The Open Road

by Iyer, Pico

  And yet, overnight as it could seem, the Berlin Wall came down, and eight weeks after his most recent stay in prison, Václav Havel was unanimously selected as president of his country. Suddenly, through the moral efforts of Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, among many others, decades of apartheid in South Africa were over. The aftermath of all those liberations has been troubled, an instant rejoinder to those who think that all will be well with the world (as Buddhists are seldom inclined to think). But no one at the beginning of 1989 expected that, by year’s end, the Cold War would be effectively over, and no one imagined, when Mandela emerged from prison, that apartheid would soon be driven out of his country. The Dalai Lama reposes his faith on such surprises—the sudden result of what has been building invisibly for years—as if to say, as he put it once, “Until the last moment, anything is possible.” Maybe a new leader will come to Beijing who cares deeply about Tibetan autonomy. Maybe an American president will demand concessions that China will have to make to appease its main rival. Maybe the Chinese in Tibet will have a change of heart. Who knows?

  A monk, in any case, is one who sees things in the largest light possible, who sees, that is, how much we can’t see, with our limited, partial view, our perspective from our spot in the middle of the flux and chaos. His job, in some respects, is to mix agnosticism with faith: to recall that he knows nothing of what will come tomorrow, and yet to remain confident that it will have meaning and will fit into a larger logic. Hope, as Václav Havel has said, is not the belief that everything will end happily ever after; it probably won’t. It is simply the belief that something makes sense, regardless of how things turn out, and even if that sense is not apprehensible to us.

  The central question mark hanging over Tibet and the Tibetans was, ever more, what would happen when the Fourteenth Dalai Lama was no longer. The man in question had been addressing that issue, straightforwardly and without flinching, ever since he was in his mid-thirties; as long as the Dalai Lama has some use, he always said, and can help the Tibetan people and others, he will be around, even if in some radical form. The sign of a true Dalai Lama is that he continues the work of previous Dalai Lamas. This shrewdly counteracted the very distinct possibility that, as soon as he died, the authorities in Beijing would suddenly produce a complaisant little boy under their control and present him as the Fifteenth Dalai Lama. But beyond strategies, it also spoke for a real truth, which is that everything changes, and some roles outlast their usefulness, but something uncreated or unconditioned, in the Buddha’s words, endures. The analogy often used for reincarnation is that of a flame that is the same flame even as it is passed from one very different candle to another.

  “When I go,” the Dalai Lama told me in the spring of 2005, “I don’t know. All depends on the respect of the Tibetan people for their popularly elected leader. One hundred percent popular, impossible! But sixty, seventy percent, and still thirty, forty percent opposed: it can create some problems. We’re in a foreign country; meantime, if Indian government withdraws some formal recognition, then I don’t know. Very complicated.”

  What he was really saying was that those restless young Tibetans outside his door might finally try to act on their understandable frustration; that even though he had tried to lay down the foundations of democracy, he was aware that Tibetans had got into the habit of listening only to those with the ritual authority of the Dalai Lama; that all the planning in the world could not take care of every contingency or wipe out old reflexes in an instant. It was a sobering reminder of just how entangled his position was that one of the first factors he mentioned when contemplating the future was not Tibet or even China but India (which allows the Tibetans to stay as a group of spiritual refugees but would grow anxious if they started to assert themselves too much as a political force).

  An elected prime minister meant, he hoped, that people are “no longer relying on Dalai Lama. So whether Dalai Lama is alive or not, we have already leadership. And in terms of religious matters, we have younger generation of lamas from various traditions. So, theoretically, we have already planned everything. But in practice, of course, it depends on many matters. So, I don’t know.”

  His own position has always been that, in the deepest sense, if we can live free of ceremony and superficial tradition, the Dalai Lama, Tibet, Buddhist temples won’t have to exist at all, so long as we keep the principles they represent alive inside us. People and cultures and buildings are perishable, changeable things, he keeps on saying—himself as much as any; but truth, possibility, fairness, kindness are not. The open road is always leading around the next corner, calling for further investigation, even if no final destination is assured.

