The Open Road (11 page)

And then his voice comes down again and brings us back to earth, leaving us gently in our seats, and there is a silence across the whole illuminated space. I glance at the friend sitting next to me, shaking my head in silence, and try to look down so he won’t see the tears of exaltation.

When I walk out into the rain—fervent Canuck fans are cavorting in their team colors among Tibetans and Tibetophiles, many of whom (the daily paper has told me) have driven fifteen hundred miles to hear the Dalai Lama speak—I try to steady myself and put things in perspective. These men are in the inspiration business, after all, and, like any professionals, they’re good at what they do. As Tutu had jokingly implied, a podium, a church, and a microphone are for him as a hockey stick, a net, and some ice might be for a professional Canuck. Again, the main interest of the event to some degree is the contrast in their voices: the Dalai Lama takes us into ourselves, where all the power and the responsibility (for a Buddhist) lie, delivering his words with a settled gravitas. Tutu, by comparison, carries us up and out of ourselves and to where we seem joined in a heavenly choir in what could be taken to be our rightful home.

Just one week later, though, at a small town two hours from Seattle, I happen to bump into a young teacher whom I had got to know in the basement of Christ Church Cathedral before the ceremony for the honorary degrees. My new friend Christian gives me a copy of an article he wrote about the occasion and says, “You know, it really made a difference. As soon as I got home, I went around and introduced myself to all my neighbors. It’s not like changing the world, but it’s a first step, I think. I’d never done that before.”

As I listen to him, I realize how little any of my ideas about celebrity and the media have to do with the days that have passed. Really, what I’ve been thinking about was my world much more than the Dalai Lama’s. A pickpocket encounters a saint, the Tibetans say, and all he sees are the other man’s pockets.

IN PRIVATE

 

It’s a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and to find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than “Try to be a little kinder.”

—
ALDOUS HUXLEY

THE PHILOSOPHER

I
magine, for a moment, that you are a body (not difficult to do, since in part that is what you are). You have eyes, ears, legs, hands, and, if you are lucky, all of them are in good working order. You never, if you are sane, think of your finger as an independent entity (though you may occasionally say, “My toe seems to have a mind of its own”). You are never, in your right mind, moved to hit your own foot, let alone sever it; the only loser in such an exercise would be yourself.

Instead, you likely take measures to ensure that every part of your body is healthy. You clean your teeth regularly (the Dalai Lama, characteristically, pulls out a toothbrush even at ceremonial occasions and brushes away, as if everywhere were home). You exercise. You ensure that you get good sleep and try to maintain some control over what you put into your system. At some level, you strive to make sure that your right foot knows what your left is doing; if they’re moving in opposite directions, you’ll fall on your face.

This is all simplistic to the point of self-evidence. But when the Buddhist speaks of “interdependence” (the central Buddhist concept of
shunyata,
often rendered as “emptiness,” the Dalai Lama has translated as “empty of independent identity”), all he is really saying is that we are all a part of a single body, and to think of “I” and “you,” of the right hand’s interests being different from the left’s, makes no sense at all. It’s crazy to impede your neighbor, because he is as intrinsic to your welfare as your thumb is. It’s almost absurd to say you wish to get ahead of your colleague—it’s like your right toe saying it longs to be ahead of the left. You can’t say you wish to devastate China, because China is your right eye (and Tibet is your left); different, to be sure, unequal—one may be 20/40, one 20/20—but all part of the same mechanism, fundamentally working toward the same end. Many Buddhists have seized on cyberspace, the ecosystem, on globalism itself as merely a perfect equivalent and metaphor of how they see the world: a complexly linked worldwide web that in classic Buddhist philosophy is sometimes known as “Indra’s Net.”

Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that the Fourteenth Dalai Lama is famous for his laughter, the sudden eruption of almost helpless giggles or a high-pitched shaking of the body. Seen from the vantage point of one who meditates several hours a day, traveling to the place where everything is connected, much of our fascination with surface or with division seems truly hilarious. Quarreling over money is a little like “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” in the Christian metaphor; it’s like taking a ten-dollar bill out of your right-hand pocket and then, after a great deal of fanfare and contention, putting it in the left. Talking about friends and enemies is a little like holding on to this hair on your arm and claiming it as a friend, because you see it daily, and calling the hair on your back an enemy, because you never see it at all. Talking of how you are a Buddhist and therefore opposed to the Judeo-Christian teaching is like solemnly asserting that your right nostril is the source of everything good, and your left nostril a place of evil. The doctrine of “universal responsibility” is not only universal but obvious: it’s like saying that every part of us longs for our legs, our eyes, our lungs to be healthy. If one part suffers, we all do.

Simple, you may say, but “it takes more courage than we imagine,” as Thomas Merton wrote, “to be perfectly simple with other men.” And from this basic proposition flow many other truths, as naturally as the fact that 2 + 2 = 4 tells you that 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 = 8. Of course you will want to forgive others, in the same way you will want to stop punching your own side. Of course you will look in terms of the larger good, the wider perspective (the word “wider” is a favorite of the Dalai Lama’s), because a hair may be cut off tomorrow, but the body as a whole can keep functioning no worse than before. There’s no great need to mourn the loss of that toe-nail; the foot as a whole is still moving and, besides, at some point every part of the body is going to grow old and die.

