The Open Road (27 page)

“Now,” the Dalai Lama had gone on in the dusty old hotel, autumn sunshine flooding in through the wood-framed windows, “humanity is becoming more mature. We notice a larger number of humanity really showing a desire for peace. Many people are fed up with bloodshed and violence. Now we need more effort to nurture that kind of trend.”

Yet who, I thought, a few weeks later, could be more fed up with violence than Beirutis, their churches pockmarked with bullet holes, their minarets having been used as snipers’ nests? Who could more passionately support the peace effort? And yet mothers had seen their sons killed by neighbors, children had watched old people cut down for no reason at all. Something in us suggests that forgiveness is a betrayal of natural justice, and even if you believe in karma, or any other unbending process of cause and effect, that cannot always fill the hole in every heart.

The Dalai Lama, as it happens, knows more about Beirut than I and many of my journalist friends do; in Taiwan in 2001, he actually cited it as an example of the world’s convolutions, having been told by a French writer how innocents were dying in one part of the city while arms dealers were making profits in another. Besides, growing up in Tibet, where a local warlord had to be paid off the equivalent of $2.5 million in today’s terms just to let the four-year-old Dalai Lama leave his home and travel to Lhasa, coming of age as his country was swept up into decades of violent warfare, he does not need to be told about what human greed and savagery can do. He always used to change the channel, he once told an interviewer, when there was a scene on TV of an animal being slaughtered. But then he resolved that he had to watch it, since at least then something good might come out of the often needless slaughter.

Whenever I saw the Dalai Lama, often just after he had returned from Belfast or Jerusalem or Berlin, I heard him deliver his arguments for peace and understanding with a logician’s suppleness and command. “It’s not sufficient to say we want peace, are against violence,” he had said in Nara. “Just saying this is not sufficient. Violence comes because there is some problem. So we must solve the problem. The best way is dialogue. The other’s interest, our interests, are very much mixed. No independence.” If one person in a neighborhood is happy and the others are suffering, he often said, no one can feel truly secure.

But then I went out into the world and saw what people who acted in the name of interdependence or of a new society had wrought. Five months before taking Hiroko to meet the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, I was inspecting killing fields and skulls in Cambodia, where a leader who had studied under both Buddhist priests and Catholic fathers had orchestrated the elimination of 20 percent of his countrymen, 1.7 million in all. Nine weeks after I left him another year, I was in Haiti, where I was told not to go out at night “because of democracy,” and signs in French and English asked citizens not to bring their guns into a hospital. The horror of Beirut was, in many ways, the very cosmopolitanism and elegance of Beirut: here was one of the most intelligent and engaged places anyone could hope to see, and it was precisely that untransformed intelligence that led to such ingenuities as suicide bombing and hostage taking, a terrorist group with its own satellite TV station and advertising agents, precisely that engagement that led to the refusal to let crimes go unanswered.

A few months after the Dalai Lama received the Nobel Prize, I was in Tibet and North Korea, and nothing I saw in either place told me that the world was more concerned than before, that human nature was moving toward “more gentleness” or that “humanity is becoming more mature.”

Such challenges are posed all the time to the Dalai Lama, of course, though my talks with him had suggested that he posed them to himself even more often. What would you do if someone threatened to rape a group of Tibetan nuns? people asked. How would you respond if a man came into the room right now, wildly waving a gun? In response, he usually cited one of the Buddha’s own classic teachings, about how a man may be justified in killing another if that other is about to kill five hundred people. Everything, again, depends on motivation, and at his evening talk in Nara he had remarked that though the upshot is the same, “friendly fire” is profoundly different from an act of aggression, if only because it arises from different impulses.

Even as he said all this, though, these questions were far from abstract for his people: their country really was being destroyed, their heritage raped and their community tortured. Many of them clearly felt that they had spent their entire lives in a waiting room, exercising preternatural patience, as their leader counseled, even as foreigners told them how Tibetans in Tibet could barely speak Tibetan now, that a Tibetan had been imprisoned for six years just for privately screening a video of her exiled leader, that the Potala Palace was mockingly surrounded by swan boats and the trappings of an amusement park. How can one stand by and practice “inner disarmament,” I could imagine them saying, when one’s own home and all its residents are going up in flames?

One warm spring afternoon I sat in one of the oldest little coffee-houses in Dharamsala, the Chocolate Log, its red-and-white-checkered tables neatly set out on a terrace so you can watch the sun casting large shadows across the mountains, the snowcaps so sharp above the settlement that you can start to believe (as in Tibet) in heavenly protection, and heard one of the settlement’s most forceful and impassioned speakers, Lhasang Tsering, brief a group of American college students on Tibet and its situation.

