by Iyer, Pico
During only his fourth year in exile, the Dalai Lama had drawn up a new constitution, both for exiled Tibet and for Tibet once it was free, taking care to write in a clause that allowed for his own impeachment. His Cabinet—almost inevitably—had taken it out, and he, in a rare exercise of executive power, had put it in again.
More recently, in 1996, he had held a referendum, so that his exiled people could choose what form of government they would like to see. No doubt reluctantly, and perhaps in deference to others’ wishes, he had added one final option—that power be left in the hands of the Dalai Lama. Almost inevitably again, the majority of Tibetans chose that the Dalai Lama be in charge of everything and, in honoring the principle of democracy, he was obliged to accept a nondemocratic system.
A few days after his talk to the students, and just before I left Dharamsala, I asked Lhasang Tsering if he would join me for a final cup of tea. Urbane and obliging as ever, he instantly agreed and led me to a lawn outside an Indian government hotel, where we sat at a small table and sipped the strong Indian chai he ordered, in fluent Hindi. Journalists love to talk to Lhasang, the most quotable naysayer in Dharamsala, and he seems to love to talk to them. “Freedom will not come from waiting,” he declared, in what I took to be one of his many carefully polished epigrams. “We have lost a clarity of purpose.” For a practicing Buddhist, I thought, freedom did in fact come from just sitting, as the Buddha had done, and patiently seeing through all the dust and obscurations in the mind, precisely in order to find the clarity of purpose for which the Dalai Lama and other monks were famous. It just happened to be a purpose (universal and far-reaching) that did not answer the impatience of many Tibetans right now.
I kept my peace, though (Lhasang, after all, was a Buddhist by birth, as I was not), and he went on, with typical passion: “I’m afraid our leaders are acting more like a welfare organization than a real government” (thus suggesting, in effect, that compassion ranked lower than politicking, and could not be a part of it). “His Holiness, as everyone knows and accepts, is our greatest strength,” he had said to the American students. “But therefore he is our greatest weakness. We have forgotten the ability to think for ourselves, the ability to do things for ourselves, to stand on our own feet. And yet there was a Tibet before the Dalai Lama. It was only in the sixteenth century that a Dalai Lama took over Tibet. Our history goes back two and a half thousand years.”
Often, listening to him speak, I had the uncanny sense of hearing the very words the Dalai Lama used and insistently stressed—“realism,” “impermanence,” “suffering”—but turned in the opposite direction. One of them was speaking the language of the spirit, it seemed, of “ultimate reality” and what was good for everybody; the other much more the language of the mind, which insists on its divisions and distinctions and asserts that we cannot abandon or be free of the realm of “conventional reality.” Hearing the Dalai Lama speak of “reality”(in a way that suggested we need a microscope in order to see everything that this entails) and then hearing the voice of Beirut speak of it, often with striking and enviable fluency, seemed to me to mark all the difference between wisdom and great cleverness.
I was most interested, though, in hearing Lhasang’s own story. He had been a boy of six, he told me, when his family came to India, in 1958, on a pilgrimage (his father, a renowned Tantric master, had seen trouble coming to Tibet), and while traveling in India, his father had suddenly died, leaving a widow and three children somehow to find a way to survive in the foreign country. They set about working on roads, as a few years later many Tibetans would do, taking on the jobs that no Indians were eager to assume. Like many Tibetans in these inhospitable circumstances, they flourished. Lhasang, in fact, soon proved himself an excellent student, and one, therefore, faced with the same choice that confronts the best in the exile Tibetan community even today: would he serve his country or just his family? In financial and practical terms, it was hard for the Tibetan exile to serve both: Lhasang wanted to put his intelligence to the use of the greater good, he said, but he could not soon forget the Tibet he had grown up in—or the sight of his father’s pyre by a river in India.
