The Open Road (21 page)

Because of the “fast pace of life” in the West, he told me once, monks in the East may have a small advantage over their counterparts in the West when it comes to meditation (though no sooner had he said this than he remembered some Catholic monks he’d visited in France who seemed unsurpassable in their single-pointed concentration); yet Buddhists, he said, perhaps had something to learn from Christians and others when it came to social action and bringing the fruits of their practice out into the world. As he said that, I recalled how Bono, the ardently Christian lead singer of the group U2, had been asked in 1990 to write a song for a Tibetan Freedom Concert and had come up with a haunting ballad about how we share “one love, one blood, one life, you’ve got to do what you should,” and yet concluded, again and again, “we’re one, but we’re not the same.” The song had become one of the group’s talismanic anthems, which I’d heard sung in the dusty Current Event café in Dharamsala, and was a favorite at modern weddings. And yet, Bono always stressed, the song was about divisions, inherent differences—the fact that we can never be as one as we would like.

Every monk is the same monk insofar as he journeys into a similar silence and a parallel darkness—the blackness behind our thoughts we find in meditation—and every monk is the same monk as every lover is the same lover: it doesn’t matter whether the object of your devotion is called Angela or Jigme or Tom, whether she existed in Sappho’s time or right now. Yet every monk is most the same monk because his journey into solitude, community, and obedience is a way, really, for him to bring something transformative to the larger world, in the attention he brings to it.

“Be not
simply
good,” as Thoreau wrote in his first letter to Harrison Blake, “be good for something.”

Perhaps the most moving moment I ever witnessed in Dharamsala came in 1988, when I was invited, during the Tibetan New Year celebrations centered on the Dalai Lama’s temple, to stand in on one of the meetings the Dalai Lama holds with Tibetans who have just arrived, after treacherous flights across the mountains, to see him again. Many of these people had risked their lives traveling three weeks across Himalayan passes in midwinter to meet with him for a few minutes and then would cross back over the mountains, perhaps never to see him again.

The people who were gathered in the room, maybe thirty or so, were strikingly ragged, their poor clothes rendered even poorer and more threadbare by their long trip across the snowcaps. They assembled in three lines in a small room, and all I could see were filthy coats, blackened faces, sores on hands and feet, straggly, unwashed hair.

When the Dalai Lama came into the room, it was as if the whole place began to sob and shake. Instantly, among almost all the people assembled on the floor, there was a wailing, a convulsive movement, a release of all the feelings (of hope and fear and concern and relief) that had been building inside some of them for over thirty years. The man sat before them, seeking them out with shrewd, attentive eyes, and none of the adults before him could even look at him.

“Even we cannot watch this, often,” said the Dalai Lama’s private secretary, who had stood by his side, imperturbably, as calm as the monk he once was, for more than a quarter of a century at that point. The Dalai Lama sat firmly in the middle of the tumult, though later he would tell me that although “generally, sadness is manageable,” even he was sometimes moved to “shed a tear” when he saw all the hopes that these people brought to him, and all that they had suffered.

“Sometimes we try to find someone else to do this for us,” the secretary whispered to me where we stood. “It’s just too much.”

The Dalai Lama tends to be more brusque with Tibetans than he is with Westerners, partly because he knows that this is what they expect of him, and partly because he knows that they would be discomfited by too much familiarity from their godhead. But now he went down the lines, greeting each person in turn, asking (I could guess) where this person came from, how things were in her local area, what might be done to help. Each person, in answer to the questions, looked down, or just began to howl and shake with sobs.

Only a few children sitting in the front, the smallest in the party, answered the questions, their high, piping voices telling him they came from Kham, or their father was a farmer, or the trip had taken them twenty-three days. Only the children had not been storing up their hopes for all these years, with only this one chance to release them. Then, after making sure that all the refugees would be properly looked after, and given new homes here if that was what they wanted, the Dalai Lama told them to keep their spirits up and their hearts intent on how they could help others.

The four hours every morning of meditation were, I saw now, straightforward compared with the house those foundations supported.

IN PRACTICE

 

You must invent your own religion, or else it will mean nothing to you. You must follow the religion of your fathers, or else you will lose it.

—
HASIDIC PROVERB

THE GLOBALIST

T
o make your way to Dharamsala, the strung-out settlement south of the Himalayas to which much of the world seems to be beating a path these days, you need a lot of determination and a strong dose of reality. You can fly to Amritsar and then take a five-hour drive from the Sikh city. But the Golden Temple, which sits shimmering on a pool at the center of Amritsar, the holiest shrine for all Sikhs, bears bullet holes from a near civil war twenty years ago when Indira Gandhi’s troops stormed the sacred space to try to rout the militant Sikhs calling for their own nation. And even the road up to Dharamsala is far from unworldly: I once saw four separate cars smashed along the road, some with bloody bodies laid out beside them.

You can also fly to Jammu and take a five-hour drive from there. Jammu, however, sits in the heart of Jammu and Kashmir state, another restricted war zone where fighting has broken out repeatedly for fifty years or more; the last time I visited the small airport there, practically the only other passengers I saw were blue-helmeted peacekeepers sent by the United Nations to try to heal the wounds of Kashmir. Most travelers going to Dharamsala from Delhi take an overnight train to Pathankot, followed by a three-and-a-half-hour drive, braving the station in the Indian capital where figures swarm around foreign passengers, hands extended, many of the beggars going to sleep in the same hallway through which you pass. The final alternative is to drive, for ten hours or more, from Delhi, through narrow country roads ever more crowded with bicycles, cars, trucks, scooters, cows, and people, so jam-packed around every town that no car can move through what is in effect a mob. This is the route, for security’s sake, the Dalai Lama usually takes.