  “Change is part of the world” is how he once distilled Buddhism into six words. When he was growing up, Sera Monastery in Lhasa was among the largest monasteries on the planet, with ten thousand monks on its rolls. Now Beijing enforces a limit of five hundred in any monastery. Yet the new Sera Monastery that refugees from Lhasa’s Sera have built in southern India is flourishing, its population having surged from five hundred to four thousand. There are now two hundred Tibetan Buddhist centers in Taiwan alone. And many, many of the Chinese who flock to Tibet (and Chinese represent 90 percent of the million or so tourists who visit every year) are making offerings at the Jokhang Temple, even taking on Tibetan names and seeking out Tibetan lamas. Even as Tibetans are sometimes denied the chance to learn Tibetan, more and more Chinese are taking up the language.

  In China, the Chinese writer Ma Jian wrote after visiting Tibet, “there is a saying: that which is united will eventually separate, and that which is separated will eventually unite.”

  “If, thirty years from now, Tibet is six million Tibetans and ten million Chinese Buddhists,” the Dalai Lama told me in 2003 (not wishfully, but because he followed events in Tibet so closely that he could reel off the names of monks and remote monasteries that were doing good work there), “then, maybe, something okay.” Once upon a time, after all, Tibet had occupied much of western China and entered the great T’ang capital of Changan, installing a puppet emperor there; less than seventy years later, as the Dalai Lama had reminded my father in 1960, monastic Buddhism had been pushed out of central Tibet for more than sixty years, and not a monk or a sacred text could be seen.

  The story, in other words, did not end with one particular being, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama; if anything, it began there (the story of a Tibet that is part of the wider modern world, of a modern world that is part of Tibet, and of those who see, as the Buddha had stressed, that the teacher is not important, only the teaching). Many of the ideas that this particular Dalai Lama had put into circulation enjoyed such currency now that it seemed more than possible that Americans, Germans, Indians—Chinese—might take them further. I asked his younger brother, one sunny winter day in San Francisco, how he saw the future of Buddhism, and Ngari Rinpoche answered, calmly, “In the future I think people will follow the principles laid down by a man called Gautama. But the word ‘Buddhism’ may disappear. Which is fine: we don’t need the name.”

  Then came the subversive laugh, and the kind gaze behind the glasses—he was about to say something about my hair—and I saw one form in which the ideas were already finding a new voice and vessel.

  Three years to the day after the trip to Nara that began this book, the Dalai Lama was back in Japan, walking through a park again in the brilliant autumn sunshine, one hand holding that of his old friend Desmond Tutu, the other linked to that of their fellow Nobel peace laureate Betty Williams, from Northern Ireland. They were striding through the November day along a broad avenue that leads to the peace memorial in Hiroshima, the sun glinting off the high-rises in the reborn city all around; they had spent the previous two days addressing a mostly young and international audience on what hopes for peace were still feasible in a city whose name had become a byword for destruction.

  Japan is the strongest Buddhist nation in the world, the Dalai Lama often noted (upending the eve
ryday assumptions of those of us who see only its modernist forms), and insofar as it felt an emptiness in its heart, it ought to bring its special skills and training to Latin America, Africa, other places where they could be of use. You make yourself feel better, richer, by giving what you have to others. Meanwhile, the rest of the world was flowing into Japan: one day before, I had followed him up through the sunlight to a steep hill in Hiroshima where a Tibetan lama had been teaching for twenty years, filling the bare serenity of a Japanese temple with vibrant Tibetan colors. The very next day, the Dalai Lama would go to the sacred island of Miyajima and offer teachings at a temple founded by the Japanese monk Kobo Daishi after he had brought something akin to Vajrayana mandalas and mudras and principles to Japan twelve hundred years before.

