Tenzin Gyatso, His
Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, is the spiritual and temporal leader of the six
million Tibetan people. He was born Lhamo Dhondup on July 6, 1935, in a small
village called Taktser in northeastern Tibet. Born to a peasant family, His Holiness
was recognized at the age of two. In accordance with Tibetan tradition, as the
reincarnation of his predecessor the 13th Dalai Lama, His Holiness is an
incarnation of Avalokiteshvar, the Buddha of Compassion.
The Dalai Lama began his
education at the age of six and completed the Geshe Lharampa Degree (Doctorate
in Buddhist Philosophy) when he was 25 in 1959. (At 24, he took the preliminary
examinations at each of the three monastic universities: Drepung, Sera, and
Ganden, outside Lhasa, the Tibetan capital city). The final examination was
conducted in the Jokhang Temple in Lhasaduring the annual Monlam Chenmo or the
great Prayer festival, held in the first month of the Tibetan calendar year. In
the morning, he was examined by 30 scholars on logic. In the afternoon, he
debated with 15 scholars on the subject of the Middle Path, and in the evening
35 scholars tested his knowledge or the canon of monastic discipline and the
study of metaphysics. His Holiness passed the examination with honors,
conducted before the 20, 000 monk scholars. In addition to Buddhist subjects,
he studied English, Sciences, Geography and Mathematics.
In
1950, at 15, His Holiness was called upon to assume full political
responsibility (head of the state and Government) when Tibet was threatened by
the might ofChina. In 1954, he went to Beijing to hold peace talks with Mao
Tsetung and other Chinese leaders including Chou En-Lai and Deng Xiaoping. In
1956, while visiting India to attend the 2500th birth anniversary of the
Buddha, he had a series of meetings with Indian Prime Minister Nehru and
Premier Chou about the deteriorating situation in Tibet.
His
efforts to bring about a peaceful solution to the Sino-Tibetan problem were
thwarted by Beijing’s ruthless policy in eastern Tibet, which ignited a popular
uprising. This resistance movement spread to other parts of the country, and
onMarch 10, 1959, the capital of Tibet, Lhasa exploded with a massive
demonstration. The demonstrating Tibetans called on China to leave Tibet and
reaffirmed Tibet’s independence.
His
Holiness escaped to India where he was given political asylum. Some 80, 000
Tibetan refugees at the time managed to follow His Holiness into exile. Today
there are more than 120, 000 Tibetan refugees in India, Nepal, Bhutan, and in
the West. Since 1960, His Holiness has resided in Dharamsala, a small town in
Northern India, aptly known as “Little Lhasa,” the seat of the Tibetan
Government-in-exile.
In
the early years of exile, His Holiness appealed to the United Nations on the
question of Tibet, resulting in three resolutions adopted by the General
Assembly in 1959, 1961, and 1965, calling on China to respect the human rights
of Tibetans and their right to self-determination.
With
the re-establishment of the Tibetan Government in India, His Holiness saw that
his immediate and urgent task was to preserve Tibetan culture. He founded 53
large-scale agricultural settlements for the refugees to live on. As an
economic base developed, he oversaw the creation of an autonomous Tibetan
school system (there are over 80 Tibetan schools in India and Nepal today) to
raise refugee children with full knowledge of their language, history, religion
and culture. The Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts was established in 1959
while the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies became a university for
Tibetans in India. He inaugurated several cultural institutes to preserve
Tibet’s arts and sciences and helped re-establish more than 200 monasteries to
keep alive the vast corpus of Buddhist teachings, the essence of the Tibetan
spirit.
