The Open Road (2 page)

Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, was, first and foremost, an empiricist, a scientist of self; what he learned he learned by conducting experiments on the closest specimen to hand, himself. First he walked out of his gilded palace at the age of twenty-nine, in order to see firsthand the realities his father had tried to screen from him, the abiding truths of old age and suffering and death. Then he traveled and traveled, consulting teachers, practicing austerities, and, finally, sitting down under a pipal tree and vowing not to get up again until he’d come to some understanding of the nature of suffering and, further, of how we could come to a liberation from suffering. Then he traveled for the rest of his life, extending and sharing the understandings he’d gained.

He always took pains to tell people he was no more than an experimenter, doing nothing that the rest of us could not do; his aim was simply that of a doctor at a sickbed, eager to find an immediate solution to the problem at hand, without claiming his was the only or even the best solution. By speaking, as he often did, of a “path,” he was saying, in effect, that we could always go further, that everything was in a constant state of flux and that all he was doing was showing the way so that others could take it in new directions.

The Fourteenth Dalai Lama had been pushing along the same road for several decades now, turning around corners to meet a world in which almost every culture could access every other, and a single image had the power to reach the entire planet; he had traveled out of the mud-and-stone village in which he was born to the center of a kingdom that had no roads linking it to the outside world even in the 1950s, and then right into the heart of the twenty-first-century whirlwind. But he always stressed that, like the “scientist of mind” who was his root teacher, he had no wish to claim final authority.

“Our master gave us liberty to investigate even his own word,” I would hear him say two years later in Zurich, of the Buddha, “so I take this liberty fully!” As a boy he early showed a fascination with all things scientific, fixing the old generator in the Potala Palace in Lhasa, using a telescope left to him by the Thirteenth Dalai Lama and seeing that—contrary to Tibetan teaching—the moon did not generate its own light; delighting (as the Thirteenth Dalai Lama did) in taking watches apart and then trying to put them together again. Even now he kept a plastic model of the brain with labeled, detachable parts on his desk at home and loved to meet scientists who could improve his understanding of the world and mind, in part by disproving his assumptions about them.

Science, he said to the Japanese intellectuals, “mainly deals with matter; faith mainly deals with the observer itself.” Both, however, tell us “there is no independent objectivity.” And both, he said, are concerned with “reducing the gap between reality and perception.” Recent research, he might have added, soon to be featured on the cover of
Time
magazine, suggested that those who score high on tests for happiness live longer than others, in part because happiness is a function not so much of our circumstances as of our perceptions. People who win the lottery often profess themselves no better off than before—they don’t know who their friends are, they feel uncomfortable in their posh new neighborhoods, they spend all their time with lawyers; yet others, who are suddenly rendered paraplegic, after roughly a year of adjustment confess themselves really no worse off than before. The mind, as Milton puts it at the beginning of
Paradise Lost,
“can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.”

The idea, I think, is to explore the world closely, so as to make out its laws, and then to see what can and cannot be done within those laws; the Dalai Lama’s favorite words, I notice more and more this morning, are “investigate” and “analyze” and “explore.” He does not mention Buddhism, if only because the people assembled around the table are here as scholars and, besides, some of them (like myself) may not even be Buddhists. The more important part is what anyone can do, whether she is a Christian or a Marxist or even an enemy to Buddhism. A scientist’s religious views are beside the point; what matters is what his experiments have disclosed, and that he be aware, as when doing nuclear research, of the real-world consequences of what his mind is discovering.

As the session goes on, I—and perhaps not just I—feel that at times the visitor sounds too optimistic, too ready to bring realism and confidence together. The recent demonstrations against the American invasion of Iraq, he says (referring to the military action begun eight months before), are something positive, “encouraging,” even though there has been no sign of a nongovernmental alternative to implement that longing for peace. Many others, I suspect, might suggest that the fact that so many people are out on the streets today could mean only that too many people have something to complain about. Yet still the principle remains: if we believe that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then maybe strength and possibility and neighborliness are, too?

The other banner under which he clearly walks is reason, and a refusal, as the Buddha said, to take anything on blind faith or because we want it to be true. “At that time,” he says, of the outbreak of the war, and speaking with his characteristic matter-of-factness, “some people asked me, ‘Go to Baghdad!’ But then I thought: that’s senseless. That’s unrealistic. I have no friends in Baghdad. I am Buddhist monk—even I may not find the road!”

On the walls of the temple next to his home in India, I recall, there are only two quotations from the Buddha. One of them reads, “As one assays gold by rubbing, cutting, and melting, so examine well my words and accept them, but not because you respect me.”

“At that point,” the Dalai Lama goes on, “I strongly felt that some individual, like President Havel, whom the world knows, and some Nobel laureate, like Jimmy Carter or Archbishop Tutu, some individual like that should go there, talk with Saddam Hussein and talk with his advisers.” That anything would come of it, he concedes, is “a remote possibility.” But there would be nothing lost in trying. “Because usually even representatives of the United Nations, people not much trust. Always suspicion.”

