The Open Road (12 page)

One day I was talking to the Dalai Lama about his ceaseless traveling around the world meeting with politicians (the most frustrating part of his job, he said, because “the problem is so big that even if these leaders sincerely want to help, they cannot do anything,” and yet not to meet with them was to achieve nothing at all). “To me,” he said, “I treat every human being, whether high officials or beggars—no differences, no distinctions.

“But newsmen, reporters,” he went on, maybe because he was speaking to one at the time, “always ask. They consider whether I meet the prime minister or not the most important issue! At some point, I get quite fed up. I am Buddhist monk, I am a follower of Buddha. From that viewpoint, it’s nothing important. It’s much more important, one simple, innocent, sincere spiritual seeker—that’s more important than a politician or a prime minister.

“So,” he said, of newsmen, “I feel it is a reflection of their own mental attitude. These reporters, usually they consider politics as something most important in their mind. So meeting with a politician becomes very significant.” For himself, “meeting with public, ordinary people, at least there’s some contribution for peace of mind, for deeper awareness about the value of human life. When I see some result, then I really feel, ‘Today I did some small contribution.’”

On a recent trip to South Africa, he said, he had met Nelson Mandela and a man regarded as the mentor of Mandela, in Soweto. He wanted to visit a typical home in Soweto but understood it might not be easy, so he waited in a car while an official found a home that was interested in meeting a visitor from Tibet.

One such house was found, “and it was really a human family, a human home: very friendly, very clear. Very innocent. I asked about their livelihood, their difficulties, their education—everything. And also the murders, the crime. Then later one person joined, I think better-educated, and he expressed to me sadly that they feel—the South African black person—that the potential of their intelligence is inferior to that of the white. Then I really felt sad.

“And then I argued, or explained, ‘This is a wrong concept. You should not feel like that. All human beings have the same potential, the same potential of intelligence. Here we need self-confidence.’ Now, I explained, the main thing about my own situation is that the Chinese attitude to Tibet—they always look down on Tibet as inferior, backward. But when we Tibetans have the opportunity, we even carry better than Chinese. So there’s no basis to believe you’re inferior.

“And then, after a lengthy explanation, all his face changed. Then, with a tear, he told me now he believed what I said. ‘Now my attitude has changed.’ He feels more confidence, he told me. And I really feel a great sense of achievement: one person, one simple person, in his late thirties, I think. Till that day, deep down he feels, ‘We are poor, we are inferior, we have less potential.’ With this kind of mental attitude, there’s no chance of making competition. And without competition, you can’t progress. And I think genuine mutual trust must be built on the basis of both sides’ self-confidence. Without that, if one feels inferior, how can you develop mutual trust? Very difficult.

“So, therefore, after changing his mind, I really felt, ‘Now I made one contribution.’”

To recall that the Dalai Lama is, as much as anything, a man trained to heal specific infirmities (of ignorance and the suffering that arises out of it) is to recall that the man himself is not all-important: he stands for a body of teaching that can be advanced and applied by many other hands; he stands, most of all, for the sense that each of us can play a significant part in healing ourselves. A doctor’s paradoxical wisdom, often, is to make himself redundant; do thirty minutes on a treadmill, he says, eat salmon and avoid fatty foods, have an apple every day, and all being well, you won’t have to see me again. Indeed, in the Buddhist context, a doctor (of philosophy, say) is not just telling people that they can heal themselves but also reminding them that, if they wish, they can read the medical textbooks themselves, and go to the source of all knowledge about the self. The wisdom being imparted has little to do with the mortal, fallible being who’s imparting it, and, indeed, the more it has to do with him, the less reliable it is.

Many of the great doctors in history have distinguished themselves and come to inspired diagnoses in part by seeing the connectedness of things, the way a problem in the head may affect the performance of the body, or how what you put in your mouth can alter the acid in your stomach. The body is a single organism in which one push here may have a strong effect there. So it is, too, the Dalai Lama says, with the world—and our very concerns about it are all intertwined, impossible to solve separately. It’s no good offering people peace, he suggests, if those same people lack food and water; and it’s no good offering them food and water if our forests and rivers are polluted. It’s no good, even, to clean up our environment if we’re still polluted within. In short, the solution to all our problems, economic, environmental, political, spiritual, can only be addressed by going back to fundamentals, the change of attitude that can create a change in everything the attitude inspects. Reforms on the surface make no difference whatsoever.

This stress on the powers within us is part of what makes Buddhism so hopeful, even if some observers, noting only the absence of God from its worldview and the mention of suffering (or, as it has been better translated, “discontent”), call it “fatalistic” or pessimistic. After all, it’s hard to change others, but nearly always possible to change ourselves. It’s all in our head, as a doctor might say, though in this case “it” refers not only to a problem, an illusion, but also, as a sequel, to a possibility, an ability to cut through illusions. “In a sense, a religious practitioner is actually a soldier engaged in conflict,” the Dalai Lama said at a New Jersey monastery on one of his first trips to America. But the practitioner’s enemies are “internal ones. Ignorance, anger, attachment and pride.” The devil, as many Christians note, is not something outside of us.

