The Open Road

by Iyer, Pico

  The phrase one always heard around Dharamsala was “Middle Way,” in deference to the Buddha’s guiding principle of walking along the road at the center, not veering toward extremes. As the Diamond Sutra put it, in what sounds like an affirmation of perpetual mobility, “The bodhisattva develops a mind that alights nowhere.”

  “Someone’s got to blow the whistle,” he continued, as we looked out over the valley. “People don’t like me because I rock the boat. I’m argumentative. But our people need to be challenged, to think harder.”

  “Not only your people.” He was doing the same with me, I thought, reminding me of the grooves and assumptions I fell into, then trying to wake me up as I wandered into his philosophy.

  “There’s no larger force out there,” he went on.

  “What about karma? Isn’t that supposed to be a process that’s larger than us and works through us?”

  For a long moment Ngari Rinpoche was silent; like anyone who enjoys a good argument or fight, he happily conceded when a point hit home. And whenever anyone came to him with a problem—I remembered him listening in rapt attention to Hiroko the evening of the storm—he became a doctor again, leaning forward in evident sympathy.

  Most days in Dharamsala, when I strolled across the busy intersection at the bottom of the slope outside my guesthouse and walked into the central temple, I stumbled into a scene out of classical Tibet. On every side, the shady courtyard between the temple and the Dalai Lama’s house, the main walkway, the parapets looking over the valley, the stone steps leading up to the temple were crowded with young monks, their red robes turning the scene into a garden of questions. They were standing in clusters of three or four, and sometimes in pairs, under a tree, against a wall, in the part of the temple where a painting of the Potala Palace hangs. And everywhere what looked to be a furious fight was going on.

  One monk would be standing above another and, every few moments, he would lunge forward, striking his left palm against his right in a thunderclap as he shouted some machine-gun sentence at the other. The one sitting on the ground would remain completely unperturbed and answer quietly, as if literally unmoved by the challenge. The standing monk would come at him again and again and again, with one shotgun question or assertion after another—“If matter is immaterial, how does anything die?” “If you say, ‘I don’t trust the mind,’ what is this ‘I’ that’s separate from the mind?”—and the other would sit where he was, offering some words in response. Then he might get up and they would change places.

  These daily sessions were, I learned, the equivalent of homework for the monks being instructed in the monastery or the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics, ways of at once training them in the central Tibetan art of debate and of refining, deepening, challenging their grasp of basic philosophical questions. It was a peaceful form of armed confrontation—mind-to-mind combat, you might say—and corresponded in its way to the in-your-face flourishes and trash-talking of the games of basketball the monks often played on the other side of the valley, dribbling behind their backs while taunting their opponents, or harassing them constantly on defense. It also, I noticed, made each novice a master of both stillness and movement.

  In the eighth century, the book Ngari Rinpoche had lent me explained, Tibetan Buddhism came to a crossroads that reflected, in a way, its difficult geographical position: should it follow China (the Chan tradition of Buddhism, which would later go to Japan and become Zen, stressing meditation and a kind of no-nonsense this-worldliness) or should it follow the giant on the other side of it, India (a more philosophical, metaphysical approach)? A great public debate was held in Tibet’s first Buddhist monastery, at Samye, from 792 to 794, and after the Indian tradition won the debate, Tibetan Buddhists took the leading philosophers of India’s Nalanda University as their teachers, many of them embarking upon a full-time pursuit of logic and reasoning, a little, perhaps, as Jesuits do in the West. Within Tibetan Buddhism, the Nyingma and Kagyu schools incline more toward meditation and mysticism, but the Gelug school, to which the Dalai Lama belongs, is firmly rooted in debate and scholarship. I remembered how the one time the Dalai Lama had contradicted his translator in Vancouver was when the eloquent younger philosopher had used the word “conversations” and the Dalai Lama had broken in with “Dialogues!”