In
1963, His Holiness promulgated a democratic constitution, based on Buddhist
principles and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as a model for a
future free Tibet. Since then, His Holiness has been the most rigorous advocate
for the refugees’ own democratic experiment, while consistently reaffirming his
desire not to hold political office once Tibet regains its independence. His
Holiness continues to present new initiatives to resolve the Tibetan issue. At
the Human Rights Caucus of the US Cong ress in 1987, he proposed a Five Point
Peace Plan as a first step toward resolving the future status of Tibet. This
plan calls for the designation of Tibet as a zone of non-violence, and end to
the massive transfer of Chinese into Tibet, restoration of fundamental human
rights and democratic freed oms, and the abandonment of China’s use of Tibet
for nuclear weapons production and the dumping of nuclear waste, as well as
urging “earnest negotiations” on the future of Tibet.
In
Strasbourg, France on June 15, 1988, he elaborated on this Five Point Peace
Plan and proposed the creation of a self-governing democratic Tibet “in
association with the People’s Republic of China.” In his address, the Dalai
Lama said that this represented “the most realistic means by which to
re-establishTibet’s separate identity and restore the fundamental rights of the
Tibetan people while accommodating China’s own interests.” His Holiness
emphasized that “whatever the outcome of the negotiations with the Chinese may
be, the Tibetan people themselves must be the ultimate deciding authority.”
However,
on September 2, 1991 (Tibetan Democracy Day), the Tibetan Government-in-exile
released a statement declaring the Strasbourg Proposal no longer binding and
added: “His Holiness the Dalai Lama made it very clear in his statement on 10th
March this year that because of the closed and negative attitude of the present
Chinese leadership he felt that his personal commitment to the ideas expressed
in the Strasbourg proposal became ineffectual, and that if there was no new
initiatives from the Chinese he would consider himself free of any obligation
to the proposals he had made in his Strasbourg address. He, however, remains
firmly committed to the path of non-violence and in finding a solution to the
Tibetan issue through negotiations and understanding. Under these circumstances
His Holiness the Dalai Lama no longer feels obligated or bound to pursue the
Strasbourg Proposal as a basis for finding a peaceful solution to the Tibetan
problem.”
Since
1967, His Holiness has initiated a series of journeys that have taken him to
some 42 nations. In February, 1990, His Holiness was invited toCzechoslovakia
by President Vaclav Havel. President Havel and His Holiness issued a joint
statement urging “all politicians to rid themselves of the restrictions of
particular private or group interests and to lead their minds by their
conscience and their feeling and responsibility for truth and justice.” In
1991, His Holiness met President George Bush of the United States, Neil
Kinnock, the British Opposition Leader, the Swiss and French Foreign Ministers,
the Chancellor and President of Austria, as well as other senior foreign
government officials. In meetings with political, religious, cultural and
business leaders, as well as before large audiences at universities, churches
and town halls, he has spoken of his belief in the oneness of the human family
and the need for each individual to develop a sense of universal
responsibility.
His
Holiness said, “We are living today in an interdependent world. One nation’s
problems can no longer be solved by itself. Without a sense of universal
responsibility, our very survival is in danger. Basically, universal
responsibility is feeling for other people’s suffering just as we feel our own.
I have always believed in the need for better understanding, closer cooperation
and greater respect among the various nations of the world. Besides, I feel
that love and compassion are the moral fabric of world peace.”
His
Holiness met with the late Pope Paul VI at the Vatican in 1973, and with His
Holiness Pope John Paul II in 1980, 1982, 1986, 1988 and 1990. At a press
conference in Rome, His Holiness the Dalai Lama outlined his hopes for the
meeting with John Paul II: “We live in a period of great crisis. It is not
possible to find peace without security and harmony between peoples. For this
reason, I look forward with faith and hope to my meeting with the Holy Father;
to an exchange of ideas and feelings, and to his suggestions, so as to open the
door to a progressive harmony between peoples.”
In
1981, His Holiness talked with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Robert Runcie,
and with other leaders of the Anglican Church in London. He also met with
leaders of the Roman Catholic and Jewish communities and spoke at an interfaith
service held in his honor by the World Congress of Faiths. In October 1989,
during a dialogue with eight rabbis and scholars from the United States
inDharamsala, India, His Holiness remarked: “When we became refugees, we knew
that our struggle would not be easy; it would take a long time, generations.
