The Open Road (18 page)

Again, one had only to tiptoe across the threshold of the dispute to find oneself in a furious, febrile world of curses and threats and almost medieval intrigue. In the letters certain Shugden supporters sent the Dalai Lama’s government in exile (released in a brochure put out by that government), the sentences pullulated with references to “donkey officials” and “poisonous and shameless” rivals. At one point, a package had been sent to a monastery in India containing a knife and the message “We were unable to meet you this time but we hope to get you next time.” A senior monk was beaten up and a barn and granary went up in flames. Then the head of the Dalai Lama’s own Institute of Buddhist Dialectics was found stabbed in his bed, along with two younger monks, apparently cut up as if for exorcism.

The letters from the Shugden group (and, its members would no doubt suggest, those sent back to them) open the door on a set of spirits not so different from the grinning skeletons and dancing monsters of a
thangka.
Some of the correspondence I read spoke of “turning the milk sea of Tibet into a sea of boiling blood,” of “eating the three carcases” (presumably belonging to the three who had been killed), and warned of more carcasses to be found soon. There was no talk of calm logic or scientific investigation, least of all of a doctor’s wish to heal.

One hot day in August 2005 in Zurich, at an eight-day set of teachings on compassion the Dalai Lama was offering, the public-address system suddenly declared—in German, Tibetan, and English—that followers of Shugden should take care not to attend the following morning, when the Dalai Lama was going to be offering some special initiations. Flyers were handed out to the same effect, and the announcement was broadcast again. Then, as he was nearing the end of his daily
explication de texte,
at four p.m., the Dalai Lama suddenly said, “Today I am going to speak for thirty extra minutes. If that makes problems for you, please feel free to go. But I hope you will not mind my going on a little late today.” The audience, which could never get enough of him—many of its members had traveled across the world for these teachings—was clearly delighted.

Slowly at first, in long and forceful Tibetan sentences—rendered into German by a scholarly man onstage next to the Dalai Lama (and into other languages by unseen translators speaking into our transistor radios)—the Dalai Lama began to explain why he did not wish any followers of Shugden to attend the special initiations, even if some of them had chosen, in spite of requests, to attend the other days’ teachings. For them to be present during these esoteric ceremonies would potentially impede the progress of everyone else, he said, and even do harm to the person giving the initiations, himself.

His voice began to rise, and soon he was speaking like thunder. Argument after argument followed as to why Shugden supporters should not come, and his bearing was as wrathful as I had ever seen in public. Occasionally, his words would trail off, and the mild-mannered Swiss professor in jacket and tie by his side would start translating the sentences; then, before the man could continue, the Dalai Lama would start up again, drowning him out.

The audience laughed at such moments, though not with delight.

“In no way are the Dalai Lamas attached to the Shugden deity,” the Tibetan leader said, going through history to show how previous Dalai Lamas had spoken of the spirit. “This has been a problem for three hundred and sixty years. I initially was involved with this deity, but then through some analysis, I realized there was some kind of harm in it, some kind of problem. Then I referred this issue to two of my tutors.”

His junior tutor, however, Trijang Rinpoche, was widely believed to be a follower of Shugden himself. Indeed, there are said to be more than one hundred thousand in the Tibetan community who propitiate the deity. Trijang Rinpoche, the Dalai Lama now said, was to be revered for his great contributions to Lam Rim, or Stages of the Path, teachings. But it was his own job, the Dalai Lama stressed, “to continue the line that the two great Dalai Lamas, the Fifth and the Thirteenth, have taken. And the Fifth actually denounced the Shugden deity as a harmful spirit.”

On and on the passionate tirade went, like nothing so much as a prosecuting lawyer’s final summation. Some people began to look at their watches. Always he was working for harmony between the schools of Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai Lama said. Yet a Shugden teacher had said that if a Gelug practitioner follows a Nyingma teaching, he will be killed by the Shugden deity. What did this have to do with the clear philosophy laid out by Lord Buddha? And if you looked at the Nalanda teaching, the great work of the Indian philosophers Shantideva and Nagarjuna, which he was explicating now, what did that have to do with propitiating deities?

It was as if a door had swung open behind him and suddenly one could see something of what this man (a tiny figure at the far end of a huge rock-star auditorium, flanked by two giant video screens that projected his face around the building) was sitting in front of. When finally the Dalai Lama stopped speaking, the eight thousand people in Hallenstadion filed out of the day’s teachings very quietly.

In the end, I thought, it was probably not so different from what you find in any relationship, even with those you have known for an entire lifetime: at the core there is likely to be a mystery. And all that you know and learn about a person does not take away from the vast amount you cannot and will never know. “Our knowledge,” as Isaac Bashevis Singer, wise chronicler of spirits and golems pointed out, “is a little island in a great ocean of non-knowledge.” In the Dalai Lama’s case, bringing a complex and sometimes secret set of rites out into the world, this was especially true, since so much of what belonged to his tradition could make little sense to another culture. And so he offered a carefully watered-down form of general teaching centered on basic human truths—science plus ethics, in effect—and true to his central contention that at every moment you should try to do some good, but at the very least should do no harm.

