he’s told me, after he’s put in his exercise for the day, as reward.

  “We had a meeting today of my old classmates,” he explains. “In Kyoto.”

  “A reunion?”

  “Kind of.”

  “How many of you came?”

  “Twenty.”

  “Quite a lot.”

  “Well…” A Japanese way of saying “Not at all.” Actually, he says, there were five hundred in each year in his day—fifty in each class—“because it was not so usual circumstances.”

  The war and the Occupation, in short.

  “So you must have graduated in 19…”

  “Nineteen fifty-nine!” he says slowly, working it out in his head.

  “But you were born in 1936.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You graduated from high school when you were twenty-three?”

  “Oh, you’re right,” he says, laughing merrily. “I told you I was under the influence!”

  “What were they serving at the lunch?”

  “Chinese wine.” He pauses. “And Japanese.” An even longer pause. “And Western.”

  No kidding: this generally regal and self-possessed man smells today like a liquor cabinet. I remember the day the head of our circle, the Emperor, started running up and down the floor with a mop, and even more ferocity than usual. “Nakagawa-san is drunk!” a matron had exclaimed with delight. “He’s had six glasses already.”

  Now, as we go to the table, my friend, uncharacteristically, lunges at a ball and misses. He flubs an easy shot, then throws a ball up for a serve and hits nothing but air. He collapses into embarrassed giggles, though not put out at all.

  “You went all the way to Kyoto today, for a long, long lunch, and still you came back and showed up here at five p.m.?” I say.

  “That’s right!”

  I remember the song-and-dance show I once saw in an elegant hotel in Nepal, in which the performers gamely kept flapping around at high speed, arms and silk robes flying, even as the lights went out across town and the music went dead.

  * * *

  —

  The neighborhood is dark by the time I make my way back. The office ladies are tottering home on their heels through ghost-quiet streets. Some teenagers are heading out to after-school, shivering theatrically at the bus stop—the girls bundled up as if wearing coats three sizes too big for them—as I follow the trail of lanterns along the hushed, straight lines, between half-sleeping houses, home.

  I look at my watch: Hiroko could be back twenty minutes from now, or sixty.

  I used to kill the time while waiting for her by scrolling idly online or turning on the TV for a Japanese-language tour of Niigata that could put a hyperactive kid to sleep. But this night I decide to restore the time instead: I open up the man who first introduced me to the scripture of the autumn, Thoreau.

  Thoreau, by his pond, reflecting on the seasons, might have been bringing into the New World the trees around Deer’s Slope; it was he, after all, who’d introduced into English the essential Buddhist text, the Lotus Sutra, by translating it from the French. Sitting still was his way of losing himself in the world around him; “I suppose,” he wrote, “that what in other men is religion is in me love of nature.”

  Driving up into the flaming hills of Concord in my early twenties, I’d made my way to his pond, eager to find out what the season meant (in England, November was just sludge on the ground, a steady drizzle, the unrelieved enclosing ceiling of low gray skies). I learned how for Thoreau it was a way of bringing people together, a “Commonwealth,” the light on the commons being the rare kind of wealth to which everybody had access. “You can no longer tell,” he wrote, “what in the dance is life and what is light.”

  But always in Thoreau there’s the snag of something tougher, as of the branches of real life. He’d held his older brother, John, in his arms as John, only twenty-six, died of lockjaw after a minor cut. Eleven days after John’s funeral, Thoreau had seen his beloved honorary godson and playmate, Emerson’s five-year-old son, Waldo, expire after three days of scarlet fever. �
��Death is beautiful,” Thoreau wrote, “when seen to be a law and not an accident.” But every year, on the anniversary of John’s death, he had bad dreams all night, and, till the end of his days, he had to leave the room whenever his late brother’s name was mentioned.

  The leaves “teach us how to die,” Thoreau observed upon his deathbed, as he prepared the last lecture he ever gave, “Autumnal Tints,” for publication in The Atlantic Monthly. Then added, with his characteristic drollness, “One wonders if the time will ever come when men…will lie down as gracefully and as ripe.” Then he sent the magazine a scarlet leaf he’d carefully selected, for engraving as an illustration. His words quite literally outlived him, as the piece appeared five months after he’d been laid into the ground.

  * * *

  —

  And then all reflective, woozy thoughts are batted into oblivion as Mayumi-san waddles into the studio again, for a cameo reappearance: a spherical Barbra Streisand on her final farewell tour.

  The yarrow sticks decree—of course—that I’m to be her partner yet again, and she swirls her arms around in a way that could unnerve a team of Special Forces operatives. A shot flies off into the ether. “Akan!” she cries, local dialect for “No!”

  “It’s like this, right, Pico-san?” she says, trying to demonstrate what she was hoping to do. “Like this, no? What are you saying, Pico-san?” She bats me heartily on the elbow. “What do you know? I’m the expert here.”

  “No!!!” The cry is even more rending the second time. “It flew off. It flew off. Pico-san, what’s happening? What the hell is going on?” Nearly all the points Mayumi wins come because the people on the far end of the table have dissolved into helpless bouts of laughter.