The Open Road

by Iyer, Pico

  A religious teacher who is telling people not to get entangled or distracted by religion; a Tibetan who is suggesting that Tibet does not have all the answers; a Buddhist who, more and more, is urging foreigners not to take up Buddhism but to study within their own traditions, where their roots are deepest: at the very least, something quite radical is being advanced, it seems. The world at the beginning of the new century is more divided than I have ever seen it, and its strongest power is fractured by loud disputes; in the middle of this, the head of Tibetan Buddhism is urging people not to listen to doctrine, which can so often be a source of divisions of its own, but to push behind it to something human, in which ideas of “clashing civilizations” can seem remote.

  As the burly Tibetan walks out into the broad sunlight—people are holding up signs saying FREE TIBET along his path and waving the Tibetan flag, now banned in Tibet—I realize there’s something incongruous about this skeptical journalist and nonbelonger (myself) devoting so much of my time to trying to figure out what this man is saying.

  But the Dalai Lama impresses, or disarms, me by doing away with many of the categories with which we imprison ourselves. The only truths that can possibly make sense to us, he suggests, apply to all human beings, as much as Pythagoras’s theorem or the laws of thermodynamics do; if they pertain only to a specific tradition or culture, they’re not human truths at all. And the only thing that an Easterner—or Westerner—can offer is an angle on these truths that allows the rest of us to see them more clearly than we have done before. To someone like me, who’s grown up in many cultures but refused to believe that lacking a physical home means lacking an inner center, this is all as encouraging to hear as the idea that we don’t have to define ourselves by differences.

  I follow along as he moves down the white-gravel paths of central Nara and notice, as people reach toward him to try to get a blessing or a handshake, how he is switching, as always, at lightning speed from monk to head of state to philosopher-scientist to regular man. But what is more striking, I realize, is that he’s pushing all these roles together, as if they were all intertwined, to see how one might throw light on the others. I don’t know many monks who are so keen to affirm only what stands up to scientific testing. And there are even fewer politicians who try to speak from the collected stillness and attention of a monk. Pope John Paul II, the Dalai Lama’s good friend, is also traveling more and more in the global order, using planes and cars to take him everywhere; but when he travels, he tends to visit fellow Catholics, to proclaim his faith and to offer doctrinal guidance. The Dalai Lama, by comparison, seems to exult in meeting people from different traditions than his own—Catholics, neuroscientists, even Maoists—and seeing what they have in common beneath their designations.

  I can’t help but think this is an interesting response to an age in which some kill others in the name of Allah, some in the name of the Christian God. But just as I am thinking all this, I see the tanks that surrounded me in Ethiopia not long ago, the armed soldiers I met in Arabia who were scrambling after pennies. I remember the guerrillas who came into the room where I was sitting in El Salvador, during its civil war, the shacks I saw in Soweto where philosophical ideas seemed unlikely to bring any food to the table. I can’t say, after twenty years of covering wars and revolutions as a journalist, that any one man is likely to have all the answers (and the Dalai Lama, I know, would not say that either); it’s the questions he puts into play that invigorate.

  After a quick lunch break at the Nara Hotel, his home for the day, the Dalai Lama comes out again into the bright afternoon, for what will surely be the high point of his visit: a trip to Todaiji, in the deer park, the great temple that is often described as the largest wooden building in the world. It was from here that the Japanese monk later known as Kobo Daishi traveled to China twelve centuries before, and brought back a form of Buddhism—Shingon—that might be a rough translation of the Tibetan kind; and for more than a millennium, a great Buddha, more than fifty feet tall, has sat at the heart of the prayer hall.

  The place is always crowded with sightseers from around the globe, trying to catch the giant Buddha on their cell-phone cameras or posing for pictures within its enormous courtyard, but on this day I realize that for a Buddhist its meaning may be something deeper. Two times the great structure has burned to the ground, and two times it has come up again. The Buddha’s hands date from the sixteenth century, its head from a later period, and other parts of the body have been here ever since the first construction. In that way, it’s not so different from the Dalai Lama: the vehicle, the physical vessel, is clearly very perishable. But the message it speaks for goes on and on.

