The Open Road (26 page)

Every year, just after the great celebration of the Tibetan New Year (which, because of the lunar calendar, generally falls in February or March), the Dalai Lama offers a set of spring teachings to reproduce Monlam, or the Great Prayer Festival, the highlight of the Tibetan calendar, which used to sweep across Lhasa in the old days. Great
thangka
s would be unscrolled across the massive white face of the Potala Palace, as many as ten thousand people would assemble to hear the Dalai Lama speak, and for sixteen days law and order would be placed in the uncertain hands of the
dob-dob
s, or soldier-monks of Drepung Monastery, five miles to the west. In Dharamsala, the teachings are the great event of the year; monks come from Bhutan and Nepal and Mongolia, from Korea and Taiwan and Italy and Tibet itself, to attend them, and laypeople from all the continents make a special effort to savor this great, almost unparalleled dose of the Tibetan leader. The rooms in many guesthouses are reserved more than a year in advance, e-mails fly across California asking for shared taxi rides from Delhi, movie stars wiggle out of important-seeming commitments to pursue what they regard as more pressing.

Every morning, the Dalai Lama comes out of his residence, surrounded by perhaps twenty or so others—senior monks, bodyguards, attendants, the spiritual head of the Mongolians (an ethnic Tibetan, as it happens), men carrying ceremonial scrolls and other objects—and takes a seat in front of his temple. As many as six thousand monks gather around him, many of them seated in a room on the second floor of the temple, able to follow him directly only by turning their backs to him and watching him speak on a TV screen. Hundreds of Tibetans sit on the ground, delighted just to be able to spend a fortnight within sight of their culture’s incarnation. At least two thousand other foreigners also push into the little space, and often the crowds are so intense that they spill out onto lower terraces and rooftops where the Dalai Lama is completely out of view, but his voice, carried on transistors and large radios, booms across the valley.

It’s quite a scene. Little girls in pink T-shirts—one says “Hello Kitty,” one says “Om”—cavort around one year, while the Dalai Lama speaks on “Stages of the Path” once more, and Tibetan or Mongolian families pass their thermoses around, cheerfully sharing their salted yak-butter tea with everyone nearby in the audience. A foreigner with Jesus locks falling down to his shoulders sits stock-still, eyes closed, hands extended before him in the lotus position. Since most foreigners follow the rarefied philosophical explanations in translation on little six-dollar radios equipped with earphones, a crackle of English and Russian and even Chinese sounds differently in every ear. The people who cannot find room inside the main courtyard sit somewhere else out in the sun, boom boxes blasting the teachings beside them.

Foreigners keep their places in the courtyard with little handwritten signs and sleeping bags, marking them out days before the teaching begins; male and female Indian and Tibetan security officers with rusted machines laboriously check every person each time he or she comes in after breakfast or after the lunch break. When the teachings adjourn, every afternoon around four-thirty, the paths and gulleys and slopes of Dharamsala run red with surging monks again; they stream between the flowering apple blossoms and mistletoe, and some of them head straight for the basketball court across from the Japanese, Thai, and Korean restaurants, for hard, slashing games in front of a graffiti-scribbled wall that could make anyone nostalgic for the Bronx (except that this wall says, “May Peace Prevail on Earth” and “Think Globally, Act Locally,” next to some mock–Keith Haring drawings).

In a certain light, the odd contradictions of the place, and our global order, become apparent. Tibetan monks do a lot of things that look strange to Western or Indian observers: they pull out their cell phones on the street, they cluster around Internet parlors, and, enjoying their time in what for them is the big city, away from their remote settlements, they pour into little cafés for big dinners. Much of the time, like young boys anywhere, they seem to be talking about girls and cars. Meanwhile, many of the foreigners on the same streets—attorneys from Santa Monica, fund-raisers from Toronto, former ad-agency executives from Germany, students and activists from Argentina—are waking up before dawn to meditate, devoting all their services free of charge to the Tibetans, and living as vegetarians, even as ascetics. I climb up to a meditation center between the pines one bright morning and see that the day’s schedule, neatly typed out, offers “Breakfast /Impermanence and Death /Suffering /Selflessness /Dinner /Equanimity.”

One afternoon I walk out of my guesthouse, toward the center of town, and think of how the settlement around me has become an unlikely model of the recent history of the world. It was set up, after all, by the British as a summer retreat for those administrators from far-off Britain trying to rule India. It was then left to the Indians, and in turn handed over to the Tibetans. Now it looks simultaneously like a ragged version of a nonexistent Tibet, a mini-Kathmandu, and an epicenter of low-budget globalism. An Indian hotel, eager to get into the spirit of the Tibetan holiday, has strung a large banner across Temple Road to commemorate the Tibetan New Year, known as “Losar.” The banner, placed just before the entrance to the Dalai Lama’s temple and compound, says, cheerfully and unfortunately, “Happy Loser.”

