The Open Road

by Iyer, Pico

  The precisely worded request was a reminder that every opening brings its complications, and the Dalai Lama was still as entangled in local political disputes as any other spiritual or political leader might be. He stands, for every Tibetan and Tibetan Buddhist (those in Mongolia, say, and now Korea and Taiwan and elsewhere, too), as a visible embodiment of their faith and, quite literally, a god—an incarnation of Chenrezig, deity of compassion—so beyond the common realm that Tibetans are too awestruck even to address him directly; and yet in recent years, those who propitiate a Tibetan deity called Dorje Shugden, sometimes known as Dolgyal, have taken to picketing his public events because they felt he was discriminating against their particular corner of Tibetan Buddhism. Like many of the debates within the Tibetan world, this one goes back centuries, and yet, like many of them, too, it is hardly an abstract or remote affair: seven years before, three members of the Dalai Lama’s private monastery, including the head of his Institute of Buddhist Dialectics, were found murdered in their beds only a couple of hundred yards away from the Dalai Lama’s home, and it was generally assumed that the killings were connected in some way with a string of bloody threats from the followers of Shugden.

  So as I settled into the media auditorium, what I felt I was really watching was how these individuals from very different situations would handle the challenges of publicity, of celebrity, even of enmity. In theory, all of them were here to receive an honorary doctorate from the university before their serious discussions began, and to inaugurate the Contemporary Tibetan Studies Program on the campus. Yet really, I felt, they were here to try, in a limited time, to offer a fresh perspective, the one that says that revolutions begin at home. The Dalai Lama liked to talk of “human beings,” nearly always preceded by the pronoun “we,” but what he was really talking about was “human becomings,” and the ways each one of us could travel along the open road to becoming more compassionate and attentive. A global peace reached by men who are themselves still restless or frightened or jealous is not going to be much of a peace at all.

  The only real peace could arise from stilling something in yourself, going back behind the self, to someplace where you had no sense of “us” and “them” but instead saw everything linked in a pulsing network, which reminded you that the boss you cannot abide may in fact have been your mother in a previous lifetime—or, indeed, might become your mother in a future life. The only revolution, in that sense, came from reevaluation; to change a society or a system, you had to push back to its root causes in the mind. “Hate,” as Graham Greene memorably puts it in The Power and the Glory, “was just a failure of imagination.”

  I knew, to that extent—as did almost everyone in attendance—what the visitors would say in advance, and we knew, all of us, that none of it was remarkable or new: “What hope can we have of finding rest outside of ourselves if we cannot be at rest within?” Saint Teresa of Avila had asked of herself and the world four centuries ago. Yet what was exciting about their presence—the hope of transformation they brought with them—was the fact that all of them were experimenting with highly practical forms for these lofty ideas: Ebadi by actually safeguarding and writing the laws of her country, in the face of a regime that wanted to rewrite or override them; Tutu by setting up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in his native South Africa after the end of apartheid, so that old crimes would neither be forgotten nor merely avenged; and the Dalai Lama by to some extent leaving his official Buddhism at home on such occasions to advance his favored “global ethics.” Havel (who had had to cancel at the last minute because of illness) had even appointed a scholar of Woody Allen to be his ambassador to Washington when he came to power, as a way, perhaps, of advancing a politics that did not rest with politicians.

  It was as if what they were really bringing the audience, even in this ritual exercise, was a frame to place around the events of the day, so that we could see them in the settings of something more lasting and expansive (“Creation,” Desmond Tutu would perhaps call it, and “justice,” maybe, for Shirin Ebadi, and “ultimate reality” or “human potential” in the Dalai Lama’s dictionary). By their nature, ideally, an archbishop, a monk, and a judge ask us to see the news of the moment in the light of principles that last much longer than mere moments.

  Look at America’s involvement in Iraq, Ebadi was effectively saying in her public statements, not just in terms of Washington’s relations with the Middle East, of the murderous Saddam Hussein and the crusading George W. Bush, but in terms of some principle of the sovereignty of states and the concerns that every nation might face if such principles were overrun. Look at your own life and all that you have suffered, Tutu was saying in his commission, not as something so large that it blocks everything else out, but from the perspective of the heavens, in which it is a mere speck on a canvas extending across centuries and continents. Look at Tibet’s dialogue with China, the Dalai Lama always said, not only in terms of this leader or that loss but, rather, in the context of an almost endless series of causes and effects that stretches indefinitely into the future. China and Tibet would always be neighbors and their destinies would always be intertwined; in taking care of the needs of the Tibetans, therefore, you could not afford to overlook the priorities and needs of the Chinese.

  As soon as Tutu was called to the front of the stage to receive his doctorate, accompanied by a large black tasseled cap, he recalled how he had received another such cap at West Point. It turned out to be many sizes too big, he said. “Now, any normal wife would at that point have said, ‘I think we need a smaller cap.’ But of course my dear wife, Leah, who has known me for so long, said, ‘This shows that my husband has much too big a head!’”