He’d told me once how surprised he had been, on meeting a Christian in Europe, to hear the man say that “the self is a mystery.” And God, too. For someone coming from the Indian philosophical tradition, he said, with its three thousand years of investigating the self, the self seemed eminently knowable, a series of laws and connections that could be investigated as any other aspect of nature or consciousness could. And yet for all of that, the rites or practices by which the mind conducted these investigations, examining the self and even its unreality, involved techniques or customs that to the outsider were at least as mysterious as any other matter of incarnation.

Often, I recalled, in the years after his death, the Buddha was represented by just the image of an empty throne.

 

In order to be remembered or even wanted, I have to be a person that nobody knows.

—
THOMAS MERTON

THE MONK

A
t the beginning of the twenty-first century, a Swiss photographer named Manuel Bauer spent more than three years following the Dalai Lama on his travels around the world, making more than thirty trips in all and recording every moment of his day the way a modern photojournalist chronicles a presidential candidate on the campaign trail. He took pictures of him as he prepared for bed, sitting in his undershirt, and he took pictures of him as he woke up in the morning and began his hours of meditation. He took pictures of him weeping onstage, conducting private ceremonies with his oracles, watching TV bare-chested, and pouring tea for Václav Havel. When Bauer showed his subject proofs of the book to see if any of the four hundred images had violated privacy or inadvertently overstepped some boundary, the only one the Dalai Lama questioned was a picture in which, because of the perspective, it appeared that he was sitting higher than one of his teachers.

It’s startling, often, for outsiders to hear the Dalai Lama say (as he always does) that he’s had eleven teachers in the course of his life, or fifteen, as he said later, or even nineteen, as one of his more recent interviews had it; many of us from abroad, knowing only that he’s the head of Tibetan Buddhism, are unaware that he’s not even the head of his own Gelug order (merely its highest incarnation). Yet his stress on his many official teachers, his memories of the whips they mounted on the wall in Lhasa to keep him in order, his turning to lamas in the crowd during public addresses to ask them for their more informed readings of a text all work to remind us that he’s a monk.

The very purpose of a monk, in any tradition, is to be an all but nameless cog inside a machine, precisely fixed within a hierarchy and committed to obedience to his practice, his seniors, and, most of all, the doctrine he’s given his life to. In Tibet this is all further complicated—or made obscure to us—by the system of incarnate lamas, which throws all notions of conventional hierarchy on their heads: when the Dalai Lama’s senior tutor during his formative years—the man he often calls his “best friend”—died in Dharamsala in 1983, a young boy was found some years later who was said to be the new incarnation of Ling Rinpoche. The result was that the Dalai Lama could be seen all but bowing before a very small toddler—and, at the same time, beginning to instruct him a little in certain of the doctrines in which he had been instructed himself by (Tibetans believe) the boy’s previous incarnation.

By reflex and training, therefore, the Dalai Lama is still as much student as teacher, and his intimates say that whenever he has a spare moment on the road, his favorite habit is to pull out a book of stories about the Buddha and read first the Tibetan commentaries and then the Indian. Outlining for me once his habit of “radical informality,” he confessed that he felt emboldened to practice it only because his senior tutor had watched him in action once and given him a kind of imprimatur. The radicalism of his lack of interest in ceremony and ritual arose out of some careful reasoning, the tutor felt, and so was not mere revolution for revolution’s sake. The leader of the Tibetans sounded, when he told me this, like nothing so much as a schoolboy told by an admiring teacher that he could study beyond the required texts and walk out of the school’s narrow bounds.

This absolute freedom in shaking up his philosophy, using exile as a way to reform Tibetan Buddhism from within, can be deceiving. The Fourteenth Dalai Lama has swept away a lot of the needless pomp and even feudalism encumbering Tibet in its past; he has allowed that a woman could quite possibly become the next Dalai Lama, “because of different circumstances” he has tried to dissolve many of the centuries-old divisions that separate one group of Tibetan Buddhist monks from another, often to the rage of other Tibetan leaders (he has in his own studies incorporated elements of Nyingma and Kagyu teaching traditionally at odds with his Gelug school, all in the interests of declaring that Tibet’s new mission is to put its petty differences behind it and join in some larger, global community). But this irreverence toward surfaces arises only, one feels, because he remains deeply rooted within. Textually, the Dalai Lama is a conservative, a sincere and wholehearted follower of the Buddhist doctrine, and very straight in his observance of what he calls the “original, classical, authentic teachings,” and here many of his admirers in the West, products of the rebellions of the 1960s and eager to be free of all the hierarchies and laws they associate with their own traditions, run quickly into a wall.

The Dalai Lama, for example, does not endorse homosexuality, because one old Buddhist text speaks out strictly against sexual penetration in the mouth or the anus (such was the state of thinking in those days that it said nothing about women). He deplores anyone who exercises prejudice against homosexuals on the grounds of their sexual orientation, but he feels that for him and his fellow monks, at least, the old laws have to be adhered to. A friend of mine, long a Tibetan Buddhist monk and sometime translator for the Dalai Lama, told me that a group of gays and lesbians held a meeting with the Dalai Lama once in San Francisco to raise the point with him. In fact, my friend (a Tibetan scholar) said, the famous injunction against oral or anal intercourse was a late addition to a text that spoke only against adultery; Tibetan Buddhism at its heart prescribed no such doctrine, which would exile male homosexuality. The Dalai Lama, true to form, said that if his friend could produce the text and show him in completely convincing scholarly terms that he had misjudged the old texts, he would certainly be open to changing his mind, but till then he could not go against the code he had inherited.