by Iyer, Pico
When someone like the Dalai Lama says—as he constantly does, in a brisk, unhesitating way—“Impossible!” or “Impractical!” or “No problem!” or “Not important!” what he is really doing is refusing to be distracted, and reminding us what is central. And when he goes to meetings with practitioners of other religions, he’s not just taking in the latest discussions and techniques in the field but also becoming a deeper Buddhist, as he said in Vancouver, by talking to a Christian. Reading Saint John’s account of the meeting between Mary Magdalene and Jesus after the Resurrection, talking on the parable of the mustard seed and the Transfiguration before a group of Christians in London, the Dalai Lama moved many of his listeners to tears, even as he constantly, carefully, stressed that Christianity and Buddhism were not just different ways of explaining the same truth, and that to try to combine them was like trying “to put a yak’s head on a sheep’s body.”
Indeed, even though all monks are committed to the same task, deep down—as doctors or hospital construction workers are—the details of their practice are as different as their wildly divergent times and cultures. A Christian generally longs to be rooted in the home he’s found in God; the Buddhist, more concerned with uncovering potential, is more interested in experiments and inquiries, always pushing deeper. In fact, Christianity works from very uncertain beginnings toward a specific end (redemption and a life with God); Buddhism starts with something very specific (the Buddha and the reality of suffering he saw) and moves toward an always uncertain future (even after one has attained Nirvana). The image of the open road speaks for a perpetual becoming.
In either case, though, the monk aspires to bring the perspective of his silence into the chatter of the world, looking past events to all that lies behind them. Thus, when terrorists attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, the Dalai Lama lost no time in sending a letter of commiseration to George W. Bush and his people, and he did the same on the first anniversary of the attack. Yet he also took pains, true to his principles, to say that everything has a cause, and that nothing will be resolved until the fundamental cause is taken care of. Simply to respond to violence with violence is like hitting a man in a hospital; he is unlikely to act kindly until he is made better. On the first anniversary of the attack, he reminded the U.S. president that in a world of flux, “today’s enemies are often tomorrow’s allies.”
A doctor’s religion may not be important, but which teacher he studied under is often of great importance, and the Dalai Lama always stresses the depth of his debt to Ling Rinpoche (“an acute philosopher with a sharp logical mind and a good debater with a phenomenal memory”) and, even more, of the closeness with which he attends to the figure he sometimes calls his boss. “As followers or students of this great teacher,” he told the American Buddhist magazine Tricycle, in 2001, speaking of the Buddha, “we should take his life as a model. His sacrifice—leaving his palace and remaining in the forest for six years. He worked hard to be enlightened. When the Buddha started his teachings, he considered his audience’s mentality, their mental disposition, then accordingly found teachings.” It was hard, reading these words, not to think that the man delivering them had himself been forced to quit his palace in his twenties; had worked, day and night, for fifty years to try to bring light to a tangled situation; and, when he appeared in public, was famous for being able somehow to communicate with small children, grandparents, atheists and Christians alike.
Whenever I read about the Buddha’s life, in fact, I felt a strange frisson of déjà vu, uncanny, which made sense only when I recalled that I had been watching someone who traveled so carefully in his footsteps. It was as if the Buddha, walking along his road, had left signs and messages for those who came after, to advise them how to get over that high gate, or which was the best way to get around the large boulder in the middle of the road. Everyone ended up taking his own, slightly different route, but the aim, as much as moving forward, was to offer what you had learned to those coming after. Once you have crossed the river, in the Buddha’s favorite example, you can leave the raft behind. And Tibetan Buddhists, true to this idea of progress, believe that there are fourteen fundamental questions (“Are the self and the universe eternal? Are the self and the universe transient?”) that even the Buddha left unanswered, for those who came after to take on.
