by Iyer, Pico
It’s quite a scene. Little girls in pink T-shirts—one says “Hello Kitty,” one says “Om”—cavort around one year, while the Dalai Lama speaks on “Stages of the Path” once more, and Tibetan or Mongolian families pass their thermoses around, cheerfully sharing their salted yak-butter tea with everyone nearby in the audience. A foreigner with Jesus locks falling down to his shoulders sits stock-still, eyes closed, hands extended before him in the lotus position. Since most foreigners follow the rarefied philosophical explanations in translation on little six-dollar radios equipped with earphones, a crackle of English and Russian and even Chinese sounds differently in every ear. The people who cannot find room inside the main courtyard sit somewhere else out in the sun, boom boxes blasting the teachings beside them.
Foreigners keep their places in the courtyard with little handwritten signs and sleeping bags, marking them out days before the teaching begins; male and female Indian and Tibetan security officers with rusted machines laboriously check every person each time he or she comes in after breakfast or after the lunch break. When the teachings adjourn, every afternoon around four-thirty, the paths and gulleys and slopes of Dharamsala run red with surging monks again; they stream between the flowering apple blossoms and mistletoe, and some of them head straight for the basketball court across from the Japanese, Thai, and Korean restaurants, for hard, slashing games in front of a graffiti-scribbled wall that could make anyone nostalgic for the Bronx (except that this wall says, “May Peace Prevail on Earth” and “Think Globally, Act Locally,” next to some mock–Keith Haring drawings).
In a certain light, the odd contradictions of the place, and our global order, become apparent. Tibetan monks do a lot of things that look strange to Western or Indian observers: they pull out their cell phones on the street, they cluster around Internet parlors, and, enjoying their time in what for them is the big city, away from their remote settlements, they pour into little cafés for big dinners. Much of the time, like young boys anywhere, they seem to be talking about girls and cars. Meanwhile, many of the foreigners on the same streets—attorneys from Santa Monica, fund-raisers from Toronto, former ad-agency executives from Germany, students and activists from Argentina—are waking up before dawn to meditate, devoting all their services free of charge to the Tibetans, and living as vegetarians, even as ascetics. I climb up to a meditation center between the pines one bright morning and see that the day’s schedule, neatly typed out, offers “Breakfast /Impermanence and Death /Suffering /Selflessness /Dinner /Equanimity.”
One afternoon I walk out of my guesthouse, toward the center of town, and think of how the settlement around me has become an unlikely model of the recent history of the world. It was set up, after all, by the British as a summer retreat for those administrators from far-off Britain trying to rule India. It was then left to the Indians, and in turn handed over to the Tibetans. Now it looks simultaneously like a ragged version of a nonexistent Tibet, a mini-Kathmandu, and an epicenter of low-budget globalism. An Indian hotel, eager to get into the spirit of the Tibetan holiday, has strung a large banner across Temple Road to commemorate the Tibetan New Year, known as “Losar.” The banner, placed just before the entrance to the Dalai Lama’s temple and compound, says, cheerfully and unfortunately, “Happy Loser.”
When I go into the Awasthi Cyber-Café, my daily haunt (needing to keep up with bosses across the world), it is to find almost all the twenty or so terminals being used, by travelers clicking away in Russian, Hebrew, Korean, and Japanese (one of them has a prized Webcam terminal and is accessing a sleepy friend in Tel Aviv). Beautiful thangkas from Ali Baba’s Treasures hang above the computers, and a group of friendly, sweatered Indians quietly tend to every need, bringing cups of tea to anyone who pays, expertly navigating the Web to try to get around the fact that you can’t access AOL, hurrying outside to start everything up again with a private generator when the electricity goes out across the valley.