Very often we would refer to the Jewish people, how they kept their identity
and faith despite such hardship and so much suffering. And, when external
conditions were ripe they were ready to rebuild their nation. So you see, there
are many things to learn from our Jewish brothers and sisters.”
His
talks in other forums focused on the commonality of faiths and the need for
unity among different religions: “I always believe that it is much better to
have a variety of religions, a variety of philosophies, rather than one single
religion of philosophy. This is necessary because of the different mental
dispositions of each human being. Each religion has certain unique ideas to
techniques, and learning about them can only enrich one’s own faith.”
Recognition
and Awards
Since
his first visit to the west in 1973, His Holiness’s reputation as a scholar and
man of peace has grown steadily. In recent years, a number of universities and
institutions in the world have conferred Peace Awards, honorary Doctorates and
fellowships on His Holiness in recognition of distinguished writings in
Buddhist philosophy and of his distinguished leadership in the service of
freedom, peace and nonviolence. One such Doctorate was conferred by Seattle
University,Washington, USA.
The
following extract from the University’s citation reflects a widely held view of
His Holiness’ stature: “In the realm of mind and spirit, you have distinguished
yourself in the rigorous academic tradition of Buddhist universities, earning
the Doctor’s degree with the highest honors at the age of 25. In the midst of
governmental and diplomatic affairs you nonetheless found time to teach and
record in writing your keen insights in philosophy and the meaning of the
contemplative life in the modern world. “Your books represent a significant
contribution not only to the vast body of Buddhist literature, but to the
ecumenical dialogue of the great religions of the world. Your own dedication to
the contemplative life of the Buddhist monk has won the admiration and awe not
only of the Buddhist, but of Christian contemplatives as well, including the
contemplative monk Thomas Merton, whose friendship and conversation with you
were mutually cherished.”
In
presenting the Raoul Wallenberg Congressional Human Rights Award, Congressman
Tom Lantos said, “His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s courageous struggle has
distinguished him as a leading proponent of human rights and world peace. His
ongoing efforts to end the suffering of the Tibetan people through peaceful
negotiations and reconciliation have required enormous courage and sacrifice.”
The
Nobel Peace Prize
The
Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decision to award the 1989 Peace Prize to His
Holiness the Dalai Lama won world wide praise and applause. In its citation,
“the committee wants to emphasize the fact that the Dalai Lama in his struggle
for the liberation of Tibet has consistently opposed the use of violence. He
has instead advocated peaceful solutions based upon tolerance and mutual
respect in order to preserve the historical and cultural heritage of his
people. The Dalai Lama has developed his philosophy of peace from a great
reverence for all things living and upon the concept of universal
responsibility embracing all mankind as well as nature. In the opinion of the Committee
the Dalai Lama has come forward with constructive and forward-looking proposals
for the solution of international conflicts, human rights issues and global
environmental problems.”
On
December 10, 1989, in Oslo, Norway, His Holiness accepted the prize on behalf
of the oppressed everywhere and all those who struggle for freedom and work for
world peace and the people of Tibet. In his remarks, he said, “The prize
reaffirms our conviction that with truth, courage and determination as our
weapons, Tibet will be liberated. Our struggle must remain nonviolent and free
of hatred.”
He
also had a message of encouragement for the democracy movement in China. “In
China the popular movement for democracy was crushed by brutal force in June of
this year. But I do not believe the demonstrations were in vain, because the
spirit of freedom was rekindled among the Chinese people and China cannot
escape the impact of this spirit of freedom sweeping in many parts of the
world. The brave students and their supporters showed the Chinese leadership
and the world the human face of that great nation.”
His
Holiness often says, “I am just a simple Buddhist monk—no more, no less.” His
Holiness follows the life of a Buddhist monk. Living in a small cottage in
Dharamsala, he rises at 4 A.M. to meditate and pursues a busy schedule of
administrative meetings, private audiences and religious teachings and
ceremonies. He concludes each day with further prayer before retiring. In
explaining his greatest sources of inspiration, he often cites a favorite
verse, found in the writings of the renowned eight century Buddhist saint
Shantideva:
“For
as long as space endures
And for as long as living beings remain,
Until then may I too abide
To dispel the misery of the world.”
