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.
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 businesslike 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 suspiciously 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 two, for day after day—he takes off his glasses 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 in listening to the BBC 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 of 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 unself-consciously 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 the world 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 danger of mixed motives, and certainly less likelihood of confusion). Listening to him speak everywhere from São 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 nonbelievers, 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 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 is 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.
Thus he’s obviously 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 whose members 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 for those who understand it, 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.