by Iyer, Pico
Yeshi himself, like the other three top executives of the Youth Congress, lived on the far side of the country from his wife and children, to bring his eloquence and persuasiveness to the Tibetan cause; his father and two brothers were among the five thousand or so Tibetans fighting for the Indian army, risking their lives to repay their debt to their hosts. But all these sacrifices had not borne visible fruit.
“Today,” he said, and this was the closest he came, really, to criticizing his leaders’ assumptions, “the world has taken Tibet as a bargaining chip, a guinea pig. To try an experiment, to try out a new notion of world peace.” But the part that was sacrificed to make this gamble possible was Tibet itself. “If I tell you you are a very good human being—kind, philanthropic,” Yeshi said (and I heard in his voice the echo of all that the rest of the world says to Tibet, as to Shangri-La), “it may hurt you; it may damage your cause. It’s a good experiment, but not for us.”
This could never be a purely theoretical issue for the Dalai Lama. Every month brought new refugees out of Tibet and into Dharamsala, and when they saw him, as I had witnessed, the very tears in their eyes, the hopes they placed on him, not only reminded him of his responsibilities but also asked a silent question: how can you continue exercising patience and extending trust when we are seeing everything torn apart around us? In this way, too, the small town looked like a Buddhist parable, the kind of story a grandfather might tell the children at his knee: a monk sits in his small house, devoting hours a day to thinking about peace, understanding, kindness, and the other hours to trying to make these workable within the unforgiving context of Realpolitik. And every day at his gates people gather—the very people it is his first priority to serve—asking him, in effect, to forswear his first monastic vows (which call for nonviolence, honesty, and celibacy), to give up his devotion to the Buddha’s example, to act not in the there and then but in the here and now. Tibet, Yeshi had implied, was giving the entire world a shining example of forgiveness, while the people who were most intimately affected by it were raging, often, at the inaction.
As a Buddhist, the Dalai Lama, I knew, could never step down from his root principles; but as a Tibetan, surely, it could not be easy for him to look at the short-term consequences of what his policy was doing.
The heart of the conundrum, again, seemed to lie in the fact that the Dalai Lama served two constituencies—his own people and the world—and the smaller group and the larger often pulled him in opposite directions. The more he gave himself to the world, sometimes, the more his own people felt, as Yeshi had implied, like natural children bewildered by the fact that their father has adopted three others. The old among the exiled Tibetans clung to the Dalai Lama, to the temple, to the rites they had grown up with, as if to magic their old country into reexistence, but the young, taking the Dalai Lama at his word—that Tibetans should learn to be more modern, more practical, more concerned—came to him with the cries of Beirut. Even in old Tibet, some had been heard to mutter, “Too much religion, too little politics,” in claiming that the huge monasteries, by hanging on to the old ways and refusing to adapt to the modern world, as the Thirteenth Dalai Lama had urged, had lost their country.
The larger world wanted the Dalai Lama to be something more than a politician—to be, in effect, a wise man, sitting above all nation-states and offering global counsel. At the annual teachings in Dharamsala, foreigners from every continent gathered for day after long day, fending off germs and rainstorms and surging crowds to hear him explain a complex text on the nature of suffering. But one year, the day after the teachings concluded, the Dalai Lama came out at the same time to the same courtyard to deliver his annual state-of-the-nation address, on Tibetan Uprising Day, March 10, and nearly all the foreigners of the day before were gone. It was mostly Tibetans who were standing in the rain as a small marching band from the Tibetan Children’s Village banged drums and unfurled the snow lion and the mountains of the outlawed Tibetan flag, while their leader offered his political assessment of their situation.
How to be global and local at once? Both Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi had in some ways concentrated on helping, even saving, their people as a way to inspire—and perhaps save—the world; but in the Tibetan situation, again, the clock was less indulgent. If the Dalai Lama offered a new vision for the global century just dawning, he was essentially addressing a century in which Tibet as we knew it no longer existed.
All of us live in two worlds at once, the Dalai Lama writes in his book on Buddhism and its correspondences with science, The Universe in a Single Atom. There is the world of “conventional reality,” in which each of us scuttles along with his own particular direction and character and destiny, and, beneath all that, there is the realm of “ultimate reality,” in which the chaos of human affairs is seen from a different perspective, behind the surface, and all the individual lives and movements become nothing more than nodes within an all-encompassing network. The conventional eye accepts the reality that China and Tibet do indeed have different traditions, customs, and languages, and that each has a very different destiny; the ultimate eye sees that Chinese and Tibetans are not so different in their basic human instincts, their longing to be happy, their eagerness to avoid pain.
The Dalai Lama’s hope was to bring some of the light and clarity of the monk’s domain, “ultimate reality,” into the politician’s world of conventional reality; to be able, in effect, to stage a kind of Copernican revolution by getting us to see that the world does not revolve around the self, but the other way round. It was as if, seeing the forest through the trees, seeing the pattern and order, the possibility within the seeming chaos, he was arguing for a complete reorientation of the center of gravity in politics; while politicians squabbled about whether to paint the vehicle of society red or green, he was calling for a rewiring of the engine.
