The Open Road (7 page)

The Harrer story is a poignant reminder of this. An Olympic skier from Nazi Austria—the metaphors come ready-made—manages, somehow, to steal out of a prisoner-of-war camp in British India in 1944 and stumbles into what is then known as the “Forbidden Kingdom,” Tibet. He walks for two years across the highest plateau on earth, picks up Tibetan, is even mistaken for a Tibetan by unworldly locals who have never seen a foreign face before. Finally he makes his way to the capital, where the teenage Dalai Lama, hearing of the curious blond-haired wanderer, asks to see him, and the two become fast friends.

The European constantly feels that he’s entered a magical world of flower-ringed cottages and garden parties and sturdy outdoors people like himself, who treat him as an honored guest; he feels that he’s slipped out of real life and into a golden fairy tale. But very soon, and inevitably, reality appears again, as Chinese troops cross into eastern Tibet in 1949 and the wayfarer is forced to abandon his idyll and return to a broken Europe.

In the years that followed, while Harrer was writing of his sojourn in a never-never land, Amdo, the province in eastern Tibet where the current Dalai Lama was born, was turned into the largest gulag in the world, set up to accommodate as many as ten million prisoners. One in every five Tibetans—more than a million in all—died of starvation or in direct encounters with the Chinese, according to Tibetan estimates. One in ten found himself in jail, while all but thirteen of the more than six thousand monasteries in Tibet were laid waste and centuries-old scriptures were incinerated. Parents were forced to applaud as their children were shot to death.

In recent years, more details of what the International Commission of Jurists described at the time as a “genocide” have come to light, as have the stories of many of those who escaped at last from incarceration. (One monk, questioned by the Dalai Lama when finally he made it to freedom in exile in India, said that he had been truly afraid while in prison—afraid that one day he might lose his sympathy for his Chinese captors.) Yet what we tend to notice, too often, are the larger-than-life contours of the story, and not the brutal realities that we can do something to transform.

In 1932, one year before his death, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama issued what is known as his “Last Testament,” in which he predicted what would come to pass if Tibetans failed to open up to the world, refused to adapt to modern developments, and continued squabbling among themselves. “It will not be long,” he wrote, as one translation has it, “before we face the red onslaught at our own front door. It is only a matter of time…and when it happens, we must be ready to defend ourselves. Otherwise, our spiritual and cultural teachings will be completely eradicated…. Monasteries will be looted and destroyed, and the monks and nuns killed or chased away…. We will become like slaves to our conquerors, and will be made to wander helplessly like beggars. Everyone will be forced to live in misery, and the days and nights will pass slowly and with great suffering and terror.”

The Thirteenth Dalai Lama worked hard to try to defend Tibet against his fears, setting up the first mint and postal system in his country’s history, bringing telephones and passports to Lhasa, even sending four Tibetan boys to be educated at Rugby School in England (one of the boys returned and helped bring electricity to Lhasa). Yet what suits our fairy tales most is the remarkable prescience, as it seems, of his vision—and not, in fact, all that it entailed. Fully eleven centuries before, Padmasambhava, the great Indian reformer of Tibetan Buddhism, whom the Tibetans revere as Guru Rinpoche, had declared, “When the iron bird flies and horses run on wheels, the Tibetan people will be scattered like ants across the face of the earth, and the Dharma will fetch a good price in the land of the red man.” And in 1956, when the current Dalai Lama was assessing his options, his state oracle, Nechung, who offers counsel in a trance, had said, “The real light will shine from the West” (he was referring, as it happened, to India, which is west of most of Tibet, and yet it was a radical prophecy given that only one Dalai Lama in all of history had ever been outside Tibet).

These hard-to-explain networks of cause and effect make us marvel at the secret powers of Tibet and overlook the fact that when Mao Zedong’s troops invaded, the Tibetan army numbered all of 8,500 men, protected by fifty pieces of artillery and a few ancient guns, and that Tibetans in the aftermath of their miscalculations were tortured and subjected to electroshock treatment, forced sterilization, and rape. The Dalai Lama has seen more than 300,000 foreign troops stationed in his homeland, and nearly a hundred nuclear missiles.

As I watched the Dalai Lama over the years and thought about what his mission was, this interest of his in “Reality,” as if it were the swarm of energies he was investigating to see how it all worked, began to seem more and more compelling. Many of the problems Tibet had suffered, he always stressed, were at some level the result of mistakes the culture itself had made, in not becoming informed enough of the truths of the outside world, in not studying itself honestly enough to consider reform; and circumstances had now given him and his people an ideal chance to learn from their mistakes and to create something more solid. Tibet could at last become part of a global family.

For a journalist like me, this was all as refreshing, even as liberating, as running into a man carrying a stethoscope instead of a white paper around the world. Most of the politicians I’d met in my twenty-five years of covering the news rooted themselves firmly in the future and the promises they made, or in the past and the grievances they promised to redress. But the scientist of self lived entirely in the present and had no more interest in the projections of romanticism than in the delusions of cynicism. A Buddhist talks not so much about good and evil as about ignorance and awakening; in that sense, he brings all responsibility inward, so as not to waste time blaming people outside himself, but to see how he can better understand (and therefore solve) the problem within.

The one time when I saw the Dalai Lama most vehement in the more than thirty years I’d been talking to him came, in fact, when I asked him one autumn day about Buddhism’s ability to adapt to the modern world and to circumstances the Buddha himself could not have imagined. He responded, as I knew he would, by saying that Buddhism outlines a set of principles that, at their core, apply to all humans at any time; the surface details may change, but the basic laws of the value of compassion and the value of training our minds so as to see past our suffering to the path to freedom have nothing, really, to do with the modern or the ancient world exclusively.