  When the Dalai Lama gets out of his car at the outermost gateway to the compound—usually closed but thrown open today—Hiroko and I follow him up the short flight of stone steps that lead to the formal entrance, and for a moment I am involuntarily silenced. Everywhere across the great expanse of the courtyard there are people. Mothers holding up their toddlers so they can catch a glimpse of the famous visitor. Tibetans from across Japan extending ceremonial white silk scarves. Foreigners in tribal hippie gear and high-heeled girls with Vuitton bags asked to postpone their visits for a few minutes. I come here often as a resident of Nara, but never have I seen it turned, as today, into a global throne room in the sun.

  The Dalai Lama moves along the path, stopping often to ask a question of some Westerners, to bless a baby, to chat with local kids; as someone who individually blessed seventy thousand people when he arrived in Lhasa at the age of four, he’s never felt out of place in crowds. After going into the temple and sitting quietly before the Buddha, then peppering his hosts (through a translator) with questions, he comes out again and offers a few words of thanks and greeting to the assembled, in an English as reassuringly ragged as their own.

  Then he is bustled toward the next stop on his itinerary, a meeting with the abbot of Todaiji at a subtemple around the corner, and he begins to move away, surrounded by forty or so bodyguards and secretaries and anxious hosts and hangers-on, such as Hiroko and myself. As he is heading away from the public space, suddenly, he sees something and veers off. The rest of us struggle to keep up. Alone at the far end of an empty colonnade, two Japanese women are standing above a girl of ten or so with a mop of black hair and thick glasses; her legs, in bright, striped socks, barely reach the ground from the wheelchair in which she is sitting.

  Within seconds, the Dalai Lama is by the girl’s side and leaning down to talk to her.

  “What is her problem?” he asks the women—a mother and a friend, I assume—and is told that her eyes are fine, but that the use of her legs is gone.

  For a long, long moment he looks into the little girl’s eyes. Then he leans forward and places his head against her cheek. Then, looking at her again, he says something else and tweaks her affectionately, before heading back toward his schedule.

  The mother of the girl, as he turns around, is dabbing at her cheeks with a tissue, saying, “Thank you. I’m so sorry. Thank you.” The woman beside her looks as if her face is about to crumple. The little girl is swinging her legs back and forth as if the day is just beginning.

  The Fourteenth Dalai Lama, when he is asked who he is, usually says (in exactly the same words deployed by the Thirteenth Dalai Lama) that he’s a “simple Buddhist monk.” This does not do justice to the fact that he’s the temporal leader of the Tibetans, organizing fifty exile communities around the world, dealing almost every day with the two great powers of the day, Beijing and Washington, while living in the third, India, making statements and decisions every hour, as every head of state must do. It does not really take in his practical obligations as head of one of the major schools of Buddhism, scholar and administrator and teacher, who has to deliver lectures, write books, and organize a highly complex hierarchy, now scattered around the globe. It does not even take into account the everyday person he is, worried constantly about his people, angry (he confesses to interviewers
) if his time is not well used, moved to tears, he’s told me, when he hears the stories his people bring to him.

  And yet the answer is, as far as it goes, as precise as most of the other things he says. He really does live simply, decorating his bedroom when he travels with just a few pictures of his teachers and his family and a portable radio. He really is a full-time, lifelong student of the Buddha, who taught him that everything is illusory and passing, not least that being who declares that everything is illusory and passing. And he really does aspire, as every monk does, to a simplicity that lies not before complexity but on the far side of it, having not dodged experience but subsumed it. Even the name by which he goes—Tenzin Gyatso—is not his own.

