The Open Road

by Iyer, Pico

  Every day, as the sun came up over the far-off ridge, turning the snowcaps pink, then gold, both of the temple’s prayer halls were filled with rows of monks reciting their chants. One in particular caught my eye. He had a flamboyant mustache, unusual in Tibet, and it gave him some of the special charisma of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama. He was the leader of the second prayer hall, offering two weeks of special prayers for world peace (Washington had attacked Iraq two weeks before), and when a dog came in one day and sat on one of the meditation cushions, the head monk broke into a big smile. The dog threw back his head and bayed as the monks chanted, and when two of them tried to carry him out, he scrambled right back and sat on the cushion again, baying in time with their chants. In Tibet it is said that dogs stay around temples not just because of the food and the kindly (it is hoped) company but because they were weak monks in their past lives and now are hoping to win their way back into their rightful homes.

  The Tibetans crowded past, walking and walking around the temple. Below us, unseen through the trees, many dozens more were making a larger circumambulation, around the whole hill on which the temple, an adjoining monastery, and the Dalai Lama’s house across from them stand. In the midst of their chants, their collected hopes, I kept my eye on the praying monks, and especially this one charismatic character.

  On this particular day, after two weeks or so of prayer, when I went to the temple at dawn I happened to see the monk I had been taken by, his weeks of chanting finished, standing outside the hall among the visitors. He was surprisingly ready to talk; his eyes lit up when he saw me and he gave me his business card, featuring his address in an affluent part of California, and made an urgent appeal for me to visit him and become his student. When he saw my glamorous Japanese companion, his eyes lit up even more. He gave her a business card, too, and then another, in case she lost one. He caught her eye and held it and told her how happy he would be if she visited him.

  “We watched you every day,” I said, to try to take the conversation back to the temple around us, the prayers.

  “I’ve been to New York many times,” he said.

  He had some power, no doubt of it—a real magnetism, compounded by mystery and the glamour of his robes, his origins. Another young Japanese girl showed up, and he came close to her and pressed a business card (or two) on her. He’d been so much more appealing when I knew nothing at all about him and was free to project all my hopes, my accumulated fairy tales upon him.

  A trivial incident, but less and less an untypical one. Here is the Tibetan conundrum in miniature, as Ngari Rinpoche always stressed. In the cafés of Dharamsala, young Tibetan boys with hair down to their waists and strong cheekbones—their smiles a glow of white, their eyes mysterious and soulful, able to tell palpitating stories of crossing the Himalayas to be near their leader, breaking into old nomad songs from Amdo when not making conversation in broken English—roam around like the packs of wild dogs, and few visitors are able to resist them. Many of the foreigners one sees in Dharamsala are, for whatever reason, female, and young, and unattached (drawn to the calm and graciousness of Tibetan culture after the grabby swarm of India, perhaps); these boys look like the exotic movie stars of their dreams, and have tragic stories to boot. The Indian shopkeepers stand amid their pyramids of biscuits and look on with envy, ill-disguised frustration, as Lhamo or Sangye takes a girl’s arm and draws a Tibetan mandala on her palm, or pulls out from his inside pocket a picture of the village he left behind him, in the Dalai Lama’s province.

  This is one of the problems that weighs on the Dalai Lama and those around him, though it will fit no part of the Western story about him; in some ways, it is the second most urgent story in his life, after the story of the Tibetans in Tibet itself. These boys and thousands more who, like people in poor countries everywhere, long to come to the West, and will call upon all their wits and charm in order to make it happen, will use Tibet whenever it suits them, even if they are not Tibetan in knowledge (how could they be? The very use of the Tibetan language in schools is fading in Tibet). They have little motivation to hold on to the culture and history that made them, though every motivation to turn it to global advantage. They know how to play the fairy tale, over and over.