I knew Lhasang well because he ran the area’s most literate and spirited bookshop, sitting behind his desk in the mornings—his sad, burning eyes, his lean face, and his white wisp of a beard giving him the air of an exiled East Asian sage—talking about literature, the latest political testaments, and, without much prompting, everything that was wrong with the Tibetan government in exile (in particular its readiness, since 1987, to concede that China could continue to control Tibet’s external affairs so long as Tibetans could control their internal ones). Lhasang had once worked in the government itself, for the Department of Information; he had taught at the Tibetan Children’s Village, with the Dalai Lama’s younger sister; he had stolen back into Tibet, in 1980, and been instrumental, along with those now closest to the Dalai Lama, in setting up the Tibetan Youth Congress, the main activist voice of exiled Tibet, always eager to do something for stranded cousins and former neighbors under Chinese rule. Dharamsala is a small town, in every sense, and Lhasang (along with Jamyang Norbu, first cousin of the Dalai Lama’s longtime private secretary) was clearly one of its brightest minds and most eloquent debaters, though now, as in some Shakespearean court, he had become the voice of indignant opposition.

“The first thing I must tell you,” he told the students, in what I took to be his standard address, his gaze as mournful as it was commanding, “is that I am not from Shangri-La. In fact, I don’t know where that place is. And, frankly, I do not have the time or inclination to look for it.” What he was really saying, I thought, was that he was not ready, as he put it bluntly, “to stand by and watch people suffer.” To talk about peace while Tibetans were dying was, he suggested, tantamount to manslaughter.

How could one take the moral high road, he went on, how could one speak of long-term consequences and universal principles when the short-term consequences—being tortured and beaten and inwardly corrupted—were being felt by others? “I don’t think it is fair for us to ignore Tibetans who are suffering in Tibet,” he said with rhetorical cunning, as if the Dalai Lama were practicing a kind of willful cruelty. “We are praying for world peace, and not even doing very much for world peace.”

The young Americans sat around the simple table looking stunned, as if someone had hit them on the head with a hammer. Lhasang, though, his eyes flaring with soft fire, his quiet voice compelling, was speaking for a very different response to suffering than the Dalai Lama was outlining, down the road, in his annual New Year’s teachings. He and his leader might almost have been monks in a classic debate, one of them (the former guerrilla in the café) lunging forward with slashing argument after argument in favor of action, the other (the Tibetan leader across the hill) sitting unmoved, and saying that tolerance, patience, forgiveness, too, are a form of action, the very opposite of passivity.

In the mornings, Lhasang sat in his shop, the Bookworm, and spoke of what he had learned working for the Department of Information (and of what he hadn’t learned—he knew much more, he said, from working outside government), what he had seen being trained by the CIA, how his own brother had been wounded while fighting for the Indian army in Bangladesh. Around him the orange and gray volumes of Steinbeck and Gordimer and Camus spoke of the virtue of action, positive involvement in the fight against injustice. One morning he pressed a button on his tape player, and a scratchy sound emerged that I recognized in time as a rendition of “This Land Is Your Land,” the deathless Woody Guthrie anthem reclaiming America for its oppressed peoples. But the lyrics in this version, I heard as I listened more closely, spoke of traveling from holy Kailas to the plains of Amdo. It was a new rendition of the song that he had written himself, the bookstore owner said with his melancholy gaze, after stealing into his country to see what it was like, more than twenty years before.

“Why is he thinking of the future?” Lhasang went on now, in the open-air café, of the Dalai Lama. “And not the present, the past? If you want freedom from this world, there’s a lot of space still free in the mountains.” He gestured toward the slopes all around, where hermits sat in caves for years, sometimes monitored and measured by researchers from America. “I want freedom in this world, not from this world.

“If a mouse is cornered by a cat, he has to make a run for it.” (No, I thought, as if I were on the other side of the hill: the cat may get distracted, he may get picked up and taken away, he might spot a more tempting target—there are many reasons why the mouse might be well advised to bide his time.) The Middle Way policy of the Dalai Lama’s government in exile, Lhasang implied, was just a way of shaking hands with the devil. (“In politics,” he might have cited President John Adams as saying, “the middle way is none at all.”)

“So you are in favor of terrorism?” a young male student asked at last when Lhasang seemed to have subsided.

“I am in favor of action. As I always say, nonviolence is not non-action. Unless we act, how can the world support us? As I keep saying, you can’t sponsor a child who won’t go to school.”

“But what form would this action take?”

“One determined Tibetan could throw out a Chinese city’s power station. Could block a road.”