And for as long as living beings remain,
Until then may I too abide
To dispel the misery of the world.”
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
MAKING
KINDNESS STAND TO REASON
A
profile of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama by Pico Iyer (from Sun After Dark:
Flights Into the Foreign, published by Knopf in 2004)
Though
the Dalai Lama is increasingly famous as a speaker, his real gift, you see as
soon as you begin talking to him, is for listening. And though he is most
celebrated in the West these days for his ability to talk to halls large enough
to stage a Bon Jovi concert, his special strength is to address 20,000
people–Buddhists and grandmothers and kids alike–as if he was talking to each
one alone, in the language she can best understand. The Dalai Lama’s maxims are
collected and packaged now as books to carry in your handbag, as calendar items
and as advertising slogans, but the heart of the man exists, I think, in
silence. In his deepest self he is that being who sits alone each day at dawn,
eyes closed, reciting prayers, with all his heart, for his Chinese oppressors,
his Tibetan people and all sentient beings.
Yet
the curiosity of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama’s life–one of the things that has
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 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 madness and vanity 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, 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 Himalayas. As I approached the distant
settlement on a ridge above a little town–the roads so jampacked 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 be taking us
farther and farther away 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 ante-chamber 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 pietas 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 sits there, 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 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 hat, sit this way
or sit that, he seizes the chance to ask him 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, often, 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 responsibilty 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 Gaddafi or Kim
Jong II. He is excited when meeting Britain’s Queen Mother–because he
remembers, from when he was young, seeing newsclips 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 there 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 suspect 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 Computers, or 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 debates 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 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 faroff Lhasa as their
leader, and in their distant dialect. Yet what the mixture of folk-tale 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 king. 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 finally 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 how “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 are close to misting over
now–“they were facing death, or something like that.” In the thirty-eight 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, and, 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 own three year-old in
Oxford. Since then, like many of us, I’ve run into him 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 gospel; 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 US 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, and 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 his
press conferences in New York being almost deserted; when once I organized a
lunch for him with a group of editors, one of them called up 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 was 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
gray–and it felt 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, now, in Dharamsala).
Robert
Thurman, the professor of Tibetan studies at Columbia, and father of 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.
But
what I also remember from that moment was that, even as the world was feting
him–congratulatory telegrams and faxes pouring into the rec room downstairs–he
couldn’t let himself off the hook. “Sometimes,” he confessed, “I wonder whether
my efforts really have an effect. I sometimes feel that unless there is a
bigger movement, the bigger issues will not change. But how to start this
bigger movement ? Originally, it must come from individual initiative.”
The
only way, he concluded, was through “constant effort, tireless effort, pursuing
clear goals with sincere effort.” Every time he left a room, he said, he tried
to switch off the light. “In a way, it’s silly. But if another person follows
my example, then a hundred persons, there is an effect. It is the only way. The
bigger nations and more powerful leaders are not taking care. So we poor human
beings must make the effort.”
*
* *
Meeting
him now, I find him a lot more business-like than he was in those days (and, of
course, much more fluent in English); when TV crews come to interview him, he
knows how to advise them on where to set up their cameras (and when we begin
talking, he is quick to point out that my tape recorder is moving suspciously
fast). He’s not less jolly than before, perhaps, but he does seem more
determined to speak from the serious side of himself, as the years go on, and
Tibet draws ever closer to oblivion. Where he used to greet me with an Indian
namaste, now he does so with a handshake, though the Dalai Lama does not so
much shake your hand as rub it within his own, as if to impart to it some of
his warmth.
