by Iyer, Pico
The result, as an American political scientist put it in 1979—introducing Buddhism to the New World—is that you can find in Tantrism “almost everything that is connected with the popular Western conceptions of magic. Secret teachings, scriptures in code, the practice of drawing symbols on the ground and uttering spells to call up deities, supernatural powers that could be used for good or evil.” As another Western scholar calmly (and typically) describes it, you protect yourself against leprosy, or the possibility of being poisoned, in classical Tibet by visualizing a goddess and then visualizing your own body as a fat corpse. Then you imagine the goddess severing the corpse’s head and throwing the skull into a container, into which are also thrown chunks of bone for another supernatural being to come and devour raw. In the high, thin air of Tibet, with the animist spirits of the traditional Bon religion still alive, the burning of effigies is common, as in many a folk tradition, and even high officials make decisions on the basis of throwing dice, casting pieces of dough up in the air, and other forms of traditional divination.
This is not so different, perhaps, from talk of a prophet who raises men from the dead, turns water into wine, and walks across the waters; in seventeenth-century France, as Huxley has it, it was regarded as a terrible form of impiety not to believe in witches (since not to believe in Satan, and thus the prospect of a fallen angel, was almost the same as not to believe in God, and thus the possible purity of angels). A Catholic church that still practices exorcism or the kind of faithful Christian who reports feeling his body growing warmer (sometimes uncomfortably so) when he recites the Jesus Prayer should not express surprise at this; accounts of the great Christian mystics’ lives also belong to a realm of ecstasy and physical intensity that lies beyond our reason.
Yet when I watched the Dalai Lama carry his tradition, very carefully, out of its centuries of isolation and into the glare of the modern world (always stressing that he thought that his culture needed to be less solitary and in closer contact with modernity), I felt I was watching him walk across not just continents but centuries, and carrying into broad daylight some of the dusty secrets of the human family that had, as it were, been locked up in some cobwebbed chest in the attic for many centuries. When he gave advanced Tantric teachings, there often came a moment when he asked those who had not taken the appropriate vows or committed themselves seriously enough to Buddhist practice to leave, because he would be giving empowerments and initiations that could be dangerous if the right motivation was not present. As it was, he had given more Kalachakra (or Wheel of Time) initiations than all thirteen previous Dalai Lamas combined, many of them in places like Toronto, Barcelona, and Madison, Wisconsin.
In effect, he seemed to be bringing out into the world two sometimes unrelated treasures, each of them explosive: one was Tibet and its particular culture, often hard to translate into other tongues, and the other was his brand of Buddhism. To mass general audiences, he always stressed “uncrazy wisdom,” as you could call it, because philosophy seemed a way to cut through all divisions to some universal human core. (“Sectarianism is poison,” he writes, in an unusually violent statement in his second autobiography.) When he spoke of “Nalanda Buddhism,” in honor of the ancient Buddhist university in India from which his tradition’s great philosophers had emerged, he was essentially suggesting that reason and universality could offer places where Gelug practitioner and Kagyu, eastern Tibetan and central, American and Chinese could come together.
Yet at the same time he was bringing a very complex series of rites and visualization techniques and mandalas into our midst, all of which took him behind closed doors again; he traveled with certain thangkas and statues that clearly had esoteric value, and locked boxes that had to do with the private requirements of the Dalai Lama, not open to the gaze of scientists. More than once, when I asked him whether Tibet’s recent sufferings were the result of its collective karma, he answered, “It’s complicated” or “Mysterious,” as if, in effect, to say that it belonged to worlds I wasn’t in a position to enter or understand.
As I watched him carry all this around from Harvard to Japan, for thirty years, part of what intrigued me was seeing him almost visibly gathering evidence everywhere he went as he noticed how different parts of his teachings hit home or distracted, how they got misunderstood or in some cases distorted, and constantly adjusted his approach accordingly. He took, as the years went on, to urging more and more foreigners not to abandon their own traditions and become Buddhists (if only because he had seen by then what misunderstandings could arise); he often downplayed meditation in the West, maybe because he felt that it was one of those exciting and even exotic techniques that could take people away from their everyday responsibilities and the need for simple mindfulness and kindness. When he did talk of meditation, he always stressed the hard work involved rather than what he called “mystical gifts.” He also began warning foreigners more and more against Tibetan lamas and teachers who, perhaps, were practicing a “crazy wisdom” amid newcomers who did not have a context for distinguishing craziness from wisdom. I once told Ngari Rinpoche that I’d heard that many Chinese were studying under Tibetan lamas. “They’ll get disenchanted soon enough” was the Dalai Lama’s younger brother’s characteristic response. “Unfortunately, it’s often the same old story.”