Of course we could win small victories against the Chinese, he was essentially saying to young Tibetans, as guerrillas do in Northern Ireland and Spain and Peru; but in the long term we would be losers, by squandering the respect of the world and sparking the rage of a nation two hundred times more populous than our own. Of course we can see the Chinese as enemies, but if we do so, we are saying, in effect, that we are going to spend all our lives in the midst of enemy forces; the better solution is to change how we think of the situation, perhaps by seeing that our real enemies are our own habitual tendencies toward thinking in terms of enemies. We can always see the decisive effects of action; but what underlies action, in the way of viewpoint and motivation and feeling, is where the real change has to come.
It was, again, an idea that was often voiced by others, and it is perhaps no surprise that the first head of state officially to recognize the Dalai Lama—only thirteen hours after coming to power—was a man who likewise spoke for what could be called “transpolitical politics” and what he once called “transcendental responsibility.” Like the Dalai Lama, Václav Havel had never campaigned for office, had never obviously sought power; he gained such respect as he had just from being a man of conscience, an everyday citizen who had spoken out for justice when it was a crime to do so. Like the Dalai Lama, too, the celebrated playwright had lost no time, when finding himself in power, in arguing for Henry Adams’s idea that “knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education,” in stressing that a change in any one place would, these days, have consequences in every other place.
His power, Havel always said, came not from his public position but from whatever positions he held internally. Over and over, in his talks before other leaders, he referred to “Being” and the soul and other unquantifiable forces, as if to stress that a man who rules others must first rule himself, and be aware that he is not an end in itself so much as a beginning. Indeed, as he constantly spoke for an affiliation larger and more enduring than “my family, my country, my firm, my success,” he might have been saying that we remake our world not just by rethinking what “the state” means
but by rethinking the “we.”
The Dalai Lama clearly echoed his friend and champion even as, in both cases, the leaders set up hopes so exalted that many came away disappointed, muttering that good intentions alone could never defeat the internal combustion engine. And as the years went on, the Tibetan leader came more and more to define himself as “an internationalist,” as he put it in a 2005 book, and to invoke the specific word “global.” The “best solution to terrorism,” I heard him say in Switzerland that same year, “is to see the whole world as a single unit, taking everything as your own.” Certainly this would require lifetimes and might even then never bear fruit, but, as he said, “what other option do we have?”
It was little solace or instruction, often, to the Tibetans who called for action now, and an action that the whole world could witness, but for me what was exciting about seeing the Dalai Lama and others like Havel pressing forward was, in part, their sense that they could seize those new opportunities that he had discussed forty-five years ago with my father. Planes, phones, broadband hookups all linked us now, and what we could make of these links was not just a metaphor for the net of interdependence but a sense that any individual was operating in a sphere much wider than his immediate physical neighborhood and country, where the stakes were universal.
“Our worst mistake, our greatest mistake,” the Dalai Lama told me once of the Tibetan situation, was being isolated from the world, and now, with assistance from circumstances, he was doing what he could to redress that problem; in a narrow, secular sense, conversations between scientists and monks, between Westerners and Asians, between Tibetans and Chinese were at least a beginning in making and seeing new openings. If Tibet in the past had stood for the farthest extremes of self-containment and remoteness, now he would make it one of the central players in a global vision that showed that Tibetans could, for example, help the Indians they lived among, and foreigners could help Tibet. In earlier generations, the main relationships between countries had seemed to be political and economic ones, alliances and deals; now, he was suggesting, there was a deeper and perhaps even more valuable kind of connection—an inner and human one that could be made in terms that were not inherently divisive.
In a curious way, therefore, without even necessarily intending to, the Tibetans had begun acting on the clairvoyant idea of Gore Vidal, decades ago, that in a global world, the center of power might be not just Washington but Hollywood. Having found that most politicians clamored to see him but were reluctant, practically speaking, to do much to help him, the Dalai Lama had, almost literally, allowed his cause to be taken to the streets, permitting movie stars and rock musicians and artists to reach a greater global audience than any national politician could. Through a typical process of pragmatic experimentation, he had perhaps noticed that Richard Gere, who had worked so selflessly for the Tibetan cause for more than a quarter of a century (even the toilets outside the Dalai Lama’s main temple were funded by him), could in some ways reach people and speak out for conscience in ways that a typical traditional politician, hemmed in by interests and obligations, could not. Philosophers, scientists, men of the cloth—he was both finding and bearing out—could talk to people in the far corners of the planet and enjoy real dialogues and exchanges, even as governments were constrained by their wish not to antagonize the largest market in the world, or to imperil some other alliance.
Thus even politics, which people like myself were tempted to see as the realm of the fallen and the corrupt, were no more tarnished than the minds and expectations we brought to them. “We say, ‘Dirty politics,’” he had said in Constitution Hall, on one of his earliest trips to the United States, “but this is not right. Politics is necessary as an instrument to solve human problems, the problems of human society. It itself is not bad; it is necessary.”
