Sun After Dark

by Pico Iyer

  Yet the curiosity of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama’s life—one of the things that have made it seem at once a parable and a kind of koan—is that he has had to pursue his spiritual destiny, for more than half a century, almost entirely in the world (and, in fact, in a political world whose god is Machiavelli). His story is an all but timeless riddle about the relation of means to ends: in order to protect six million people, and to preserve a rare and long-protected culture that is only years away from extinction, he has had to pose for endless photos with models and let his speeches be broadcast on the floors of London dance clubs. To some extent, he has had to enter right into the confusion and chaos of the Celebrity Age in order to fulfill his monastic duties. The question that he carries with him everywhere he goes is the simple one of whether the world will scar him before he elevates it: in three centuries, after all, no Ocean of Wisdom, Holder of the White Lotus, and protector of the Land of Snows before him has ever served as guest editor of French Vogue.

  I went to visit the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala not long ago, as I have done at regular intervals since my teens. I took the rickety Indian Airlines flight from Delhi to Amritsar, itself a restricted war zone (because it houses the Sikh stronghold of the Golden Temple), and from there took a five-hour taxi ride up into the foothills of the Himalaya. As I approached the distant settlement on a ridge above a little town—the roads so jam-packed with scooters and bicycles and cows that often we could hardly move (the Dalai Lama has, for security reasons, to drive for ten hours along such roads every time he wishes to take a flight)— Dharamsala came into view, and then disappeared, like a promise of liberation, or some place that didn’t really exist. Most of the time—the car collapsing on a mountain road, a group of villagers assembling to push it hopefully forwards, night falling, and each turn seeming to take us farther from the string of lights far off—I felt sure we’d never get there.

  As soon as you arrive at the dusty, bedraggled place, however, you realize you are very far from fairy tale, in the realm of suffering and old age and death. Windows are broken and paths half paved in the rainy little village where the Dalai Lama has made his home for more than half his life now; even the happy cries and songs of the orphans at the Tibetan Children’s Village on one side of town have a slightly wistful air, as the sun sets behind the nearby mountains. When you call the Dalai Lama’s office, you will hear that “All circuits are busy” or that the five-digit number changed yesterday. Sometimes my calls got cut off in mid-sentence, amidst a blur of static; sometimes I got put on hold—for all eternity, it seemed—to the tune of “London Bridge Is Falling Down.”

  It is, therefore, perhaps the perfect paradoxical setting for a humble monk who lives alone when he is not being sought out by Goldie Hawn or Harrison Ford. In the antechamber to his living room, after you’ve been checked by a Tibetan guard and then an Indian one, you sit under a certificate of Honorary Citizenship from Orange County, an award from the Rotary Club of Dharamsala, and a plaque commemorating an honorary professorship from Kalmyk State University. Ceremonial masks, Hindu deities, and pietàs shine down on you. On one wall is a huge, blown-up photo of the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, showing that the palace where the Dalai Lama once lived is now ringed by discos, brothels, and a new Chinese prison, with high-rises dwarfing the old Tibetan houses.

  The Dalai Lama has a singular gift for seeing the good in everything and seeming unfazed by all the madness that swirls around him; he is always thoroughly human and always thoroughly himself. Sometimes, as you wait to see him, his exuberant new friend, a very puppyish German shepherd, runs into the room and starts jumping over a group of startled Tibetan monks here for a serious discussion, licking the faces of the Buddhist teachers before romping off into the garden again. Sometimes a pair of English hippies is in attendance, since the Dalai Lama is ready to take advice and instruction from anyone (and knows—such is the poignancy of his life—that even the most disorganized traveler may know, firsthand, more about contemporary Tibet, and the state of his people, than he does). When a photographer asks him to take off his glasses, pose with this expression, sit this way or sit that, he seizes the chance to ask the young man about what he saw when he photographed uprisings in Lhasa many years before.

