The Open Road (8 page)

Yet what surprised me, repeatedly, in the middle of all this was that the Dalai Lama clearly saw things in a much more spacious way than I would: everything in the world could be used for some good was his position, even the publicity machine, the celebrity circus, the ever more intrusive media. It’s customary for some of us to think of the spiritual world, the realm of the monk, as pure, while the world of the flashbulb and the sound bite is compromised at best. And certainly liberties were taken with the Buddhist that I could rarely imagine being taken with the pope or even, these days, an Islamic cleric. But one of the striking arguments being advanced by this most visible of monks, as by a few like-minded souls, was that even these things of the world could be transformed by the purposes we bring to them. There is nothing good or bad, as Hamlet has it, but thinking makes it so.

In the spring of 2004, therefore, I flew to Vancouver to see how the Dalai Lama would deal with clamorous crowds and media scrutiny much more intense than in low-key Nara. I wasn’t especially interested in his personality, glowing and moving though that personality was, in part because I didn’t feel he was very much interested in it and, more, because his public virtues were really just symptoms of the private practices and stillness that underlay them. But for decades now I had been interested in how globalism could acquire depths, an inwardness that would sustain it more than mere goods or data could, and how even the media might be able to address something more than just the passing events of the day. If our new way of living were to offer any real sustenance, I’d long thought, it would have to be invisible, in the realm of what underlies acceleration and multinationals.

Weeks before I even set foot in British Columbia, the Web site specially set up for the event (as for just about every visit the Dalai Lama makes around the world these days) informed me that the city was already in a frenzy of excitement; the global order’s godfather, as he sometimes seems, had not been to Canada in more than a decade. His general talks on how to lead a kinder and more attentive life had already been relocated to the largest public arena in town—the Pacific Coliseum, long home to the ice-hockey–playing Canucks—after tickets had gone, months in advance, in just twenty minutes, and eight thousand people had been left disappointed. In Toronto, on the same trip, the Dalai Lama was scheduled to give a talk at the cavernous fifty-thousand-seat SkyDome, generally host to major rock groups and baseball games. Whichever direction I turned in, on the rainy April evening when I arrived, there were pictures of the Dalai Lama, fluttering from the lampposts of Vancouver (or those lampposts not given over to banners of the Canucks). It was as if, as the press frequently put it, a president was visiting, in the company of Mick Jagger.

The Dalai Lama was coming here, rather typically, at the invitation of a Chinese friend who had stumbled into his home in 1972, in black cape and Fu Manchu goatee, with no idea, really, of where he was going. The traveler, Victor Chan, had just been abducted in Afghanistan, along the hippie trail, with two women, and when the three of them had escaped, one of them had recalled that she was in possession of the name and address of a hospitable Tibetan who lived in a forgotten hill station in northern India called Dharamsala. The Tibetan in question, of course, turned out to be the Dalai Lama, not much known in those days, and now, thirty-two years on, this countercultural Chinese Heinrich Harrer, as it might seem, Victor, was bringing him to Vancouver to speak on peace and reconciliation with two of his longtime friends and allies, Desmond Tutu and Václav Havel, as well as with the most recent Nobel peace laureate, Shirin Ebadi, the female judge who had fearlessly stood up to the theocratic regime in Iran.

Everywhere I looked, traveling up to the event, George W. Bush and John Kerry were debating on TV, in anticipation of the presidential election six months later, and as soon as the two men in suits had stopped talking about war, other men in suits—my media colleagues—appeared on-screen to talk about what the men in suits had been saying about war; the nature of modern broadcasting is that nothing is feared—not bombast or repetition or bile—so much as silence. In just a generation—since my first trip to Tibet, in fact—the world seemed to have moved from having too little information about itself to having too much, and what the soul cried out for, I began to think, listening to the men chattering on all those screens, was something that could put the clutter into a larger perspective. Where once information had seemed the first step to knowledge, and then to wisdom, now it sometimes seemed their deepest enemy.