He went on to tell me about the scholarship he had been offered to study medicine at Johns Hopkins, and his confrontation with the Dalai Lama, his telling his leader that he had to see Tibet and the people he was working for to serve them best. It wasn’t hard, as he spoke, to imagine that Lhasang had inherited the firelit power of his father; he spoke with a rare intensity and eloquence, his voice now soft, now rising to a roar, and I remembered the time when, suddenly, in his bookshop, he had launched into Brutus’s funeral speech for Caesar, in which the Roman explains why he has betrayed his longtime friend and leader, even as—or maybe because—signs around town had taken to calling him “the Invincible God.”
“His Holiness congratulates the Tibetans who fight for India in the Indian army,” Lhasang now said, calling on an example he often used. “He congratulates the Tibetans who give their lives to the war in Bangladesh. But a poor young boy in Lhasa, without any hope, picks up a stone and throws it at a Chinese tank, and His Holiness condemns it as violence? It is okay for us to fight for India in Bangladesh, but not for Tibetans in Tibet?” (Yes, I thought, you could make a case for doing your duty to a host as being more important than fighting for yourself.) I remembered how the Dalai Lama, nine years before, had said to me calmly, in counseling patience among young Tibetans, “And one way, yes, my position has become weaker, because no development, no progress. In spite of my open approach, with maximum concessions, Chinese position becomes even harder and harder.”
But there was something else about Lhasang that affected me even more (and might, I thought, have moved the Dalai Lama more than could any of his words or ideas, which sometimes had the sound of thrice-told arguments delivered to a partner, in a relationship conducted for too many years in much too small a space). What books do you recommend reading, I asked him, to try to bring us onto less painful topics, and he said that somehow he hadn’t found the energy to read in recent times. He’d lost all stomach for it, he said sorrowfully. And writing? The poems he had written he sometimes gave out as bookmarks in his shop, reminding customers, for example, of the great debt that Tibetans owed their host, India. No, he said; somehow all the life had gone out of him. When he’d worked in the government, what he’d seen had so shocked him that he’d had a mild stroke, while only thirty-three. Nowadays he still suffered blackouts and, as his wife vigorously attested, was constantly haunted by the moment when “I even forgot who I was.”
A debate like Dharamsala’s will never end, perhaps, as we never manage to live entirely in the world we hope for, even though we accept that to give up hope entirely is to give up a reason for living. And even within the Dalai Lama’s own family, the debate raged on without end. One of the strongest voices for full independence—and the man who had written the foreword to a book featuring pieces by Lhasang Tsering and Jamyang Norbu, arguing that the Dalai Lama’s position was, in Norbu’s phrase, “a pathetically watered-down compromise” sponsored by “pocket Kissingers, ‘friends’ of Chinese leaders, even well-meaning imbeciles”—was, in fact, the Dalai Lama’s eldest brother, himself an incarnate lama, and resident for many decades in Indiana. Yet the most visible spokesman for conciliation, constantly going back and forth to Beijing, based in Hong Kong, fluent in Chinese, and long married (until her death) to a Chinese woman, was the Dalai Lama’s other older brother, Gyalo Thondup. The positions seemed as inseparable as the monks in the courtyard, one standing up and lunging forward, the other sitting unmoved before him.
The Buddha himself had once faced just such a situation, when a mass murderer called Angulimala slaughtered people all across the Gangetic plain. The Buddha worked with this terrorist—the spokesman for Beiruti justice, you could say—just by talking to him patiently and showing him the self-destructiveness of his actions. Yet those who had lost their husbands and daughters could not give up t
heir sorrows so easily. They came to the Buddha and said, “How can you ask us to forgive a man who has all but destroyed our lives?” The Buddha’s answer, like that of a doctor in a refugee camp, was simply to speak to each victim individually, explaining that if suffering lay inside them, so, too, did the means for overcoming suffering.