One of the striking things about Siddhartha Gautama was that after coming upon his enlightenment under the pipal tree, he had no wish to spread his discoveries, since he didn’t feel confident that they would be of use or interest to anyone else; the essence of his teaching, famously, was “Be lamps unto yourselves” and “Seek no refuge but yourself.” But when he became convinced that there might be some virtue in talking of his own experience, he spent the last forty-five years of his life ceaselessly traveling across the Gangetic plain, among the new cities that were coming up there in a time of flux that also brought, as one biographer, Karen Armstrong, writes, a sense of “spiritual hunger.” Although he engaged in public debates, he repeatedly shied away from cosmic questions as distractions, perhaps, from the main concern.
“Forget about next life,” I once heard the Dalai Lama say on a tape as I was browsing in a bookshop within his temple. “This very life should be useful to others. If not, at least no harm.”
“I do not give knowledge,” the Buddha said. “If you can believe anything, you get caught in that belief or distraction.” Zen monks, famously, took this distrust of images to such an extreme that they burned Buddhas to keep themselves warm in winter and said, “If you meet the Buddha along the road, you must kill the Buddha.”
The correspondences between the teacher and his far-off student were sometimes so startling that I did not know whether to call them coincidence or continuity or a mixture of the two. The Buddha is said to have had his first moment of insight when his nursemaids left him alone as they went to watch an annual ceremonial plowing of the field and he noticed that some young grasses had been torn up for the ceremony, destroying insects and their eggs. No television interviewer who has seen the Dalai Lama break off an answer because he’s noticed a bird falling to the ground outside and wants to tend to it will be surprised. When the Buddha practiced austerities, all he achieved, in the dry accounting of Karen Armstrong (once a nun herself, and now a scholar of religions), “was a prominent rib cage and a dangerously weakened body.” When the Dalai Lama tried to become a vegetarian for twenty months around 1965, he contracted hepatitis B and almost died, his doctors telling him, as his mother had done, that his Himalayan constitution could not survive without meat. The Buddha is said to have cried out in pity when he heard of a yogic master who had spent twenty years learning to walk on water (he could just have taken a ferry and used his energies for something else); the Dalai Lama has said that “the best thing is not to use” any magic powers, not least, perhaps, because they take most of us away from what is more sustaining.
Even Thomas Merton, during his visit, was struck by how “always and everywhere the Dalai Lama kept insisting on the fact that one could not attain anything in the spiritual life without total dedication, continued effort, experienced guidance, real discipline.” In later years, however, the Dalai Lama has begun talking even more about “hard work,” “determination,” the importance of not giving up. Indeed, it’s not uncommon to see tears come to his eyes, even in a huge arena, when he speaks of the Tibetan poet-saint Milarepa, say, meditating and meditating for years in a cave, or of any of the great Tibetan figures who almost killed themselves in their exertions. (I remembered how a tear had come into his eye even when Hiroko once said that she had tried, really hard, to learn from his books, but it was difficult.)
One other thing moved him to tears, even in public, I heard from an American monk who had been living in the Dalai Lama’s monastery for twenty years. That was when someone asked, during a public address, “What is the quickest, easiest, cheapest way to attain enlightenment?” And, the Californian monk went on, “these days in the West th
ere’s nearly always someone who asks that question.”
Every monk is the same monk, in that he is working to dissolve himself, in part by surrendering to something larger; and every monk is a radical, insofar as he works from the root (radix in Latin). For the Buddhist, though, this has especial truth, since his first concern is the interior landscape, where awareness or its obscuration lies; faith for him is really self-confidence, and prayer a form of awakening latent energies.
The Dalai Lama is in these respects truly just another monk, “a little bit anxious,” as he confessed to me, when he has to give a talk before senior monks, many of whom have much more time for study than he does, and obliged to spend months doing “a lot of homework.” He comes to important meetings in flip-flops (for interviews he generally sheds his shoes and sits cross-legged in his chair, sometimes holding his interlocutor’s hand), and when he’s backstage at a modern theater, I have seen, he eagerly cross-questions technicians as to how the lights work. “Utilize modern facilities,” is his practical position, “but try to develop a right kind of attitude.” It seems apt that he has a remarkable memory for dates and faces, but is altogether less good with names.
