The Open Road (9 page)

I looked at Ebadi, sitting firmly in her chair, and recalled how she had, at times, in protecting dissidents, uncovered lists of troublemakers to be assassinated on which her own name featured prominently; death threats were her daily bread. And I saw the Dalai Lama craning forward in his seat and picking out faces in the crowd, and recalled that he was still traveling, after almost fifty years, on the yellow identity certificate of a refugee. Prayer, I recalled reading in Emerson—and it was perhaps the best definition I had met—is merely “the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view.”

The very notion of a “spiritual celebrity” is an odd one, of course, and yet in a world where celebrity is ever more a global currency, the spiritual celebrity is the one who can actually change the coin of the realm into something more precious or sustaining. All three of the visitors were here because they refused to turn away from the clatter and commotion that is the real and daily world; and yet all three were also here because they were determined to find in that clatter the seed or outline of something more worthwhile. Their job now was to give this audience a human, living sense of contact that no audience could get from a screen (the crowd, after all, had been waiting for this day for months); and yet they had to leave behind them something that would outlast them, and maybe help people return to the clatter and commotion a little differently, in part by seeing how they could change the world by changing the way they looked at the world.

After Tutu has sat down, the president of the university comes up to the podium and reads from a prepared statement. “There is no one in our society today,” she intones, “who represents love, compassion, and altruism as much as the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.” Then she invites him to step forward. A fairly routine formulation, I think, but what moves me is that “our”: if the Dalai Lama has some relevance to those in Vancouver, it will come only if they see him as part of their world and he sees them as part of his. Precisely, in fact, the kind of connection that was impossible when Tibet was set behind the highest mountains on earth, a fantasy place for most of us, and full of people who perhaps saw the rest of us as not quite real.

The Tibetan steps to the front of the stage and offers a few words in English, always a handy way of at once putting his listeners at ease and reminding them, with his uncertain grammar, that he’s just one of us, no different. Then he says, “I need a walking stick for my broken English,” and summons to his side his translator for the session, a famously learned Tibetan scholar and philosopher, with doctorates from both Tibetan institutes and Cambridge, who now lives in Canada, trying to bring Tibet to the world and vice versa. “So long as space remain, so long as sentient being remain,” the Dalai Lama says in English, invoking his favorite prayer, from the eighth-century Indian philosopher Shantideva, “I will remain, to serve.”

“I believe that,” he continues. “That is my fundamental view. This is not holistic view; this is selfish view. Because thinking about others, I feel tremendous satisfaction. Serving others, best way get one’s own deep satisfaction. In realistic way, I try to promote human values.”

“Realism” again, I think. And complex ideas broken down into simple building blocks, as in a child’s construction kit (the Dalai Lama loved playing with Meccano sets as a boy in the Potala). In the five minutes he has, he must try to give the audience something practical and clear enough that people can both remember it and take it home.

He speaks then, as ever, of his new favorite theme, of how Buddhism can offer something, perhaps, to “cognitive science and the study of consciousness,” and the fact that certain properties of mind and the emotions do not belong to his tradition but, tests are showing, to all mankind. We see a rope in our room and take it to be a snake, the Tibetans say, and we are terrified; but as soon as we look more clearly and see that it is just a rope, all our fears are calmed. Our terrors are of our own creation. The world itself is not so frightening, if only we can see it correctly. Then he speaks of his old friend Tutu.” I have only one difference,” he says, turning around to beam at the beaming archbishop. “Creator! But, same aim.” The audience is transparently won over by a transparent sincerity and lack of shadow: just one man obviously speaking from the heart, with no apparent wish to sell any position or philosophy, let alone himself.

Yet what strikes me as much as the matter of the speech is its manner. The Dalai Lama begins his sentences in English, often, with “So, therefore,” as if to double-knot his propositions in a tight sequence of cause and effect. At the same time, he often ends his sentences with “That’s my view” or “That I really believe,” as if to acknowledge that this is only his thinking, not absolute truth. His sentences are crowded with careful qualifiers—“generally,” “perhaps,” “I think”—much as, in normal conversation, he always cites dates, and, on one occasion, making a small claim for Buddhism, he scrupulously offered me seven “maybe’s” in a single answer. The words he returns to over and over, I notice again, are “calm,” “sincere,” “healthy,” and “authentic,” and two of the words he also uses constantly are “heartfelt” and “unbiased,” as if, once more, to tell us that he seeks scientific objectivity, but not at the expense of the human heart.

He also seems to be reverting often, this particular day, to the New Agey word “holistic,” which someone must have told him is the best way to capture the central Buddhist idea that everything is interconnected and nothing has an independent existence. It may be the right word for the idea, but still it sounds strange from a man who regularly writes off the New Age as lacking in rigor. “Wholeism” is really what he’s talking about.

His translator, after twenty years of collaboration, conveys the few words of Tibetan into English very fluently, a small figure with almost crew-cut hair next to his bulky boss. As a onetime monk and professional philosopher, he knows how to keep up with the sometimes intricate and rarefied ideas behind the simple words. As he does so, the Dalai Lama, as in Nara, peers around the room, almost visibly taking notes, then looks up, with conspicuous eagerness, at the ceiling, for all the world like a small boy suddenly finding himself in a natural history museum. At one point, though, as the translator is speaking of “conversations with scientists,” the Dalai Lama breaks in quickly and I see that he has been paying attention all along. “No,” he says briskly. “Dialogues!” It is, I gather, an important term for him.

