Last November, travelling across Japan with the 14th Dalai Lama, I soon discovered that even dawn-to-dusk surveillance of the man meant missing one of his important daily activities: by 7.30 each morning he had already completed four hours of meditation, reflecting on the needs of the people around him, on his “Chinese brothers and sisters” occupying Tibet, and on his death.
The days got more fast-paced from there. One morning in Ise, after meetings with Japanese monks and a shy young woman running a youth magazine, we drove down to the nearby train station and set off for Nagoya. Upon arrival, we were greeted by five young Tibetans studying abroad and eager to talk to their exiled leader. After that brief encounter, we boarded another train and met two journalists waiting to question the Dalai Lama on the political complications associated with his freedom struggle and the refusal of Japan’s leaders to meet him. We lunched with a Japanese politician and then went upstairs to a suite in a Yokohama hotel to meet a full roster of supplicants: scientists keen to share the results of research they’d done on compassion; the heads of a Buddhist organisation hosting the Dalai Lama at a conference with 5,000 guests the next day; emissaries from Japanese high society, offering him a book from the Empress Michiko; and a young television crew. Finally, he walked along a corridor at the top of the glossy hotel, strode into a conference room and found 60 people waiting for him. As soon as he entered, all of them began sobbing and prostrating themselves before him. Every one of the devout was, remarkably, a Han Chinese from the People’s Republic of China.
By the end of the day – by the end of every day of the trip, in fact – I was exhausted. But for the 72-year-old Tibetan leader, this was the life he has known for six decades – and the life, I think, he will be leading on his next visit to Britain a few days from now.
Much of the world knows that Tenzin Gyatso is a “simple Buddhist monk” – his repeated words – located as a child by a search party of older monks and made political leader of the Tibetans little more than a decade later. The exact dates may be less well known: the young boy was identified as the next Dalai Lama at the age of two; he was enthroned at the age of four; and he became Tibet’s full-time temporal leader in 1950, when he was 15 years old. This final transition occurred just months after Mao Zedong sent his troops over the Tibetan border in late 1949, seizing the chance to take over a strategic and resource-rich piece of land two-thirds the size of western Europe and ruled by a teenager.
Some of us remember how, after years of negotiation with Mao Zedong and his foreign minister Zhou Enlai, and a year spent in China in 1954, the Dalai Lama finally fled Tibet in 1959, realising that if he stayed, he would be arrested or killed – and that Tibet would be gone forever.
Still, it is astonishing how little most of us know about a man who has become one of the most easily recognised figures on the planet. Few people realise that the 14th Dalai Lama is a keen amateur scientist who delights in holding conferences with neuroscientists to see how Tibetan notions of the mind might learn from and instruct modern empirical studies. Even the words of the Buddha, he says, should be thrown out if they are shown by new research to be faulty or incomplete. Nor do many people realise that the head of Tibetan Buddhism has delivered an extended series of lectures on the Gospels; or that he calls himself a defender of Islam and sometimes a ”half-Marxist”, admiring Marxism’s ideas of equality, if not the kind of dogmatism that has so ruthlessly assaulted his own country. The figure we see on television screens is so often smiling and loveable that we forget he is a doctor of philosophy, the single most seasoned political leader on the planet and a man who remembers dealing with Mao, Jawaharlal Nehru and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
While some supporters in the west see him as a messiah, and his enemies in Beijing call him “a jackal in monk’s robes”, the Dalai Lama sees himself always as human. He delights in gardening and his Alsatian dog; and when, on the bullet train from Nagoya in November, one of the journalists asked him how he would resolve the situation between Israel and the Palestinians if he had a “magic wand”, the Dalai Lama looked at him with friendly directness and said, “Silly question!” The whole point of Buddhism, he might have been saying, was that the Buddha was not a magician, a miracle worker or a superhuman. He was just a man, doing what any one of us could do if we applied ourselves – doing, in fact, what his most celebrated living student does from before sunrise until after dark, almost every day of the year.
. . .