It’s a happy aspect of his circumstances that he takes as his political model a Hindu (Gandhi), works very closely with many Christians (Tutu, Václav Havel, Jimmy Carter), and lives in a country (India) that has the world’s second-largest Muslim population. Many of the scientists he collaborates with may pride themselves on having no religion at all. Yet even as he has made dissolving distinctions his life’s work, he is careful not to speak for a “world religion,” if only because we need different approaches and different languages, as it were, to deal with the different kinds of people there are in the world. “Sometimes,” I heard him say in Europe, “people, in order to have closer relations [with other traditions], stress only the positive things. That’s wrong! We have to make clear what are the fundamental differences.” In almost the next sentence, though, he added that whenever he saw an image of the Virgin Mary, he was moved: which human being does not have a mother?
Because of the “fast pace of life” in the West, he told me once, monks in the East may have a small advantage over their counterparts in the West when it comes to meditation (though no sooner had he said this than he remembered some Catholic monks he’d visited in France who seemed unsurpassable in their single-pointed concentration); yet Buddhists, he said, perhaps had something to learn from Christians and others when it came to social action and bringing the fruits of their practice out into the world. As he said that, I recalled how Bono, the ardently Christian lead singer of the group U2, had been asked in 1990 to write a song for a Tibetan Freedom Concert and had come up with a haunting ballad about how we share “one love, one blood, one life, you’ve got to do what you should,” and yet concluded, again and again, “we’re one, but we’re not the same.” The song had become one of the group’s talismanic anthems, which I’d heard sung in the dusty Current Event café in Dharamsala, and was a favorite at modern weddings. And yet, Bono always stressed, the song was about divisions, inherent differences—the fact that we can never be as one as we would like.
Every monk is the same monk insofar as he journeys into a similar silence and a parallel darkness—the blackness behind our thoughts we find in meditation—and every monk is the same monk as every lover is the same lover: it doesn’t matter whether the object of your devotion is called Angela or Jigme or Tom, whether she existed in Sappho’s time or right now. Yet every monk is most the same monk because his journey into solitude, community, and obedience is a way, really, for him to bring something transformative to the larger world, in the attention he brings to it.
“Be not simply good,” as Thoreau wrote in his first letter to Harrison Blake, “be good for something.”
Perhaps the most moving moment I ever witnessed in Dharamsala came in 1988, when I was invited, during the Tibetan New Year celebrations centered on the Dalai Lama’s temple, to stand in on one of the meetings the Dalai Lama holds with Tibetans who have just arrived, after treacherous flights across the mountains, to see him again. Many of these people had risked their lives traveling three weeks across Himalayan passes in midwinter to meet with him for a few minutes and then would cross back over the mountains, perhaps never to see him again.
The people who were gathered in the room, maybe thirty or so, were strikingly ragged, their poor clothes rendered even poorer and more threadbare by their long trip across the snowcaps. They assembled in three lines in a small room, and all I could see were filthy coats, blackened faces, sores on hands and feet, straggly, unwashed hair.
When the Dalai Lama came into the room, it was as if the whole place began to sob and shake. Instantly, among almost all the people assembled on the floor, there was a wailing, a convulsive movement, a release of all the feelings (of hope and fear and concern and relief) that had been building inside some of them for over thirty years. The man sat before them, seeking them out with shrewd, attentive eyes, and none of the adults before him could even look at him.
“Even we cannot watch this, often,” said the Dalai Lama’s private secretary, who had stood by his side, imperturbably, as calm as the monk he once was, for more than a quarter of a century at that point. The Dalai Lama sat firmly in the middle of the tumult, though later he would tell me that although “generally, sadness is manageable,” even he was sometimes moved to “shed a tear” when he saw all the hopes that these people brought to him, and all that they had suffered.
“Sometimes we try to find someone else to do this for us,” the secretary whispered to me where we stood. “It’s just too much.”
