The Open Road (20 page)

You can see all this in the way the Dalai Lama speaks. Monks tend to be sparing with their words, precise—few “um’s” and “er’s”—because they have cut away everything that is inessential and their words emerge from an abundant silence. Often the Dalai Lama will say nothing for what seems like minutes after I ask him something, and I can almost see him gathering himself and sorting through his mind to find the central principle.

He starts speaking slowly, usually, like a car in a residential neighborhood, and then gathers speed and continuity, as if accelerating onto the open highway, going back to develop points he’s made before, picking up new examples and facts, often returning after an hour or so to offer an addendum or ignoring my next question to go back and amplify his previous answer. (One time he even used driving as a good practical example of how all the book knowledge in the world does not help until we practice—and the more we practice driving, the less dangerous it will become.) The answers tend to be rich, fully paragraphed philosophical treatises, complete with subclauses and qualifications, and broken down almost visibly into points 1, 2, and 3; though they end, very often, in some comical example that sets him off on gusts of infectious laughter and, to some degree, brings us back to earth. Humor in the Dalai Lama arises, frequently, from setting the world around us against the lofty principles he’s just explained.

It’s no coincidence, I think, that the Dalai Lama is often photographed peering down a microscope in some foreign lab; as with most of the monks I know, he tends to bring a concentration to things that means a large part of him is living below the surface. Often I will take something he’s said to be almost a truism, solid and inert as it comes to me; but as soon as I go over my notes or start to think more about it, I realize that “the mind is its own master,” say, has special and rich implications for those who believe that the “mind” is something different from the self, and that mastery is a way of speaking of discipline and craft, as well as power, and that the very word “master” is the same word often used for the Buddha. A student at the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics, next to the Dalai Lama’s house, one of its teachers told me, spends two years studying just four lines written by Tsong Kha Pa. He then spends the next four years on a single phrase.

When someone like the Dalai Lama says—as he constantly does, in a brisk, unhesitating way—“Impossible!” or “Impractical!” or “No problem!” or “Not important!” what he is really doing is refusing to be distracted, and reminding us what is central. And when he goes to meetings with practitioners of other religions, he’s not just taking in the latest discussions and techniques in the field but also becoming a deeper Buddhist, as he said in Vancouver, by talking to a Christian. Reading Saint John’s account of the meeting between Mary Magdalene and Jesus after the Resurrection, talking on the parable of the mustard seed and the Transfiguration before a group of Christians in London, the Dalai Lama moved many of his listeners to tears, even as he constantly, carefully, stressed that Christianity and Buddhism were not just different ways of explaining the same truth, and that to try to combine them was like trying “to put a yak’s head on a sheep’s body.”

Indeed, even though all monks are committed to the same task, deep down—as doctors or hospital construction workers are—the details of their practice are as different as their wildly divergent times and cultures. A Christian generally longs to be rooted in the home he’s found in God; the Buddhist, more concerned with uncovering potential, is more interested in experiments and inquiries, always pushing deeper. In fact, Christianity works from very uncertain beginnings toward a specific end (redemption and a life with God); Buddhism starts with something very specific (the Buddha and the reality of suffering he saw) and moves toward an always uncertain future (even after one has attained Nirvana). The image of the open road speaks for a perpetual becoming.

In either case, though, the monk aspires to bring the perspective of his silence into the chatter of the world, looking past events to all that lies behind them. Thus, when terrorists attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, the Dalai Lama lost no time in sending a letter of commiseration to George W. Bush and his people, and he did the same on the first anniversary of the attack. Yet he also took pains, true to his principles, to say that everything has a cause, and that nothing will be resolved until the fundamental cause is taken care of. Simply to respond to violence with violence is like hitting a man in a hospital; he is unlikely to act kindly until he is made better. On the first anniversary of the attack, he reminded the U.S. president that in a world of flux, “today’s enemies are often tomorrow’s allies.”

A doctor’s religion may not be important, but which teacher he studied under is often of great importance, and the Dalai Lama always stresses the depth of his debt to Ling Rinpoche (“an acute philosopher with a sharp logical mind and a good debater with a phenomenal memory”) and, even more, of the closeness with which he attends to the figure he sometimes calls his boss. “As followers or students of this great teacher,” he told the American Buddhist magazine
Tricycle,
in 2001, speaking of the Buddha, “we should take his life as a model. His sacrifice—leaving his palace and remaining in the forest for six years. He worked hard to be enlightened. When the Buddha started his teachings, he considered his audience’s mentality, their mental disposition, then accordingly found teachings.” It was hard, reading these words, not to think that the man delivering them had himself been forced to quit his palace in his twenties; had worked, day and night, for fifty years to try to bring light to a tangled situation; and, when he appeared in public, was famous for being able somehow to communicate with small children, grandparents, atheists and Christians alike.

Whenever I read about the Buddha’s life, in fact, I felt a strange frisson of déjà vu, uncanny, which made sense only when I recalled that I had been watching someone who traveled so carefully in his footsteps. It was as if the Buddha, walking along his road, had left signs and messages for those who came after, to advise them how to get over that high gate, or which was the best way to get around the large boulder in the middle of the road. Everyone ended up taking his own, slightly different route, but the aim, as much as moving forward, was to offer what you had learned to those coming after. Once you have crossed the river, in the Buddha’s favorite example, you can leave the raft behind. And Tibetan Buddhists, true to this idea of progress, believe that there are fourteen fundamental questions (“Are the self and the universe eternal? Are the self and the universe transient?”) that even the Buddha left unanswered, for those who came after to take on.