I have been talking to the Dalai Lama and visiting him in his home-in-exile in the British-built hill station of Dharamsala, northern India, for 33 years now. My father, a philosopher at Oxford, went to meet him in the first year of his exile, in 1960; I followed in 1974 and began covering him as a journalist in the mid-1980s. But even after following the Dalai Lama from Zurich to Hiroshima, after celebrating the Tibetan New Year with him in 1988 and marking his 54th birthday in Los Angeles in 1989, and even after spending long afternoons in his modest yellow cottage and watching him evolve from a strikingly bright-faced, burly man to one more stooped and greying, I’m still taken aback at how this modest, penetrating and brilliant political and philosophical thinker has become a friend to so much of the world.
He was born, after all, in a cowshed, in a 20-house village in rural Amdo province, eastern Tibet. His father was a quick-tempered farmer who loved horses, his mother a compassionate woman who bore 16 children, only seven of whom survived to adulthood. A boy named Lhamo Thondup was the fifth among the latter group.
After the 13th Dalai Lama died, in 1933, monks scattered around the country, following signs and clues to find the little boy who would be his successor. Led to the little village of Taktser, the monks came upon two-year-old Lhamo Thondup, to whom they administered a series of tests (could he, for example, identify among a group of objects the ones that had belonged to the previous Dalai Lama? He could). After the boy passed all the tests, even greeting the monks in the dialect of faraway Lhasa, a ransom equivalent to a million pounds today was paid to the local warlord to win his freedom, and he was taken to the Lion Throne in Lhasa.
The little boy was put through a gruelling 18-year course of studies, and was made to live most of the year far from his family in the cold, dark, 1,000-roomed Potala Palace, which looms over Lhasa. He was a mischievous child who could not resist baiting his immediate elder brother (the only family member allowed to keep him company in the Potala). He set up a projector so he could see footage of the outside world, ranging from newsreels from the second world war to screenings of Henry V. He used to watch the children of Lhasa, he later said, playing in the streets below, and realised the full depths of his loneliness.
Loneliness aside, he was a typical schoolboy in those early years, eager to steal away from classes and not keen to do all his studies. But when he reached his early teens, that changed. Suddenly, the beauty and importance of his monastic vocation hit him, and he began to give himself intensely to his studies. He finished the full programme required of Dalai Lamas and then went on to earn a doctoral degree, after completing an oral exam in front of 20,000 monks in March 1959 – the month he was forced to flee China’s advancing forces.
The story of the young leader’s flight across the world’s highest mountain ranges captivated the world, but after his arrival in India (soon followed by 80,000 other Tibetans), he was, to some degree, forgotten. Turning that neglect to advantage, he set about recreating the best of old Tibet outside its borders and adapting its traditions to the modern world. In his first year in exile he drew up a new constitution for Tibet, bringing his people democracy for the first time in their history and even including a clause allowing for his own impeachment. He set up monasteries, schools and cultural centres, while getting rid of much in Tibetan custom that struck him as outdated. Monks in exile now learn modern science as well as ancient philosophy; women are allowed to study for doctoral degrees, which they could never do in old Tibet; and children take their lessons in the Tibetan language until the age of 10 or so and then switch to English.
What the exile experience soon showed was that the 14th Dalai Lama would be a realist and a pragmatist, determined to incorporate into his culture all the modern and technological wisdom it had lacked, while also sustaining the core of Tibetan traditions. The costumes and rituals of Tibetan culture are often no longer relevant, he told me three years ago; but ideas of compassion and of universal responsibility are as appropriate outside Tibet as they ever were within it. “Exile”, the word that for most of us means disruption and severance from the past, he decided to read as ”opportunity”, a chance to liberate his people for the future.
In the early years of remoteness from the outside world, he also gave himself to extended retreats and studies – something he might not have been able to do from a throne in Lhasa. The result was that when he first began travelling widely, with his first trip to Europe in 1973, his charisma and ability to make contact with almost everyone he met were undeniable. I remember seeing him on his first American tour, in 1979, at Harvard, and hearing a philosopher so erudite that few in the audience could follow what he said (mostly in Tibetan then, and translated into English by a scholar at his side). Realising he was talking over the heads of most people, he began transforming these complex principles into simple epigrams and pieces of human advice. Kindness, he said, helps the person who gives it. Anger works against the person who feels it.