The Dalai Lama tends to be more brusque with Tibetans than he is with Westerners, partly because he knows that this is what they expect of him, and partly because he knows that they would be discomfited by too much familiarity from their godhead. But now he went down the lines, greeting each person in turn, asking (I could guess) where this person came from, how things were in her local area, what might be done to help. Each person, in answer to the questions, looked down, or just began to howl and shake with sobs.
Only a few children sitting in the front, the smallest in the party, answered the questions, their high, piping voices telling him they came from Kham, or their father was a farmer, or the trip had taken them twenty-three days. Only the children had not been storing up their hopes for all these years, with only this one chance to release them. Then, after making sure that all the refugees would be properly looked after, and given new homes here if that was what they wanted, the Dalai Lama told them to keep their spirits up and their hearts intent on how they could help others.
The four hours every morning of meditation were, I saw now, straightforward compared with the house those foundations supported.
IN PRACTICE
You must invent your own religion, or else it will mean nothing to you. You must follow the religion of your fathers, or else you will lose it.
—HASIDIC PROVERB
THE GLOBALIST
To make your way to Dharamsala, the strung-out settlement south of the Himalayas to which much of the world seems to be beating a path these days, you need a lot of determination and a strong dose of reality. You can fly to Amritsar and then take a five-hour drive from the Sikh city. But the Golden Temple, which sits shimmering on a pool at the center of Amritsar, the holiest shrine for all Sikhs, bears bullet holes from a near civil war twenty years ago when Indira Gandhi’s troops stormed the sacred space to try to rout the militant Sikhs calling for their own nation. And even the road up to Dharamsala is far from unworldly: I once saw four separate cars smashed along the road, some with bloody bodies laid out beside them.
You can also fly to Jammu and take a five-hour drive from there. Jammu, however, sits in the heart of Jammu and Kashmir state, another restricted war zone where fighting has broken out repeatedly for fifty years or more; the last time I visited the small airport there, practically the only other passenge
rs I saw were blue-helmeted peacekeepers sent by the United Nations to try to heal the wounds of Kashmir. Most travelers going to Dharamsala from Delhi take an overnight train to Pathankot, followed by a three-and-a-half-hour drive, braving the station in the Indian capital where figures swarm around foreign passengers, hands extended, many of the beggars going to sleep in the same hallway through which you pass. The final alternative is to drive, for ten hours or more, from Delhi, through narrow country roads ever more crowded with bicycles, cars, trucks, scooters, cows, and people, so jam-packed around every town that no car can move through what is in effect a mob. This is the route, for security’s sake, the Dalai Lama usually takes.
There is, on paper, an airport only a few miles from Dharamsala, but on most days it is closed; sometimes it seems to be closed for years on end. When occasionally a small plane does take off from there, there is often no room for luggage, so that the few passengers arrive at the other end to learn (as in a Buddhist story about death) that none of their possessions have accompanied them. The wonky twelve-seater run by one of India’s new start-up airlines is such a shaky prospect, on this route between the mountains, that even the Dalai Lama’s celebrated calm is said to be unsettled by it.
The town itself, when you arrive, conforms to none of the rosy notions many visitors have entertained—of temples set among picturesque valleys and meditating monks in an otherworldly location. There are such temples, often dramatically placed, and there is always snow on the mountains that rise up to fifteen thousand feet here, the foothills of the Himalayas; Tibet is barely a hundred miles away. But what greets you, as you get off a bus or step out of your taxi from the airport or far-off rail station, are some very muddy little lanes with open sewers running beside them, and a jumble of broken shops, overseas phone parlors, and guesthouses tumbling up and down the unpaved slopes (the last time I counted, there were eighty-one guesthouses in this settlement of only twenty thousand people offering rooms for less than seven dollars a night). The signs say “Dreamland” and “Lost Horizon” and “Tibet Memory,” flyers on the walls sing of Shiva Full Moon Parties, and everywhere, along the grimy lanes, are the world’s young and the seekers of five continents, being besieged by Indian taxi drivers and purveyors of wisdom, and Tibetans who stand outside shops called “Kundalini Cosmic Souvenirs” or roadside stalls offering “spiritual gems.”