  This tradition of debating had always struck me as Tibetan Buddhism’s way of keeping itself honest and on its toes, alert to every challenge, not hardened into dogma or a sense of certainty. One of the powers of Catholicism, to an outsider like myself, was how fearlessly its more thoughtful practitioners give life and flesh to everything that unsettles us: Graham Greene chose to center his stories around frightened, lonely men who are asked suddenly to act better than they are; the rock band U2 gives drama to its interest in a life of conscience by actually pantomiming onstage the appearance of a devil and all that tempts us toward glamour or wealth or pride. Flannery O’Connor dreamed up a character who shows his interest in Jesus by denying the existence of Jesus, and Martin Scorsese serves up movies that examine a life of clarity and direction through its absence and plunge us into a counterworld ruled by Milton’s Satan, to give flesh to his belief, as one character says, that “you don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets.”

  Tibetan Buddhism’s equivalent to all this is the ritual of debating, which so thoroughly becomes second nature in its practitioners that every time I spoke to either the Dalai Lama or Ngari Rinpoche, I heard them say, “Look at it from the other side” or “If you believe this, what about this?” (the opposite of a profound truth, as Niels Bohr once said, is another profound truth). The Dalai Lama, in fact, is said most to enjoy those sessions where he gets together with advanced monks and takes them on in hardcore dialectics. He will offer a reading of a classical text and then invite the others to hammer away at it; or he will ask one of them to offer an interpretation and then will lavish criticisms from his own position. More than just a way of sharpening the instrument that is the mind, and learning how to defend one’s positions, it is a way of moving in the world in a flexible, unbiased way.

  The most passionate and articulate dissident in Dharamsala once told me, over tea on a sunny lawn in the spring, that he had actually, when young, been offered a scholarship to go and study (of all things) medicine in America. As a young man of conviction and rebellious tendencies, though, he wanted to join the CIA-trained guerrillas then fighting for Tibet.

  He went to see the Dalai Lama to inform him of his choice, and, he told me, his leader was furious that he would give up the chance to acquire useful training (and, besides, imperil the chance for future Tibetans to get such scholarships abroad). “I think I can help Tibet more by seeing the people and culture I am struggling for,” the rebel said, not one to bow down. Instantly, in his telling, the Dalai Lama relented: since there was a conclusively thought-out position behind the decision, he would respect it.

  This training in reasoning (which is, really, a training in cutting through externals and going back to a first cause, the founding principle from which everything else follows) explains, perhaps, the speed with which certain Buddhists slash through almost everything to what they see as essential. All the money in the world cannot deal with mental disturbances, the Dalai Lama has said, in suggesting why there is some value in exploring our inner resources. Looking at the surface is only going to take you away from the cure if the problem is within.

  Only a fool, a Buddhist might say, would rage at the fact that 2 + 2 = 4; that is a principle of life that one has to accept in order to work with. And for rationalists like Tibetan Buddhists of the Gelug school, the main law of cause and effect that runs through the universe like a wheel is the one I’d mentioned to Ngari Rinpoche: karma, that elaborate, latticed form of connection, as strong as Newton’s laws, that stretches back over lifetimes and suggests not just that everything is intertwined but that, in some way too complicated for us fully to understand, we will reap what we have sown. That is why, Ti
betans believe, some children are born with AIDS, though clearly they have done nothing wrong in their lives—it is the working out of something from a past life. It is why a nun who has given her whole life to helping children is suddenly—senselessly, as it seems to us—struck down by cancer. It is why, as some see it, Tibet was abruptly overrun by China; this arose from practical mistakes (declining to join the League of Nations when an invitation was extended in the 1920s; not modernizing and building an army, as the Thirteenth Dalai Lama had suggested; remaining too isolated), but it might also have sprung from causes and conditions too intricate for most of us to follow. In William James’s terms, we are like dogs barking at the injustice of the universe when our keeper goes out, to buy us some more food.