I remembered attending an event once in which, as the Dalai Lama walked into a temple, suddenly a raging young woman stepped forward and shouted out, “Lama! Dalai Lama! I need to talk to you. I am divine.” She was pulled away by security guards, her screams and indignant shouts reaching even the small chapel in which the Dalai Lama sat. To my surprise, though, when he emerged from the temple a few minutes later, the Tibetan leader had his assistants bring her to him and stood before her, blessing her and cupping her face affectionately in his hand. You do not heal problems just by shouting at them, he might have been saying. You look at them and offer what you can.
On my last night in Dharamsala, a group of Tibetans invited me to dinner at the Hotel Tibet. There were six of them, all male, quick-witted, eager to talk, the bright young prospects of the Tibetan diaspora. And almost as soon as we sat down, one of them, the sweetest and most optimistic, a student of law, said, “Democracy is going to take time. Look at the U.S. It took two hundred years for democracy to settle down there.”
“We don’t have two hundred years,” another replied.
“But we’ve got to be practical,” the first went on. “We’re new to this.”
What do we do when the Dalai Lama is no longer around? Though nobody said it, that was the real topic of the discussion, as of so many discussions around Dharamsala. It was the shadow question that haunted almost every home and silence here. One of the young men present, working for the government in exile, had told me that he foresaw civil war and terrorist action in Tibet once the Fourteenth Dalai Lama was no more; the more hopeful law student had answered that Tibetans could flourish in the democratic patterns laid down by the Dalai Lama. Around us foreign scholars, wealthy Tibetans, high-up monks in the Dalai Lama’s administration, and noisy backpackers tucked into Tibetan, Chinese, Indian, and Continental food while “Hotel California” reminded us that you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.
“We in Tibet always have this discussion,” one of the boys explained to me, almost by way of apology. “Because on the one hand we’re taught to be nationalist. To be proud of Tibet and work on behalf of Tibet, to protect our country. But on the other we’re always getting the spiritual lesson, to be patient, forbearing, nonviolent. So, really, we don’t know what to do!”
His own hope, the law student said, lay in a country like Sikkim, which was to some degree its own world, even as it was part of India. Earlier in the evening, when the boys had asked me to say a few words about Tibet from a foreign perspective, we had heard Lhasang say, with characteristic fury, “If a man is raping a girl and she cries out for help, you don’t wait and pray for peace.”
“The Chinese are playing for time,” he had also said, in what was his favorite aphorism, “and we are playing into their hands. What is the good of extending a hand if the other person does not? Nothing. It takes two to shake hands.”
“But if you extend no hand at all,” I’d said, “you’ve given up. Nothing can be achieved.”
“You can use that hand as a fist!” His eyes, as so often, had been on fire.
Now we shifted the conversation in the restaurant a little, to what foreigners could do or had done for Tibet.
“Yesterday,” said one of the boys, “an American man said to me, ‘Do you meditate?’ And I couldn’t tell him that very few Tibetans meditate. It’s really not a part of our culture.”
“And,” a more innocent boy piped up, “this Frenchman was saying to me—I get it all the time from Westerners—‘If Buddhism is about nonattachment, why are you attached to Tibet?’”
“What do you say?”
“I say that Tibetan religion and culture help everyone. So naturally I want them to continue. We sometimes say that people want to enjoy the food of Tibetan culture and religion but don’t care what’s going on in the kitchen.”
“We say in Tibet sometimes,” put in another, who had not spoken all evening, “that spirituality is the means, but the end is political. Please could you tell Westerners that we are proud if they enjoy our spiritual life, but what we care about right now is politics?”
Nine months later, in a move that shocked the world, the king of Bhutan, an Oxford-educated Buddhist who had been taught by one of the same rinpoches who’d taught the Dalai Lama, announced that, though only fifty, he would voluntarily step down from his throne two years later, to bring democratic elections to his country. His people were distressed—they had known only hereditary monarchy for the past ninety-eight years and wanted him always to be in charge of them—but he felt that his kingdom had to change with the times. The chain of cause and effect in a web, a Buddhist might have told me, is not always linear or easy to predict. The “butterfly effect”—so often spoken of by leaders like Havel—whereby an insect shaking its wings leads to a tornado many continents away took many forms, it seemed. An idea over here, and a sudden effect over there. Every word and tiny act has consequences, the Dalai Lama might have been reminding us, though often they are consequences we cannot and will not ever see.