  In this respect, as in so many others, Tibet seems to speak for more and more places across the globe, as if it were a setting for a parable; as fast as globalism has answered some needs, it has complicated thousands of others. We now have access, increasingly, to more and more cultures across the globe, and the result is that restlessness has gone global, and hopefulness, and the sense of an answer to be found somewhere else. “When they were in Tibet, they dreamed of Dharamsala,” a high Tibetan philosopher said to me one day over dinner as he considered the Tibetan boys prowling the streets around us. “Now that they are in Dharamsala, they dream of the West. What will they dream of when they get to California?”

  Buddhism, more than any philosophy I am aware of, has no interest in “dreamlands,” or in the places in our head that stand in the way of our engagement with what is happening right now; the Buddha, after all, took his very name and meaning from the sense of being wide-awake in the middle of confusion and ignorance. The philosophy that arose out of his teaching affirms no absolute paradise of the kind hymned in Christian or in Islamic texts; for those in the Dalai Lama’s tradition, Nirvana itself is just a way station, a state of mind, really, that the true bodhisattva sees not as an endpoint but a viewpoint, to carry back with him into the clamor of the world.

  Yet one curious aspect of the global order is that the Other is everywhere nowadays, and it’s ever easier to assume that he has the answers that we do not. The Dalai Lama thus finds himself, almost poignantly, in the midst of conflicting dreams. We look to him for his monasticism, even his remoteness; and yet in order to fulfill his monastic duties and to protect his community, he is obliged to travel constantly, away from his home, and come out into our very different world.

  In the process, those Chinese officials who feel threatened by him can say that he’s merely a politician, advancing his cause while hiding out in monk’s robes, and those foreigners who’ve never seen or heard him can imagine that he’s just a flavor of the media moment, the plaything of movie stars and millionaires. For decades now, the Dalai Lama has stressed that one of the virtues of exile is that it has brought him and his people “closer to reality,” as he puts it, and, as he stressed to me twenty years ago, “there’s no point now in pretending.” Yet those who are most anxious to listen to him ask him to be not just another figure from the real world but an emissary from some other world that doesn’t exist.

  In the Age of the Image, when screens are so much our rulers, anyone who wishes to grab our attention—and to hold it—does so by converting himself into a “human-interest story,” translating his life into a kind of fable. The boy from Hope, the barefoot peanut farmer from Plains—the names themselves enforce the air of allegory; in India, as in the United States, it’s commonplace for movie stars to step onto the political stage, simply carrying their larger-than-life appearance and association with happy endings from one auditorium to another. Those who long to be entrusted with real consequences in our lives acquire that power increasingly by presenting themselves as fairy tales.

  The Dalai Lama, by nature and training, is in the odd position of trying to do the opposite: he comes to us to tell us that he is real, as real as his country, bleeding and oppressed, and that he lives in a world far more complex than a two-year-old’s cries of “Good Tibetans, bad Chinese” (the Dalai Lama would more likely say, “Potentially good Tibetans, potentially good Chinese”). As a longtime student of real life, ruler of his people before the age of five, he listens every morning to the Voice of America, to the BBC East Asian broadcast, to the BBC World Service—even while meditating—and devours Time and Newsweek and many other news sources (I think of how the Buddha is often depicted with one hand touching the earth, in what Buddhists call the “witnessing the earth” g
esture). His own father—according to some members of their own family—was poisoned to death at a picnic, and his father’s father died in the same way. When the current Dalai Lama was a small boy, the regent who was overseeing him went away on an extended retreat, and power was handed over, temporarily as it seemed, to an older man. When the regent, Reting Rinpoche, returned (as the Dalai Lama’s mother has it), the other man declined to relinquish power. In response (though there are as many different accounts of what followed as there are Tibetans), the deposed man’s supporters sent a package to the rival that, when opened, exploded and killed one of the rival’s men. Civil war broke out, and the monks of Sera, one of Lhasa’s great monasteries, ran amok, killing more than two hundred of their fellows, including an abbot. Reting Rinpoche was found dead in prison, the victim, some assumed, of the son of a man whose eyes he’d had gouged out. When the plotters were brought to trial and sentenced to be flogged, one of them committed suicide before full justice could be served.