It was a register of his confidence and the trust he had won that the Dalai Lama seemed to feel increasingly comfortable telling foreign audiences exactly what they didn’t want to hear; yet I sometimes recalled how even the Buddha, by some accounts, had not always been able to determine or affect all that was said and done in his name. For five centuries after his death, people by and large respected his wish that no images of him be created (because images take us away from his teachings and, besides, imply that he was something more than a regular human who is moving and inspiring precisely because of that humanness). When he was depicted, it was sometimes as a footstep (walking along the open road), sometimes as a tree (offering us shade—and reminding us of where he found enlightenment), sometimes even as a wheel (the wheel of Dharma teachings rolling along the Eight-Fold Path).
Yet when Buddhism reached the edges of Asia—became, you could say, the victim of its own popularity—it found its way into the hands of Greek statue makers, who started to depict the Buddha’s own face (which looked strikingly similar, in their renditions, to Apollo’s). Later, Chinese craftsmen added a crown to the head. By now there are so many giant Buddhas in so many temples—starting with Todaiji, in Nara, which I had visited with the Dalai Lama—that it may be hard to recall that the Buddha was speaking, more than anything, for the illusion of form and the impermanence of everything, not least the human figure.
“We Tibetans are not real Buddhists,” Ngari Rinpoche said one morning as I took my place on his terrace and he served me tea, along with a plate of cookies. “Too many spirits, too many deities. We’re always looking for something outside ourselves to come to the rescue. That’s not Buddhism.”
“But it’s human,” I replied. “You can’t expect people to live without prayers or talismans of some kind. We may be high-minded in theory and talk of clinging to nothing at all, but in practice people need something to help them through their fears.” I recalled how the Dalai Lama himself had told me that, twice, as a child he had been so frightened in the dark that he’d seen a cat jumping across the room (later, when he’d checked the cats nearby, he’d realized they were all of a different color).
“But that’s not Buddhism. I think there should be a police force to go into all these organizations, all the Tibetan centers around the world, and take care of the ones who are encouraging this.” I could see from his smile what was coming next. “And I would like to be the one to volunteer for the job!”
He broke into a huge, infectious explosion of laughter that set his body shaking—the very laugh that his older brother had made famous around the world. Tibetan Buddhism often balances Avalokitesvara, the god of compassion, with Manjushri,
the god of wisdom, generally depicted with a sword raised in order to slash through our illusions. Kindness without wisdom is sometimes no kindness at all.
“But it wasn’t so different in Tibet many centuries ago. It’s no different in Japan—or Thailand, or any Buddhist country. Even in India, where the Buddha came from.”
“But we Tibetans are the worst offenders,” he said, not ready to be placated; the other man’s grass is always less polluted. “We have all these pujas, these rituals, but we don’t know the meaning of Lord Buddha. We can’t say we’re Buddhists.”
He looked at me in the quiet morning, his eyes holding mine while I thought of a response. High above the valley, we could hear barely a sound from the road below. A piece of paper rustled in the wind, and I reached for one of the cookies on the plate.
“It’s good to sway,” he said in a very different voice, much gentler, so that I recalled that devil’s advocacy was part of his self-created job description. “Next time you see me, I’ll be doing or saying something completely different. Everything’s always changing, always moving. That piece of paper, you, me, this terrace—nothing is the way it was even a second ago.”
While we spoke, scientists at Berkeley and Princeton and Wisconsin and elsewhere—as the Dalai Lama had told the academics in Nara—were working on a series of experiments, conducted over decades now and reported on in Nature and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and many other of the most respected scientific journals, that, remarkably, suggested that the wildest stories passed on by Alexandra David-Neel were not so wild after all. Senior monks and seasoned meditators really could dry wet sheets in less than an hour, experimenters had found, and resist the coldest temperatures just through the force of their meditation. One monk had reduced the rhythm of his heart to an almost unimaginable five beats a minute, and brain scans showed, visibly and quantifiably, how certain monks had reached levels of calm and self-possession that were, quite literally, off the charts.
Meditation was now being taught at West Point—perhaps as a result of what had been conclusively proven about how it could contribute to both health and composure; the findings of such researchers had been featured on the cover of my longtime employer, Time magazine. An issue of the Harvard Law Review, of all things, had been devoted to the practice of sitting in one place and stilling the mind. The Dalai Lama, in fact, seemed to be stressing science more and more as the twenty-first century began, perhaps because—again—it offered to take us out of a domain where one side of the world used the Koran to justify terrible acts of violence, while another used the Bible. The “essencelessness” that quantum mechanics stresses, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the very way relativity and quantum mechanics dissolve the separation of subject and object—all were ideas he felt should be intrinsic to a Tibetan monastic curriculum.
In a curious way, in fact, globalism was supporting some of the principles of Buddhism, as much as the other way round. Fifty years ago, an American visiting a village in Tibet might have been taken to be a magician, even a sorcerer, if he had pulled out a Polaroid and snapped a picture then and there, or produced a tape recorder and played back to the villagers the sound of their own voices. And they, in turn, might have seemed to be uncanny fakirs or wonder workers if they had showed the American how they could reduce their oxygen consumption by 64 percent in deep meditation, or bring down their entire metabolism. These days, what had once looked like a miracle just seemed to be a particular capacity of the mind or body developed unusually intensely, and Tibetans could see that it wasn’t magic—only real life and training—when they turned on their TVs and watched Olympic sprinters running at nearly twenty-three miles an hour, or Carl Lewis jumping over the equivalent of a nine-yard pond.