  As I sit across from him in his room with its large windows, looking out on pine-covered slopes and the valley below— thangkas all around us on the walls—the Dalai Lama makes himself comfortable, cross-legged in his armchair, and serves me tea. He always notices when my cup is empty before I do. He rocks back and forth as he speaks, the habit acquired, one realizes, over decades of punishing hours-long meditation sessions, often in the cold. And part of his disarming power (the result, no doubt, of all that meditation and the dialectics of which he is a master) is that he launches stronger criticisms against himself than even his fiercest enemies might.

  When first he met Shoko Asahara, he tells me one day (referring to the man who later planned the planting of deadly sarin gas in the Tokyo subway system), he was genuinely moved by the man’s seeming devotion to the Buddha: tears would come into the Japanese teacher’s eyes when he spoke of Buddha. But to endorse Asahara, as he did, was, the Dalai Lama quickly says, “a mistake. Due to ignorance! So, this proves”—and he breaks into his full-throated laugh—“I’m not a ‘Living Buddha’!” Another day, talking about the problems of present-day Tibet, he refers to the fact that there are “too many prostrations there,” and then, erupting into gales of infectious laughter again, he realizes that he should have said “too much prostitution” (though, in fact, as he knows, “too many prostrations” may actually constitute a deeper problem). He’d love to delegate some responsibility to his deputies, he says frankly, “but, even if some of my cabinet ministers wanted to give public talks, nobody would come.”

  The result is that it all comes down to him. The Dalai Lama is rightly famous for his unstoppable warmth, his optimism, and his forbearance—“the happiest man in the world,” as one journalist-friend calls him—and yet his life has seen more difficulty and sadness than that of anyone I know. He’s representing the interests of six million largely unworldly and disenfranchised people against a nation of 1.2 billion whom nearly all the world is trying to court. He’s the guest of a huge nation with problems of its own, which would be very grateful if he just kept quiet. He travels the world constantly (on a yellow refugee’s “identity certificate”), and, though regarded by most as a leader equivalent to Mother Teresa or the Pope, is formally as ostracized as Muammar Qaddafi or Kim Jong Il. He is excited when meeting Britain’s Queen Mother—because he remembers, from his boyhood days, seeing news clips of her tending to the poor of London during the Blitz—but the world is more excited when he meets Sharon Stone.

  And so a serious spiritual leader is treated as a pop star, and a doctor of metaphysics is sought out by everyone, from every culture, who has a problem in his life. As a monk, he seems more than happy to offer what he can, as much as he can, but none of it helps him towards the liberation of his people. I ask him one day about how Tibet is likely to be compromised by its complicity with the mass media, and he looks back at me shrewdly, and with a penetrating gaze. “If there are people who use Tibetans or the Tibetan situation for their own purposes,” he says, “or if they associate with some publicity for their own benefit, there’s very little we can do. But the important thing is for us not to be involved in this publicity, or associate with these people for our own interests.”

  The razor-sharp reasoning is typical, even if it doesn’t quite address the conundrum in which he finds himself. For precisely in order to satisfy his inner and outer mandate, the Dalai Lama is obliged to traffic in the world incessantly. He has to listen to a reporter asking him how he’d like to be remembered—which is, in the Buddhist context, akin to asking the Pope what he thinks of Jennifer Lopez. (“I really lost my temper,” he tells me, of the question, “though I didn’t show it.”) He has to answer for every scandal that touches any of the many, often highly sus
pect Tibetans and Tibetan groups around the world. And he has to endure and address every controversy that arises when his image is used by Apple Computer, or when younger Tibetans deride him as an out-of-it peacenik who’s done nothing to help Tibet for forty years.

  As we spoke for day after day in the radiant fall afternoons, young monks practicing ritual debating outside his front door, the snowcaps shining in the distance, and the hopes of Tibet poignantly, palpably in the air around the ragged town of exiles, the time the Dalai Lama most lit up, in some respects, was when he spoke of some Catholic monks he’d run into in France who live in complete isolation for years on end and “remain almost like prisoners” as they meditate. “Wonderful!” he pronounced, leaving it to his visitor to deduce that, left to his own devices, that’s how he’d like to be.