As
we talk, though–every afternoon at 2:00 p.m., for day after day–he takes off
his glasses sometimes and rubs his eyes; his aides say that in recent years,
for the first time ever, they’ve seen him exhausted, his head slumped back in
his chair (this the man usually seen leaning into the conversation, as if to
bring to it all his attention and beady-eyed vigor). He doesn’t have much time
for spiritual practice now, he tells me–only four hours a day (his duties
increasing as he becomes a more senior monk). He still likes to do “some repair
work, of watches and small instruments,” and he still loves tending to his
flowers; one of the longest and most animated answers he gives me comes when I
ask after his “four small cats.” But these days the only real break he can take
comes listening to the B.B.C. World Service, to which he cheerfully confesses
himself addicted.
This
is the tendency of an engaging, still boyish character alight with curiosity;
but it’s also the confession of a man whose duties are almost entirely tied up
with the dealings of the world, on a minute-by-minute level. One thing the
Dalai Lama is not is otherworldly. He can explain in precise detail why the
Tibetan cause is weaker than that of the Palestinians, or how globalism is, at
its best, advancing a kind of Buddhism in mufti. His references nearly always
come from the day’s most recent news, and he watches everything–from the fall
of the Berlin Wall to the tragedy in Rwanda–both to see how it illuminates some
metaphysical theory and to see what other kind of teaching it can impart. Exile
has allowed him, he will tell you, to become a student of the world in a way
that no earlier Dalai Lama could, and to see a planet that previously he, and
the Dalai Lamas before him, could glimpse only through the parted curtains of a
palanquin. The best aspect of his traveling is that he can schedule meetings
with scientists and psychologists and Hopi leaders, all of whom, he believes,
can help him refine his understanding of his own tradition. Buddhists can and
should learn from Catholics, from physicists, even from Communists, he is quick
to tell his startled followers–and if the words of the Buddha (let alone of the
Dalai Lama) are not borne out by the evidence, they must be discarded
instantly.
This
is one reason why he seems much more interested in asking questions than in
giving answers; and much more comfortable as a student (which he’s been, in the
context of Tibetan Buddhism, most of his life) than as a teacher. It is also
why I would say his sovereign quality is alertness: watch the Dalai Lama enter
a crowded auditorium, or sit through a long monastic ceremony that has many
others nodding off, and you will notice him looking around keenly, for what he
can pick up: a friend to whom he can unselfconsciously wave, some little detail
that will bring a smile to his face. Alertness is the place where the slightly
impish boy and the rigorously trained monk converge, and though the world at
large most responds to his heart–the pleasure afforded by his beam and air of
kindness and good nature–the specific core of him comes no less from his mind,
and the analytical faculties honed in one of the world’s most sophisticated
metaphysical technologies. It’s not unusual, I’ve come to see by now, for the
Dalai Lama to remember a sentence he’s delivered to you seven years before, or
to complete an answer he began ninety minutes ago, while lacing up his sturdy
mountain boots. Sometimes, in large gatherings, he will pick out a face he last
saw in Lhasa forty years before; once, as we were talking, he suddenly
remembered something an Englishman had said to him twenty years before–about
the value of sometimes saying, “I don’t know”–and asked me, searchingly, what I
thought of it.
Again,
the irony here is that the mindfulness he’s cultivated in meditation–on
retreats, and at the hands of pitilessly strict teachers–is what has helped him
in his travels; spiritual training–this is one of the lessons of his life and
his example–has constant practical application in the world. Much of the time
he’s speaking to people who know nothing about Buddhism–who may even be hostile
to it–and he’s mastered the art of speaking simply, and ecumenically, from the
heart, stressing, as he does, “spirituality without faith–simply being a good
human being, a warm-hearted person, a person with a sense of responsibility.”
Talking to his monks, he delivers philosophical lectures that few of the rest
of us could begin to follow; speaking to the world, he realizes that the most
important thing is not to run before you can walk. The title of a typical book
of his mentions not “Enlightening” the heart, but, simply, “Lightening” it.
