The Open Road (29 page)

“When we arrived here,” the TYC vice president told me, with a lawyer’s articulate ease, “our aim was to settle down, to settle down the refugees. Now, after forty-five years, we have settled down. Now is the time to act!” Almost everything in Tibet in exile had been a step forward, in ways people could hardly have dared expect; in a climate, terrain, and nation very foreign to their own the Tibetans had not just re-created and reinvigorated their old institutions and principles—reforming them in the process—they had also prospered and kept up their ties worldwide, to the point where the
Economist,
never fulsome in its praise, had called theirs “by far the most serious” government in exile in the world. Yet in the same forty years, everything in Tibet itself had been dismantled and suppressed in ways beyond most people’s imaginings. And the relatively successful exile community had been unable to do very much at all for its imprisoned cousins back home.

In some ways, the sense of hopelessness and powerlessness that resulted could almost have paralleled or been quickened by the way that all the world raced to offer the Dalai Lama its respect and affection, its open ears, but very few in power did much to help him. “Here we are,” Yeshi said, “the TYC was organized thirty-five years ago, but we still haven’t achieved what we’re looking for. We haven’t achieved even one government recognizing us. So frustration is there, anger is there.” And beyond even that, a cutting sense of displacement conveyed by the fact that he was saying all this in English, and in cadences that were distinctly Indian.

“Everyone always says China is trying to Sinicize us,” he went on. “But, in fact, we are ourselves being Indianized. We speak Hindi, we eat Indian food, we watch Indian movies. We are like Indians with Tibetan faces.” Since Washington had opened the door to a thousand Tibetan refugees in 1991, more and more young Tibetans were setting their sights on the New World. They told their friends (perhaps they told themselves) that they could do more for Tibet by going to America, the center of power, by getting rich and telling the world about the situation in their homeland; but the suspicion lingered that, in reality, the very process of getting rich would prevent them from thinking about their homeland, and soon they would become just Tibetan-Americans, and then maybe even Americans.

“We’ve achieved something here,” Yeshi said as we sipped from two silver tumblers of tea, “but it’s mostly because of the hard work our parents have done. They have done everything. They have set up schools, they have educated us. Most of the Tibetans are well-off, comfortably settled, sometimes too comfortable.” In some ways, the implication went, the very success of the Tibetan exile enterprise had made Tibetans in places like Dharamsala too prosperous, too distracted by the opportunities of the wider world, too ready to forget those suffering in Tibet itself. They needed, Yeshi told me (echoing in more forceful terms what the Dalai Lama always said), to take more responsibility, to rise to the opportunities of democracy, and to show their devotion to their leader by actually sharing some of the load with him.

And the more Yeshi spoke, the more I could see what lay beneath all the reasoning and the careful dialectics, and what only increased as the years went on. “We’re human beings,” he said. “We have lost our homeland; we have seen our forefathers killed. Even if you find us smiling, laughing along, deep down the frustration is there. We’re not carrying our political life. China should be grateful to the Dalai Lama.” His eyes began to flash, a little as Lhasang Tsering’s had done. “They call him a separatist, a splittist, but if the Dalai Lama weren’t there, the Tibetan struggle would have taken a different turn.”(The vehemence in his voice left me in no doubt as to what kind of turn that would have been.)

“The Chinese say we’re savages,” he said, “we’re nothing, we aren’t a civilization. They say we badly need them. But in the last forty-five years we have shown we can really come up, and build a civilization. Even in exile.” It was a variation, beneath the words, on what I heard so often in Dharamsala, a variation on the human, Beiruti response: His Holiness asks us to extend forgiveness and tolerance, but how can we forgive those who have slaughtered our families? We are not monks or saints.

Yeshi himself, like the other three top executives of the Youth Congress, lived on the far side of the country from his wife and children, to bring his eloquence and persuasiveness to the Tibetan cause; his father and two brothers were among the five thousand or so Tibetans fighting for the Indian army, risking their lives to repay their debt to their hosts. But all these sacrifices had not borne visible fruit.

“Today,” he said, and this was the closest he came, really, to criticizing his leaders’ assumptions, “the world has taken Tibet as a bargaining chip, a guinea pig. To try an experiment, to try out a new notion of world peace.” But the part that was sacrificed to make this gamble possible was Tibet itself. “If I tell you you are a very good human being—kind, philanthropic,” Yeshi said (and I heard in his voice the echo of all that the rest of the world says to Tibet, as to Shangri-La), “it may hurt you; it may damage your cause. It’s a good experiment, but not for us.”