As the local translator renders the words into Japanese, the Tibetan visitor looks around the room with the interest of a newcomer. He pulls out a silver pen from within his capacious robes at one point, and makes a note. He sits in front of the scientists as unself-consciously as if sitting alone in his room at home. People always talk about his smile and his almost palpable charm; but if his ideas are really going to have some effect, I think, they must arise from acuity and alertness.

“The great home of the Soul,” D. H. Lawrence once wrote, in a typically pinwheeling account of Walt Whitman, “is the open road. Not heaven, not paradise. Not ‘above.’” The soul, in Lawrence’s vision, is “a wayfarer down the open road,” and “true democracy” flowers in that place “where soul meets soul, in the open road.” In that sense, the road also seems the natural home of someone who is visibly pressing along a path, to talk to anyone he meets along the way and to see how foreigners, specialists, fellow travelers can instruct him.

As soon as the Dalai Lama has finished speaking, the experts around the table, one after another, offer responses, generally in the form of dry and somewhat formal readings of prepared statements. Then, however, one man—the youngest in attendance, perhaps in his late thirties—suddenly addresses the Dalai Lama directly. “I am a realist,” he says. “All this talk of
ahimsa
and nonviolence, it’s all well and good, but how has it really helped the world?” People are dying in Iraq, in Afghanistan, all over, he hardly needs to add. Instantly, the Dalai Lama comes to life, as in one of the debates that his school of Tibetan Buddhism cherishes as a way to sharpen the mind and cut through fixed assumptions. Governments are slow to catch up with the possibilities that individuals discern, he says; and in any case, it takes time to change and slough off the habits of old. The answer comes with such assurance that I begin to wonder if this, too, isn’t one of the many questions the Dalai Lama asks himself every day.

A religious teacher who is telling people not to get entangled or distracted by religion; a Tibetan who is suggesting that Tibet does not have all the answers; a Buddhist who, more and more, is urging foreigners not to take up Buddhism but to study within their own traditions, where their roots are deepest: at the very least, something quite radical is being advanced, it seems. The world at the beginning of the new century is more divided than I have ever seen it, and its strongest power is fractured by loud disputes; in the middle of this, the head of Tibetan Buddhism is urging people not to listen to doctrine, which can so often be a source of divisions of its own, but to push behind it to something human, in which ideas of “clashing civilizations” can seem remote.

As the burly Tibetan walks out into the broad sunlight—people are holding up signs saying
FREE TIBET
along his path and waving the Tibetan flag, now banned in Tibet—I realize there’s something incongruous about this skeptical journalist and nonbelonger (myself) devoting so much of my time to trying to figure out what this man is saying.

But the Dalai Lama impresses, or disarms, me by doing away with many of the categories with which we imprison ourselves. The only truths that can possibly make sense to us, he suggests, apply to all human beings, as much as Pythagoras’s theorem or the laws of thermodynamics do; if they pertain only to a specific tradition or culture, they’re not human truths at all. And the only thing that an Easterner—or Westerner—can offer is an angle on these truths that allows the rest of us to see them more clearly than we have done before. To someone like me, who’s grown up in many cultures but refused to believe that lacking a physical home means lacking an inner center, this is all as encouraging to hear as the idea that we don’t have to define ourselves by differences.

I follow along as he moves down the white-gravel paths of central Nara and notice, as people reach toward him to try to get a blessing or a handshake, how he is switching, as always, at lightning speed from monk to head of state to philosopher-scientist to regular man. But what is more striking, I realize, is that he’s pushing all these roles together, as if they were all intertwined, to see how one might throw light on the others. I don’t know many monks who are so keen to affirm only what stands up to scientific testing. And there are even fewer politicians who try to speak from the collected stillness and attention of a monk. Pope John Paul II, the Dalai Lama’s good friend, is also traveling more and more in the global order, using planes and cars to take him everywhere; but when he travels, he tends to visit fellow Catholics, to proclaim his faith and to offer doctrinal guidance. The Dalai Lama, by comparison, seems to exult in meeting people from different traditions than his own—Catholics, neuroscientists, even Maoists—and seeing what they have in common beneath their designations.

I can’t help but think this is an interesting response to an age in which some kill others in the name of Allah, some in the name of the Christian God. But just as I am thinking all this, I see the tanks that surrounded me in Ethiopia not long ago, the armed soldiers I met in Arabia who were scrambling after pennies. I remember the guerrillas who came into the room where I was sitting in El Salvador, during its civil war, the shacks I saw in Soweto where philosophical ideas seemed unlikely to bring any food to the table. I can’t say, after twenty years of covering wars and revolutions as a journalist, that any one man is likely to have all the answers (and the Dalai Lama, I know, would not say that either); it’s the questions he puts into play that invigorate.

After a quick lunch break at the Nara Hotel, his home for the day, the Dalai Lama comes out again into the bright afternoon, for what will surely be the high point of his visit: a trip to Todaiji, in the deer park, the great temple that is often described as the largest wooden building in the world. It was from here that the Japanese monk later known as Kobo Daishi traveled to China twelve centuries before, and brought back a form of Buddhism—Shingon—that might be a rough translation of the Tibetan kind; and for more than a millennium, a great Buddha, more than fifty feet tall, has sat at the heart of the prayer hall.