  The Gospels, revealingly, tell us little of Jesus’s spiritual formation and concentrate mostly on his words and actions. The Buddha story, by comparison, places most of its emphasis on how Siddhartha came to enlightenment—the process (which anyone can follow, even today, in principle)—while the particular details of his subsequent teachings and wanderings are often barely mentioned. Even non-Christians may know some of Jesus’s words, while typical Buddhists may know hardly any of Buddha’s specific discourses. Buddha is a precedent more than a prophet; and where Jesus came to earth as the way, the truth, and the life, the Buddha came to suggest that the way is up to us, the “truth” is often impermanent, and the light comes and goes, comes and goes, until we have found something changeless within.

  Around the temple, meanwhile, and the Dalai Lama’s house, there were lepers permanently gathered and a blind man wailing, a small boy by his side as if to protect him. As soon as I walked toward the courtyard where the debating was taking place, men with no arms came up to me, and others whose growth had been stunted, while women taking shelter under the roof of their saris cried, “Namaste! Sir, sir!” As across all of India—though here there were more importunities, because of the large proportion of foreign tourists and of Tibetans who believe they gain merit by giving things away—women and their babies, next to ancient-looking men in rags, were assembled in straggly groups along the side of the road, feeding their tiny fires after dark, and, when the rain came down, trying to keep themselves dry or warm under the awnings of precarious houses. In places like Dharamsala, talk of healing and suffering, questions about justice and why people had to bear such burdens, were never entirely academic.

  The Dalai Lama, then, follows the teachings of the Buddha as faithfully and carefully as a doctor follows Gray’s Anatomy. When his younger sister lost her husband in a car crash, he offered her constant support and comfort, she records in her memoirs, but he also told her, as many a Buddhist monk might, to remember that she was not alone in the world, death, perhaps, being the sort of event that joins us with others at least as much as it separates. Of losing his homeland, he says, over and over, “It is not the time to pretend things are beautiful. That’s something. You feel involved with reality,” sounding a little like a physician who refuses to dress up a diagnosis (our very lives, some Buddhists say, are akin to a burning house). And even when, sometimes, he talks somewhat sorrowfully about all the expectations brought to him by his people, he is, like his forebear at times, perhaps, a doctor in a war zone wondering how he will ever deal with the unending rush of emergency cases.

  All this, though, is only what the job demands: all Buddhist priests, and certainly all thirteen Dalai Lamas before him, have had to deal with their flocks in this way. What makes the present incarnation unique—again, what gives him a new fascination and fresh potential across the globe—is that in bringing his teachings to foreign cultures, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama is doing most of his instruction in translation, as it were, to people who know next to nothing of his tradition, and so it becomes doubly important to leave complexity behind and try to speak to and for some universal concern. He is a doctor, to continue the analogy, addressing a classroom of schoolchildren, in a language not his own, about issues that are to him of life-and-death importance. It’s no surprise that much of what the children hear (I think of the reporter in Vancouver and his understandable disappointment) sounds like childishness.

  Very soon after the Dalai Lama began traveling to the West, he saw, as earlier noted, that he achieved nothing by giving the sorts of highly technical lectures on epistemology and metaphysics he delivered in 1979. The Buddha himself was acclaimed for his “skillful means” and, especially, for his ability to talk to those who did not know or even, perhaps, distrusted his teachings (finding the right way, for example, to cool down parents upset that they had lost their children to him). Thus the Fourteenth Dalai Lama slowly shifted toward delivering lectures on “basic human values,” as he puts it, that could be of use to anyone who listened and equipped listeners not with new theories but with practical measures for everyday life. These fundamentals—that anger backfires against the one who feels it, that kindness helps us if only by making us feel better, that ignoring another’s perspective is to create problems for yourself in the long run—are as basic, to the Buddhist, as the earth’s being 93 million miles from the sun. Every culture has its own words for the figures, even its own symbols, but the law universally applies.

