The Open Road by Pico Iyer Page A

that when Mao Zedong’s troops invaded, the Tibetan army numbered all of 8,500 men, protected by fifty pieces of artillery and a few ancient guns, and that Tibetans in the aftermath of their miscalculations were tortured and subjected to electroshock treatment, forced sterilization, and rape. The Dalai Lama has seen more than 300,000 foreign troops stationed in his homeland, and nearly a hundred nuclear missiles.
    As I watched the Dalai Lama over the years and thought about what his mission was, this interest of his in “Reality,” as if it were the swarm of energies he was investigating to see how it all worked, began to seem more and more compelling. Many of the problems Tibet had suffered, he always stressed, were at some level the result of mistakes the culture itself had made, in not becoming informed enough of the truths of the outside world, in not studying itself honestly enough to consider reform; and circumstances had now given him and his people an ideal chance to learn from their mistakes and to create something more solid. Tibet could at last become part of a global family.
    For a journalist like me, this was all as refreshing, even as liberating, as running into a man carrying a stethoscope instead of a white paper around the world. Most of the politicians I’d met in my twenty-five years of covering the news rooted themselves firmly in the future and the promises they made, or in the past and the grievances they promised to redress. But the scientist of self lived entirely in the present and had no more interest in the projections of romanticism than in the delusions of cynicism. A Buddhist talks not so much about good and evil as about ignorance and awakening; in that sense, he brings all responsibility inward, so as not to waste time blaming people outside himself, but to see how he can better understand (and therefore solve) the problem within.
    The one time when I saw the Dalai Lama most vehement in the more than thirty years I’d been talking to him came, in fact, when I asked him one autumn day about Buddhism’s ability to adapt to the modern world and to circumstances the Buddha himself could not have imagined. He responded, as I knew he would, by saying that Buddhism outlines a set of principles that, at their core, apply to all humans at any time; the surface details may change, but the basic laws of the value of compassion and the value of training our minds so as to see past our suffering to the path to freedom have nothing, really, to do with the modern or the ancient world exclusively.
    Then, suddenly, he veered off in another direction. “With this incarnation,” he said (referring, as he often does, to the role of the Dalai Lama as if it were just a robe he happened to be wearing), “there are some translations, especially of the Chinese, that say, ‘Living Buddha.’ That is totally wrong!”
    He looked at me almost fiercely, to make sure I understood. “The Chinese word means ‘Living Buddha.’ In Tibetan the word ‘lama’ is a direct translation of ‘guru.’ That is, someone who is respected because of his wisdom, or because of the indebtedness one owes to him. So the rough meaning is ‘someone worthy of respect.’ No implication of ‘Living Buddha!’ So the Chinese created this confusion through Chinese translations.”
    It was rare indeed for him to say anything against the Chinese, whom he goes out of his way to forgive and try to understand. And I knew that he had no need to go into the issue in just offering a formal response to my simple question. But clearly the matter was of such importance to him that he was determined to explain his position fully, with a tenacity that I’d seen him apply to many points of scholarly precision.
    “Some Western books,” he went on, “also say ‘Living Buddha’ when they describe me, or ‘God.’ Totally wrong!” As he said this, I recalled that I had used versions of the term many times in writing a profile of him eight