  The twelve-year-old Dalai Lama witnessed all this, seeing his former regent in a prison inside the very Potala Palace where he lived; the young ruler was even, by one account, said to be a false Dalai Lama and taken to the central Jokhang Temple to be tested against a rival (three times the ceremonial lots were drawn, and three times the current Dalai Lama’s name came up). A little after this monastic coup attempt, he heard that his eldest brother had been urged by the Chinese to try to kill him. The Thirteenth Dalai Lama, soon after he came to office, had also had an attempt made on his life, by a rival who placed the outline of a human figure in a new pair of shoes belonging to the young leader, in a kind of Tibetan voodoo.

  In all the years I’ve listened to him, I cannot remember the Dalai Lama ever using the words “fairy tale” or “romance” or even “wishfulness,” least of all as something good. His domain is the present, and the word he always stresses (as his Christian friends stress “Creation”) is “Reality.” In some ways, his power as a political and global thinker derives from the fact that he is a hyperrealist who bursts into fits of contagious laughter when he thinks of such unrealistic gestures as fellow Tibetans hanging on to their heavy brocade in the heat of southern India or activists hoping they can reverse centuries of history and go back to the fifteenth century. Where the Christian believes in the transcendence of everyday life, through finding a higher life in God, the Buddhist generally believes in the transformation of it, by finding the better life in the here and now.

  And yet for many of us—like myself as a little boy—the power of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama’s story comes from the fact that he was found at the age of two by a search party of monks, led to him after rainbows arced across the northeastern skies of Lhasa, a star-shaped fungus appeared on a pillar of the Potala Palace, and the head of the corpse of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama repeatedly moved in a northeasterly direction. He lives in exile with four state oracles and a lama specializing in the art of bringing rain. The robes in which he speaks of examining reality are sometimes capped by what looks like a conical wizard’s hat, studded with stars, and he sits in front of thangkas, or scrolls, that swarm with grinning skulls and lascivious deities whose meanings the rational mind can’t grasp.

  More profoundly, all of us still choose to call the never-never land where we dream of putting the world behind us and rising to a higher place in ourselves “Tibet” (the elevated kingdom hidden behind the world’s highest mountains). In Tibet, as the British historian Peter Hopkirk writes in describing the visits of early explorers who tried to steal into the sequestered land, “one can suffer from frostbite and sunburn simultaneously.” The sky is so clear in places that you can see figures ten miles away; other gorges are so deep that the light catches them for less than an hour each day. You can plunge your hand into boiling water in Tibet and not retract it (since water boils at a lower temperature at fourteen thousand feet, the average altitude of the Tibetan plateau); you can walk for eighty-one straight days in parts, a Western traveler has reported, without seeing another soul.

  I remember the first time I visited Tibet, in 1985, as a hard-headed writer on world affairs for Time magazine determined not to repeat all the usual clichés (the stuff, I thought, of comic books like Tintin in Tibet). I flew into Lhasa from the Chinese city of Chengdu and, after the two-hour drive in from the airport, walked along the city’s main road with my suitcase, decidedly untrans-ported. The only two guesthouses on offer had rooms that were lightless boxes gathered around a small, central hole in the ground, with a single water pump in a courtyard; the Holiday Inn on the other side of town was an abandoned ghost town with oxygen tanks beside every empty bed. Traveling through Beijing and Guangzhou, and on the railway between them, had trained me in a strikingly unglamorous life in which creature comforts were still some years away.

  And then I settled down in a little bare room and began to walk up to the Potala Palace, and out to the edges of town where the old monasteries stood (once the largest in the world, now largely in ruins). And very soon I was in another world, one that hardly touched the one I knew. Monks came out into the sunlit courtyards to play with my camera; dogs sat in the lanes around the shrines, completely silent. In little rooms thick with the smell of melted yak butter the light came in from the high sun, falling in shafts on dusty monks who sat in the corners, reciting prayers. I went to the great, heartrending ruins of Ganden Monastery, outside Lhasa; I saw fistfights and butchers slicing up human bodies in the traditional Tibetan way to feed to predatory birds; I wandered out of town before sunrise, past the occasional lights of yak-skin nomads’ tents, and realized that whatever I saw and thought hardly belonged to the life I knew, as had not, and has not, happened to me in a lifetime of traveling.