  At this point, after two Dalai Lama autobiographies and two major Hollywood films telling the story of his life, the otherworldly contours of the Dalai Lama’s life are well known: his birth in a cowshed in rural Tibet, in what was locally known as the Wood Hog Year (1935); his discovery by a search party of monks, who’d been led to him by a vision in a sacred lake; the tests administered to a two-year-old who, mysteriously, greeted the monks from far-off Lhasa as their leader, and in their distant dialect. Yet what the mixture of folktale and Shakespearean drama doesn’t always catch is that the single dominant theme of his life, a Buddhist might say, is loss.

  To someone who reads the world in terms of temporal glory, it’s a stirring story of a four-year-old peasant boy ascending the Lion Throne to rule one of the most exotic treasures on earth. To someone who really lives the philosophy for which the Dalai Lama stands, it could play out in a different key. At two, he lost the peace of his quiet life in a wood-and-stone house where he slept in the kitchen. At four he lost his home, and his freedom to be a regular person, when he was pronounced head of state. Soon thereafter, he lost something of his family, too, and most of his ties with the world at large, as he embarked on a formidable sixteen-year course of monastic studies, and was forced, at the age of six, to choose a regent.

  The Dalai Lama has written with typical warmth about his otherworldly boyhood in the cold, thousand-roomed Potala Palace, where he played games with the palace sweepers, rigged up a hand-cranked projector on which he could watch Tarzan movies and Henry V, and clobbered his only real playmate—his immediate elder brother Lobsang Samten—in the knowledge that no one would be quick to punish a boy regarded as an incarnation of the god of compassion (and a king to boot). Yet the overwhelming feature of his childhood was its loneliness. Often, he recalls, he would go out onto the rooftop of his palace and watch the other little boys of Lhasa playing in the street. Every time his brother left, he recalls standing “at the window, watching, my heart full of sorrow as he disappeared into the distance.”

  The Dalai Lama has never pretended that he does not have a human side, and though it is that side that exults in everything that comes his way, it is also that side that cannot fail to grieve at times. When the Chinese, newly united by Mao Zedong, attacked Tibet’s eastern frontiers in 1950, the fifteen-year-old boy was forced hurriedly to take over the temporal as well as the spiritual leadership of his country, and so lost his boyhood (if not his innocence), and his last vestiges of freedom. In his teens he was traveling to Beijing, overriding the wishes of his fearful people, to negotiate with Mao and Zhou En-lai, and not long thereafter he became only the second Dalai Lama to leave Tibet, when it seemed his life might be in peril.

  At twenty-four, a few days after he completed his doctoral studies, and shone in an oral in front of thousands of appraising monks, he lost his home for good: the “Wish-Fulfilling Gem,” as he is known to Tibetans, had to dress up as a soldier and flee across the highest mountains on earth, dodging Chinese planes, and seated on a hybrid yak. The drama of that loss lives inside him still. I asked him one sunny afternoon about the saddest moment in his life, and he told me that he was moved to tears usually only when he talked of Buddha, or thought of compassion—or heard, as he sometimes does every day, the stories and appeals of the terrified refugees who’ve stolen out of Tibet to come and see him.

  Generally, he said, in his firm, prudent way, “sadness, I think, is comparatively manageable.” But before he said any of that, he looked into the distance and recalled: “I left the Norbulingka Palace that late night, and some of my close friends and one dog I left behind. Then, just when I was crossing the border into India, I remember my final farewell, mainly to my bodyguards. They were deliberately facing the Chinese, and when they made farewell with me, they were determined to return. So that means”—his eyes were close to misting over—“they were facing death, or something like that.” In the thirty-nine years since then, he’s never seen the land he was born to rule.