In
a sense, he’s turned his predicament to advantage in part by learning about
Western religions, and meditation practices in other traditions, as earlier Dalai
Lamas could seldom do. And he’s also had to deal with a worldwide stampede
towards a Buddhism for which it may not be ready (to such a point that, more
and more as the years go on, he tells Westerners not to become Buddhists, but
just to stick to their own tradition, where there’s less of a danger of mixed
motives, and certainly less likelihood of confusion). Listening to him speak
everywhere from Sao Paulo to Chicago, Philip Glass says, “The word `Buddha’
never came up. He talks about compassion, he talks about right living. And it’s
very powerful and persuasive to people because it’s clear he’s not there to
convert them.”
Pragmatism,
in short, trumps dogmatism. And logic defers to nothing. “Out of 5.7 million
people,” he tells me one day, his eyes glittering with the delight of a student
immersed in one of Tibet’s ritual debates, “the majority of them are certainly
not believers. We can’t argue with them, tell them they should be believers.
No! Impossible! And, realistically speaking, if the majority of humanity
remains non-believers, it doesn’t matter. No problem! The problem is that the
majority have lost, or ignore, the deeper human values–compassion, a sense of
responsibility. That is our big concern, For whenever there is a society or
community without deeper human values, then even one single human family cannot
be a happy family.”
Then–and
it isn’t hard to see the still eager student playing his winning card–he goes
on, “Even animals, from a Buddhist viewpoint, also have the potential of
showing affection towards their own children, or their own babies–and also
towards us. Dogs, cats, if we treat them nicely, openly, trustingly, they also
respond. But without religion; they have no faith!” Therefore, he says
triumphantly, kindness is more fundamental than belief.
Yet
the deepest loss of all in the Dalai Lama’s often bright and blessing-filled
life, is that all the friends he’s made worldwide, all the presidents and prime
ministers he’s won over, all the analytical reasoning with which he argues for compassion
and responsibility have not really helped him at all in what is the main
endeavor of his life: safeguarding the people of Tibet, and sustaining a
Tibetan identity among a scattered population, six million of whom have not
seen their leader for two generations, and the other 140,000 of whom have not,
in many cases, seen their homeland. Many of those who see him flying across
five continents in a year (in business class) and delivering lectures to
sold-out halls don’t realize that he’s working with a staff drawn from a
population smaller than that of Warren, Michigan, and with a circle of advisors
who’d never seen the world, or known much about it, before they were propelled
into a premature exile.
Within
the Tibetan community, he remains as lonely as ever, I think. His people still
regard him, quite literally, as a god, with the result that even young
Indian-born Tibetans who are fluent in English are too shy to offer their
services as translators. And as fast as he tries to push democracy onto his people–urging
them to contradict him and to make their own plans regardless of him–they push
autocracy back onto him: most Tibetans believe everything the Dalai Lama says,
except when he says that the Dalai Lama is fallible. None of this has been made
easier by the fact that he’s clearly his country’s main selling point, so that
it can seem as if the destiny of a whole people rests on the shoulders of one
decidedly mortal man
In
this context, he’s clearly grateful for the chance to meet foreigners, who will
more readily challenge and counsel him–even criticize him–and he’s lucky to
have a large and unusually gifted family around him, two of whom are incarnated
lamas themselves. His younger brother Tenzin Choegyal lives down the road, and
even as the Dalai Lama claims to be unconcerned about all the complications
that arise as Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism go around the world, his kid brother
(who shed the monastic robes into which he was born) is outspoken in calling
the situation “a hell of a hodgepodge,” and referring to the West’s infatuation
with Tibet, and the Tibetans who make corrupt use of that, as “the Shangri-La
syndrome.”
Even
in context, after all, Tibetan Buddhism is a vividly charged and esoteric body
of teachings, a “unique blend,” as the British judge and Buddhist scholar
Christmas Humphreys once wrote, “of the noblest Buddhist principles and debased
sorcery.” Its core, as with all Buddhism, is a belief in suffering and
emptiness, and the need for compassion in the face of those. But unlike the
stripped-down austerities of Zen, say, it swarms with animist spirits, pictures
of copulating deities and Tantric practices of sexuality and magic that, in the
wrong hands, or without the proper training, can be inflammable.