By seven o’clock the next morning, when I arrived at the Chan Center for the Performing Arts at the University of British Columbia (the city had become something of an outpost of China, and this Chan was no relative of Victor’s), long, long lines of people, mostly silent, were trailing all around the building in the rain, and deep into the recesses of the campus. It was, as is the case almost everywhere the Dalai Lama speaks, a de facto global gathering: women in formal Tibetan dress, the powers that be of the local community, journalists from what looked to be Japan and Taiwan and maybe mainland China, a hundred different means and ends. The media alone were so numerous that we were assigned a separate theater from which to follow the proceedings on-screen and so, asked to arrive two hours in advance for security reasons, we filed into a large auditorium where the living laureates would be turned into images, oversized icons in a virtual world.

It was a little strange in this context to have read, among the many stipulations sent out in advance, that “for the purpose of these events, the Pacific Coliseum is considered a church”—and yet in some ways it seemed a perfect model of what these visitors hoped to do: to turn an entertainment complex into a place for entertaining (with due humor and humility) a sense of conscience and awareness and something more than just the self. As the great student of comparative religions Huston Smith has noted, ours is the first age that archaeologists have found that does not have a temple (but has, rather, a stadium or a shopping mall) at its center. Another stipulation, though, reminded us that even churches are by no means sanctuaries, outside the real world and its conflicts: “Dolgyal worshippers and those propitiating Dolgyal are asked not to attend the teachings.”

The precisely worded request was a reminder that every opening brings its complications, and the Dalai Lama was still as entangled in local political disputes as any other spiritual or political leader might be. He stands, for every Tibetan and Tibetan Buddhist (those in Mongolia, say, and now Korea and Taiwan and elsewhere, too), as a visible embodiment of their faith and, quite literally, a god—an incarnation of Chenrezig, deity of compassion—so beyond the common realm that Tibetans are too awestruck even to address him directly; and yet in recent years, those who propitiate a Tibetan deity called Dorje Shugden, sometimes known as Dolgyal, have taken to picketing his public events because they felt he was discriminating against their particular corner of Tibetan Buddhism. Like many of the debates within the Tibetan world, this one goes back centuries, and yet, like many of them, too, it is hardly an abstract or remote affair: seven years before, three members of the Dalai Lama’s private monastery, including the head of his Institute of Buddhist Dialectics, were found murdered in their beds only a couple of hundred yards away from the Dalai Lama’s home, and it was generally assumed that the killings were connected in some way with a string of bloody threats from the followers of Shugden.

So as I settled into the media auditorium, what I felt I was really watching was how these individuals from very different situations would handle the challenges of publicity, of celebrity, even of enmity. In theory, all of them were here to receive an honorary doctorate from the university before their serious discussions began, and to inaugurate the Contemporary Tibetan Studies Program on the campus. Yet really, I felt, they were here to try, in a limited time, to offer a fresh perspective, the one that says that revolutions begin at home. The Dalai Lama liked to talk of “human beings,” nearly always preceded by the pronoun “we,” but what he was really talking about was “human becomings,” and the ways each one of us could travel along the open road to becoming more compassionate and attentive. A global peace reached by men who are themselves still restless or frightened or jealous is not going to be much of a peace at all.

The only real peace could arise from stilling something in yourself, going back behind the self, to someplace where you had no sense of “us” and “them” but instead saw everything linked in a pulsing network, which reminded you that the boss you cannot abide may in fact have been your mother in a previous lifetime—or, indeed, might become your mother in a future life. The only revolution, in that sense, came from reevaluation; to change a society or a system, you had to push back to its root causes in the mind. “Hate,” as Graham Greene memorably puts it in
The Power and the Glory,
“was just a failure of imagination.”