As I wait the long, long minutes, stretching into hours, for the system to boot up, I notice that the man next to me (a Buddhist monk from Taiwan?) is receiving a message addressed to “Dear Ven. Tommy.” The Israeli girl on the other side of me is typing, “I am so happy we are going to be married.” An Internet café, especially in so remote a place as Dharamsala, is a collection of lost lives, or lives that seem very distant now, messages sent back and forth to new friends or loves you can hardly remember who, in their new (old) lives, can hardly remember you.
“I am not mean I want your money,” a Tibetan blade whose on-screen name is “smileyboy” has just typed; if the girl he’s wooing reads the message too quickly, I think, or is scrolling through messages in between appointments in her office above the Thames, she may see a dot after that “mean” and the whole message will be inverted, perfectly reversed. A distraught, somewhat disturbed-seeming woman is beseeching one of the polite Indian managers to help her type a message to her bank in New Zealand to authorize a cash transfer, and someone else is shouting into the phone on the desk (since the place doubles as a public call center). The photocopying machine is rolling off dozens of pages of sutras. Nearly all the messages I notice as people come and go around me—musical chairs—have to do with love or money, perhaps with the confusion between the two.
“I don’t feel comfortable with you,” a woman has written to the Indian who is now beside me. “Why did you fall in love with me so quickly? You must meet lots of foreign tourists. We are so different. I had a dream about you last night.”
Is he used to such challenges? Is this the first? Do his words come out so fluently because he means them or because he doesn’t and he’s used them all before? “Yes, darling, we are so different levels as you say. You are high-class, I am only high-school. But our lives are not all so different. Today there is sun on mountain and I think of you. Rododendron everywhere, blessings are there. When I look at the mountains I think of you, darling.”
Down the road, undisturbed by such age-old, universal exchanges, the center of the community sits, a little like a stupa on whom those walking around have stuck their plans, their hopes, their slogans or fashions of the moment. The last time I’d come here he had joked to me that Tibetans were teaching the local Indians “bad habits” by eating meat; now signs around the temple say, “To Be Healthy, Be Vegetarian” and “Please Stop Eating Us, You (Inhuman) Human Beings!” and he is encouraging those Tibetans who can do so to try to become vegetarians (he practices vegetarianism himself every other day, true to his Middle Way philosophy, having been forbidden by his doctors from practicing it entirely). He has also recently decided that his government should make no profit from any information it dispenses, and so videos, posters, pamphlets are offered at cost price at a little store in town, and you can buy a feature-length video for less than a dollar, and a thick book for fifty cents at one of the tables outside his teachings.
Dharamsala is a global community based on ideals and the possibility of pledging oneself to something better; but—of course—realities swim all around it, like sharks. In Tibet the Dalai Lama was an embodiment of an old culture that, cut off from the world, spoke for an ancient, even lost traditionalism; now, in exile, he is an avatar of the new, as if, having traveled eight centuries in just five decades, he is increasingly, with characteristic directness, leaning in, toward tomorrow.
It is the only thing we can do, Klaas, I see no alternative, each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.
—ETTY HILLESUM,
on her way to her death, at twenty-nine, in Auschwitz
THE POLITICIAN
Almost the first thing the Dalai Lama had said when he came to Nara, addressing the local experts in the small conference room right after breakfast, was “The world is getting smaller. So, closer understanding between humanity is necessary. We need attitude of oneness of humanity. All world is one body.”
This had all sounded reasonable enough, though I had not been able to hold much
confidence that humanity would rise to this sense of unity. “I believe,” he had gone on, “basic human nature is more gentleness. Our whole life, human affection is most important factor for our survival.” How better, I had thought, to approach a group of intellectuals?
And yet, fewer than nine weeks later, I was walking the streets of Beirut and taking in one of the most sophisticated and advanced communities the human mind has ever devised. Egyptians and Assyrians and Phoenicians and Greeks, Romans and Ottomans and French and British had been here, and after ten millennia of visitations, the city glittered with more urbanity than I had seen in Paris or New York, its people discussing the issues of the day—and philosophy, culture, history—in English and Arabic and French, with an intensity and charm I had seldom seen on any of my travels.