When I go into the Awasthi Cyber-Café, my daily haunt (needing to keep up with bosses across the world), it is to find almost all the twenty or so terminals being used, by travelers clicking away in Russian, Hebrew, Korean, and Japanese (one of them has a prized Webcam terminal and is accessing a sleepy friend in Tel Aviv). Beautiful
thangka
s from Ali Baba’s Treasures hang above the computers, and a group of friendly, sweatered Indians quietly tend to every need, bringing cups of tea to anyone who pays, expertly navigating the Web to try to get around the fact that you can’t access AOL, hurrying outside to start everything up again with a private generator when the electricity goes out across the valley.

As I wait the long, long minutes, stretching into hours, for the system to boot up, I notice that the man next to me (a Buddhist monk from Taiwan?) is receiving a message addressed to “Dear Ven. Tommy.” The Israeli girl on the other side of me is typing, “I am so happy we are going to be married.” An Internet café, especially in so remote a place as Dharamsala, is a collection of lost lives, or lives that seem very distant now, messages sent back and forth to new friends or loves you can hardly remember who, in their new (old) lives, can hardly remember you.

“I am not mean I want your money,” a Tibetan blade whose on-screen name is “smileyboy” has just typed; if the girl he’s wooing reads the message too quickly, I think, or is scrolling through messages in between appointments in her office above the Thames, she may see a dot after that “mean” and the whole message will be inverted, perfectly reversed. A distraught, somewhat disturbed-seeming woman is beseeching one of the polite Indian managers to help her type a message to her bank in New Zealand to authorize a cash transfer, and someone else is shouting into the phone on the desk (since the place doubles as a public call center). The photocopying machine is rolling off dozens of pages of sutras. Nearly all the messages I notice as people come and go around me—musical chairs—have to do with love or money, perhaps with the confusion between the two.

“I don’t feel comfortable with you,” a woman has written to the Indian who is now beside me. “Why did you fall in love with me so quickly? You must meet lots of foreign tourists. We are so different. I had a dream about you last night.”

Is he used to such challenges? Is this the first? Do his words come out so fluently because he means them or because he doesn’t and he’s used them all before? “Yes, darling, we are so different levels as you say. You are high-class, I am only high-school. But our lives are not all so different. Today there is sun on mountain and I think of you. Rododendron everywhere, blessings are there. When I look at the mountains I think of you, darling.”

Down the road, undisturbed by such age-old, universal exchanges, the center of the community sits, a little like a stupa on whom those walking around have stuck their plans, their hopes, their slogans or fashions of the moment. The last time I’d come here he had joked to me that Tibetans were teaching the local Indians “bad habits” by eating meat; now signs around the temple say, “To Be Healthy, Be Vegetarian” and “Please Stop Eating Us, You (Inhuman) Human Beings!” and he is encouraging those Tibetans who can do so to try to become vegetarians (he practices vegetarianism himself every other day, true to his Middle Way philosophy, having been forbidden by his doctors from practicing it entirely). He has also recently decided that his government should make no profit from any information it dispenses, and so videos, posters, pamphlets are offered at cost price at a little store in town, and you can buy a feature-length video for less than a dollar, and a thick book for fifty cents at one of the tables outside his teachings.

Dharamsala is a global community based on ideals and the possibility of pledging oneself to something better; but—of course—realities swim all around it, like sharks. In Tibet the Dalai Lama was an embodiment of an old culture that, cut off from the world, spoke for an ancient, even lost traditionalism; now, in exile, he is an avatar of the new, as if, having traveled eight centuries in just five decades, he is increasingly, with characteristic directness, leaning in, toward tomorrow.

 

It is the only thing we can do, Klaas, I see no alternative, each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.

—
ETTY HILLESUM,
on her way to her death, at twenty-nine, in Auschwitz

THE POLITICIAN

A
lmost the first thing the Dalai Lama had said when he came to Nara, addressing the local experts in the small conference room right after breakfast, was “The world is getting smaller. So, closer understanding between humanity is necessary. We need attitude of oneness of humanity. All world is one body.”

This had all sounded reasonable enough, though I had not been able to hold much confidence that humanity would rise to this sense of unity. “I believe,” he had gone on, “basic human nature is more gentleness. Our whole life, human affection is most important factor for our survival.” How better, I had thought, to approach a group of intellectuals?

And yet, fewer than nine weeks later, I was walking the streets of Beirut and taking in one of the most sophisticated and advanced communities the human mind has ever devised. Egyptians and Assyrians and Phoenicians and Greeks, Romans and Ottomans and French and British had been here, and after ten millennia of visitations, the city glittered with more urbanity than I had seen in Paris or New York, its people discussing the issues of the day—and philosophy, culture, history—in English and Arabic and French, with an intensity and charm I had seldom seen on any of my travels.

The result of all this history, though, was that 150,000 Beirutis had been killed in fifteen years of unrelenting civil war not very long before. Forty competing militia had run wild across a country half the size of Wales; Muslims had avenged themselves on other Muslims by attacking Christians, Syrians had joined Christians in fighting Palestinians and then joined Palestinians in fighting Christians. The governing logic of Beirut was, famously, the belief that “My enemy’s enemy is my friend,” not so very different from the complications of factionalism in old Tibet, where, favoring China over Britain, some people used to say, “Better an old adversary nearby than a new friend far away.”