There is, on paper, an airport only a few miles from Dharamsala, but on most days it is closed; sometimes it seems to be closed for years on end. When occasionally a small plane does take off from there, there is often no room for luggage, so that the few passengers arrive at the other end to learn (as in a Buddhist story about death) that none of their possessions have accompanied them. The wonky twelve-seater run by one of India’s new start-up airlines is such a shaky prospect, on this route between the mountains, that even the Dalai Lama’s celebrated calm is said to be unsettled by it.

The town itself, when you arrive, conforms to none of the rosy notions many visitors have entertained—of temples set among picturesque valleys and meditating monks in an otherworldly location. There are such temples, often dramatically placed, and there is always snow on the mountains that rise up to fifteen thousand feet here, the foothills of the Himalayas; Tibet is barely a hundred miles away. But what greets you, as you get off a bus or step out of your taxi from the airport or far-off rail station, are some very muddy little lanes with open sewers running beside them, and a jumble of broken shops, overseas phone parlors, and guesthouses tumbling up and down the unpaved slopes (the last time I counted, there were eighty-one guesthouses in this settlement of only twenty thousand people offering rooms for less than seven dollars a night). The signs say “Dreamland” and “Lost Horizon” and “Tibet Memory,” flyers on the walls sing of Shiva Full Moon Parties, and everywhere, along the grimy lanes, are the world’s young and the seekers of five continents, being besieged by Indian taxi drivers and purveyors of wisdom, and Tibetans who stand outside shops called “Kundalini Cosmic Souvenirs” or roadside stalls offering “spiritual gems.”

You have ended up, you may well imagine, in some wild bazaar of the sacred and the profane. Notices around town advertise “Traditional Tibetan Universal Massage,” remind you that “Harmonising with the Moon Courses Are Taking Place at House Om Tara,” ask for news of a man from near Seattle who’s gone missing. The British alighted on Dharamsala in 1849 and set up the little Anglican church, the army cantonment, the cottages called Ivanhoe and Eagle’s Nest, which are still the first things you see if you arrive by bus. But an earthquake destroyed the settlement in 1905, and hardly had it begun to recover than Partition, in 1947, sent up to 70 percent of its people away. McLeod Ganj, the area the Tibetans have settled, at fifty-four hundred feet, a few miles above the everyday little Indian town of Dharamsala, was a ghost town when the Dalai Lama and his family arrived here in 1960, and to this day many people believe that Prime Minister Nehru offered it to the exiled Tibetans as a way to put them out of view, only three hundred miles from Delhi on the map but, in practice, tucked away in another universe.

The town that has arisen around the Tibetan leader has the feeling, therefore, like so much in the Tibetan situation, of an inner diagram or an extended symbol. You hear that inscriptions mentioning a Buddhist monastery from more than two thousand years ago have been found in the Kangra Valley below; when the Chinese traveler Hsuan Tsang passed through in the year 635, he reported seeing fifty monasteries, with two thousand monks in them. You learn that the very word “Dharamsala” means, too fittingly, “a place of shelter,” often for pilgrims. You gather that the house where the Dalai Lama first lived when he arrived here, alert for visitations of bears and leopards and deer, is now, too perfectly, a “mountaineering institute.” But what hits you most about this highly improvised, unorthodox assemblage of houses and hopes is that it seems to stand for so much else. Foreigners like to call it “Little Lhasa” and come here in search of the Tibetan wisdom that had never been available to the world till it came out of China in 1959 and landed in this neglected area. Tibetans struggle across the Himalayas and settle here because it is the home of their beloved leader and, therefore, the home of their hearts, the next best thing until Tibet itself can be recovered. Indian holiday makers and honeymooners flock into the flimsy, many-storied, wedding-cake new Indian hotels perched on slopes because they have heard it is a cool place where they can get a whiff of both West and East.

Dharamsala, built, in effect, by a man who is talking about the impermanence of everything and the folly of desire, can seem very much like a community founded on longing, on homesickness and restlessness and dreams. The Tibetans who live here to some degree wish, more than anything, that, like a sand mandala, it can be dissolved and they can return to the place of which it is a mere replica; many foreigners who visit are exiles of a deeper kind who hope to make a home in this foreign culture, surrounded by customs that are not their own. The Tibetans look to the Westerners, often, as emissaries from the land of abundance and freedom they dream of; the Westerners gather around the Tibetans to hear about antiquity and mysticism.

To get almost anywhere in Dharamsala, you have to scramble up steep, steep slopes made of nothing but mud and jagged rocks and cow dung, so dark after nightfall that even a flashlight or small candle does not prevent you from falling on your face or lurching suddenly into a ditch. Pathways twist around the side of mountains, over pieces of industrial piping, through small forests where, it is whispered, women often get attacked or confronted by exhibitionists. And the weather changes precipitously, as if, in the classic Buddhist metaphor, standing for the mind (different, shifting clouds in front, and deep blue sky always within).

Dharamsala is the single rainiest spot in all of monsoonal India, and in the summer it is notoriously sludgy, the unstinting downpours turning everything into a damp cave of sorts; in winter, snow and ice lie on the ground, and the little lanes are dark and forlorn for much of the day. And then, out of nowhere, the sun begins to shine and picks out the marigolds outside the bright houses, the flowering honeysuckle in the spring, the gold turrets and yellow walls of the temples set on hillsides and in valleys, and you can easily feel as if you have landed in a realm of enchantment.