The result of all this history, though, was that 150,000 Beirutis had been killed in fifteen years of unrelenting civil war not very long before. Forty competing militia had run wild across a country half the size of Wales; Muslims had avenged themselves on other Muslims by attacking Christians, Syrians had joined Christians in fighting Palestinians and then joined Palestinians in fighting Christians. The governing logic of Beirut was, famously, the belief that “My enemy’s enemy is my friend,” not so very different from the complications of factionalism in old Tibet, where, favoring China over Britain, some people used to say, “Better an old adversary nearby than a new friend far away.”
“Now,” the Dalai Lama had gone on in the dusty old hotel, autumn sunshine flooding in through the wood-framed windows, “humanity is becoming more mature. We notice a larger number of humanity really showing a desire for peace. Many people are fed up with bloodshed and violence. Now we need more effort to nurture that kind of trend.”
Yet who, I thought, a few weeks later, could be more fed up with violence than Beirutis, their churches pockmarked with bullet holes, their minarets having been used as snipers’ nests? Who could more passionately support the peace effort? And yet mothers had seen their sons killed by neighbors, children had watched old people cut down for no reason at all. Something in us suggests that forgiveness is a betrayal of natural justice, and even if you believe in karma, or any other unbending process of cause and effect, that cannot always fill the hole in every heart.
The Dalai Lama, as it happens, knows more about Beirut than I and many of my journalist friends do; in Taiwan in 2001, he actually cited it as an example of the world’s convolutions, having been told by a French writer how innocents were dying in one part of the city while arms dealers were making profits in another. Besides, growing up in Tibet, where a local warlord had to be paid off the equivalent of $2.5 million in today’s terms just to let the four-year-old Dalai Lama leave his home and travel to Lhasa, coming of age as his country was swept up into decades of violent warfare, he does not need to be told about what human greed and savagery can do. He always used to change the channel, he once told an interviewer, when there was a scene on TV of an animal being slaughtered. But then he resolved that he had to watch it, since at least then something good might come out of the often needless slaughter.
Whenever I saw the Dalai Lama, often just after he had returned from Belfast or Jerusalem or Berlin, I heard him deliver his arguments for peace and understanding with a logician’s suppleness and command. “It’s not sufficient to say we want peace, are against violence,” he had said in Nara. “Just saying this is not sufficient. Violence comes because there is some problem. So we must solve the problem. The best way is dialogue. The other’s interest, our interests, are very much mixed. No independence.” If one person in a neighborhood is happy and the others are suffering, he often said, no one can feel truly secure.
But then I went out into the world and saw what people who acted in the name of interdependence or of a new society had wrought. Five months before taking Hiroko to meet the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, I was inspecting killing fields and skulls in Cambodia, where a leader who had studied under both Buddhist priests and Catholic fathers had orchestrated the elimination of 20 percent of his countrymen, 1.7 million in all. Nine weeks after I left him another year, I was in Haiti, where I was told not to go out at night “because of democracy,” and signs in French and English asked citizens not to bring their guns into a hospital. The horror of Beirut was, in many ways, the very cosmopolitanism and elegance of Beirut: here was one of the most intelligent and engaged places anyone could hope to see, and it was precisely that untransformed intelligence that led to such ingenuities as suicide bombing and hostage taking, a terrorist group with its own satellite TV station and advertising agents, precisely that engagement that led to the refusal to let crimes go unanswered.
A few months after the Dalai Lama received the Nobel Prize, I was in Tibet and North Korea, and nothing I saw in either place told me that the world was more concerned than before, that human nature was moving toward “more gentleness” or that “humanity is becoming more mature.”