  The audience chuckled with delight; such self-effacement was exactly what it expected from a man of the cloth, and Tutu knew how to work a crowd just with the way his voice went up and down, melodiously. And yet, I thought—since men of God, as much as monks and lawyers, tend to be careful with their words—the joke contained, like much around it, a useful point. Don’t expect the world to fit its needs to accommodate you; work your needs around the circumstances of the world.

  I could imagine what some of my colleagues would say in response to all this—and a journalist’s job is to entertain such voices (as, the Dalai Lama might say, is a Buddhist’s). All three of the peace laureates were idealists, in the happy position of spinning out moral principles instead of dealing with a real world in which we more often have to choose between wrong and wrong than between right and wrong. All three of them had suffered, to be sure, and weathered their suffering with dignity, and yet suffering alone was no guarantee of wisdom, let alone of political authority. There was a reason why church and state were generally separate, and it was that church operated in the eternal world of justice, and politics acted in the much more qualified, temporizing world of men.

  But then I recalled the words I had read at the very beginning of Tutu’s most recent book, and they were words that had taken me aback at first. “I am not an optimist,” he wrote. “Optimism relies on appearances, and very quickly turns into pessimism when the appearances change. I see myself as a realist.” Instead of just placing a Band-Aid on a wounded society, he was trying (as his Tibetan friend might echo) to undertake radical heart surgery. Living for sixty-two years without being able to vote in his own country had trained him in the hollowness of just wishing things might be otherwise, and when he had urged the world to boycott his country, he had essentially been saying that he and his parishioners were ready to go without everything if it could finally effect a change in a government that could transform their lives at the core.

  I looked at Ebadi, sitting firmly in her chair, and recalled how she had, at times, in protecting dissidents, uncovered lists of troublemakers to be assassinated on which her own name featured prominently; death threats were her daily bread. And I saw the Dalai Lama craning forward in his seat and picking out faces in the crowd, and recalled that he was still traveling, afte
r almost fifty years, on the yellow identity certificate of a refugee. Prayer, I recalled reading in Emerson—and it was perhaps the best definition I had met—is merely “the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view.”

  The very notion of a “spiritual celebrity” is an odd one, of course, and yet in a world where celebrity is ever more a global currency, the spiritual celebrity is the one who can actually change the coin of the realm into something more precious or sustaining. All three of the visitors were here because they refused to turn away from the clatter and commotion that is the real and daily world; and yet all three were also here because they were determined to find in that clatter the seed or outline of something more worthwhile. Their job now was to give this audience a human, living sense of contact that no audience could get from a screen (the crowd, after all, had been waiting for this day for months); and yet they had to leave behind them something that would outlast them, and maybe help people return to the clatter and commotion a little differently, in part by seeing how they could change the world by changing the way they looked at the world.

  After Tutu has sat down, the president of the university comes up to the podium and reads from a prepared statement. “There is no one in our society today,” she intones, “who represents love, compassion, and altruism as much as the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.” Then she invites him to step forward. A fairly routine formulation, I think, but what moves me is that “our”: if the Dalai Lama has some relevance to those in Vancouver, it will come only if they see him as part of their world and he sees them as part of his. Precisely, in fact, the kind of connection that was impossible when Tibet was set behind the highest mountains on earth, a fantasy place for most of us, and full of people who perhaps saw the rest of us as not quite real.

  The Tibetan steps to the front of the stage and offers a few words in English, always a handy way of at once putting his listeners at ease and reminding them, with his uncertain grammar, that he’s just one of us, no different. Then he says, “I need a walking stick for my broken English,” and summons to his side his translator for the session, a famously learned Tibetan scholar and philosopher, with doctorates from both Tibetan institutes and Cambridge, who now lives in Canada, trying to bring Tibet to the world and vice versa. “So long as space remain, so long as sentient being remain,” the Dalai Lama says in English, invoking his favorite prayer, from the eighth-century Indian philosopher Shantideva, “I will remain, to serve.”

  “I believe that,” he continues. “That is my fundamental view. This is not holistic view; this is selfish view. Because thinking about others, I feel tremendous satisfaction. Serving others, best way get one’s own deep satisfaction. In realistic way, I try to promote human values.”

  “Realism” again, I think. And complex ideas broken down into simple building blocks, as in a child’s construction kit (the Dalai Lama loved playing with Meccano sets as a boy in the Potala). In the five minutes he has, he must try to give the audience something practical and clear enough that people can both remember it and take it home.

  He speaks then, as ever, of his new favorite theme, of how Buddhism can offer something, perhaps, to “cognitive science and the study of consciousness,” and the fact that certain properties of mind and the emotions do not belong to his tradition but, tests are showing, to all mankind. We see a rope in our room and take it to be a snake, the Tibetans say, and we are terrified; but as soon as we look more clearly and see that it is just a rope, all our fears are calmed. Our terrors are of our own creation. The world itself is not so frightening, if only we can see it correctly. Then he speaks of his old friend Tutu.” I have only one difference,” he says, turning around to beam at the beaming archbishop. “Creator! But, same aim.” The audience is transparently won over by a transparent sincerity and lack of shadow: just one man obviously speaking from the heart, with no apparent wish to sell any position or philosophy, let alone himself.

