The Open Road (4 page)

As the Dalai Lama moves off toward the next stop on his global itinerary—getting up while it is still dark to complete his four hours of meditation—people around me say, as they often seem to do after such a visit, that it feels as if a light has come on in the city. For a brief moment, friends and neighbors seem a little more hopeful, as if given heart by a wandering uncle. Yet I, ever the journalist, am keen to see how much of what he’s said and done remains, and what effect it would have, if any, on someone who’d never seen him. The overall impression I come away with from the visit is one of efficiency and speed, the way a doctor on call in a hospital will not let a second go wasted (especially, perhaps, if he is also here to talk about others in desperate need far away).

When Hiroko and I step into the dusty old room in the Nara Hotel he’s been given to receive visitors, we find him standing at the window, looking out at the deer. The Fourteenth Dalai Lama, known in Beijing as a “wolf in monk’s clothing,” is famous for his love of animals.

“You’re lucky to be in a place where the deer are effectively the bosses,” I say. “They’ve been ruling Nara, in their way, for thirteen hundred years.”

“Perhaps you will be a deer in your next life,” he says, breaking into laughter. “A deer who writes!

“How do you say?” he goes on, turning to a private secretary.

“With hoof! A deer who writes with his hoof!”

“No,” says Hiroko, always quick with her perceptions. “With his head.” She mimics a deer writing on the ground with its antlers, and the Dalai Lama, now sitting down, claps his hands with delight and falls about laughing.

“You see,” he explains, “some people tell me that because I like animals I will come back in my next life as an animal.” He has a German shepherd at home, he says, and she is so compassionate, she has even adopted a rabbit from his garden. (“Even the rabbit is trying to suck at the dog’s teats. Of course, a little disturbing for the dog!”) Whereas the dog of his other private secretary, now minding the store in Dharamsala—“famous for his fierce nature!”

This is not, I’ll realize later, just idle chitchat. In his public address, he stresses the phrase “social animals,” if only to remind us that nurturing is as much an instinct with us as being predatory. And when he talks about how the Nara deer, lacking sharp claws, were clearly meant by nature to be vegetarians, I will see—though only much later—that he’s making a point about humans, too, likewise lacking sharp claws.

Yet the main thing he’s keen to talk about, as always, is what he’s learned from his current tour, and particularly from his meetings with physicists in Tokyo. In old Tibet, he says, mandalas showed the sun and moon as being of equal size, as if equidistant from the earth. That is wrong, he declares, with the vigor that he increasingly often calls upon; nothing can be maintained once disproved by science. “The Four Noble Truths,
shunyata
”—the doctrine of emptiness, or interdependence—“those we Buddhists need.” Everything else, goes the implication, is autumn leaves.

I remember how he had lit up when challenged by the young Japanese philosopher around the conference table; Buddhism itself, he now says, can only gain from being debated, just as Hinduism did before it. Whole kingdoms used to be at stake, he declares, with evident excitement, when Buddhism debated its positions against Hinduism, and people watched the clash of ideas as later they watched the struggle of armed men.

And whole kingdoms are at stake now, I think, as I remember all the Tibetans who are urging the Dalai Lama to be more decisive in his opposition to Chinese oppression, to accept no compromise, to speak for action and full independence and not just the religious principles of forbearance and turning the other cheek.

This is, in fact, the most agonizing and mounting of all the conundrums he travels with. For even as he has charmed this small corner of Japan and begun to pass on some confidence, the country that he was born to rule is slipping ever closer to extinction. In the course of his life, and thanks in part to him, Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism have become a living and liberating part of the global neighborhood; and yet at the same time, on his watch, his own people have lost most of their contact with their leaders, their loved ones, and their culture, and one of the great centers of Buddhism, five times as large as Britain, has been all but wiped off the map. The leader of the Tibetans finds himself carrying an entire culture on his shoulders; and even as he’s trying to support six million people he hasn’t seen in half a century, he is obliged to create a new Tibet among those who have seldom or never seen Tibet.

One evening in Dharamsala, I notice clouds beginning to gather above the Kangra Valley below. The little town in northern India where the Dalai Lama and his government have made their home for more than forty years now is a bedraggled and makeshift place, but if you catch it at the right angle, as in the little guesthouse where I stay, it can give off something of the light of fairy tale. From the garden where I sit, all I can hear are the sounds of chants and gongs from the temple across the way, set next to the Dalai Lama’s home; if I sit on the sunlit terrace outside my room, all I can see are young monks racing along the whitewashed terraces of a monastery, their red robes laid out under the snowcaps to dry.

This little corner of the hill station is a perfect symbol of how Tibet is being rebuilt, in compact, more conscious form, outside the borders of Tibet. On this day, however, as I watch a storm building in the valley, it begins to rain furiously, and the wind starts to shake the solid three stories of the building, the trees outside beginning to shiver and crack. Then there is a crash from somewhere down below, and electricity across the settlement is gone.

Looking outside, I see nothing but dark. Shouts rise up from the road down below, and I can hear the people who live along the road scrambling for shelter. It seems madness to go out into the elements, but if Hiroko and I do not honor tonight’s engagement, I’m not sure when, or whether, it will come again.

We struggle out together into the rain, our umbrella tearing as we slip and slither down an unpaved slope, every attempt at respectability suitably mocked, and, after many minutes, find a minivan that is not taken. As it wends its way down the precipitous mountain road, we see occasional figures sheltering under trees, beggars huddled together under stoops.