Indeed, the beauty of Buddhism, as the Dalai Lama might see it, is precisely that it is not exclusive or rarefied; much of what it is showing us is exactly what people throughout the centuries have told us, whether they call themselves Vedantists or Muslims or nothing at all. “They that be whole need not a physician,” as Jesus famously says in Matthew 9:12. Epictetus told us, centuries ago, that it is not pain that undoes us but our response to it, the way we let it keep lingering in the mind. Confucius, an exact contemporary of the Buddha, spoke in exactly the same terms as the Buddha about the virtue of moderation, the need for detachment in a world of constant change, the truth of interdependence, and the way we must care for the larger whole. Gandhi himself, a Hindu sometimes described as a “Christian Muhammadan,” said that his mission was not “to deliver people from difficult situations” but, rather, to show that “every man or woman, however weak in body, is the guardian of his or her self-respect and liberty.” To call these truths Buddhist, the Dalai Lama is often quick to imply, is as strange as calling the law of gravity Christian just because it happened to have been formulated by the Christian named Isaac Newton.

I puzzled all this out, the way I might once have tried to unriddle a complicated mathematical equation, and felt that I was coming at last to a beginner’s (and outsider’s) view of how Buddhism made sense. And then—quite fatally—I went to see Ngari Rinpoche, the Dalai Lama’s younger brother, again, and all the understandings I’d come to were just a source of mirth to him.

“We’re really such a tiny speck in the universe,” I pronounced as we sat out on his terrace in the spring sunshine, overlooking miles and miles of the Kangra Valley receding down below. “Hardly more than a wisp of smoke.” Secretly, I was proud of myself; I’d begun to grasp something of the Buddhist distinction between the false self, which we construct, and the true self, which is just a stream of energy within a network of such streams. I put down the book on self, reality, and reason in Tibetan Buddhism he’d lent me the previous week, to show him that I’d read it.

“Why?” he said, almost jumping out of his chair. “Are you telling me I should be a vegetable—like the Zen monks in Japan? We need some conceptual thought, if only as a monitor to keep ourselves honest.”

“Another person, you mean?”

“Surveillance.” He stopped for a moment. “Something to watch over the mind that’s about to disappear.”

I didn’t say anything in return; he’d caught me off guard, just as I thought I’d got my head around an elusive truth.

“Look at it the other way,” he said calmly, as if laying down a law. “Perhaps we are the center of the universe. The problem if you see yourself as a speck is that you lose all self-esteem.”

I thought of the Dalai Lama’s heartfelt story about the man in Soweto; I thought, too, of the Tibetans all around me, who regularly said that they were nothing and should leave all power in the hands of the Dalai Lama.

“If you are proud and likely to argue,” he said, “then you need to realize that the self is nothing. If you are lacking in self-esteem, then you have to think about your potential, how much power you have inside yourself.”

The phrase one always heard around Dharamsala was “Middle Way,” in deference to the Buddha’s guiding principle of walking along the road at the center, not veering toward extremes. As the
Diamond Sutra
put it, in what sounds like an affirmation of perpetual mobility, “The bodhisattva develops a mind that alights nowhere.”

“Someone’s got to blow the whistle,” he continued, as we looked out over the valley. “People don’t like me because I rock the boat. I’m argumentative. But our people need to be challenged, to think harder.”

“Not only your people.” He was doing the same with me, I thought, reminding me of the grooves and assumptions I fell into, then trying to wake me up as I wandered into his philosophy.

“There’s no larger force out there,” he went on.

“What about karma? Isn’t that supposed to be a process that’s larger than us and works through us?”

For a long moment Ngari Rinpoche was silent; like anyone who enjoys a good argument or fight, he happily conceded when a point hit home. And whenever anyone came to him with a problem—I remembered him listening in rapt attention to Hiroko the evening of the storm—he became a doctor again, leaning forward in evident sympathy.

Most days in Dharamsala, when I strolled across the busy intersection at the bottom of the slope outside my guesthouse and walked into the central temple, I stumbled into a scene out of classical Tibet. On every side, the shady courtyard between the temple and the Dalai Lama’s house, the main walkway, the parapets looking over the valley, the stone steps leading up to the temple were crowded with young monks, their red robes turning the scene into a garden of questions. They were standing in clusters of three or four, and sometimes in pairs, under a tree, against a wall, in the part of the temple where a painting of the Potala Palace hangs. And everywhere what looked to be a furious fight was going on.