The Open Road by Pico Iyer Page B

years before, and my editors in New York had added insult to injury by titling the piece “Tibet’s Living Buddha.” Perhaps he was just trying to ensure that I didn’t make the same mistake again? Living Buddhas, after all, are seldom seen fleeing from their thrones on hybrid yaks and arriving in the outside world suffering from the highly ungodly condition known as dysentery. To call the Dalai Lama more than human is, for non-Tibetans, to demean him in a way—and to demean ourselves, by suggesting that what he does we cannot do as well.
    I duly recorded his amendment and wrote a new article taking in the series of discussions we had had. When it appeared in the same New York magazine, it was given—what else?—the title “The God in Exile.” Humans, as he might have told me, are never very keen to give up on their fairy tales.

 
 
    If nothing but the bright side of characters should be shewn, we should sit down in despondency, and think it utterly impossible to imitate them in any thing.
     
    — SAMUEL JOHNSON (to Edmund Malone)
     

 
     
    THE ICON
     
    T he first time I met the Dalai Lama in person, I was a seventeen-year-old schoolboy being reluctantly dragged on a trip around my ancestral roots by my parents and introduced to the uncles, grandparents, cousins I had barely seen before. India was of no interest to me then, except insofar as it flavored and colored the psychedelic songs and fashions that were popular in my English high school, and I did what I could not to be moved or engaged by its kaleidoscopic swirl but to hold on to my privacy and my secret wisdom, as any teenager eager to be misunderstood might. When my father took me on a two-day trip up into the mountains to meet the Dalai Lama, I was determined not to betray any interest in him; the man was, after all, just a friend—or colleague—of my father’s.
    I succeeded quite well in my intention. We took the overnight train from Delhi to Pathankot, and then jammed into a taxi for the long drive toward Upper Dharamsala. For hour after hour, so it seemed, we drove in and out of clouds, shifting levels of grayness. Dharamsala is notorious for the intensity of its rainfall in the summer, and all I can recall now is pine trees, switchback turns, clouds, and more clouds. Then we arrived at a battered little settlement of a few huddled huts and, following along a narrow road above a valley, came to the house at its end and went in to see a man in red and saffron robes.
    What he said then, I really cannot remember, though our conversation went on for an hour and a half or more (not many people were knocking at the Dalai Lama’s door in 1974). All I remember is his using the word bodhichitta (which he translates as “a good heart infused with wisdom”), a term he would use again the next time I visited him, alone, in that room. In the fullness of my seventeen-year-old’s wisdom, I knew nothing, of course, about the fact that this monk had been in constant negotiation with China and Mao Zedong for a quarter of a century by that point, was hoping to send delegations to Tibet before too long, had recently told his Khampa guerrillas to lay down their arms, after President Nixon and Henry Kissinger had opened the door to China and Nepal had decided it would help the coming power in Beijing. All I knew was that there were clouds everywhere, in the room and around it, swirling in and out of the space where we talked, and the world was very far away indeed, not visible through the mist.
    We were on a mountaintop—I had never been so high in Asia at the time—and a deposed ruler in monk’s robes was talking about Emptiness and Reality, and outside the large picture windows there were no signs of human habitation. We had taken leave of the real world altogether.
    It has been one of the small miracles of my life to see the Dalai Lama come down from the mountaintop, as it were, and out of the mist and become as sharply defined a member of the global