The Open Road (19 page)

In the same way, he will not endorse intoxicants or sexual license, and is tough on the subject of divorce, because it makes young children the victims of their elders’ uncertainties or immaturity. He has “a little bit of reservation,” he told me once, about all the incarnate lamas popping up in every corner of the globe, some from non-Buddhist families, as well as about the reverence brought to certain Tibetan teachers and lamas abroad, some of whom were not regarded as very great scholars within their own community. He delights listeners everywhere by being the rare spiritual figure to say there’s no need for temples or scriptures, let alone for an immersion in his own tradition; but then he disappoints them, often, by suggesting that there is a need for old-fashioned ethics and all the things your grandmother told you were good for you.

By curious circumstance, one of the first Western visitors to travel all the way to Dharamsala to see Tibet in exile, and to report at length on his discussions with the Dalai Lama, was the Cistercian monk Thomas Merton, who headed off from his monastery in Kentucky in 1968 to talk to some of the teachers and philosophers in Asia he’d been following from afar, with such interest and sympathy, for so long. There is a large extent to which only a monk can really appreciate and read a fellow monk, as only a ballet dancer can assess a fellow dancer’s performance, catching the subtleties and minutiae the unprofessional watcher would miss, and Merton’s account of the Tibetan leader served to open the door for the West to a being who had previously appeared to belong to exotic books in a foreign tongue. (The fact that Merton was found dead, apparently of electrocution, only six weeks after his stay in Dharamsala, in his hotel room in Bangkok, gives an added piquancy and perhaps weight to the encounters that to him threw such a fresh light upon his long vocation.)

When Merton arrived in Dharamsala, via the overnight train from Delhi (the first train ride, he reported excitedly, he’d taken since joining his monastery twenty-seven years before), he came upon a whole settlement of monks, as his eager eyes conceived of it. The valleys in and around Dharamsala were a mandala, he wrote, in which there were hermits and mystics in every corner, deep in meditation, and ten-year-old incarnate lamas being trained in their ancient practices while the laypeople of Tibet walked around and around, driving the community on with their constant recitation of chants and spinning of prayer wheels. It was raining when the visitor arrived, and thunder “talked to itself all over and around the cloud-hidden peaks.” There was even a tremor of earthquakes, and Merton was moved to reflect on how, across the world, elections were bringing a new American president into office (Richard Nixon, as it happened).

Merton reported, vividly, on the Indian goatherds walking along the slopes, as they do now, members of the Naddi tribe, and the sharp, bracing air of the snowcaps overlooking the settlement. He registered, below his room, “an argument of women,” the same ones whose granddaughters are perhaps arguing today. He looked in on “a rather crumby” restaurant (his unorthodox spelling revealing, touchingly, how far he lived from the colloquial world) and used the day’s newspapers for toilet paper. In the distance, he heard “the report of a gun from down in the valley,” a reminder, startling, of how the Indian army lived, as it still does, at the very edge of the Tibetan community.

Yet the heart of his visit, fully reported in his letters back home, was the series of discussions he enjoyed with the Dalai Lama, then only thirty-three, and perhaps as excited as he was to get to meet a monk from another tradition. “The central presence,” as Merton put it in his journal, “is a fully awake, energetic, alert, nondusty, nondim, nonwhispering Buddha.” To the visitor’s relief, the young leader seemed much more solid than all the talk abroad of the magic and mystery of Tibet had led him to anticipate.

“The Dalai Lama is strong and alert, bigger than I expected” was Merton’s first response and then—clearly speaking of something within as well as without—he added,” a very solid, energetic, generous, and warm person.” The sense of solidity (the idea that recurred) was confirmed when, in their second discussion, the two of them talked of epistemology, then of
samadhi,
or one-pointed concentration, the Dalai Lama striking Merton as “very existential” and quite “scholastic.” The Dalai Lama’s “ideas of the interior life are built on very solid foundations and on a real awareness of practical problems,” Merton reported, and the Tibetan ended their second meeting with the injunction to his Western visitor to “think more about the mind.”

In their third and final encounter, the Dalai Lama—as he has become famous for doing—bombarded the foreigner with questions: about the process of initiation for monks in the West, about the process of enlightenment, about whether Trappists could watch movies, whether they could drink alcohol, whether they were vegetarians. You can hear, in Merton’s reports, the sound of a professional in his field, still more isolated than he would like, seizing on the chance to grill and exchange ideas with another professional passing through. The Dalai Lama, Merton decided, was really “interested in the ‘mystical life,’ rather than in external observance.”

The Cistercian left Dharamsala, as so many would do, feeling he’d found a true friend, even a kindred spirit. Yet he realized, even then, that the young lama was “very sensitive about partial and distorted Western views of Tibetan mysticism and especially about popular myths.” Over and over the Dalai Lama stressed the importance of hard work, of rigor, of putting in grueling training before thinking, say, of Dzogchen practice (a form of advanced, intense meditation). Reading Merton’s reports now, one can feel that one is hearing a veteran of contemplation and metaphysics (the Dalai Lama) wondering why and how anyone would wish to play professional football, as it were, before he’s even learned how to put on a helmet (he’ll get hurt, he’ll throw off everyone else, he’ll get in the way of real spiritual progress, if he thinks that spiritual practice somehow requires any less training than does any other discipline or job). And already, Merton notes, “the Dalai Lama has to see a lot of blue-haired ladies in pants—losers. And people looking for a freak religion.”