When William James, then a Harvard professor, went to research various mediums on behalf of the American Society for Psychical Research, he confessed that he found the investigation of these seeming charlatans “a loathsome occupation” and (as he put it later) “a strange and in many ways disgusting experience.” As a hardened empiricist and a lifelong student of chemistry, comparative anatomy, and physiology, James rejoiced whenever one of the mystics popular in his day was exposed as a fake, her secret doors revealed.
Yet, as a serious scientist, James was committed to keeping his mind open and drawing no conclusions that could not be fully supported. This left him at a loss when, on at least one occasion, a dozen visits and all the protocols of research failed to find a flaw in a medium he inspected.
“I have hitherto felt,” he wrote a friend of his father’s, “as if the wonder-mongers and magnetic physicians and seventh sons of seventh daughters and those who gravitated towards them by magical affinity were a sort of intellectual vermin. I now begin to believe that that type of mind takes hold of a range of truths to which the other kind is stone blind.” This new feeling left him “all at sea,” he confessed, “with my old compass lost, and no new one” to replace it. To a Buddhist it would just mean that a form of ignorance had been removed; the “wildest dreams of Kew,” as Kipling put it around the same time, “are the facts of Khathmandhu.”
Two hours east of the Dalai Lama’s home in Dharamsala, passing along small country roads running between trees and tea plantations, the snowcaps shining brilliant in the blue skies above, I turned one day off the narrow main road and onto an even rougher path, which gave onto a hidden valley of sorts. Houses were clustered on a ridge halfway up the slope, and in a moment I had left India behind and was in a country of whitewashed houses with the golden turrets of a temple looking over them. I got out of the car in a dusty courtyard and followed a path along the slope to a temple with a front courtyard perhaps the size of a kindergarten playground.
Old Tibetan women were already sitting on the ground in front of the courtyard—though it was barely eight a.m.—and the prayer halls were full of young monks bustling about and running hither and thither. Visitors began to assemble from all around the area, till soon the space around the courtyard was completely packed, and newcomers had to peer over three or four heads to see what was going on.
The answer to that inquiry was that Tashi Jong Temple, home to a group from the Kagyu order, whose head is the young Karmapa, was holding an annual “lama dance” that makes the hidden forces of Tibetan Buddhism manifest and gripping over the course of eight days. Very soon the courtyard was full of lamas from the temple moving their arms and legs in a highly choreographed, very slow dance. The rhythm was almost hypnotic—the opposite of dramatic—and all the ready smiles and air of improvised jollity that surround a traditional performance of Tibetan folk dancing or opera were absent. Every gesture held a precise meaning, and the whole ceremony was at once a kind of exorcism and a petition to certain gods.
In an elevated chair—a kind of throne—to one side of the courtyard the young rinpoche of the temple looked on. Behind him roamed a much wilder figure, in much paler robes, the coils of his dusty hair piled on the top of his head like a sleeping snake. This was, I heard, a yogi—a monk who had meditated for years at a time in a cave. His top-knot represented the years he had spent far from society, not cutting his hair while he meditated.
Now this figure was the unofficial head of the temple, a tutor to the rinpoche and, almost literally, the power behind the throne. Figures came onto the scene from the inner halls of the temple wearing masks that looked grotesque to me, and representing various old kings and spiritual figures. Above the courtyard stood a building in which monks were going on sustained retreats even now. Farther up was a pleasant, brightly colored cottage with a garden where I would meet another yogi, close to death, whose years of meditation were evident in his gaze. Nearby was the now celebrated Englishwoman who had become a nun and meditated alone in a cave, through avalanches and visits from wolves and stalkers, for an unbroken twelve years. Later in the afternoon I would climb up to a retreat hall high above the temple courtyard where people could take off for months-long explorations of the interior. I h
ad never been in any place (outside of Tibet) that felt so much like Tibet, so removed from the daily world I recognized.
At moments like this, I was always reminded, forcibly, of how the Dalai Lama, to summon the metaphor again, was constantly coming in and out of his temple, emerging to greet the outside world and talk to it and then disappearing once more into what was a private and almost unimaginable Tibet (just as, during the teachings he gave in Dharamsala, he emerged twice a day from his compound and walked, smiling and greeting petitioners, behind his texts and accompanied by various objects and ritual figures, to the chair from which he spoke; and twice a day he walked back again, into his strictly guarded domain). Much of the time he and his monks practiced a highly cerebral debating that, to some extent, argued about how many symbolic angels could dance on the nonexistent head of an imaginary pin; yet the rest of the time they functioned in a world that acknowledged that philosophy cannot, as is classically said, cure a toothache, and even that, to the nomad in his lonely tent, fifteen thousand feet up, all the figures that swarm across Tibetan thangkas were real, painfully real.
