The Open Road (15 page)

One of the conundrums I watched the Dalai Lama face as he traveled around the world was the fact that it was this explosive, esoteric, specialized side of Tibetan Buddhism—full of the “magic and mystery” of which such explorers as Alexandra David-Neel excitedly wrote—that has long been the main source of fascination to outsiders; those who are turning away from the Sunday School traditions of their own faiths do not want to give them up just to receive Sunday School wisdom from Tibet (or, in fact, to receive talk of analytical scholarship and scientific rigor and hard work, as the Dalai Lama stresses). The Dalai Lama carefully unfolded across the globe principles for selflessness and compassion, examples of responsibility drawn from the Buddhist notion of interconnectedness and an emphasis on practicing humanity, as it were, without having to think constantly about religious rites and scriptures. But what many a foreigner in his audience wanted (and perhaps saw, whether he provided it or not) was fire and smoke.

I once went to my local university library to read up on Tibetan Buddhism, and, not to my surprise, the shelves were crowded with books with titles like
Civilized Shamans, Oracles and Gods of Tibet,
and
Travellers in Space;
over and over they served up what could be called the spiritual side of the fairy-tale Tibet we’ve Orientalized for so long, which can be seen as a faraway monk with his back turned to the world, developing inner strengths and charting an interior landscape—the geography of the mind—while the explorers of Queen Victoria were searching for the source of the Nile and mapping the canyons of Afghanistan. And certainly Tibet, like any person who spends a lot of time alone, seemed to have plumbed its inner resources, examined its mind and its dreams, so intensively that the result was what could look to the outsider like genius or madness or, most likely, a confounding mixture of the two.

Even seven centuries ago, Marco Polo was entertaining his readers in Venice by writing of Tibetan lamas who made a khan’s cup rise to his lips, and even in the last century David-Neel was electrifying audiences by writing of monks keeping themselves warm on the icy Himalayan plateau just through the strength of their meditation, or running for two hundred miles at a stretch while in a trance. The very uniqueness of the school of Buddhism that Tibet had taken to its highest pitch—Vajrayana, or the “Thunderbolt Vehicle”—lay in its extraordinary claim that if you were able to master certain extremely advanced and secret techniques, you could actually attain enlightenment in a single lifetime.

The Dalai Lama always spoke of daily practice, on and on through lifetimes, of not expecting rewards for millions of incarnations, of not looking for the bright lights and instant powers that some beginners hoped for in the exotic practice; yet even he, when asked, said with characteristic directness that if you meditate for long periods every morning, you can improve your memory and “finally you can develop clairvoyance,” and even he, in his second autobiography, admitted that much in Tibetan life and culture confounded his scientific mind: at one point, he reports seeing a piece of a rinpoche’s skull that had somehow survived the fires of cremation (as Tibetans believe is possible) and on which was clearly visible the Tibetan character representing that rinpoche’s particular protector deity. Whenever I read such sentences, it was as if the human, appreciably accessible figure I saw and touched had vanished in a second behind a closed door.

For Tibetan Buddhists, as for scientists like Michael Faraday, the world is made up not just of matter but of fields of energy, currents that for Tibetans link what they call “subtle vestures” to “gross vestures,” hell realms, or the land of hungry ghosts, to the world of protective spirits and deities. To the real practitioner, to say it again, all these figures are symbolic: as the Dalai Lama stresses, the beings carrying skulls brimming over with blood, the naked figures entwined around one another, tongues alive, are just unusually graphic representations of the forces that play out inside us and, in some cases perhaps, of the forces we need to summon within to repel the lures of hatred or ignorance or greed. Yet on a remote plateau three miles above the sea, where people live huge distances from others, in a charged, almost otherworldly atmosphere where the heavens seem very, very close and each of their changes and moods has strong and distinct implications on earth, none of the iconography probably seems entirely pictorial.

That is the other element of Tibet that leads to all the books called
Out of This World
and
Dreamtime Tibet
and
Tibet the Mysterious;
due to its intense and high isolation, and because its monks and scientists of self were developing inner techniques while other countries were working on cars and airplanes, it seems to belong to an earlier time that feels to many of us like an almost preconscious memory, an ancestral wisdom that we have lost (in part through all the great technological innovations we have gained). Until very recently, and even now in places, Tibetans have lived in a domain eerily similar to that of the early Christians, amid what Gibbon called “an uninterrupted succession of miraculous powers, the gift of tongues, of vision, and of prophecy.” Tibetan culture is much closer than our own to the world of Shakespeare, in which every comet or cloud formation is a direct message from the gods (and the king of the day, James I, was celebrated for his book
On Daemonologie
); Tibetan religion keeps intact a system we nowadays associate with the ancient Greeks or Romans, in which the connection between other worlds and our own has not been broken. It was only a few centuries ago, after all, that murderers in Europe hoped to escape capture by eating meals on the bodies of those they’d killed and housebreakers stole into homes in disguise, bearing tapers made of the fingers of stillborn infants.

“Below and beyond the conscious self,” as Aldous Huxley wrote, examining the eruptions of hysteria and witch burning that arose in seventeenth-century Catholic France, “lie vast ranges of subconscious activity, some worse than the ego and some better, some stupider and some, in certain respects, far more intelligent.” Almost as a function of not embracing modernity till recently—and in spite of an analytical tradition that can debate philosophical abstractions with any Platonist or positivist—Tibet still seemed to have at least one foot in this other world. Its scientists of the mind speak of seventy-seven thousand chambers of the “subtle body” and eighty-four thousand “negative emotions” in the human sphere (as well as eighty-four thousand “doors of transformation”); Buddhism is always committed to reality, but reality, as Picasso reminds us, is made up not just of what we see but of all that we make of it, the dreams and impulses that arise out of it, all the ways an external, visible landscape plays out in an inner, invisible terrain. To be only rational is not, you could say, entirely reasonable.