This mention of an extended sense of kinship, even identity, is as global, as ecumenical, as loving your neighbor as yourself. But where Buddhism differs from other philosophies is in saying that the architect, the administrator, the guardian of this whole body is not Allah or God or the swarm of deities of the Hindu pantheon; it is a network of which we are part (that is a part of us). That is why the Buddha did not speak of “praying ceaselessly,” as Saint Paul did, but of “striving ceaselessly.” Buddhists do not (or need not) seek solutions from outside themselves, but merely awakening within; the minute we come to see that our destinies or well-being are all mutually dependent, they say, the rest naturally follows (meditation sometimes seems the way we come to this perception, reasoning the way we consolidate it).

If you believe this, human life offers you many more belly laughs daily, as the Dalai Lama exemplifies. Why run around the world, to Lourdes or Tuscany or Tibet, when in truth the source of all your power, your answers, lies right here, inside yourself? Why give yourself a hard time and proclaim your own worthlessness when in fact the keys for transformation are within? Why despair, indeed, when you can change the world at any moment by choosing to see that the person who gave your last book a bad review is as intrinsic to your well-being as your thumb is?

To understand the Dalai Lama, or any serious, full-time follower of the Buddha, especially if (as in my case) you come from some other tradition, perhaps it’s most useful to see him as a doctor of the soul. The Buddha always stressed that he was more physician than metaphysician; when you find an arrow sticking out of the side of your body, he famously said, you don’t argue about where it came from or which craftsman fashioned it—you simply pull it out.

A practical, immediate cure for suffering and ignorance is what he offered; when asked about the existence of the soul or other lofty philosophical questions, the Buddha customarily said nothing, as if to suggest that such disquisitions were beside the point when a patient was lying on his deathbed and you had the chance to help him. As Somerset Maugham, the onetime medical student and lifelong traveler who had a rare gift for entering other characters, put it, the Buddha “made only the claim of the physician that you should give him a trial and judge him by the results.”

The Dalai Lama, always so faithful to his source, often uses the image of medicine, as he did when receiving his honorary doctorate at Christ Church Cathedral in Vancouver, and tells people that there is no “right” religion for anyone, though some find Buddhism helpful, some Christianity, the way some patients choose radiation therapy, some chemotherapy, and some, perhaps, Chinese herbs. Besides, as he told an interviewer in 1989, “we have enough religions. Enough religions, but not enough real human beings…. Don’t let us talk too much of religion. Let us talk of what is human.”

Like any doctor, he’s not concerned with pressing on strangers his view of the universe; the important thing is diagnosing what the problem is and suggesting a possible cure. If there’s no problem, then, as he often says, he can go home; there’s no need of a house call. Ideally, he prescribes the kind of preventive medicine that might be called meditation or philosophical training. But, however charming or lovable or intelligent he is, a doctor’s presence is only as good, really, as his ability to heal our pain.

If someone asks the Dalai Lama about a problem in her sexual life, he is likely to say, as many a doctor might, “That’s out of my domain. You’ll have to consult a specialist.” If he is about to join in a discussion with an abbot in Nara and he spots a girl sitting in a wheelchair nearby, he will instantly break from his discussion the way a physician, if suddenly there is a car crash outside, will leave his dinner companions and see if he can be of help. Though trained in the technical and complicated history and implications of disease, his job is to take that recondite learning and translate it into simple, concrete instruction for his patients. The most important thing we ask of a doctor is that he not hide the truth from us, out of kindness or sympathy, not dress it up in euphemisms or periphrases, but just tell it to us straight, so we know where we stand.

A doctor is not presumed to be all-powerful. He has a private life, we know, and though his part in our life is to give us the fruits of his specialized training, we do not expect him to be an expert when it comes to playing tennis or taking photographs or being a father. “If you have come here with expectations of the Dalai Lama,” I heard the Dalai Lama say before a large public audience in Switzerland, “you’re likely to be disappointed. If you think the Dalai Lama has special powers, you’re wrong, unfortunately. If I had healing powers”—he broke into a series of coughs—“I wouldn’t have this sore throat right now.” A doctor has sides of his life that are not covered by his training, but at some level every doctor is on twenty-four-hour call for life.

Like any doctor, the Dalai Lama tries to remain abreast of all the latest discoveries and breakthroughs in the field, and travels constantly to interfaith meetings and labs around the world. Often, even on social occasions, he is asked for his advice—as we, when meeting a doctor, may say, “I’m sorry to bother you, but my cousin’s wife has this pain…”—and he has to be careful not to offer advice in those fields where he’s not qualified. To a physician who takes seriously the Hippocratic oath, the notion of a celebrity doctor is a little comical. He may have a good bedside manner, he may be called in on TV shows as a pundit, he may have published many books, but all he is doing, really, is applying a knowledge that is universal, outside of him, and available to anyone who works in the same field. When he retires, another doctor comes along and, generally, offers us the same diagnoses and prescriptions (not least because medicine is an objective science where diagnoses are arrived at through empirical tests, records of famous cases, and statistical probability).

Most of all, a doctor has to be clear-eyed; he cannot avert death forever—sooner or later he will lose many of his patients—and all he can do is to try to ensure that every day is spent as fruitfully, as happily as possible. He doesn’t care, ideally, whether his patient is a backpacker or a head of state (the diagnosis is the same); and he isn’t concerned about surface issues (asked how he feels about discos around the Potala Palace, the Dalai Lama always answers, instantly, “No problem”). The words he will use—and this, too, perhaps sounds familiar—are “beneficial,” “useful,” and “positive effect,” generally qualified by the wise disclaimer “generally.”