When, finally, we arrive at our destination, our host comes up to us with a typically urbane, unflustered “Come. Are you sure you’re okay?” and we step into the shelter of Ngari Rinpoche’s home. The younger brother of the Dalai Lama—more than a decade younger—Ngari Rinpoche was discovered to be a
rinpoche,
or high incarnate lama, when he was a boy and trained as a monk, in charge of large numbers of monks in the Indian areas of Zanskar and Ladakh. Early on, however, he shed his robes and recast himself as something of the loyal opposition to institutional Tibet. Of course I was declared to be a rinpoche, he more or less said; I was the younger brother of the Dalai Lama. (In fact, their eldest brother had also been taken to be a high lama even before the Dalai Lama was born, but still the point remained: Tibet’s system of incarnations has always left room for manipulation.)

In the years that followed, the Dalai Lama’s youngest sibling became a paratrooper in the Indian army; he smoked and devoured steaks; and to this day he loves to shock those he meets with his equal-opportunity irreverence: say something positive about Tibet, and he’s likely to reply, “You’re just a susceptible Westerner, a groupie.” More and more, as the years go on, he asks me, when he meets me, if I’m preparing to be a monk by losing my hair.

He leads us now into his spare, elegant living room, which looks out over the huge valley below. Lightning breaks across the expanse, and the electricity flickers on again, then dies. On one table I see the new English translation of a three-volume Tibetan text from the fifteenth century that Ngari Rinpoche is studying in his evenings (his written English is in places more confident than his Tibetan, since he left Tibet when he was barely thirteen).

I have not seen Ngari Rinpoche—who now prefers to go by the secular name Tendzin Choegyal—for seven years, and the change in him is remarkable. He has always seemed to be the uncensored private side, the alter ego, of the Dalai Lama, having lived beside him in Dharamsala for more than forty years, working with him as translator, filter, even private secretary (their eldest brother moved to Bloomington, Indiana, to teach, in 1968; their second-eldest brother lives in Hong Kong and works as a businessman, going to and from Beijing as a kind of unofficial emissary; their sister oversees the Tibetan Children’s Village in Dharamsala; and their third-eldest brother, who had lived simply in New Jersey as a janitor called “Sam” until his cover was blown by the
New York Times,
died in his early fifties).

Tonight, however, I notice how much Ngari Rinpoche is coming to resemble his most celebrated sibling. The voice, low and deep, could be the Dalai Lama’s, especially on a night like this when the room is almost dark. The laugh, sudden and wildly accelerating—all conversation stops with it—is identical. And of course what he’s saying is often word for word what his brother would say, in part because they are brothers, but even more because they are both lifelong students of the same philosophy, and Ngari Rinpoche has spent his life studying under and talking to the Dalai Lama. When Hiroko begins telling a story of imagining she saw her estranged brother in a temple in Tibet, our host leans forward in the thin light, a single candle picking up his high cheekbones, his attentive eyes, the look of a doctor listening for symptoms, and it’s impossible not to think we’re up the hill in the Dalai Lama’s house, though unofficially.

“You should tell His Holiness when you see him,” he says to Hiroko, and a part of me bridles at the romanticism of imputing too much to this disrobed monk—Tibet lends itself too easily to such ideas—while a part of me notices that she is in fact looking a lot better.

We go to sit at the dinner table—lightning breaking across the valley again, and every syllable intimate in the near dark—and I remember how, the last time I had seen him, the unorthodox lama had told me about what he called the “Shangri-La syndrome,” whereby foreigners were much too ready to ascribe all kinds of wisdom to every Tibetan they met, and Tibetans much too ready to take advantage of that. Fluent in Chinese and English as well as Tibetan, having grown up for a year in Beijing and then in northern India as well as Lhasa, Ngari Rinpoche speaks for the part of Tibet that is both modern and global.

We retire, after dinner, to the living room for tea, and suddenly, with his characteristic directness, our host turns to me in the near dark.

“Do you think I’ve done anything for Tibet?”

“Of course,” I say, stumbling a little, because taken aback.

“You’ve been an intermediary between Tibetans and the Western world.”

“You’re saying I’m just a Westerner.”

“No.” Less trained than he at ritual debating, I fumble for a second. “But you can take information to His Holiness that he wouldn’t hear otherwise.”

“He has other people who can do that for him. Take my word for it.”

I shuffle uneasily in my chair, hoping he’ll change direction.

“You’re being polite,” he goes on (and again I think of his brother’s impatience with mere formality). “Mine is a serious question. Do you think I’ve done anything to make Tibetan lives any better?”

“You have, by knowing the world outside Tibet.”

He laughs dismissively, as if I’ve hit an easy serve ten feet over the line. We go on talking for a while, and then Hiroko and I make our way back to our little room in the guesthouse up the hill. As we get there, I recall how I had heard almost exactly the same sentence fourteen years before, from the Dalai Lama, the day after his Nobel Prize had been announced. “I really wonder if my efforts are enough,” he had said, at the very moment when he was being most feted by the world. All we can do, he had told me, is try, even though it sometimes seems to be in vain.

At the end of the evening, I pick up my pen. Of all the many books and films that have brought the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and his people to the world, I’m not sure any of them has addressed that most central of questions.

 

I and my four cameramen were rendered speechless by the emptiness of the landscape, the invisible wind that swept across the barren land, the high boundless sky, and the utter silence. My heart and soul felt clean and empty. I lost any sense of where I was or of the need to talk.