The
Dalai Lama’s very equanimity, and refusal to be autocratic (even if he had the
time)–unlike their Catholic counterparts, he says, Tibetan and Buddhist groups
“have no central authority. They’re all quite independent”–have left him
relatively powerless as all kinds of questionable things are done in the name
of his philosophy, and three-hundred-year-old rivalries that used to be
conducted in the privacy of the Himalayas are now played out on the world’s
front pages.
Three
years ago, with no help from the Chinese, an unseemly mess broke out when two
six year-old boys were presented as the new incarnation of the high Karmapa
lineage, one of them endorsed by the Dalai Lama, the other by friends of the
departed lama’s family. One of the most prominent lamas in the West was banned
from entering America for many years after a $10 million sexual harassment suit
was brought against him; perhaps the most famous rinpoche in the West was
notorious for his women, his drinking and his brutal bodyguards, and left a
community riddled with AIDS. Not long ago, three members of the Dalai Lama’s
inner circle were found murdered in their beds, the victims, it was supposed,
of some complex internecine rilvary.
The
Dalai Lama takes all this in his stride–he was putting down insurrections at
the age of eleven, after all–but the whole issue of authority (when to enforce
it, and how to delegate it) takes on a special urgency as he moves towards his
seventies. The finding of a new Dalai Lama when all of Tibet is in Chinese
hands would in the best of circumstances be treacherous; but it became doubly
so two years ago when Beijing unilaterally hijacked the second highest
incarnation in Tibet, that of the Panchen Lama, placing the Dalai Lama’s six
year-old choice under house arrest and installing a candidate of its own (the
Panchen Lama, by tradition, is the figure officially responsible for
authorizing the Dalai Lama’s own incarnation–and the maneuver suggested that
the Chinese may have few qualms about coming up with their own puppet as the
next Dalai Lama).
In
response to this, the Tibetan has been typically canny. More than a decade ago,
he reminds me, he said that “If I die in the near future, and the Tibetan
people want another reincarnation, a Fifteenth Dalai Lama, while we are still
outside Tibet, my reincarnation will definitely appear outside Tibet.
Because”–the logic, as ever, is impeccable–“the very purpose of the incarnation
is to fulfil the work that has been started by the previous life.” So, he goes
on, “the reincarnation of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, logically, will not be a
reincarnation which disturbs, or is an obstacle to, that work. Quite clear,
isn’t it ?” In any case, he says cheerfully, “at a certain stage the Dalai Lama
institution will disappear. That does not mean that Tibetan Buddhism will
cease. But the incarnation comes and goes, comes and goes.
As
ever, few of his supporters are equally ready to acquiesce in such lese majeste
(when I ask a group of Tibetan officials if this one will be the last Dalai
Lama, they all say anxiously, “No, no”). And many of them, too, have found it
hard to countenance his policy of forgiving the Chinese (he has referred to Mao
as “remarkable,” called himself “half-Marxist, half-Buddhist” and stepped back
from his original demands of independence to calling only for an autonomous
“Zone of Peace”). The pressure on him to forswear his policy of non-violence
has intensified as the years go by, and Chinese repression comes ever closer to
rendering Tibet extinct.
“In
one way, yes,” he tells me, “my position has become weaker, because there’s
been no development, no progress. In spite of my open approach, of maximum
concessions, the Chinese position becomes even harder and harder.” Last year,
all photographs of the exiled leader were banned in Tibet, and monks and nuns
continue to be imprisoned and tortured at will, in what the International
Commission of Jurists long ago called a policy of “genocide.” Yet the Dalai
Lama takes heart from the fact that more and more Chinese individuals have been
speaking out for Tibet (as they would not have done, he feels, if he’d been
more militant); last August, at their invitation, he gave a special three-day initiation
in Los Angeles expressly for those of Chinese descent.