After the great debate at Samye, in which Tibet decided to follow the philosophical Indian path more than the pragmatic and more meditation-based Chinese, and especially after Tsong Kha Pa created the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism in the fifteenth century, many Tibetan monks gathered in monasteries that were, among other things, great philosophical laboratories for examining and perhaps extending the ideas of Nagarjuna and Shantideva and the other seminal Buddhist philosophers. Yet equally inevitably, many other monks wandered off across the vast emptiness of the Tibetan plateau, meditated for years on end in caves, and developed spiritual faculties that belong more to the realm of religion than to pure philosophy. The Dalai Lama presents a practical Buddhism that is striking for its sanity, its balance and lucidity, its appeal to common sense as much as to the other senses; but many other Tibetan lamas, for many centuries, have practiced a much wilder and more radical kind of Buddhism that can manifest itself in what has been called “crazy wisdom,” ideas and acts so far beyond the norm that most of the rest of us don’t know what to make of them (and certainly lack the tools to pass any judgment on them).

Tantra, as esoteric Buddhism is sometimes called, is, according to the Dalai Lama, a very specialized and secret training for death, and the kind of inflammable practice that can be pursued only under very careful supervision and expert guidance. It takes much of what Tibetans see as belonging to the “gross” levels of mind—sex and drink and illusion—and tries to raise them to the subtle, the way, I once heard the Dalai Lama say, Ayurvedic doctors take mercury, which, untreated, works as poison, and use it as a medicine. Far from the talk of compassion and selflessness that the Dalai Lama often gives to outsiders, Tantra celebrates the dangerous fact that the human is not the humane and that transcendence, by its very nature, remains far beyond conventional notions of right and wrong. “To give up one’s concept of being good,” as William James put it, “is the only door to the Universe’s deeper reaches.” Tibet itself is said by its folklore to have emerged from the union of a bodhisattva and a demoness.

The result, as an American political scientist put it in 1979—introducing Buddhism to the New World—is that you can find in Tantrism “almost everything that is connected with the popular Western conceptions of magic. Secret teachings, scriptures in code, the practice of drawing symbols on the ground and uttering spells to call up deities, supernatural powers that could be used for good or evil.” As another Western scholar calmly (and typically) describes it, you protect yourself against leprosy, or the possibility of being poisoned, in classical Tibet by visualizing a goddess and then visualizing your own body as a fat corpse. Then you imagine the goddess severing the corpse’s head and throwing the skull into a container, into which are also thrown chunks of bone for another supernatural being to come and devour raw. In the high, thin air of Tibet, with the animist spirits of the traditional Bon religion still alive, the burning of effigies is common, as in many a folk tradition, and even high officials make decisions on the basis of throwing dice, casting pieces of dough up in the air, and other forms of traditional divination.

This is not so different, perhaps, from talk of a prophet who raises men from the dead, turns water into wine, and walks across the waters; in seventeenth-century France, as Huxley has it, it was regarded as a terrible form of impiety
not
to believe in witches (since not to believe in Satan, and thus the prospect of a fallen angel, was almost the same as not to believe in God, and thus the possible purity of angels). A Catholic church that still practices exorcism or the kind of faithful Christian who reports feeling his body growing warmer (sometimes uncomfortably so) when he recites the Jesus Prayer should not express surprise at this; accounts of the great Christian mystics’ lives also belong to a realm of ecstasy and physical intensity that lies beyond our reason.

Yet when I watched the Dalai Lama carry his tradition, very carefully, out of its centuries of isolation and into the glare of the modern world (always stressing that he thought that his culture needed to be less solitary and in closer contact with modernity), I felt I was watching him walk across not just continents but centuries, and carrying into broad daylight some of the dusty secrets of the human family that had, as it were, been locked up in some cobwebbed chest in the attic for many centuries. When he gave advanced Tantric teachings, there often came a moment when he asked those who had not taken the appropriate vows or committed themselves seriously enough to Buddhist practice to leave, because he would be giving empowerments and initiations that could be dangerous if the right motivation was not present. As it was, he had given more Kalachakra (or Wheel of Time) initiations than all thirteen previous Dalai Lamas combined, many of them in places like Toronto, Barcelona, and Madison, Wisconsin.

In effect, he seemed to be bringing out into the world two sometimes unrelated treasures, each of them explosive: one was Tibet and its particular culture, often hard to translate into other tongues, and the other was his brand of Buddhism. To mass general audiences, he always stressed “uncrazy wisdom,” as you could call it, because philosophy seemed a way to cut through all divisions to some universal human core. (“Sectarianism is poison,” he writes, in an unusually violent statement in his second autobiography.) When he spoke of “Nalanda Buddhism,” in honor of the ancient Buddhist university in India from which his tradition’s great philosophers had emerged, he was essentially suggesting that reason and universality could offer places where Gelug practitioner and Kagyu, eastern Tibetan and central, American and Chinese could come together.

Yet at the same time he was bringing a very complex series of rites and visualization techniques and mandalas into our midst, all of which took him behind closed doors again; he traveled with certain
thangka
s and statues that clearly had esoteric value, and locked boxes that had to do with the private requirements of the Dalai Lama, not open to the gaze of scientists. More than once, when I asked him whether Tibet’s recent sufferings were the result of its collective karma, he answered, “It’s complicated” or “Mysterious,” as if, in effect, to say that it belonged to worlds I wasn’t in a position to enter or understand.