  This Dalai Lama has, in only a few years, and unexpectedly, become one of the most visible figures on the planet. And yet, I sometimes think, that very visibility often gets in the way of the ideas he’s speaking for or the people on whose behalf he’s talking. His very warmth and charisma are so strong that those who listen to him sometimes don’t see behind them to what is really lasting and has little to do with his particular being. In that sense, he may be one of the least-seen figures on the planet.

  The Buddha, whenever his followers tried to create a religion or a doctrine around him—a cult of personality, even, around a figure who was speaking for the flimsiness of personality—always stressed that he was just a human being, doing what any one of us could do if we resolved to sit still and see through the delusions of the mind. He was nothing special in himself, he always said; he was just a signpost, akin to what Zen monks call a finger pointing at the moon. The most prominent Buddhist in the world today, I think, would likely say that this is even truer in his case: he is just a finger pointing at a finger pointing at the moon.

  As night begins to fall over the deer park and the first pinch of winter comes to the day, the Dalai Lama heads to his last engagement of this visit, in a modern theater not so far from Todaiji, and for most of the people in the city, this general address is what he will ultimately leave behind him. He gives such talks at almost every place he visits nowadays, usually on some general principle of how our lives are intertwined and what that means in terms of possibility and transformation. By now he has given them so often that he can deliver them even when unwell and in his improving English, the way a politician might deliver a campaign speech (though this is a campaign less for self-advancement than its opposite).

  “We are not talking about God,” he explains to the two thousand people who’ve poured into the place (a group of Raelians, meanwhile, stands up with a sign reminding us that our hope lies in outer space). “We are not talking about Nirvana. We are only talking about how to become a more compassionate human being.” The very words “Tibetan” or “Buddhist” or “monk” can only come between people; his interest, clearly, is in what someone can do who has no interest in terms or theories.

  “I am sixty-eight years old,” he goes on, “and yet I am striving, day after day.” (The Buddhists in attendance no doubt notice how close this is to the Buddha’s final words before he died: “Work out your own salvation with diligence.”) I think of how Tibetans generally draw a distinction between suffering and unhappiness: suffering is the state of the world, they say, but unhappiness is just the position we choose (or can not choose) to bring to it.

  His energy is discernibly lower as the day nears its end, and the Dalai Lama often talks about sleep as one of the most important activities of the day, even calling on old texts to suggest how sleep can in fact be positively used, as almost anything can, for the clarification of the mind. It appeals to him, I think, because it is one activity that every member of humanity has in common, and the nature of our sleep plays a large part in how clearly we see the world. Yet the minute a chic woman steps onto the stage, stands at a podium on one side, and offers to read questions collected from the audience, the Dalai Lama comes to life. “This is my chance to learn from you,” he says, with evident sincerity (through a Japanese woman from Dharamsala whom he’s using to translate for this public address). “Please don’t be shy. Ask anything. Don’t hold back or be too formal. We’re all just human beings.”

  To my surprise, the Japanese, though generally hesitant or reserved, don’t seem shy at all. They don’t hold back, and do seem ready to ask anything. Most of the questions come from women, identified only by age and gender, and with each one the Dalai Lama seems to enter another mood or voice. (Paul Ekman, the world’s leading scientist of the emotions, has said that the Fourteenth Dalai Lama uses his facial muscles more vigorously and with greater precision than anyone he has studied in forty years; every feeling—mirth, sharpness, solicitude, reflectiveness—is fully inhabited for a moment, and then gone.)

  Someone asks a question about Tibet, and the man onstage, seated cross-legged in a chair under a large golden banner, turns solemn, even grave. Someone asks him about how she can get on better with her boss, and he breaks into hearty laughter—“Maybe you can join with others in your company and form a circle. Or if that doesn’t work, just go on strike!”