Then, suddenly, he veered off in another direction. “With this incarnation,” he said (referring, as he often does, to the role of the Dalai Lama as if it were just a robe he happened to be wearing), “there are some translations, especially of the Chinese, that say, ‘Living Buddha.’ That is totally wrong!”

He looked at me almost fiercely, to make sure I understood. “The Chinese word means ‘Living Buddha.’ In Tibetan the word ‘lama’ is a direct translation of ‘guru.’ That is, someone who is respected because of his wisdom, or because of the indebtedness one owes to him. So the rough meaning is ‘someone worthy of respect.’ No implication of ‘Living Buddha!’ So the Chinese created this confusion through Chinese translations.”

It was rare indeed for him to say anything against the Chinese, whom he goes out of his way to forgive and try to understand. And I knew that he had no need to go into the issue in just offering a formal response to my simple question. But clearly the matter was of such importance to him that he was determined to explain his position fully, with a tenacity that I’d seen him apply to many points of scholarly precision.

“Some Western books,” he went on, “also say ‘Living Buddha’ when they describe me, or ‘God.’ Totally wrong!” As he said this, I recalled that I had used versions of the term many times in writing a profile of him eight years before, and my editors in New York had added insult to injury by titling the piece “Tibet’s Living Buddha.” Perhaps he was just trying to ensure that I didn’t make the same mistake again? Living Buddhas, after all, are seldom seen fleeing from their thrones on hybrid yaks and arriving in the outside world suffering from the highly ungodly condition known as dysentery. To call the Dalai Lama more than human is, for non-Tibetans, to demean him in a way—and to demean ourselves, by suggesting that what he does we cannot do as well.

I duly recorded his amendment and wrote a new article taking in the series of discussions we had had. When it appeared in the same New York magazine, it was given—what else?—the title “The God in Exile.” Humans, as he might have told me, are never very keen to give up on their fairy tales.

 

If nothing but the bright side of characters should be shewn, we should sit down in despondency, and think it utterly impossible to imitate them in
any thing.

—
SAMUEL JOHNSON
(to Edmund Malone)

THE ICON

T
he first time I met the Dalai Lama in person, I was a seventeen-year-old schoolboy being reluctantly dragged on a trip around my ancestral roots by my parents and introduced to the uncles, grandparents, cousins I had barely seen before. India was of no interest to me then, except insofar as it flavored and colored the psychedelic songs and fashions that were popular in my English high school, and I did what I could not to be moved or engaged by its kaleidoscopic swirl but to hold on to my privacy and my secret wisdom, as any teenager eager to be misunderstood might. When my father took me on a two-day trip up into the mountains to meet the Dalai Lama, I was determined not to betray any interest in him; the man was, after all, just a friend—or colleague—of my father’s.

I succeeded quite well in my intention. We took the overnight train from Delhi to Pathankot, and then jammed into a taxi for the long drive toward Upper Dharamsala. For hour after hour, so it seemed, we drove in and out of clouds, shifting levels of grayness. Dharamsala is notorious for the intensity of its rainfall in the summer, and all I can recall now is pine trees, switchback turns, clouds, and more clouds. Then we arrived at a battered little settlement of a few huddled huts and, following along a narrow road above a valley, came to the house at its end and went in to see a man in red and saffron robes.

What he said then, I really cannot remember, though our conversation went on for an hour and a half or more (not many people were knocking at the Dalai Lama’s door in 1974). All I remember is his using the word
bodhichitta
(which he translates as “a good heart infused with wisdom”), a term he would use again the next time I visited him, alone, in that room. In the fullness of my seventeen-year-old’s wisdom, I knew nothing, of course, about the fact that this monk had been in constant negotiation with China and Mao Zedong for a quarter of a century by that point, was hoping to send delegations to Tibet before too long, had recently told his Khampa guerrillas to lay down their arms, after President Nixon and Henry Kissinger had opened the door to China and Nepal had decided it would help the coming power in Beijing. All I knew was that there were clouds everywhere, in the room and around it, swirling in and out of the space where we talked, and the world was very far away indeed, not visible through the mist.

We were on a mountaintop—I had never been so high in Asia at the time—and a deposed ruler in monk’s robes was talking about Emptiness and Reality, and outside the large picture windows there were no signs of human habitation. We had taken leave of the real world altogether.

It has been one of the small miracles of my life to see the Dalai Lama come down from the mountaintop, as it were, and out of the mist and become as sharply defined a member of the global community, and as widely heeded, as the singer-activist Bono or that other hero of oppressed peoples, Nelson Mandela. His face appears on bumper stickers in surfer towns (“Be Stoked”); in-flight magazines tell us (in an article on “cool”) that “the Dalai Lama is cool because he is.” The eccentric film director Werner Herzog brings out a book on him, and Hunter Thompson includes him in his “Honor Roll” of gonzo heroes. This bringing together of such different worlds (a larger reality and a smaller, perhaps) offers an opportunity and poses a question: when a monk comes out in front of the swarming cameras, how much do we see the monk, and how much only what the cameras construct?

By the summer of 2005, I had grown accustomed, almost, to finding the Dalai Lama used as a comic prop in nearly every other Hollywood movie; in the space of two months I saw him alluded to in
Monster-in-Law, The Wedding Crashers, In Good Company,
and
Uptown Girls
(in which a bored Manhattan princess, applying for a job at the Fifth Avenue boutique Henri Bendel, gives as a reference “The Dalai Lama, Tibet”—a rather poignant error in light of the fact that Tibet barely exists now and the Dalai Lama hasn’t lived there in almost half a century). You can buy $200 limited-edition dolls of the monk these days, and a Broadway producer is talking of having a vampire dress up as him, for farcical effect. “Formerly,” as Oscar Wilde’s Gilbert noted more than a century ago, “we used to canonize our heroes. The modern method is to vulgarize them.”