  Yet what strikes me as much as the matter of the speech is its manner. The Dalai Lama begins his sentences in English, often, with “So, therefore,” as if to double-knot his propositions in a tight sequence of cause and effect. At the same time, he often ends his sentences with “That’s my view” or “That I really believe,” as if to acknowledge that this is only his thinking, not absolute truth. His sentences are crowded with careful qualifiers—“generally,” “perhaps,” “I think”—much as, in normal conversation, he always cites dates, and, on one occasion, making a small claim for Buddhism, he scrupulously offered me seven “maybe’s” in a single answer. The words he returns to over and over, I notice again, are “calm,” “sincere,” “healthy,” and “authentic,” and two of the words he also uses constantly are “heartfelt” and “unbiased,” as if, once more, to tell us that he seeks scientific objectivity, but not at the expense of the human heart.

  He also seems to be reverting often, this particular day, to the New Agey word “holistic,” which someone must have told him is the best way to capture the central Buddhist idea that everything is interconnected and nothing has an independent existence. It may be the right word for the idea, but still it sounds strange from a man who regularly writes off the New Age as lacking in rigor. “Wholeism” is really what he’s talking about.

  His translator, after twenty years of collaboration, conveys the few words of Tibetan into English very fluently, a small figure with almost crew-cut hair next to his bulky boss. As a onetime monk and professional philosopher, he knows how to keep up with the sometimes intricate and rarefied ideas behind the simple words. As he does so, the Dalai Lama, as in Nara, peers around the room, almost visibly taking notes, then looks up, with conspicuous eagerness, at the ceiling, for all the world like a small boy suddenly finding himself in a natural history museum. At one point, though, as the translator is speaking of “conversations with scientists,” the Dalai Lama breaks in quickly and I see that he has been paying attention all along. “No,” he says briskly. “Dialogues!” It is, I gather, an important term for him.

  In Tibet, and among Tibetans around the world, not least in his exile home of Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama is revered as a god, quite literally; every shop in Dharamsala has at its center a framed picture of him, and even the most renegade Tibetans, jiving before Western girls to the latest song from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, grow silent, almost teary-eyed, if asked about the Dalai Lama (who is, to some extent, their homeland, as well as their faith and their sense of self). In the Tibetan community the Dalai Lama still officially settles every institutional dispute, has ordained a whole generation of monks, and carries such ritual authority that even the most cocky, Columbia-educated Tibetan kids (I have seen) are too nervous to translate for him and reflexively bow their bodies before him, as subjects used to do before kings. In exile, more than ever, he’s the Tibetans’ main external asset.

  But in the larger world the Dalai Lama is merely an icon, a secular divinity of sorts, and for that there is less precedent. The Dalai Lama remains intensely pragmatic about the uses the world makes of him—if it helps people to use his smiling face as a screen saver, he says, or if it does some substantial good to broadcast his speeches on the dance floors of London discos, then let them use him or anything that is “beneficial” beyond a point he can’t control the ideas people have of him or the hopes they bring to him, and a physician’s job is to try to offer help wherever he is needed. Still, one effect of this is that he offers forewords even to books about young Tibetans’ impatience with his policies and, as one close friend asserts, “answers questions he shouldn’t answer.”

  It might almost, I sometimes think, be a kind of riddle that people of this kind pose for us: how much will we respond to their essence, the changeless core of what they are saying, and how much will we merely read them through the keyhole of our own priorities? I remember, in my own case, being moved and humbled, meeting him the day after his Nobel Prize had been announced, when the Dalai Lama spoke to me as openly and directly as if we were equals,
not even stopping to remove any barrier between us, as if he seemed to see none. But the incident I probably spoke of more widely that year was his fifty-fourth birthday party in the hills of Malibu, a few months earlier, when mortals like me got to stand for hours next to such figures of glamour as Cindy Crawford and Tina Chow. Everyone we meet we tend to cast in the light of our own tiny concerns.

  As I watch the Dalai Lama and Tutu proceed out from the large auditorium and follow them into a small room nearby where they will be conducting two TV interviews (with Ebadi, also) for consumption across Canada, I cannot help but notice how they speak for the “same aim” but in radically different voices. Tutu uses the whole register of his rolling, musical voice in English to call upon powers hidden in the language that bring Shakespeare in union with the King James Bible; he gets the audience to move in by making his voice very soft, and then he steadily raises the volume so we climb and climb with him. The Dalai Lama speaks, especially in English, much more slowly and carefully, in precise, rounded phrases, as if offering the stones out of which he’s built his thinking. Tutu is a figure of jokes and flights, of silvery expansiveness and shine, and the effect of listening to him, as he repeats and repeats phrases, is of seeing light stream through a stained-glass window; the Dalai Lama speaks as logician more than as poet and (true to his Buddhist principles) offers statements that seem almost simplistic until you dig beneath each word to see the reasoning behind it.