I knew, to that extent—as did almost everyone in attendance—what the visitors would say in advance, and we knew, all of us, that none of it was remarkable or new: “What hope can we have of finding rest outside of ourselves if we cannot be at rest within?” Saint Teresa of Avila had asked of herself and the world four centuries ago. Yet what was exciting about their presence—the hope of transformation they brought with them—was the fact that all of them were experimenting with highly practical forms for these lofty ideas: Ebadi by actually safeguarding and writing the laws of her country, in the face of a regime that wanted to rewrite or override them; Tutu by setting up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in his native South Africa after the end of apartheid, so that old crimes would neither be forgotten nor merely avenged; and the Dalai Lama by to some extent leaving his official Buddhism at home on such occasions to advance his favored “global ethics.” Havel (who had had to cancel at the last minute because of illness) had even appointed a scholar of Woody Allen to be his ambassador to Washington when he came to power, as a way, perhaps, of advancing a politics that did not rest with politicians.

It was as if what they were really bringing the audience, even in this ritual exercise, was a frame to place around the events of the day, so that we could see them in the settings of something more lasting and expansive (“Creation,” Desmond Tutu would perhaps call it, and “justice,” maybe, for Shirin Ebadi, and “ultimate reality” or “human potential” in the Dalai Lama’s dictionary). By their nature, ideally, an archbishop, a monk, and a judge ask us to see the news of the moment in the light of principles that last much longer than mere moments.

Look at America’s involvement in Iraq, Ebadi was effectively saying in her public statements, not just in terms of Washington’s relations with the Middle East, of the murderous Saddam Hussein and the crusading George W. Bush, but in terms of some principle of the sovereignty of states and the concerns that every nation might face if such principles were overrun. Look at your own life and all that you have suffered, Tutu was saying in his commission, not as something so large that it blocks everything else out, but from the perspective of the heavens, in which it is a mere speck on a canvas extending across centuries and continents. Look at Tibet’s dialogue with China, the Dalai Lama always said, not only in terms of this leader or that loss but, rather, in the context of an almost endless series of causes and effects that stretches indefinitely into the future. China and Tibet would always be neighbors and their destinies would always be intertwined; in taking care of the needs of the Tibetans, therefore, you could not afford to overlook the priorities and needs of the Chinese.

As soon as Tutu was called to the front of the stage to receive his doctorate, accompanied by a large black tasseled cap, he recalled how he had received another such cap at West Point. It turned out to be many sizes too big, he said. “Now, any normal wife would at that point have said, ‘I think we need a smaller cap.’ But of course my dear wife, Leah, who has known me for so long, said, ‘This shows that my husband has much too big a head!’”

The audience chuckled with delight; such self-effacement was exactly what it expected from a man of the cloth, and Tutu knew how to work a crowd just with the way his voice went up and down, melodiously. And yet, I thought—since men of God, as much as monks and lawyers, tend to be careful with their words—the joke contained, like much around it, a useful point. Don’t expect the world to fit its needs to accommodate you; work your needs around the circumstances of the world.

I could imagine what some of my colleagues would say in response to all this—and a journalist’s job is to entertain such voices (as, the Dalai Lama might say, is a Buddhist’s). All three of the peace laureates were idealists, in the happy position of spinning out moral principles instead of dealing with a real world in which we more often have to choose between wrong and wrong than between right and wrong. All three of them had suffered, to be sure, and weathered their suffering with dignity, and yet suffering alone was no guarantee of wisdom, let alone of political authority. There was a reason why church and state were generally separate, and it was that church operated in the eternal world of justice, and politics acted in the much more qualified, temporizing world of men.

But then I recalled the words I had read at the very beginning of Tutu’s most recent book, and they were words that had taken me aback at first. “I am not an optimist,” he wrote. “Optimism relies on appearances, and very quickly turns into pessimism when the appearances change. I see myself as a realist.” Instead of just placing a Band-Aid on a wounded society, he was trying (as his Tibetan friend might echo) to undertake radical heart surgery. Living for sixty-two years without being able to vote in his own country had trained him in the hollowness of just wishing things might be otherwise, and when he had urged the world to boycott his country, he had essentially been saying that he and his parishioners were ready to go without everything if it could finally effect a change in a government that could transform their lives at the core.