This wisdom may be easily digestible, but its transparency and practicality can make it seem like one truism after another – and has led some, at times, to underestimate the Dalai Lama. Even as recently as the early 1980s, his New York press conferences attracted barely a handful of people. But in 1987, when the Tibetans rose up against Chinese occupation, the world noticed how this exiled leader spoke always and only for tolerance and dialogue. He won the Nobel Peace Prize two years later and began coming ever more frequently to the west.
Beyond his sharp memory and attention to detail (he can recognise people he last saw in Tibet 50 years ago, and pounces on mistranslations with a scholar’s tenacity), the Dalai Lama soon evinced an unusual gift for appealing to people not as ruler, monk, Tibetan or Buddhist, but as a regular human being. He is that rare Buddhist who offers foreigners practical guidance while also telling them to study within their own traditions, where there’s less chance of misconception (seizing upon Buddhism before they have fully understood it, or gauged certain important cultural differences). He devours newspapers and news-magazines, drawing his examples from the Korean war and what happened in Iraq yesterday, and confessed to me once that he was “addicted” to the BBC World Service.
We thus end up with the unlikely sight of a monk from what had been one of the world’s most underdeveloped and isolated countries becoming a champion of globalism, writing introductions to books about the internet, speaking always for the importance of connectedness (Tibet’s “greatest mistake”, he told me once, was being too cut off from the world before 1959). It has meant that a modest, self-styled scientist is greeted as a rock star, his speeches played on the dance floors of London clubs.
If the Dalai Lama has failed in anything, it is, perhaps, in trying to depose himself among his people (he urges democracy on them, and they say they’d much rather leave all the decision-making to him), and in trying to dethrone himself across the world. To this day, he chooses not to take on students – he prefers to have “spiritual friends” – and takes pains to cite the 19 or more teachers to whose wisdom he always defers.
I still remember seeing him the day after his Nobel Prize was announced, staying (such is the curiosity of his life) in a ranch-style private home in Newport Beach, California, attending a conference with scientists. The minute he saw me – an intrusive journalist bothering him on one of the busiest days of his busy life – he grabbed me by the hand, took me into a small room nearby, spent many minutes looking for a chair in which I could sit comfortably (as if I were the Nobel laureate). He then asked me how he should spend the money he had won.
. . .
I had a long series of discussions with the Dalai Lama 12 years ago, just before his life story was about to be turned into two Hollywood films, Kundun and Seven Years in Tibet. If people were to project their own needs or wants on to him, he said, there was little he could do to prevent it. All he could do was keep his own motivations pure and treat a homeless person the same way he would a movie star.
That Tibet is so often taken to be an otherworldly Shangri-La – and that its culture and philosophy have become such a high-fashion trend among conspicuous consumers – has not always helped Tibetans. And yet the Dalai Lama, I suspect, has seen that as Gore Vidal pointed out years ago, in a global community of the image, Hollywood can be more powerful than Washington. The recurring challenge of the Dalai Lama’s life is that political leaders almost everywhere are keen to meet him and enjoy the glow of his presence – and yet very few are ready to stand up to China.
When Mohandas Gandhi led non-violent protests against the British Empire, the one advantage he had was that of numbers: if half of India chose to go on strike, it could at least dent the economy of the Raj. If six million Tibetans were to stop working today, it would have no effect at all on the juggernaut of 1.2 billion Chinese. Tibet lacks oil, as the Dalai Lama points out, and is much too remote for the rest of the world to care about in practical terms. The only thing on Tibet ’s side is that, unlike many other freedom movements, it has not so far resorted to violence.
This unique stance has become especially charged, of course, as protests have broken out in recent weeks across Tibet and China. Oppressed minorities across the People’s Republic have decided to take advantage of the world’s focus on China in the months leading up to the August Olympics in Beijing and are broadcasting their suffering to the world. The Dalai Lama, in response, tells his people to speak out, but not to lash out; to ask for basic freedoms such as freedom of thought and speech but not to demonise the Chinese; and to forswear violence. It will only, he says, bring more violence down on a people who have suffered too much already.