The problem in politics had always been that whoever sought office almost by definition was someone many of us would not trust with it; by the very act of entering politics, he seemed to suggest (to our jaded way of thinking) that he was more committed to his needs and hopes than to our own. Yet a politics without politicians had never been easy. The Tibetan system dared to place a monk at the head of the state, in the hope that he could transform the political process from within. In practice, though, the Dalai Lama was often as much a victim as a maker of the system—in the entire nineteenth century not a single new Dalai Lama reached the age of twenty, and their deaths were seldom presumed to have come from natural causes.
It seemed clear that the Tibetans had paid a high price at times for being associated with movie stars and for seeing their predicament taken up as the fashion of the moment, sometimes among people so smitten with the idea of Shangri-La that they barely seemed to notice the six million individuals suffering in Tibet. Yet part of the unusual fascination of Dharamsala was that Lebanese TV cameras, Mexican Catholics, Chinese scientists from the mainland all assembled here to find answers from the other groups for their local problems. Buddhism, in fact, had come back to India, its homeland, with new vitality, thanks to the exiled Tibetans.
And in Tibet itself, such few gains as had been made had often come from foreigners, like the forty or so who had witnessed and recorded the first demonstrations in Lhasa, in late 1987. Many had risked their lives to collect information, to bring supplies, to speak out against an oppressive government; the streets of Dharamsala were still full of foreign lawyers, doctors, architects who were turning away from lucrative jobs to devote their services to Tibet. Among the handful of hopeful developments in Tibet’s recent history was the simple fact that it had become a global concern among those who saw it not as a matter of China and Tibet but as one of right and wrong. When the Nobel committee rewarded the Dalai Lama for his efforts for peace, offering up the prize “in tribute to the memory of Mahatma Gandhi,” the Tibetan spoke again for this larger sense of community by giving some of his prize money to Mother Teresa, to help the poor in India; some to Africa, to feed the hungry; and some to Costa Rica, to help set up a university for peace.
The deepest of all the conundrums the Dalai Lama sat upon, though, was, simply, the fact that he was both spiritual and temporal leader of his people, and whatever he did to serve one aspect of his mandate could seem to go against the other. When he spoke from the heart, extending trust, as his monastic vocation urged, he could be accused of being too innocent or unworldly; when he operated with canniness or pragmatism, as he often did, he could be seen as forfeiting his spiritual authority. Often, as when he said in 1987 that he was seeking not full independence from China but only autonomy—a Buddhist notion, if one stopped to think about it—he got assailed from one side for being too expedient, and on the other for being too idealistic.
“My own understanding,” said the Dalai Lama’s first elected prime minister, Samdhong Rinpoche, when I went to see him in 2005, “is that spirituality cannot be separated from any life. It may be family, it may be society, it may be nation or state. You need a little bit of spiritual background—not a little, but quite strong spiritual background—without which I don’t think order can be maintained. That order should come from within. It cannot be imposed. The Communist system, the imposition of everything from the top, has totally failed.”
Yet Samdhong Rinpoche was also a Tibetan monk, which meant that he was a dialectician; indeed, he had served for many years as head of the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies in Sarnath, the first official university for Tibet in exile. “Organized religion should not interfere in state affairs,” he went on, quoting his leader directly. The government in exile had taken pains to include the word “secular” in the charter it drew up for the Tibetan parliament in 1991—only to be overruled by a few votes, from people who thought it meant not just an absence of religion but an active avoidance of it. Indeed, when, in 2001, Tibetans in exile had been invited, for the first time in Tibetan history, to vote for their own prime minister (previously, he had been appointed by the Dalai Lama or, more recently, his
Cabinet), they had selected this celebrated monk and scholar. “His Holiness sometimes jokes,” Samdhong Rinpoche told me, in his gentle, Indian-inflected English, “‘I ask people to choose their own political leadership and again they have chosen an old monk, instead of young, energetic, educated, secular people!’”
Yet it was clear, even to the man I was talking to, that few Tibetans would listen to him as they listened to the man they regard as a god, with hundreds of years of the Dalai Lama lineage behind him. I remembered the Dalai Lama once telling me that he constantly urged his people, in an informal way, to practice democracy—“You should carry your work as if I didn’t exist,” he told them, because “that day will come, definitely.” And he frequently urged members of his immediate staff to take on many of the jobs—speaking to foreign politicians, addressing international support groups, explaining the situation in Tibet—that they could do, he felt, at least as well as he could. Meetings with scientists, with certain religious practitioners, and public teachings, he knew, he’d have to continue taking on himself. Because “even if some of our Cabinet members wanted to give these talks, nobody would come!”
For the Dalai Lama, democracy was the rare, happy place where Buddhist principles and real-world political systems converged. Nothing could better speak to his sense that each of us has a power in ourselves and an equal right to put forward his opinion and then be challenged in turn. Nothing could better represent his idea of independent choices within an interdependent network, each person thinking of his role in the larger whole, and debating giving everyone a say. For many Tibetans, though, especially in exile, what democracy really meant was giving up the very system and line of power that had held them up in Tibet and was all they had to cling to now.