  In Sky Burial, a story by the longtime Beijing journalist Xinran Xue of a Chinese woman she met who went missing in Tibet in search of her husband, the Chinese radio broadcaster writes of her subject, “She was coming to understand that the whole of Tibet was one great monastery. Everyone was infused with the same religious spirit, whether they wore religious robes or not.” The author begins her account by speaking of the “legendary cruelty” of Tibetans and ends it by reminding us that “the Tibetans’ savagery was legendary.” But in between, she refers to kindness and devotion and a magical innocence that begin to transform the visitor from China who has always looked down on the Tibetans as savages. (The book reads, in fact, a lot like the captivity reports of early American settlers abducted by natives who come to see that there is a strength and power to the Indian way that they don’t know in their own.)

  Perhaps it’s in part the altitude and the thin air that work this transformative effect (though I have never felt the same thing on three trips to La Paz, Bolivia, which sits a little higher than Lhasa); perhaps it’s the unworldliness of the location, intensified by culture shock and jet lag. Perhaps it’s also the years of stories of Tibet that move us to see the magical place we’ve always heard of. Those who’ve never visited Tibet wish for it to be transporting, and those who have seen it want their stories to be spellbinding.

  The net result, though, is that when China attacked eastern Tibet in 1949—at the time, there was not a single airstrip in the entire country and there were all of five foreigners in residence—the government appealed to the U.N. and never received an answer; its allies in London and Washington and New Delhi were able to pretend that Tibet hardly existed as a real place at all (though six years earlier F.D.R. had sent a letter and two Office of Strategic Services emissaries to the eight-year-old Dalai Lama, asking for help in the transportation of American supplies through Tibet during World War II). When the young Dalai Lama made his first foreign friend, the Austrian traveler Heinrich Harrer, he asked him to help him set up a projector so that (as it were) he could get a real, unprojected sense of the wider world, and he religiously watched newsreels that told him what was going on outside his isolated kingdom; yet for Harrer, as for too many of us, before and after, the lure of Tibet and its leader lay in
their distance from the real world as we know it.

  I’ve noticed, whenever I follow the Dalai Lama around, that people’s faces don’t light up much when he says, “Dream—nothing!” in stressing to a questioner that for a resolution of her situation, “the main responsibility lies on your own shoulders,” or when he says, “We expect peace, compassion to come from the sky. Nonsense! Someone must start it,” in reminding us of the virtue of real action instead of daydreaming. Over and over, he counsels a practical realism and a refusal to get caught up in the lures and distraction of mindless optimism, least of all the kind that comes from indiscriminate faith. This emphasis on how much we can do ourselves lies at the heart of his own optimism and infectious confidence; yet it’s not always the part that most of us want to hear.

  The Harrer story is a poignant reminder of this. An Olympic skier from Nazi Austria—the metaphors come ready-made—manages, somehow, to steal out of a prisoner-of-war camp in British India in 1944 and stumbles into what is then known as the “Forbidden Kingdom,” Tibet. He walks for two years across the highest plateau on earth, picks up Tibetan, is even mistaken for a Tibetan by unworldly locals who have never seen a foreign face before. Finally he makes his way to the capital, where the teenage Dalai Lama, hearing of the curious blond-haired wanderer, asks to see him, and the two become fast friends.

  The European constantly feels that he’s entered a magical world of flower-ringed cottages and garden parties and sturdy outdoors people like himself, who treat him as an honored guest; he feels that he’s slipped out of real life and into a golden fairy tale. But very soon, and inevitably, reality appears again, as Chinese troops cross into eastern Tibet in 1949 and the wayfarer is forced to abandon his idyll and return to a broken Europe.