  I, too, remember that drama: the fairy-tale flight of the boy-king from the Forbidden Kingdom was the first world event that made an impression on me when I was growing up; a little later, when my father went to India to greet the newly arrived Tibetan, he came back with a picture of the monk as a little boy, which the Dalai Lama gave him when he talked of his three-year-old in Oxford. Since then, like many of us, I’ve run into the Tibetan leader everywhere I go—at Harvard, in New York, in the hills of Malibu, in Japan—and have had the even stranger experience of seeing him somehow infiltrate the most unlikely worlds: my graduate-school professor of Virginia Woolf suddenly came into my life again as editor of a book of the Dalai Lama’s talks about the Gospels; at the Olympics, a longtime friend and sportswriter for the New York Times started reminiscing about how he covered the Dalai Lama on the Tibetan’s first U.S. tour, in 1979, and found him great because he was so humble. “It sounds like he considers you part of the family,” a friend once said, when I told her that the Dalai Lama and his equally mischievous younger brother call me “Pinocchio.” But really, his gift is for regarding all of the world as part of his family.

  At the same time, the world itself has not always been very interested in the details of his faraway country, or of a tradition that seems to belong to another world. When Tibet appealed for help against China to the newly formed United Nations, it was Britain and India, its two ostensible sponsors, who argued against even hearing the motion. And as recently as the 1980s, I remember, the Dalai Lama’s press conferences in New York were almost deserted; when once I organized a lunch for him with a group of editors, one of them phoned a couple of days before to call it off, because no one really wanted to come into the office on a Monday just to chat with a Tibetan monk. When first I visited him in Dharamsala, in 1974, I really did feel as if I were looking in on one of the deposed emperors of China or Vietnam, sitting in a far-off exile. As we sat drinking tea in his modest, colorful cottage, clouds passed through the room from the rains outside—all we could see through the large windows was mist and grey—and it seemed as if we were truly sitting in the heavens, at least a mile above anything that felt real.

  Yet one of the paradoxes of the Dalai Lama’s life—a paradox to answer the koan that has been his fulfillment of a spiritual duty in the world—is that it was, it seems, his monastic training that allowed him to be so focused and charismatic a presence in the world. In his early years in India, the Dalai Lama used the world’s neglect of him to organize his exiled community and to write his country’s constitution (in part to allow for his own impeachment). Even exile could be a liberation, he was saying (and showing his compatriots): it freed him from the age-old protocol that so shackled him in Tibet and it brought the forever feuding groups of Tibet together in a common cause. Most of all, though, he used his free time to go on long meditation retreats, enjoying a solitude that could never have been his in Tibet (or can be, now, in Dharamsala).

  Robert Thurman, the professor of Tibetan studies at Columbia (and father of actress Uma), remembers first meeting the Dalai Lama in 1964, when he, full of spiritual ambitions, cross-questioned the young Tibetan about shunyata, or voidness, while the Dalai Lama questioned him
, no less eagerly, about Freud and the American bicameral system. “It was fun,” Thurman says, using the word people often use of the Dalai Lama. “We were young together.” At the same time, the answers that the monk only in his twenties then gave to complex theological questions were less good, Thurman feels, than those offered by more senior monks.

  When the Tibetan leader emerged from his retreats, though, and came out into the world—Thurman saw him on his first U.S. tour, in 1979—“I almost keeled over. His personal warmth and magnetism were so strong. In the past, of course, he had the ritual charisma of being the Dalai Lama, and he’s always been charming and interesting and very witty. But now he’d opened up some inner wellspring of energy and attention and intelligence. He was glorious.”

  And yet that air of responsibility—the word he always stresses in the same breath as “compassion”—has never left him. I remember going to see him the day after he won the Nobel Prize, when he happened to be staying (as is so typical of his life) in a suburban ranch house in Newport Beach. What struck me at the time was that, as soon as he saw me, he whisked me (as he would no doubt have whisked any visitor) into a little room, and spent his first few minutes looking for a chair in which I would be comfortable—as if I were the new Nobel laureate and he the intrusive journalist.