The Open Road (32 page)

Nine months later, in a move that shocked the world, the king of Bhutan, an Oxford-educated Buddhist who had been taught by one of the same rinpoches who’d taught the Dalai Lama, announced that, though only fifty, he would voluntarily step down from his throne two years later, to bring democratic elections to his country. His people were distressed—they had known only hereditary monarchy for the past ninety-eight years and wanted him always to be in charge of them—but he felt that his kingdom had to change with the times. The chain of cause and effect in a web, a Buddhist might have told me, is not always linear or easy to predict. The “butterfly effect”—so often spoken of by leaders like Havel—whereby an insect shaking its wings leads to a tornado many continents away took many forms, it seemed. An idea over here, and a sudden effect over there. Every word and tiny act has consequences, the Dalai Lama might have been reminding us, though often they are consequences we cannot and will not ever see.

 

For in this world of ours where everything withers, everything perishes, there is a thing that decays, that crumbles into dust even more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself, than beauty: namely, grief.

—
MARCEL PROUST

THE FUTURE

O
ne day in Dharamsala, an autumn day, the light golden and sharp outside his
thangka
-filled room, though it was cold not far away and snow was gathering on the mountains above, the Dalai Lama suddenly leaned across to me, as he often does (leaning into the world has become his characteristic position, as much as sitting stock-still in meditation), eyes alight, and, though nothing in our conversation had led to this, went off on a sudden tangent. He’d been talking about his love of informality, the way that sometimes it seemed to relax people and open them up, and then he remembered how, on his first trip to England, in 1973, after his talk “one old English gentleman—very gentlemanly—one old one come to me, and he expressed he very much appreciated that the Dalai Lama said, ‘I don’t know.’”

In Tibet, he went on, this would sound strange. Tibetans appreciate humility and laugh at one who claims to know it all, but still they would never think of congratulating someone on saying “I don’t know.” He was so taken aback by the old man’s comment that he was moved to reflect on it twenty-three years later. Maybe, he speculated, “it’s becoming rare—to admit you don’t know. And once rare things happen, that becomes a surprise. I don’t know. What do you feel?”

I fumbled for an answer—the question was so genuine—and I could see that the Tibetan was probing a serious aspect of cultural misunderstanding. He’s always eager to offer assistance where it’s required, and yet he is in no hurry to speak on things he knows nothing about. But when I went back to my room, crossing the flower-bordered driveway outside his house, walking through the gates into the shady courtyard filled with monks in their red robes, and Tibetans in prayer and the odd foreigner come to inspect the sense of devotion and ritual debating, as I went down the slope and along the road crowded with dogs and refuse and beggars, Tibetans setting up stalls to sell Dalai Lama posters, photographs, tapes to sightseers, and I climbed the steep, unpaved hill back to my guesthouse and my simple, sunlit room, I thought that saying “I don’t know” was actually one of the better lessons he had taught us. He traveled everywhere in part to transmit what he did know, through his training, his meditation, his experience: about hard work in the face of suffering, about kindness and the way it makes everyone feel better, about interconnectedness and the logical basis for thinking of others (if they are a part of ourselves). People flew across the world and lined up for hours to hear him give all the answers. A monk is a walking answer, in the commitment that is the basis of his life. But he is also a man whose duty it is (and whose nature it surely is, too) to have questions. He is one who lives daily in the presence of something he can’t put a finger on.

The Dalai Lama’s whole life sometimes seems to be a lesson on how little we really know. Who could have guessed that the little boy clambering around in a tiny village in eastern Tibet would be pronounced the ruler of his people and brought to the Potala Palace at the age of four? Who could have expected that, while not yet ten, he would have to be the figurehead of his people during the tumult of World War II? And who could have known that just as the war ended, his own problems would begin? He didn’t see the Chinese occupation coming, it seems fair to say—his Cabinet was still taking picnics as Chinese troops crossed into eastern Tibet—and he could never have known that he would be spending nearly all his adult life far from home, in India. People credit the Dalai Lama with great intuition and prescience, and these he might have, but he also has, surely, a human capacity for being surprised, and sometimes mortified.

He has made of “I don’t know” one of the great cornerstones of his optimism. There are no grounds for hope regarding Tibet as we know it: things just keep getting worse and worse, to the point where Tibet is almost a place of memory now. China has no real reason for wishing to give up an area it knows as the “Western Treasure House,” at the very center of Asia; the moral pressure of other governments has achieved nothing. Tibetans are in no position to resist a force that sees itself as the center of the earth and everywhere else as its mere satellite. There is simply no reason to imagine that an old Tibet could magically return.