Such challenges are posed all the time to the Dalai Lama, of course, though my talks with him had suggested that he posed them to himself even more often. What would you do if someone threatened to rape a group of Tibetan nuns? people asked. How would you respond if a man came into the room right now, wildly waving a gun? In response, he usually cited one of the Buddha’s own classic teachings, about how a man may be justified in killing another if that other is about to kill five hundred people. Everything, again, depends on motivation, and at his evening talk in Nara he had remarked that though the upshot is the same, “friendly fire” is profoundly different from an act of aggression, if only because it arises from different impulses.
Even as he said all this, though, these questions were far from abstract for his people: their country really was being destroyed, their heritage raped and their community tortured. Many of them clearly felt that they had spent their entire lives in a waiting room, exercising preternatural patience, as their leader counseled, even as foreigners told them how Tibetans in Tibet could barely speak Tibetan now, that a Tibetan had been imprisoned for six years just for privately screening a video of her exiled leader, that the Potala Palace was mockingly surrounded by swan boats and the trappings of an amusement park. How can one stand by and practice “inner disarmament,” I could imagine them saying, when one’s own home and all its residents are going up in flames?
One warm spring afternoon I sat in one of the oldest little coffee-houses in Dharamsala, the Chocolate Log, its red-and-white-checkered tables neatly set out on a terrace so you can watch the sun casting large shadows across the mountains, the snowcaps so sharp above the settlement that you can start to believe (as in Tibet) in heavenly protection, and heard one of the settlement’s most forceful and impassioned speakers, Lhasang Tsering, brief a group of American college students on Tibet and its situation.
I knew Lhasang well because he ran the area’s most literate and spirited bookshop, sitting behind his desk in the mornings—his sad, burning eyes, his lean face, and his white wisp of a beard giving him the air of an exiled East Asian sage—talking about literature, the latest political testaments, and, without much prompting, everything that was wrong with the Tibetan government in exile (in particular its readiness, since 1987, to concede that China could continue to control Tibet’s external affairs so long as Tibetans could control their internal ones). Lhasang had once worked in the government itself, for the Department of Information; he had taught at the Tibetan Children’s Village, with the Dalai Lama’s younger sister; he had stolen back into Tibet, in 1980, and been instrumental, along with those now closest to the Dalai Lama, in setting up the Tibetan Youth Congress, the main activist voice of exiled Tibet, always eager to do something for stranded cousins and former neighbors under Chinese rule. Dharamsala is a small town, in every sense, and Lhasang (along with Jamyang Norbu, first cousin of the Dalai Lama’s longtime private secretary) was clearly one of its brightest minds and most eloquent debaters, though now, as in some Shakespearean court, he had become the voice of i
ndignant opposition.
“The first thing I must tell you,” he told the students, in what I took to be his standard address, his gaze as mournful as it was commanding, “is that I am not from Shangri-La. In fact, I don’t know where that place is. And, frankly, I do not have the time or inclination to look for it.” What he was really saying, I thought, was that he was not ready, as he put it bluntly, “to stand by and watch people suffer.” To talk about peace while Tibetans were dying was, he suggested, tantamount to manslaughter.
How could one take the moral high road, he went on, how could one speak of long-term consequences and universal principles when the short-term consequences—being tortured and beaten and inwardly corrupted—were being felt by others? “I don’t think it is fair for us to ignore Tibetans who are suffering in Tibet,” he said with rhetorical cunning, as if the Dalai Lama were practicing a kind of willful cruelty. “We are praying for world peace, and not even doing very much for world peace.”
The young Americans sat around the simple table looking stunned, as if someone had hit them on the head with a hammer. Lhasang, though, his eyes flaring with soft fire, his quiet voice compelling, was speaking for a very different response to suffering than the Dalai Lama was outlining, down the road, in his annual New Year’s teachings. He and his leader might almost have been monks in a classic debate, one of them (the former guerrilla in the café) lunging forward with slashing argument after argument in favor of action, the other (the Tibetan leader across the hill) sitting unmoved, and saying that tolerance, patience, forgiveness, too, are a form of action, the very opposite of passivity.