  Even now, when I attend his annual teachings in Dharamsala (or at other places around the world), all I can hear through my headphones is translated talk of how the self may not exist, or may not not exist, as apprehensible to me as the numbered propositions of Wittgenstein might be. Yet as soon as the same speaker is addressing a general audience, a few hours later, he translates himself into a breathing clarity whose simple precepts (universal, and delivered now in English) are given weight and authority in part by the bearing of the person who’s delivering them. “There is no need for temples,” he characteristically says, “no need for complicated philosophy. One’s own mind, one’s own heart, is our temple.”

  In his typically coruscating late novel Magic Seeds, V. S. Naipaul sends his confused hybrid hero, W. Somerset Chandran, the drifting son of a self-styled Hindu wise man, an Indian Maugham perhaps, into the jungle to become a revolutionary and then into prison to enjoy the revolutionary’s fate. In prison, Willie is greeted by a sign saying, HATE SIN NOT THE SINNER, which, ever mixed up, he doesn’t know whether to ascribe to Gandhi or the Gospels. Later he meets other such slogans on the wall: “Truth always wins” and “Anger is a man’s greatest enemy.” Placebos of sorts, we are made to understand, that are no more substantial than the revolutionaries’s logans, used only to try to make the prisoners feel better. “To do good is the greatest religion,” “Non-violence is the greatest of all religions.”

  All these “pieties,” as Naipaul calls them, are in fact not so different from statements of the Dalai Lama’s that are disseminated across the world—bromides, as it may seem, that tell people no more than any Golden Rule or Boy Scout’s manual might. The Dalai Lama knows, of course, that life is more complicated than such sentences, knows (to revert to the image of the body) that sometimes we do have to rely on one extremity more than another (as when we’re standing on tiptoe), knows that sometimes there are genuine differences between the parts (the mind hungry for the spicy Thai curry that the stomach distrusts). The little apothegms of his that get marketed on buttons and bumper stickers make no more sense than a single thread taken out of a Persian carpet, an intricate web, and pronounced to be beautiful. When once I mentioned a celebrated text on “The Paradox of the Age” found on T-shirts and posters everywhere (even in Tibetan temples), one of the man’s longtime translators could barely contain his impatience. “It’s nonsense!” he roared. “All these things you see ascribed to him, others are just making up!”

  Yet the Dalai Lama, like anyone bringing a gift to a host, sees that it makes sense to bring only those things that the other person can use. Complex, technical Buddhism is of no value to typical non-Buddhists or beginners; indeed, it can take them away from the task at hand. People may get so caught up in the issue of whether mind exists that they
ignore the hungry person knocking at their door. Nobel physicists in my hometown sometimes visit junior high school classrooms, and their intelligence there is measured not by how brilliantly they talk but by how simply.

  The Dalai Lama, in any case, is not saying, “All you need is love,” and if he were, his own life would remind him of the inadequacy of mere good intentions. Tibetan temples do not swarm with wrathful deities for nothing, and even when one is told that the triumphal dances of skull-headed ghosts across their walls represent only the victory over ignorance and delusion, one cannot soon erase the images of violence. As Abraham Joshua Heschel, who constantly explored the paradoxes of the spiritual life through the twentieth century, has it, life is often war, and “a war which cannot be won by the noble magic of merely remembering a golden rule.” Reason, for Heschel, “is a lonely stranger in the soul, while the irrational forces feel at home and are always in the majority. Why bear hardship on behalf of virtue?”

  I noticed, as I followed the Dalai Lama around, that he often got dismissed when he spoke in English, in compressed and simple terms, by people who had come expecting fireworks; and yet, conversely, when he took to the high road, in Tibetan, with intricate philosophical arguments worthy, as one Christian professor told me, of Aquinas, he generally got ignored. In six weeks of being in Dharamsala during one spring of daily teachings, I heard only two people talk about what the Dalai Lama was saying; the rest spoke more generally, as Tibetans might, of “presence” and warmth and goodness. Often, the easiest thing was to say that he spoke just with his person, his actions, making sure the old man at the back of the room was given a place to sit, cheerfully putting on an extremely unflattering orange-visored baseball cap while talking on “Stages of the Path,” as if to make himself seem less exalted or remote.