It’s never clear how much Merton was writing as he always did and how much in the light of his meeting with the monk who reflected back to him some of his own qualities, but it was while he was in Dharamsala that he began to formulate the idea of “the metaphysician as wounded man. A wounded man is not an agnostic—he just has different questions, arising out of his wound.”

A monk is a figure of fascination to some of us, even of inspiration, precisely because (in theory, at least) he turns his back on what most of us find important and chooses to interpret success, wealth, power only inwardly, seeing the self as more of an instrument than an end per se. Where some of us try to make a name for ourselves, he begins by discarding his very name, and where some of us try to follow the news, he roots himself in the old, through which he can make sense of everything new that happens. The Christian monks I know who gather in their cloisters on Sunday evenings to watch John Cleese movies, the Tibetan rinpoches who have no patience for Westerners’ careful pieties can afford to be irreverent only because their sense of what they owe reverence to is so precise and so sharp.

I often felt that the heart and soul, quite literally, of the Dalai Lama’s life existed in precisely the parts that most of us couldn’t see. “The truth,” as Meister Eckhart put it, “is that the more ourselves we are, the less of self is in us.” Like the most impressive experts in any field, the Dalai Lama tempted us to forget that he had studied for eighteen years and faced an oral examination by thirty scholars of logic, thirty-five doctors of metaphysics, and thirty-five experts on the Noble Path; indeed, his warmth and everyday humanity meant that many of us spoke to him as if he were truly one of us—no one asks the pope whether he has dreams of women or what makes him angry. Yet the fact remained that, like every Tibetan Buddhist monk, he was bound by more than 253 different vows.

I asked the Dalai Lama once how things had changed for him since the last time we’d met in his room, and he said, “Less hair, I think, both of us,” to get rid of all reserve at the outset, and broke into gales of wholehearted laughter. Then he answered my question, saying that nothing much had changed except for a small problem with his throat. “And my spiritual practice,” he went on, “not much. But as usual, I carry it.”

Nowadays, he said, as a result of ongoing studies and the new requirements that came with each new teaching, “my daily prayer, especially what I have to recite and go through, that normally takes about four hours.”

“Every day?”

To answer, he took me through his day: meditation, prostrations, reciting special mantras, then more meditation and more prostrations, followed by reading Tibetan philosophy or other texts; then reading and studying and, in the evening, “some meditation—evening meditation—for about one hour. Then, at eight-thirty, sleep. Most important meditation. Compulsory meditation for everyone—even some birds. The most important meditation, not for Nirvana, but for survival!”

A joke, of course, to defuse the onerous sound of the activities, and to bring in everyone, even those birds, and yet what I was brought up against again was an almost unimaginable otherness at the center of him. Most of what he did, I was reminded, was invisible.

I have spent much of my adult life in monasteries, interested in watching how these often silent revolutionaries turn the world inside out, subverting our assumptions, rooting themselves in what can’t be seen, and then disappearing at regular intervals behind the sign that says,
MONASTIC ENCLOSURE. PLEASE DO NOT ENTER
. The Greek word
askesis,
from which “ascetic” comes, refers to the training of athletes, and monks are, at least in principle, spiritual athletes who put themselves through almost unfathomable training practices to make their minds as sharp and effective as the bodies of professional sportsmen are.

On Mount Hiei, behind Kyoto, near where I write this, so-called marathon monks embark on prolonged stretches of meditation and, in a few cases, go for days on end without sleeping, spending every night, all night, racing along the narrow paths of the sacred mountain, a dagger at their side; they have sworn they will take their own lives if they drink a single glass of water or eat a crust of bread in the course of nine days. At the end of their ordeal, the monks of Mount Hiei look as if they’ve passed through death itself and emerged at the other end like human candles, illuminated outlines of themselves, aglow (photographs are taken of them after their intense austerities, as if to record the inner equivalent of a three-minute mile). On Mount Hiei a monk is said to be able to hear ash dropping from a stick of incense in the next room; in Catholic hermitages, according to the Benedictine brother David Steindl-Rast, an ascetic aspires to a state in which a “drop of spring water” is full of flavor.

When we see the Dalai Lama pick out from a crowd a face he has not seen for fifty years, or recover a statement he heard thirty years before, what we are seeing, in effect, are the fruits of his long exercises in collecting himself, the ways he has brought his attention to a point in meditation so that it burns as a magnifying glass might burn a piece of paper in the sun. Students at the Gyuto Monastery in Tibet, to take an almost random example, used to have to memorize 600 pages just to gain admission to the monastery, and then embarked on learning another 2,500 pages by heart, apart from all the other chants and recitations they had to master. The purpose of such exercises is not just ritualistic; it is a way of sharpening the mind so that it opens out into what might seem a gigantic filing cabinet or computer hard drive (thus the Dalai Lama, for example, when talking about rural development around the world, will, as in Taiwan in 2001, recall the mayor of Shanghai in 1955, who—with impressive prescience, as the Dalai Lama sees it—told him that he was devoting as much energy to developing the villages around Shanghai as to the city center, so as not to deepen the gap between rich and poor). This is not magic but—the whole point, really—something anyone can choose to do if it may be of help.