The Open Road (16 page)

As I watched him carry all this around from Harvard to Japan, for thirty years, part of what intrigued me was seeing him almost visibly gathering evidence everywhere he went as he noticed how different parts of his teachings hit home or distracted, how they got misunderstood or in some cases distorted, and constantly adjusted his approach accordingly. He took, as the years went on, to urging more and more foreigners not to abandon their own traditions and become Buddhists (if only because he had seen by then what misunderstandings could arise); he often downplayed meditation in the West, maybe because he felt that it was one of those exciting and even exotic techniques that could take people away from their everyday responsibilities and the need for simple mindfulness and kindness. When he did talk of meditation, he always stressed the hard work involved rather than what he called “mystical gifts.” He also began warning foreigners more and more against Tibetan lamas and teachers who, perhaps, were practicing a “crazy wisdom” amid newcomers who did not have a context for distinguishing craziness from wisdom. I once told Ngari Rinpoche that I’d heard that many Chinese were studying under Tibetan lamas. “They’ll get disenchanted soon enough” was the Dalai Lama’s younger brother’s characteristic response. “Unfortunately, it’s often the same old story.”

It was a register of his confidence and the trust he had won that the Dalai Lama seemed to feel increasingly comfortable telling foreign audiences exactly what they didn’t want to hear; yet I sometimes recalled how even the Buddha, by some accounts, had not always been able to determine or affect all that was said and done in his name. For five centuries after his death, people by and large respected his wish that no images of him be created (because images take us away from his teachings and, besides, imply that he was something more than a regular human who is moving and inspiring precisely because of that humanness). When he was depicted, it was sometimes as a footstep (walking along the open road), sometimes as a tree (offering us shade—and reminding us of where he found enlightenment), sometimes even as a wheel (the wheel of Dharma teachings rolling along the Eight-Fold Path).

Yet when Buddhism reached the edges of Asia—became, you could say, the victim of its own popularity—it found its way into the hands of Greek statue makers, who started to depict the Buddha’s own face (which looked strikingly similar, in their renditions, to Apollo’s). Later, Chinese craftsmen added a crown to the head. By now there are so many giant Buddhas in so many temples—starting with Todaiji, in Nara, which I had visited with the Dalai Lama—that it may be hard to recall that the Buddha was speaking, more than anything, for the illusion of form and the impermanence of everything, not least the human figure.

“We Tibetans are not real Buddhists,” Ngari Rinpoche said one morning as I took my place on his terrace and he served me tea, along with a plate of cookies. “Too many spirits, too many deities. We’re always looking for something outside ourselves to come to the rescue. That’s not Buddhism.”

“But it’s human,” I replied. “You can’t expect people to live without prayers or talismans of some kind. We may be high-minded in theory and talk of clinging to nothing at all, but in practice people need something to help them through their fears.” I recalled how the Dalai Lama himself had told me that, twice, as a child he had been so frightened in the dark that he’d seen a cat jumping across the room (later, when he’d checked the cats nearby, he’d realized they were all of a different color).

“But that’s not Buddhism. I think there should be a police force to go into all these organizations, all the Tibetan centers around the world, and take care of the ones who are encouraging this.” I could see from his smile what was coming next. “And I would like to be the one to volunteer for the job!”

He broke into a huge, infectious explosion of laughter that set his body shaking—the very laugh that his older brother had made famous around the world. Tibetan Buddhism often balances Avalokitesvara, the god of compassion, with Manjushri, the god of wisdom, generally depicted with a sword raised in order to slash through our illusions. Kindness without wisdom is sometimes no kindness at all.

“But it wasn’t so different in Tibet many centuries ago. It’s no different in Japan—or Thailand, or any Buddhist country. Even in India, where the Buddha came from.”

“But we Tibetans are the worst offenders,” he said, not ready to be placated; the other man’s grass is always less polluted. “We have all these
puja
s, these rituals, but we don’t know the meaning of Lord Buddha. We can’t say we’re Buddhists.”

He looked at me in the quiet morning, his eyes holding mine while I thought of a response. High above the valley, we could hear barely a sound from the road below. A piece of paper rustled in the wind, and I reached for one of the cookies on the plate.

“It’s good to sway,” he said in a very different voice, much gentler, so that I recalled that devil’s advocacy was part of his self-created job description. “Next time you see me, I’ll be doing or saying something completely different. Everything’s always changing, always moving. That piece of paper, you, me, this terrace—nothing is the way it was even a second ago.”

