In his sepulchral cabin, Cohen breaks out the cognac and serves an old friend and me gefilte fish, Hebrew National salami, and egg-and-onion matzohs from a box. The two of them look like battle-hardened veterans—“non-commissioned officers,” as the friend says—and it’s not hard to see how this celebrated lady-killer called an early backup band “The Army” and one of his sweetest records “an anti-pacifist recording.”
Yet even at his most ragged here, he seems a long way away from the one who cried out, so pitifully, on his 1973 live album, “I can’t stand who I am.” Leonard Cohen has always seemed, or tried, to inhabit a higher zone of sorts, and one that his parable-like songs, his alchemical symbols, and his constant harking back to Abraham and David and Isaac only compound. In trying to marry Babylon with Bethlehem, in reading women’s bodies with the obsessiveness of a Talmudic scholar, in giving North America a raffish tilt so that he’s always been closer to Jacques Brel or Georges Moustaki than to Bob Dylan, he’s been trying, over and over, to find ceremony without sanctimony and discipline without dogma. Where else should he be, where else could he be, than in a military-style ritualized training that allows him to put Old Testament words to a country-and-western beat and write songs that sound like first-person laments written by God?
“I feel,” says Cohen a little later, when we’re alone, “we’re in a very shabby moment, and neither the literary nor the musical experience really has its finger on the pulse of our crisis. From my point of view, we’re in the midst of a Flood: a Flood of biblical proportions. It’s both exterior and interior—at this point it’s more devastating on the interior level—but it’s leaking into the real world. And this Flood is of such enormous and biblical proportions that I see everybody holding on in their individual way to an orange crate, to a piece of wood, and we’re passing each other in this swollen river that has pretty well taken down all the landmarks, and pretty well overturned everything we’ve got. And people insist, under the circumstances, on describing themselves as ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative.’ It seems to me completely mad.”
Of course, he says, impatiently, he can’t explain what he’s doing here. “I don’t think anybody really knows why they’re doing anything. If you stop someone on the subway and say, ‘Where are you going—in the deepest sense of the word?’ you can’t really expect an answer. I really don’t know why I’m here. It’s a matter of ‘What else would I be doing?’ Do I want to be Frank Sinatra, who’s really great, and do I want to have great retrospectives of my work? I’m not really interested in being the oldest folksinger around.
“Would I be starting a new marriage with a young woman and raising another family? Well, I hated it when it was going on”—signs of the snarl beneath the chuckle—“so maybe I would feel better about it now. But I don’t think so.
“What would I be doing? Finding new drugs, buying more expensive wine? I don’t know. This seems to me the most luxurious and sumptuous response to the emptiness of my own existence.
“I think that’s the real deep entertainment,” he concludes. “Religion. Real profound and voluptuous and delicious entertainment. The real feast that is available to us is within this activity. Nothing touches it.” He smiles his godfatherly smile. “Except if you’re courtin’. If you’re young, the hormonal thrust has its own excitement.”
Before I leave, he catches my eye, and his voice turns soft.
“We are gathered here,” he says, “around a very, very old man, who may outlive all of us, and who may go tomorrow. So that gives an urgency to the practice. Everybody, including Roshi, is practicing with a kind of passionate diligence. It touches my heart. It makes me proud to be part of this community.”
Before I leave the following morning, the
roshi
invites me, with Cohen, to his cabin for lunch. It’s a typically eclectic meal, of noodles and curry, taken quietly and simply, in a small sunlit dining area. As ever when the
roshi
is around, Cohen sits absolutely humble and silent in one corner, all the tension emptied out of his face; everything about him is light, like a clear glass once the liquid’s drained.
He tells me a little about how he was once fascinated by Persian miniatures. He talks of the intensity of “living in a world of samples.” He cleans up around the kitchen, and asks his old friend, very gently, if he’s tired. When we go out into the parking lot, a woman comes up and starts telling him how much his songs have meant to her, and Cohen gives her his warmest smile and leaves her with a kind of blessing. “A practice like this,” he tells me, “and I think everyone here would say the same thing, you could only do for love.”
“So if it weren’t for the
roshi,
you wouldn’t be here?” I ask.
“If it weren’t for the
roshi,
I wouldn’t be.”
And as I set off down the mountain—listening with new ears now to the old songs, and seeing the shadow of an old Japanese man behind the love songs and the ballads about “the few who forgive what you do and the fewer who don’t even care”—I realize that the whole stay has affected me more powerfully than any trip I’ve taken in years. Why? Mostly, I think, because of a sense of the deep bond between Sasaki and Cohen, and the way neither seems to need anything from the other, yet each allows the other to be deeper than he might be otherwise. “Roshi knows me for who I am,” Cohen had said, “and he doesn’t want me to be any other. ‘International Man,’ ‘Culture Man,’ he calls me; he knows I am an ‘International Man.’ ” And, by all accounts, he will take everything Cohen brings him—his selfishness, his anger, his ambition, his sins—and, while holding him to them, accept him.
It’s touching in a way: the man who has been the poet laureate of those in flight, who has never found in his sixty-three years a woman he can marry or a home he won’t desert, the connoisseur of betrayal and self-tormenting soul who claimed, twentyfive years ago, that he had “torn everyone who reached out for me,” and who ended his most recent collection of writings with a prayer for “the precious ones I overthrew for an education in the world”—the man, in fact, who became an international heartthrob while singing “So Long” and “Goodbye”—has finally found something he hasn’t abandoned and a love that won’t let him down.
“Roshi said something to me the other day that I like,” Cohen told me just before I left. “ ‘The older you get, the lonelier you become; and the deeper the love that you need.’ ” For the old and the deep and the lonely, change, it seems, may not be the only aphrodisiac.
1998
MAKING KINDNESS STAND TO REASON
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 around the world these days for his ability to talk to halls large enough to stage a Bon Jovi concert, his special strength is to address twenty thousand people—Buddhists and grandmothers and kids alike—as if he were 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 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 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 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.