Pico Iyer Journeys

A Monk's Struggle

The Scientist

I have been visiting the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala regularly since 1974 and have been listening to him speak to psychologists, non-Buddhist priests and philosophers—from Harvard to Hiroshima and Zurich to Malibu—since 1979. I’m not a Buddhist myself, only a typically skeptical journalist whose father, a professional philosopher, happened to meet the Dalai Lama in 1960, the year after he went into exile. But having spent time watching wars and revolutions everywhere from Sri Lanka to Beirut, I’ve grown intrigued by the quietly revolutionary ideas that the Dalai Lama has put into play. China and Tibet will long be geographic neighbors, he implies, so for Tibetans to think of the Chinese as their enemies—or vice versa—is to say they will long be surrounded by enemies. Better by far to expunge the notion of “enmities” that the mind has created.

Among fellow Buddhists, the Dalai Lama delivers complex, analytical talks and wrestles with doctrinal issues within a philosophy that can be just as divided as anything in Christianity or Islam, but he has decided after analytical research that when he finds himself out in the wider world talking to large audiences of people with no interest in Buddhism, the most practical course is just to offer, as a doctor would, simple, everyday principles that anyone, regardless of religion (or lack of same), might find helpful. Since material wealth cannot help us if we’re heartbroken, he often says, and yet those who are strong within can survive even material hardship (as many monks in Tibet have had tragic occasion to prove), it makes more sense to concentrate on our inner, not our outer, resources. We in the privileged world spend so much time strengthening and working on our bodies, perhaps we could also use some time training what lies beneath them, at the source of our well-being: the mind.

His own people, inevitably, have not always been able to live according to these lucid precepts, and if you walk along the crowded, gritty streets of Dharamsala, you find as many Tibetans looking to the West for salvation as you find Westerners looking to Tibet. Melancholy signs in the Tibetan government-in-exile compound say Tibetan Torture Survivors’ Program and Voice Of Tibet (Voice For The Voiceless), and many young Tibetans feel they have spent all their lives dreaming of a country they’ve never seen. In Tibet, meanwhile, I remember—visiting in 1990, when the shadow of martial law hung over the capital—seeing soldiers on the rooftops of the low buildings around the central Jokhang Temple and tanks stationed just outside the city limits.

Yet the larger sense of identity being proposed by the Dalai Lama—and many others from every tradition—has special relevance today because, as the Tibetan leader likes to say, we are living in a “new reality” in which “the concept of ‘we’ and ‘they’ is gone.” And if the terrorist attacks and wars of the new millennium have made some people on every continent wary and skeptical of religion, they have also made them ache, more palpably than ever, for precisely the sense of moral guidance and solace that religions traditionally provide.

Exile and Opportunity

What could be called a global movement on behalf of post identity thinking seems one of the brightest hopes of our new world order and one often advanced by such close friends and admirers of the Dalai Lama as Vaclav Havel and Desmond Tutu. Yet what has made the Dalai Lama’s example particularly striking—and what was perhaps partly responsible for his receiving the 1989 Nobel Prize for Peace—is that he has had to live these principles and put them to the test during almost every hour of his 72 years. He came to the throne in Lhasa, after all, when he was only 4 years old, and he was receiving envoys from F.D.R. with intricate questions about the transportation of military supplies across Tibet during World War II when he was just 7. He was 11 when violent fighting broke out around him in Lhasa, and by the time he was 15—an age when most of us are stumbling through high school—he was the full-time political leader of his people, having to negotiate against Mao Zedong. After he fled Tibet at age 23, when Chinese pressure on Lhasa seemed certain to provoke widespread violence, he had to remake an entire ancient culture in exile.

The result of all this is that he is as rigorous and detailed a realist as you could hope to meet. His life has never allowed him the luxury of talking abstractly or wishfully from a mountaintop. He follows the news more closely than many journalists do and cheerfully confessed to me more than a decade ago that he is “addicted” to the bbc World Service broadcast every morning. When he speaks around the world, one of his favorite lines is “Dream—nothing!” or some other expression to stress that instead of looking outside ourselves for help or inspiration, we should act right now because “responsibility for our future lies on our own shoulders.”

This makes for a novel way of practicing the art of politics—one inspired, you could say, by the prince called the Buddha more than by the one described by Machiavelli. The central principle of Buddhism is the idea of interdependence—the notion that all sentient beings are linked together in a network that was classically known as Indra’s Net. Thus, calling Chinese individuals your enemy and Tibetans your friend, the Dalai Lama might suggest, is as crazy as calling your right eye your ally and your left your adversary; you usually need both to function well, and all parts of the world body depend on all other parts. “Before,” I heard him say last November, “destruction of your enemy was victory for your side.” But in our globalized world, where ecology enforces our sense of mutual dependence, “destruction of your enemy is destruction of yourself.”

The other essential idea of Buddhism (more accurately called a science of mind than a religion) is that we can change our world by changing how we choose to look at the world. “There is nothing either good or bad,” as Hamlet said, “but thinking makes it so.” For most of us, for example, exile means disruption and loss. But the Dalai Lama has decided that exile is his reality and therefore should be taken as opportunity. Almost as soon as he left Tibet in 1959, he started to draw up a new democratic constitution for Tibetans, allowing for the possibility of impeaching the Dalai Lama. He threw out much that he regarded as outdated or needlessly ritualistic in the Tibetan system while gradually bringing in reforms so that women are now allowed to study for doctoral degrees and become abbots (which they could not do in old Tibet) and science is part of the monastic curriculum. Tibetan children in exile take their lessons in Tibetan until they are 10 or so—to make sure they are strongly rooted in their own tradition—and then in English ever after (so as to be connected to the modern world).

This has made the Tibetan exile community one of the success stories among refugee groups in recent decades. But no less important, perhaps, it has offered a possibility to many others on a planet where there are, by some counts, as many as 33 million official and unofficial refugees. By showing how Tibet can exist internally, in spirit and imagination, even if it is barely visible on the map, the Dalai Lama has been suggesting to Palestinians, Kurds and Uighurs that they can maintain a cultural community even if they have lost their territory. Communities can be linked not by common soil so much as by common ground, a common foundation.

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