In Tibet, and among Tibetans around the world, not least in his exile home of Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama is revered as a god, quite literally; every shop in Dharamsala has at its center a framed picture of him, and even the most renegade Tibetans, jiving before Western girls to the latest song from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, grow silent, almost teary-eyed, if asked about the Dalai Lama (who is, to some extent, their homeland, as well as their faith and their sense of self). In the Tibetan community the Dalai Lama still officially settles every institutional dispute, has ordained a whole generation of monks, and carries such ritual authority that even the most cocky, Columbia-educated Tibetan kids (I have seen) are too nervous to translate for him and reflexively bow their bodies before him, as subjects used to do before kings. In exile, more than ever, he’s the Tibetans’ main external asset.

But in the larger world the Dalai Lama is merely an icon, a secular divinity of sorts, and for that there is less precedent. The Dalai Lama remains intensely pragmatic about the uses the world makes of him—if it helps people to use his smiling face as a screen saver, he says, or if it does some substantial good to broadcast his speeches on the dance floors of London discos, then let them use him or anything that is “beneficial” beyond a point he can’t control the ideas people have of him or the hopes they bring to him, and a physician’s job is to try to offer help wherever he is needed. Still, one effect of this is that he offers forewords even to books about young Tibetans’ impatience with his policies and, as one close friend asserts, “answers questions he shouldn’t answer.”

It might almost, I sometimes think, be a kind of riddle that people of this kind pose for us: how much will we respond to their essence, the changeless core of what they are saying, and how much will we merely read them through the keyhole of our own priorities? I remember, in my own case, being moved and humbled, meeting him the day after his Nobel Prize had been announced, when the Dalai Lama spoke to me as openly and directly as if we were equals, not even stopping to remove any barrier between us, as if he seemed to see none. But the incident I probably spoke of more widely that year was his fifty-fourth birthday party in the hills of Malibu, a few months earlier, when mortals like me got to stand for hours next to such figures of glamour as Cindy Crawford and Tina Chow. Everyone we meet we tend to cast in the light of our own tiny concerns.

As I watch the Dalai Lama and Tutu proceed out from the large auditorium and follow them into a small room nearby where they will be conducting two TV interviews (with Ebadi, also) for consumption across Canada, I cannot help but notice how they speak for the “same aim” but in radically different voices. Tutu uses the whole register of his rolling, musical voice in English to call upon powers hidden in the language that bring Shakespeare in union with the King James Bible; he gets the audience to move in by making his voice very soft, and then he steadily raises the volume so we climb and climb with him. The Dalai Lama speaks, especially in English, much more slowly and carefully, in precise, rounded phrases, as if offering the stones out of which he’s built his thinking. Tutu is a figure of jokes and flights, of silvery expansiveness and shine, and the effect of listening to him, as he repeats and repeats phrases, is of seeing light stream through a stained-glass window; the Dalai Lama speaks as logician more than as poet and (true to his Buddhist principles) offers statements that seem almost simplistic until you dig beneath each word to see the reasoning behind it.

And yet the biggest difference between the two visitors, at this point in history, is simply that they’re standing on opposite sides of the struggles they stand for. Archbishop Tutu’s task is to some extent over; his battle has been won. Thanks to his efforts, and those of Nelson Mandela and many others in South Africa and outside, apartheid has been lifted, and although the violence and danger and confusion in the country may at times be even worse than before, the outside world has done its bit to put power back in the hands of the majority. So when he goes up to the podium, what he says is “Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.” Thanks to those in Canada and elsewhere, he says, South Africa is celebrating its tenth anniversary of freedom a week from now. It’s hard not to glow when such a dignified man offers thanks.

The Dalai Lama, by contrast, is saying, “Please.” Please help my people in Tibet even though you may seem to lose the support of the world’s largest nation in the short term. Please rise to your highest selves in seeing that responsibility is an assertion of enlightened self-interest. Please try to see that if you think we really inhabit a global universe, then your welfare depends on that of Tibet, as much as its welfare depends on you.

No one likes to hear a plea, especially from a guest, and least of all from a man she likes and respects; the natural impulse is to look past the plea to the liking and respecting (especially if that man seems so in command of himself and his philosophy that it’s easy to imagine he can help you much more than you can help him). The very fact that the Dalai Lama tells the world he needs it moves many in the world to assume that he must, in fact, be above it.

And yet, for all these underlying strains, it’s touching to see the Dalai Lama with his old friend and colleague, relaxed, perhaps, and playful, as we can only be when in the company of someone who knows what we are up against and shares our aims. As the TV interviews proceed, I notice how the Tibetan chooses examples that are as unexpected as they are precise: in arguing how force can sometimes be used for the good, he cites the Korean War, which he followed in his teens, suddenly thrown into a full-time struggle with China; and in mentioning how there are practical ways of improving the world, he cites the rivers of Stockholm, where marine life was once dead and now fish are everywhere. Coming to places like Vancouver, I realize, is how he refines and updates his observation of the world.