This could never be a purely theoretical issue for the Dalai Lama. Every month brought new refugees out of Tibet and into Dharamsala, and when they saw him, as I had witnessed, the very tears in their eyes, the hopes they placed on him, not only reminded him of his responsibilities but also asked a silent question: how can you continue exercising patience and extending trust when we are seeing everything torn apart around us? In this way, too, the small town looked like a Buddhist parable, the kind of story a grandfather might tell the children at his knee: a monk sits in his small house, devoting hours a day to thinking about peace, understanding, kindness, and the other hours to trying to make these workable within the unforgiving context of Realpolitik. And every day at his gates people gather—the very people it is his first priority to serve—asking him, in effect, to forswear his first monastic vows (which call for nonviolence, honesty, and celibacy), to give up his devotion to the Buddha’s example, to act not in the there and then but in the here and now. Tibet, Yeshi had implied, was giving the entire world a shining example of forgiveness, while the people who were most intimately affected by it were raging, often, at the inaction.

As a Buddhist, the Dalai Lama, I knew, could never step down from his root principles; but as a Tibetan, surely, it could not be easy for him to look at the short-term consequences of what his policy was doing.

The heart of the conundrum, again, seemed to lie in the fact that the Dalai Lama served two constituencies—his own people and the world—and the smaller group and the larger often pulled him in opposite directions. The more he gave himself to the world, sometimes, the more his own people felt, as Yeshi had implied, like natural children bewildered by the fact that their father has adopted three others. The old among the exiled Tibetans clung to the Dalai Lama, to the temple, to the rites they had grown up with, as if to magic their old country into reexistence, but the young, taking the Dalai Lama at his word—that Tibetans should learn to be more modern, more practical, more concerned—came to him with the cries of Beirut. Even in old Tibet, some had been heard to mutter, “Too much religion, too little politics,” in claiming that the huge monasteries, by hanging on to the old ways and refusing to adapt to the modern world, as the Thirteenth Dalai Lama had urged, had lost their country.

The larger world wanted the Dalai Lama to be something more than a politician—to be, in effect, a wise man, sitting above all nation-states and offering global counsel. At the annual teachings in Dharamsala, foreigners from every continent gathered for day after long day, fending off germs and rainstorms and surging crowds to hear him explain a complex text on the nature of suffering. But one year, the day after the teachings concluded, the Dalai Lama came out at the same time to the same courtyard to deliver his annual state-of-the-nation address, on Tibetan Uprising Day, March 10, and nearly all the foreigners of the day before were gone. It was mostly Tibetans who were standing in the rain as a small marching band from the Tibetan Children’s Village banged drums and unfurled the snow lion and the mountains of the outlawed Tibetan flag, while their leader offered his political assessment of their situation.

How to be global and local at once? Both Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi had in some ways concentrated on helping, even saving, their people as a way to inspire—and perhaps save—the world; but in the Tibetan situation, again, the clock was less indulgent. If the Dalai Lama offered a new vision for the global century just dawning, he was essentially addressing a century in which Tibet as we knew it no longer existed.

All of us live in two worlds at once, the Dalai Lama writes in his book on Buddhism and its correspondences with science,
The Universe in a Single Atom.
There is the world of “conventional reality,” in which each of us scuttles along with his own particular direction and character and destiny, and, beneath all that, there is the realm of “ultimate reality,” in which the chaos of human affairs is seen from a different perspective, behind the surface, and all the individual lives and movements become nothing more than nodes within an all-encompassing network. The conventional eye accepts the reality that China and Tibet do indeed have different traditions, customs, and languages, and that each has a very different destiny; the ultimate eye sees that Chinese and Tibetans are not so different in their basic human instincts, their longing to be happy, their eagerness to avoid pain.

The Dalai Lama’s hope was to bring some of the light and clarity of the monk’s domain, “ultimate reality,” into the politician’s world of conventional reality; to be able, in effect, to stage a kind of Copernican revolution by getting us to see that the world does not revolve around the self, but the other way round. It was as if, seeing the forest through the trees, seeing the pattern and order, the possibility within the seeming chaos, he was arguing for a complete reorientation of the center of gravity in politics; while politicians squabbled about whether to paint the vehicle of society red or green, he was calling for a rewiring of the engine.

Of course we could win small victories against the Chinese, he was essentially saying to young Tibetans, as guerrillas do in Northern Ireland and Spain and Peru; but in the long term we would be losers, by squandering the respect of the world and sparking the rage of a nation two hundred times more populous than our own. Of course we can see the Chinese as enemies, but if we do so, we are saying, in effect, that we are going to spend all our lives in the midst of enemy forces; the better solution is to change how we think of the situation, perhaps by seeing that our real enemies are our own habitual tendencies toward thinking in terms of enemies. We can always see the decisive effects of action; but what underlies action, in the way of viewpoint and motivation and feeling, is where the real change has to come.