“To
isolate China is totally wrong,” he tells me forcefully, “China needs the
outside world, and the outside world need China.” Besides, even China stands to
gain from a freer Tibet. “If the Tibetan issue can be resolved through
dialogue, and if we remain happily in the People’s Republic of China, it will
have immense impact in the minds of another six million Chinese in Hong Kong
and, eventually, twenty-one million Chinese in Taiwan. The image of China in
the whole world will, overnight, change.”
That
is the position he must take, of course, and a skeptic would say, confronted
with his stubborn optimism, that it can be a little perverse to celebrate
clouds just because they show us silver linings. Yet it’s worth recalling that
the Dalai Lama’s policy of forgiveness is not an abstract thing. When he speaks
of suffering, it’s as one who has seen his land destroyed, up to 1.2 million of
his people killed and all but thirteen of his 6,254 monasteries laid waste.
When he talks of inner peace, it’s as one who was away on the road, struggling
for his cause, when his mother, his senior tutor and his only childhood
playmate, Lobsang Samten, died. And when he speaks of forbearance, it’s as one
who is still publicly called by Beijing a “wolf in monk’s robes.”
***
As
I left Dharamsala, in fact–at dawn, with the Dalai Lama leading his monks in a
three-hour ceremony while the sun came up–it struck me that the man has lived
out a kind of archetypal destiny of our times: a boy born in a peasant village
in a world that had scarcely seen a wheel has ended up confronting the great
forces of the day–exile, global travel and, especially, the mass media; and a
man from a culture we associate with Shangri-La now faces machine-guns on the
one hand, and a Lhasa Holiday Inn on the other, while J. Peterman catalogues
crow, “Crystals are out! Tibetan Buddhism is in!” It says much about the
challenges of the moment that a spokesman for an ancient, highly complex
philosophy finds himself in rock-concert arenas obliged to answer questions
about abortion and the “patriarchal” nature of Tibetan Buddhism.
Yet
to these twenty-first century conundrums, the Dalai Lama is aiming to bring a
state-of-the-art solution. Tibet’s predicament, he tells me with practiced
fluency, is not just about a faraway culture hidden behind snowcaps five miles
high. It’s about ecology (since the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Mekong and Yellow
Rivers all have their sources in Tibet). It’s about natural resources (since
“according to Chinese official documents, there are more than 166 or 167
different minerals in Tibet”). It’s about human rights, and a unique and
imperiled culture, and a buffer zone “between these two giants, India and
China.”
Most
of all, though, it’s about a different way of moving through the world. Far
from turning his back on the madness of the times, the Dalai Lama is taking it
on whole-heartedly, to the point of working with forces that many of us might
see as compromised (“We’re just fallen sentient beings,” Richard Gere says,
touchingly, of the Hollywood community. “We need some help too”). If part of
him is suggesting that monks can’t afford to be unworldly hermits, another part
is suggesting that politicians need not be aggressive schemers. Compassion, he
argues over and over, only stands to reason.
If
the Dalai Lama were a dreamer, it would be easy to write him off. In fact, he’s
an attentive, grounded, empirical soul whose optimism has only been bolstered
by the breakthroughs achieved by his friends Desmond Tutu and Vaclav Havel.
Havel, indeed, who became the first head of state to recognize the Dalai Lama,
within thirteen hours of coming to power, has been a powerful spokesman for
this new kind of statesmanship. The politician of conscience, he writes, need
not have a graduate degree in political science, or years of training in
duplicity. Instead, he may rely on “qualities like fellow-feeling, the ability
to talk to others, insight, the capacity to grasp quickly not only problems but
also human character, the ability to make contact, a sense of moderation.” In
all those respects, the Czech president might well have been thinking of a
canny Tibetan scientist with a surprising gift for repairing old watches,
tending to sick parrots and, as it happens, making broken things whole again.
(1997)
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