And yet, more Tibetans in exile are saying more frequently that they cannot wait any longer: that this is the moment for decisive action or some defiant gesture of opposition to the Chinese. The sorrow of their predicament is that most of them have never seen Tibet, or China. The one exiled Tibetan who really understands China’s leadership is, in fact, the Dalai Lama, who has been dealing with it for 59 years, who has spent time in Beijing and who even has an elder brother who speaks fluent Chinese, lives in Hong Kong and was married to a Chinese woman.
Circumstances have meant that the Dalai Lama has had to be as much a political as a spiritual leader – although his politics are always an expression of his monastic beliefs. As far back as 1996, he told me that, yes, looked at from one point of view, his policy of maximum concessions to China and extending the hand of friendship had borne no visible fruit, with China cracking down on Tibet ever harder. But in the long term, he argues, dialogue and forgiveness are the only way: any resolution that solves the Tibetan question without taking in Chinese individuals is no solution at all. Tibet, he reiterated last November, has much to gain economically from remaining part of the People’s Republic – and the world has everything to gain from keeping up contact with its largest nation.
Thus the Dalai Lama keeps his hand extended while Chinese officials have, as recently as March, called him “an evil spirit with a human face and the heart of a beast”. He speaks for interdependence and the Beijing leadership calls him a “splittist”. He calls on his people to forswear violent protest and the Chinese accuse him of fomenting revolution. For 21 years now, while more militant Tibetans call out for independence and a “free Tibet”, the Dalai Lama has asked only for an autonomous Tibet, over which China could still have control in terms of defence and foreign affairs. He asks people not to free Tibet, but simply to “save it”.
He has always placed his faith in individuals, Chinese and otherwise. He does not expect the Chinese leadership to come to its senses overnight, but has said for years that regular Chinese people, officially denied religion for more than half a century, may, one by one, notice how much they have in common with Tibet, and how they still have a rich spiritual tradition within their borders – in Tibet. The last time I visited Lhasa, in 2002, some of the Chinese I saw in the Tibetan capital were indeed making offerings at the central temple, seeking out Tibetan lamas and Buddhist texts. And as the moving encounter in the Yokahama hotel reminded me, wherever the Dalai Lama travels, Chinese are among the people most eager to hear his message of transformation and peace.
. . .
It is generally assumed that the Chinese government has for years been simply waiting for this Dalai Lama to die, imagining that once he is gone, Tibetans will be without an experienced leader and Tibet will be theirs forever. Since the late 1960s, Tenzin Gyatso has responded by saying that a 15th Dalai Lama will necessarily advance the programme of the 14th Dalai Lama. Besides, he notes, with typical radicalism, the next Dalai Lama might be a woman, or might be found outside Tibet in some highly untraditional way. Or there may be no 15th Dalai Lama at all.
New circumstances, in short, call for new measures. It is the curiosity – but also the fascination – of this Dalai Lama’s life that, embracing the possibilities represented by aeroplanes, TV screens and exile, he has called upon entirely new and previously unimagined tools to advance his trans-Buddhist philosophy of kindness and responsibility.
I am surprised to find him much more realistic and persuasive than almost all the politicians I’ve met, some of whom stress the future, some of whom speak for the past. “Dream – nothing!” the Dalai Lama said when I was with him in Hiroshima 18 months ago. Do not wait or pray for a miracle; do something that might make your life and the lives of others a little better right now.
The world wants, at times, to place the Dalai Lama on a mountain top, but he has never had such a luxury and seems always in our midst, trying to remind us that we change the world by changing how we look at it. And to point out that suffering (the day-to-day reality of the world) is not unhappiness (the way we choose to respond to it).
Some people marvel at how compassionate and clear-sighted the Tibetan leader is; some assume he can’t be as good as he seems. But he comes to Britain this month merely to suggest, as ever, that any one of us can be more compassionate and clear-sighted, if we only put our minds to it. In the long term, that is how the Tibetan – and Chinese – situation will be most fruitfully resolved.
Pico Iyer’s new book, ‘The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama’, is published by Bloomsbury this month