While we spoke, scientists at Berkeley and Princeton and Wisconsin and elsewhere—as the Dalai Lama had told the academics in Nara—were working on a series of experiments, conducted over decades now and reported on in
Nature
and
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
and many other of the most respected scientific journals, that, remarkably, suggested that the wildest stories passed on by Alexandra David-Neel were not so wild after all. Senior monks and seasoned meditators really could dry wet sheets in less than an hour, experimenters had found, and resist the coldest temperatures just through the force of their meditation. One monk had reduced the rhythm of his heart to an almost unimaginable five beats a minute, and brain scans showed, visibly and quantifiably, how certain monks had reached levels of calm and self-possession that were, quite literally, off the charts.

Meditation was now being taught at West Point—perhaps as a result of what had been conclusively proven about how it could contribute to both health and composure; the findings of such researchers had been featured on the cover of my longtime employer,
Time
magazine. An issue of the
Harvard Law Review,
of all things, had been devoted to the practice of sitting in one place and stilling the mind. The Dalai Lama, in fact, seemed to be stressing science more and more as the twenty-first century began, perhaps because—again—it offered to take us out of a domain where one side of the world used the Koran to justify terrible acts of violence, while another used the Bible. The “essencelessness” that quantum mechanics stresses, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the very way relativity and quantum mechanics dissolve the separation of subject and object—all were ideas he felt should be intrinsic to a Tibetan monastic curriculum.

In a curious way, in fact, globalism was supporting some of the principles of Buddhism, as much as the other way round. Fifty years ago, an American visiting a village in Tibet might have been taken to be a magician, even a sorcerer, if he had pulled out a Polaroid and snapped a picture then and there, or produced a tape recorder and played back to the villagers the sound of their own voices. And they, in turn, might have seemed to be uncanny fakirs or wonder workers if they had showed the American how they could reduce their oxygen consumption by 64 percent in deep meditation, or bring down their entire metabolism. These days, what had once looked like a miracle just seemed to be a particular capacity of the mind or body developed unusually intensely, and Tibetans could see that it wasn’t magic—only real life and training—when they turned on their TVs and watched Olympic sprinters running at nearly twenty-three miles an hour, or Carl Lewis jumping over the equivalent of a nine-yard pond.

When William James, then a Harvard professor, went to research various mediums on behalf of the American Society for Psychical Research, he confessed that he found the investigation of these seeming charlatans “a loathsome occupation” and (as he put it later) “a strange and in many ways disgusting experience.” As a hardened empiricist and a lifelong student of chemistry, comparative anatomy, and physiology, James rejoiced whenever one of the mystics popular in his day was exposed as a fake, her secret doors revealed.

Yet, as a serious scientist, James was committed to keeping his mind open and drawing no conclusions that could not be fully supported. This left him at a loss when, on at least one occasion, a dozen visits and all the protocols of research failed to find a flaw in a medium he inspected.

“I have hitherto felt,” he wrote a friend of his father’s, “as if the wonder-mongers and magnetic physicians and seventh sons of seventh daughters and those who gravitated towards them by magical affinity were a sort of intellectual vermin. I now begin to believe that that type of mind takes hold of a range of truths to which the other kind is stone blind.” This new feeling left him “all at sea,” he confessed, “with my old compass lost, and no new one” to replace it. To a Buddhist it would just mean that a form of ignorance had been removed; the “wildest dreams of Kew,” as Kipling put it around the same time, “are the facts of Khathmandhu.”

Two hours east of the Dalai Lama’s home in Dharamsala, passing along small country roads running between trees and tea plantations, the snowcaps shining brilliant in the blue skies above, I turned one day off the narrow main road and onto an even rougher path, which gave onto a hidden valley of sorts. Houses were clustered on a ridge halfway up the slope, and in a moment I had left India behind and was in a country of whitewashed houses with the golden turrets of a temple looking over them. I got out of the car in a dusty courtyard and followed a path along the slope to a temple with a front courtyard perhaps the size of a kindergarten playground.

Old Tibetan women were already sitting on the ground in front of the courtyard—though it was barely eight a.m.—and the prayer halls were full of young monks bustling about and running hither and thither. Visitors began to assemble from all around the area, till soon the space around the courtyard was completely packed, and newcomers had to peer over three or four heads to see what was going on.

The answer to that inquiry was that Tashi Jong Temple, home to a group from the Kagyu order, whose head is the young Karmapa, was holding an annual “lama dance” that makes the hidden forces of Tibetan Buddhism manifest and gripping over the course of eight days. Very soon the courtyard was full of lamas from the temple moving their arms and legs in a highly choreographed, very slow dance. The rhythm was almost hypnotic—the opposite of dramatic—and all the ready smiles and air of improvised jollity that surround a traditional performance of Tibetan folk dancing or opera were absent. Every gesture held a precise meaning, and the whole ceremony was at once a kind of exorcism and a petition to certain gods.