  Someone asks about Buddhism in Japan, and he becomes a diplomat. Someone asks about daily Buddhist practice, and he turns into a practical instructor, counting off points on his fingers, breaking down every point into clear and logical steps, moving his sturdy, elegant hands up and down as he outlines certain effective techniques. His voice, famously, goes up and down, from the depths of a basso profundo, ideal for muttering Tibetan chants at dawn, to a young boy’s high-pitched squeal of incredulity or delight. He speaks largely with his body, leaning into things, moving with all of himself, rocking back and forth on his raised chair, eye clearly alert to pick out salient details.

  The question period after the forty-five-minute talk is scheduled to last only fifteen minutes, but the Dalai Lama goes on and on, as if this is his chance to impart something useful. Every time the mistress of ceremonies looks to him, seeing if he is ready to call a halt, he says, in English, “Next question! Next!” (She, in turn, answers with a formal, almost military “Hai! Arigato gozaimashita!”—meaning “Yes, sir. Thank you very much!”—and at one point, mischievous, he briefly mimics the “Hai!”) For almost an hour he continues, using the moments when his answers are translated into Japanese to look up and take in the banner above him, to pick out a friend in the audience and offer a cheerful wave, to sit alone, eyes closed, for all the world as if he were meditating in his room at dawn. At times he pulls out a piece of tissue from his shoulder bag and polishes his glasses—which might, I realize, be a metaphor for what he’s encouraging all of us to do.

  At another point, clearly curious himself, he asks for a show of hands of those under twenty-five, and then of those under thirty (they are the ones who will make the future, he is evidently thinking). He even asks who in the audience doesn’t have a religion (quite a few hands pop up) and who doesn’t drink. At the beginning of the talk, as at every such event, he has taken off his watch, with its sturdy stainless-steel band, and the mala beads he wears around his wrist. Know exactly how much time you have, he might be saying to himself, and use that time for some good.

  As the Dalai Lama moves off toward the next stop on his global itinerary—getting up while it is still dark to complete his four hours of meditation—people around me say, as they often seem to do after such a visit, that it feels as if a light has come on in the city. For a brief moment, friends and neighbors seem a little more hopeful, as if given heart by a wandering uncle. Yet I, ever the journalist, am keen to see how much of what he’s said and done remains, and what effect it would have, if any, on someone who’d never seen him. The overall impression I come away with from the visit is one of efficiency and speed, the way a doctor on call in a hospital will not let a second go wasted (especially, perhaps, if he is also here to talk about others in desperate need far away).

  When Hiroko and I step into the dusty old room in the Nara Hotel he’s been given to receive visitors, we find him standing at the
window, looking out at the deer. The Fourteenth Dalai Lama, known in Beijing as a “wolf in monk’s clothing,” is famous for his love of animals.

  “You’re lucky to be in a place where the deer are effectively the bosses,” I say. “They’ve been ruling Nara, in their way, for thirteen hundred years.”

  “Perhaps you will be a deer in your next life,” he says, breaking into laughter. “A deer who writes!

  “How do you say?” he goes on, turning to a private secretary.

  “With hoof! A deer who writes with his hoof!”

  “No,” says Hiroko, always quick with her perceptions. “With his head.” She mimics a deer writing on the ground with its antlers, and the Dalai Lama, now sitting down, claps his hands with delight and falls about laughing.

  “You see,” he explains, “some people tell me that because I like animals I will come back in my next life as an animal.” He has a German shepherd at home, he says, and she is so compassionate, she has even adopted a rabbit from his garden. (“Even the rabbit is trying to suck at the dog’s teats. Of course, a little disturbing for the dog!”) Whereas the dog of his other private secretary, now minding the store in Dharamsala—“famous for his fierce nature!”

  This is not, I’ll realize later, just idle chitchat. In his public address, he stresses the phrase “social animals,” if only to remind us that nurturing is as much an instinct with us as being predatory. And when he talks about how the Nara deer, lacking sharp claws, were clearly meant by nature to be vegetarians, I will see—though only much later—that he’s making a point about humans, too, likewise lacking sharp claws.