One of the striking things about Siddhartha Gautama was that after coming upon his enlightenment under the pipal tree, he had no wish to spread his discoveries, since he didn’t feel confident that they would be of use or interest to anyone else; the essence of his teaching, famously, was “Be lamps unto yourselves” and “Seek no refuge but yourself.” But when he became convinced that there might be some virtue in talking of his own experience, he spent the last forty-five years of his life ceaselessly traveling across the Gangetic plain, among the new cities that were coming up there in a time of flux that also brought, as one biographer, Karen Armstrong, writes, a sense of “spiritual hunger.” Although he engaged in public debates, he repeatedly shied away from cosmic questions as distractions, perhaps, from the main concern.

“Forget about next life,” I once heard the Dalai Lama say on a tape as I was browsing in a bookshop within his temple. “This very life should be useful to others. If not, at least no harm.”

“I do not give knowledge,” the Buddha said. “If you can believe anything, you get caught in that belief or distraction.” Zen monks, famously, took this distrust of images to such an extreme that they burned Buddhas to keep themselves warm in winter and said, “If you meet the Buddha along the road, you must kill the Buddha.”

The correspondences between the teacher and his far-off student were sometimes so startling that I did not know whether to call them coincidence or continuity or a mixture of the two. The Buddha is said to have had his first moment of insight when his nursemaids left him alone as they went to watch an annual ceremonial plowing of the field and he noticed that some young grasses had been torn up for the ceremony, destroying insects and their eggs. No television interviewer who has seen the Dalai Lama break off an answer because he’s noticed a bird falling to the ground outside and wants to tend to it will be surprised. When the Buddha practiced austerities, all he achieved, in the dry accounting of Karen Armstrong (once a nun herself, and now a scholar of religions), “was a prominent rib cage and a dangerously weakened body.” When the Dalai Lama tried to become a vegetarian for twenty months around 1965, he contracted hepatitis B and almost died, his doctors telling him, as his mother had done, that his Himalayan constitution could not survive without meat. The Buddha is said to have cried out in pity when he heard of a yogic master who had spent twenty years learning to walk on water (he could just have taken a ferry and used his energies for something else); the Dalai Lama has said that “the best thing is not to use” any magic powers, not least, perhaps, because they take most of us away from what is more sustaining.

Even Thomas Merton, during his visit, was struck by how “always and everywhere the Dalai Lama kept insisting on the fact that one could not attain anything in the spiritual life without total dedication, continued effort, experienced guidance, real discipline.” In later years, however, the Dalai Lama has begun talking even more about “hard work,” “determination,” the importance of not giving up. Indeed, it’s not uncommon to see tears come to his eyes, even in a huge arena, when he speaks of the Tibetan poet-saint Milarepa, say, meditating and meditating for years in a cave, or of any of the great Tibetan figures who almost killed themselves in their exertions. (I remembered how a tear had come into his eye even when Hiroko once said that she had tried, really hard, to learn from his books, but it was difficult.)

One other thing moved him to tears, even in public, I heard from an American monk who had been living in the Dalai Lama’s monastery for twenty years. That was when someone asked, during a public address, “What is the quickest, easiest, cheapest way to attain enlightenment?” And, the Californian monk went on, “these days in the West there’s nearly always someone who asks that question.”

Every monk is the same monk, in that he is working to dissolve himself, in part by surrendering to something larger; and every monk is a radical, insofar as he works from the root (
radix
in Latin). For the Buddhist, though, this has especial truth, since his first concern is the interior landscape, where awareness or its obscuration lies; faith for him is really self-confidence, and prayer a form of awakening latent energies.

The Dalai Lama is in these respects truly just another monk, “a little bit anxious,” as he confessed to me, when he has to give a talk before senior monks, many of whom have much more time for study than he does, and obliged to spend months doing “a lot of homework.” He comes to important meetings in flip-flops (for interviews he generally sheds his shoes and sits cross-legged in his chair, sometimes holding his interlocutor’s hand), and when he’s backstage at a modern theater, I have seen, he eagerly cross-questions technicians as to how the lights work. “Utilize modern facilities,” is his practical position, “but try to develop a right kind of attitude.” It seems apt that he has a remarkable memory for dates and faces, but is altogether less good with names.

It’s a happy aspect of his circumstances that he takes as his political model a Hindu (Gandhi), works very closely with many Christians (Tutu, Václav Havel, Jimmy Carter), and lives in a country (India) that has the world’s second-largest Muslim population. Many of the scientists he collaborates with may pride themselves on having no religion at all. Yet even as he has made dissolving distinctions his life’s work, he is careful not to speak for a “world religion,” if only because we need different approaches and different languages, as it were, to deal with the different kinds of people there are in the world. “Sometimes,” I heard him say in Europe, “people, in order to have closer relations [with other traditions], stress only the positive things. That’s wrong! We have to make clear what are the fundamental differences.” In almost the next sentence, though, he added that whenever he saw an image of the Virgin Mary, he was moved: which human being does not have a mother?