  So much had happened in the years since I’d last seen the Dalai Lama in the mild sunshine of an autumn in Japan, I thought: a onetime party chief of Tibet, who had gained favor in Beijing by cracking down on the Tibetans in the late 1980s, had now become the paramount leader of all China. A high-speed train linking Beijing and Lhasa had been completed, ahead of schedule, ensuring that more than six thousand Han Chinese could now pour into the Tibetan capital every day, doubling its population again. War had broken out, once more, in Beirut, and the Dalai Lama had gone through severe challenges to his health that had brought all of Tibet up against the real truth of mortality. As for my own life, I was just back from a trip to Sri Lanka, where I’d seen Buddhist monks urging the hard-line government of the day toward war against the Hindu Tamil insurgents in the north; my own people, the Tamils, were busy picking off civilians, children, innocent sightseers, using even pregnant women to carry suicide bombs; and the great Buddhist temples were more full of soldiers than of monks.

  And yet in other ways, much was as it had always been. The same attendant was tending to the Dalai Lama’s robes, as he had been doing almost since they were both in the Potala Palace, fifty years before. The Dalai Lama’s nephew was running his office in Dharamsala during his absence (and another nephew was organizing his Web site). When Hiroko and I went to his hotel room in Hiroshima—sunlight flooding through the windows, and a newspaper lying half-open on a long table—one of the first things he told us was that “doubt is very important. Without skeptical attitude (‘skeptical’ not in a negative sense) or doubt, there is no possibility to bring investigation. Without investigation, you cannot see the reality.” He even cited some contradictions or exaggerated statements of the Buddha’s to show that—because the Buddha adjusted his teaching according to his audience—even his words could be taken in the wrong way.

  Yet in the long run, he stressed, as he had said to my father forty-six years before, a valid view would always triumph over a distorted one. And even out of chaos, he somehow seemed to conjure hope. The current war in Iraq, he said, was “the symptom of some great mistake, some negligence, in the past, even from as far back as the nineteenth century. Similarly, on the other side, if we start some effort with vision now, then some positive result may happen end of this century, beginning of next one.” Some of our dreams, he told the audience in Hiroshima, “we may not achieve in our own lifetime. Maybe no sign of achievement even within this twenty-first century. But you must make effort.”

  When I followed him to Miyajima, the island not far from Hiroshima that is sometimes called the holiest place in Japan—two thousand deer grazing among its many temples, and a one-story orange shrine now in its seventh incarnation sitting on the water like a vision—I felt more than ever as if Tibet, or Dharamsala at least, had come to the country where I lived.

  Day after day, great flocks of people climbed up the steep, narrow steps to Daisho-in, the temple in the hills that Kobo Daishi had set up, its gray roofs hovering above the turning maples like mist in the bright sunshine. As the Dalai Lama consecrated the new chapel, twelve of his monks from southern India sat next to the Japanese monks from the temple, red and yellow mingling with lustrous purple, one group of chants following another. When he began his two days of teachings—before days of empowerments and initiations—one young Taiwanese rinpoche from California offered a simultaneous translation to an excited group of pilgrims from Beijing, someone else delivered them in Korean to a small group on the other side of the golden Buddha, and a doctor of metaphysics from the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics in Dharamsala delivered the words in English (89 on the FM dial).

  All the while he was speaking—the elegiac sunshine outside offering its own vision of mortality and radiance—the Dalai Lama looked as alert as ever. In the moments when he was waiting for his Japanese translator from Dharamsala to render his words into Japanese, he looked around the individual faces seated before him, beaming, bursting into his spontaneous laughter, at one point motioning for his monks to make way and offer their seats to some Japanese monks, at another point asking an individual in the audience if he was sure he could follow without a translator. Sometimes he turned to a rinpoche in the front row to ask his scholarly advice; sometimes he turned to his hosts to ask them to make sure that those in the courtyard outside could hear and feel a part of things. Sitting only a few yards away from him, for day after day, I thought he seemed the very picture of vigorous attentiveness. When I went in to see him at the end of one day’s teachings, though, I noticed that his eyes were red and smarting, visibly tearing from the effort of talking for five hours. The teachings were taking a real toll on him.