For in this world of ours where everything withers, everything perishes, there is a thing that decays, that crumbles into dust even more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself, than beauty: namely, grief.
—MARCEL PROUST
THE FUTURE
One day in Dharamsala, an autumn day, the light golden and sharp outside his thangka-filled room, though it was cold not far away and snow was gathering on the mountains above, the Dalai Lama suddenly leaned across to me, as he often does (leaning into the world has become his characteristic position, as much as sitting stock-still in meditation), eyes alight, and, though nothing in our conversation had led to this, went off on a sudden tangent. He’d been talking about his love of informality, the way that sometimes it seemed to relax people and open them up, and then he remembered how, on his first trip to England, in 1973, after his talk “one old English gentleman—very gentlemanly—one old one come to me, and he expressed he very much appreciated that the Dalai Lama said, ‘I don’t know.’”
In Tibet, he went on, this would sound strange. Tibetans appreciate humility and laugh at one who claims to know it all, but still they would never think of congratulating someone on saying “I don’t know.” He was so taken aback by the old man’s comment that he was moved to reflect on it twenty-three years later. Maybe, he speculated, “it’s becoming rare—to admit you don’t know. And once rare things happen, that becomes a surprise. I don’t know. What do you feel?”
I fumbled for an answer—the question was so genuine—and I could see that the Tibetan was probing a serious aspect of cultural misunderstanding. He’s always eager to offer assistance where it’s required, and yet he is in no hurry to speak on things he knows nothing about. But when I went back to my room, crossing the flower-bordered driveway outside his house, walking through the gates into the shady courtyard filled with monks in their red robes, and Tibetans in prayer and the odd foreigner come to inspect the sense of devotion and ritual debating, as I went down the slope and along the road crowded with dogs and refuse and beggars, Tibetans setting up stalls to sell Dalai Lama posters, photographs, tapes to sightseers, and I climbed the steep, unpaved hill back to my guesthouse and my simple, sunlit room, I thought that saying “I don’t know” was actually one of the better lessons he had taught us. He traveled everywhere in part to transmit what he did know, through his training, his meditation, his experience: about hard work in the face of suffering, about kindness and the way it makes everyone feel better, about interconnectedness and the logical basis for thinking of others (if they are a part of ourselves). People flew across the world and lined up for hours to hear him g
ive all the answers. A monk is a walking answer, in the commitment that is the basis of his life. But he is also a man whose duty it is (and whose nature it surely is, too) to have questions. He is one who lives daily in the presence of something he can’t put a finger on.
The Dalai Lama’s whole life sometimes seems to be a lesson on how little we really know. Who could have guessed that the little boy clambering around in a tiny village in eastern Tibet would be pronounced the ruler of his people and brought to the Potala Palace at the age of four? Who could have expected that, while not yet ten, he would have to be the figurehead of his people during the tumult of World War II? And who could have known that just as the war ended, his own problems would begin? He didn’t see the Chinese occupation coming, it seems fair to say—his Cabinet was still taking picnics as Chinese troops crossed into eastern Tibet—and he could never have known that he would be spending nearly all his adult life far from home, in India. People credit the Dalai Lama with great intuition and prescience, and these he might have, but he also has, surely, a human capacity for being surprised, and sometimes mortified.
He has made of “I don’t know” one of the great cornerstones of his optimism. There are no grounds for hope regarding Tibet as we know it: things just keep getting worse and worse, to the point where Tibet is almost a place of memory now. China has no real reason for wishing to give up an area it knows as the “Western Treasure House,” at the very center of Asia; the moral pressure of other governments has achieved nothing. Tibetans are in no position to resist a force that sees itself as the center of the earth and everywhere else as its mere satellite. There is simply no reason to imagine that an old Tibet could magically return.