And yet, overnight as it could seem, the Berlin Wall came down, and eight weeks after his most recent stay in prison, Václav Havel was unanimously selected as president of his country. Suddenly, through the moral efforts of Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, among many others, decades of apartheid in South Africa were over. The aftermath of all those liberations has been troubled, an instant rejoinder to those who think that all will be well with the world (as Buddhists are seldom inclined to think). But no one at the beginning of 1989 expected that, by year’s end, the Cold War would be effectively over, and no one imagined, when Mandela emerged from prison, that apartheid would soon be driven out of his country. The Dalai Lama reposes his faith on such surprises—the sudden result of what has been building invisibly for years—as if to say, as he put it once, “Until the last moment, anything is possible.” Maybe a new leader will come to Beijing who cares deeply about Tibetan autonomy. Maybe an American president will demand concessions that China will have to make to appease its main rival. Maybe the Chinese in Tibet will have a change of heart. Who knows?

A monk, in any case, is one who sees things in the largest light possible, who sees, that is, how much we can’t see, with our limited, partial view, our perspective from our spot in the middle of the flux and chaos. His job, in some respects, is to mix agnosticism with faith: to recall that he knows nothing of what will come tomorrow, and yet to remain confident that it will have meaning and will fit into a larger logic. Hope, as Václav Havel has said, is not the belief that everything will end happily ever after; it probably won’t. It is simply the belief that something makes sense, regardless of how things turn out, and even if that sense is not apprehensible to us.

The central question mark hanging over Tibet and the Tibetans was, ever more, what would happen when the Fourteenth Dalai Lama was no longer. The man in question had been addressing that issue, straightforwardly and without flinching, ever since he was in his mid-thirties; as long as the Dalai Lama has some use, he always said, and can help the Tibetan people and others, he will be around, even if in some radical form. The sign of a true Dalai Lama is that he continues the work of previous Dalai Lamas. This shrewdly counteracted the very distinct possibility that, as soon as he died, the authorities in Beijing would suddenly produce a complaisant little boy under their control and present him as the Fifteenth Dalai Lama. But beyond strategies, it also spoke for a real truth, which is that everything changes, and some roles outlast their usefulness, but something uncreated or unconditioned, in the Buddha’s words, endures. The analogy often used for reincarnation is that of a flame that is the same flame even as it is passed from one very different candle to another.

“When I go,” the Dalai Lama told me in the spring of 2005, “I don’t know. All depends on the respect of the Tibetan people for their popularly elected leader. One hundred percent popular, impossible! But sixty, seventy percent, and still thirty, forty percent opposed: it can create some problems. We’re in a foreign country; meantime, if Indian government withdraws some formal recognition, then I don’t know. Very complicated.”

What he was really saying was that those restless young Tibetans outside his door might finally try to act on their understandable frustration; that even though he had tried to lay down the foundations of democracy, he was aware that Tibetans had got into the habit of listening only to those with the ritual authority of the Dalai Lama; that all the planning in the world could not take care of every contingency or wipe out old reflexes in an instant. It was a sobering reminder of just how entangled his position was that one of the first factors he mentioned when contemplating the future was not Tibet or even China but India (which allows the Tibetans to stay as a group of spiritual refugees but would grow anxious if they started to assert themselves too much as a political force).

An elected prime minister meant, he hoped, that people are “no longer relying on Dalai Lama. So whether Dalai Lama is alive or not, we have already leadership. And in terms of religious matters, we have younger generation of lamas from various traditions. So, theoretically, we have already planned everything. But in practice, of course, it depends on many matters. So, I don’t know.”

His own position has always been that, in the deepest sense, if we can live free of ceremony and superficial tradition, the Dalai Lama, Tibet, Buddhist temples won’t have to exist at all, so long as we keep the principles they represent alive inside us. People and cultures and buildings are perishable, changeable things, he keeps on saying—himself as much as any; but truth, possibility, fairness, kindness are not. The open road is always leading around the next corner, calling for further investigation, even if no final destination is assured.

“Change is part of the world” is how he once distilled Buddhism into six words. When he was growing up, Sera Monastery in Lhasa was among the largest monasteries on the planet, with ten thousand monks on its rolls. Now Beijing enforces a limit of five hundred in any monastery. Yet the new Sera Monastery that refugees from Lhasa’s Sera have built in southern India is flourishing, its population having surged from five hundred to four thousand. There are now two hundred Tibetan Buddhist centers in Taiwan alone. And many, many of the Chinese who flock to Tibet (and Chinese represent 90 percent of the million or so tourists who visit every year) are making offerings at the Jokhang Temple, even taking on Tibetan names and seeking out Tibetan lamas. Even as Tibetans are sometimes denied the chance to learn Tibetan, more and more Chinese are taking up the language.

In China, the Chinese writer Ma Jian wrote after visiting Tibet, “there is a saying: that which is united will eventually separate, and that which is separated will eventually unite.”

“If, thirty years from now, Tibet is six million Tibetans and ten million Chinese Buddhists,” the Dalai Lama told me in 2003 (not wishfully, but because he followed events in Tibet so closely that he could reel off the names of monks and remote monasteries that were doing good work there), “then, maybe, something okay.” Once upon a time, after all, Tibet had occupied much of western China and entered the great T’ang capital of Changan, installing a puppet emperor there; less than seventy years later, as the Dalai Lama had reminded my father in 1960, monastic Buddhism had been pushed out of central Tibet for more than sixty years, and not a monk or a sacred text could be seen.