  It seemed less and less relevant, at least in this context, to put boxes around any of what he was talking about, whether those boxes said “twenty-first century” or “radical” or even “Dalai Lama.” If an aspirin works, you don’t care where it comes from. If lightning sets off fires, you don’t quibble about religions. If a “new reality” is around us—he had sounded that theme again in Hiroshima—then you look at it, as at the hand you’ve just been dealt. There was a candle in this temple, set up by the Japanese monk who had traveled to China to bring back a system very similar to the Tibetan (originally from India), that had been burning continuously, so it was said, for more than a thousand years.

  I happened, as I began this book by saying, to travel down to see the Dalai Lama the very day after he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in 1989. He was attending a meeting with scientists south of Los Angeles at the time, and, after hearing news of the prize on the radio while drifting around Santa Barbara, I had decided to drive down to intrude on him with my congratulations and some questions for an interview. He was characteristically open when I arrived at the house where he was staying, welcoming me in as if this were just another day (as I suppose it was), leading me by the hand into a side room as if he had all the time in the world, and taking care to look around, it seemed reflexively, for a chair in which I would be comfortable, as if I were the one who was being feted. He asked me how he should use the money and looked at me piercingly, clearly waiting for an answer. He told me that sometimes he felt that he could never do enough, and that nothing he did could ever really affect things (a prescient and far-sighted concern, in some ways, as, after the excitement and sense of possibility the Nobel awakened had subsided, Tibet was only ten years closer to destruction). He told me that it was “up to us poor humans to make the effort,” one step at a time, and again, as if invoking the final words of the Buddha, he spoke of “constant effort, tireless effort, pursuing clear goals with sincere effort.”

  Then, as we were walking out of the room, he went back and turned off the light. It’s such a small thing, he said, it hardly makes a difference at all. And yet nothing is lost in the doing of it, and maybe a little good can come of it, if more and more people remember this small gesture in more and more rooms.

  I drove back to Los Angeles and filed my article (for an editor who wasn’t especially interested in the thoughts of a Tibetan monk and all but deleted it). I went back to my life, seeing the Dalai Lama next a few months later, when he came to Santa Barbara just after my house had burned down and I had lost everything I owned.


  Six thousand days or so after that morning, when he came back to Japan, I thought about that simple gesture of turning off the light. Every one of those six thousand days, it seemed to me, I had had some revelation, encountered some wisdom, scribbled down sentences I’d read or come up with myself about the meaning of the universe, the way to lead a better life, the essence of the soul, the unreality of the soul. I had had more lightning flashes and moments of illumination than I could count in the next six thousand years. And yet now, on this bright autumn morning, I could remember not a one of them, except the simple, practical task of turning off the light. Not enlightenment, not universal charity, not the Golden Rule or the wisdom of the ages: just something I could do several times a day.

  I went home after hearing the Dalai Lama on the sunlit island, and then went out for a walk. I closed the door behind me and was about to turn the key in the lock when I remembered the long-ago day. I opened the door again, and turned off the light.

  Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit…No truth so sublime but it may be trivial tomorrow in the light of new thoughts.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  READING

  The starting point of any book, at least for me, is an exhaustive reading of as many of the other books in the field as possible, to see what has been done already and what does not need to be done again. In the case of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, this is a task as formidable as it is rewarding, and very quickly even a newcomer realizes that the basic biographical details of the Dalai Lama’s life have been covered wonderfully, in films and biographies and autobiographies, and nothing more needs to be said. As for the intricacies of his practice and his philosophy, the steady stream of books coming out under the Dalai Lama’s own name—of lectures, of interviews, of official teachings, and even just of aphorisms—share a complexity and sophistication that few of the rest of us could hope to reproduce. On Tibet and Buddhism as a whole, the library is enormous, and many of its items are quite exceptional, the kind of works that can change your life and make you see everything anew.