Asia Literary Review - Chinese writing

THERE ARE FEW INDIVIDUALS on the international stage more likely to rile China than Lhamo Thondup, better known as the fourteenth reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of the Tibetan branch of Mahayana Buddhism and Tibet’s leader in exile since the 1959 uprising against China. His February meeting with US President Barak Obama at the White House predictably raised the hackles of China, with Beijing saying it ‘seriously harms US-China relations’. He understands political gesturing and pays it no heed. Many books have been written about the Dalai Lama, with and without his cooperation, the latest of which is The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama by Pico Iyer, author of two novels, seven works of non-fiction, including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk and The Global Soul, and numerous essays for the New York Review of Books, Harper’s, the New York Times, and Time.

In this interview with ABC Radio National’s The Book Show, Iyer talks about his own quest as a writer for the contemplative life and his assessment of the Dalai Lama and light and dark sides of Tibetan Buddhism.

Iyer : My father was a professional philosopher and interested in many religions, including Buddhism, and so as soon as the Dalai Lama came out of Tibet and arrived in India in 1959, we were living in England, I think my father was one of the relatively few people who realised that suddenly for the first time in history this amazing repository of centuries’ worth of wisdom and tradition, who had always been completely secluded from the world, was available to the larger world.
So my father sailed all the way from England to India and requested an audience with the Dalai Lama in his first few months in India, and went up to visit him in the foothills of the Himalayas. They had a long conversation and my father, by good fortune, was deep in research on Gandhi at the time so I think the Dalai Lama felt that he had a lot to learn from my father, too, because he was newly interested in Gandhi and how to lead a non-violent resistance against an occupying power in Tibet.

And at the end of the conversation, maybe I suppose like any proud father, my dad said, ‘Your Holiness, I’ve got this little kid back in Oxford, England, three years old, and he took an unusually keen interest in the story of your flight across the mountains from Tibet into India.’ And so the Dalai Lama, I think with his perfect gift for the perfect gesture, found a photograph of himself when he was only five years old but was already on the throne in Lhasa and sent it through my father to me. Of course I was a typical three-year-old, so I didn’t exactly really know who or what a Dalai Lama was, but I think I could instantly make contact with this picture of a little boy not much older than myself, in a difficult position, living in something of a foreign country.

I can remember to this day that when I was growing up and I had that picture on my desk, every now and then I’d begin to feel sorry for myself, you know, here I am, Indian boy living in England by myself, life seems difficult, and then I look at this picture of a little boy, five years old, already ruling six million people, and I can’t feel sorry for myself again. So I made that contact with his image and the idea of him very young, and then I first met him a few years later when I was a teenager.

Koval: Just remind us again of the position of the Dalai Lama. He’s supposedly the fourteenth reincarnation of …?

Iyer : … of Avalokitesvara, who is the Tibetan god of compassion. But it’s interesting because, as you know, the Dalai Lama always makes a distinction between his position among the Tibetans, which is indeed their leader and the incarnation of their god, and his position among the rest of us where he always emphasises that he’s a fallible human. I remember once I was writing an article about him and I described him as a god-king, and the next time I saw him he was very impatient and he said, ‘No, I’m not a god at all, I’m just a regular human being, and to call me a god actually makes a mockery of the whole of Buddhism,’ which doesn’t necessarily believe in god.

He does feel convinced that he’s the reincarnation of this particular spirit and in some ways it’s like inheriting a company or inheriting a job from your parents, and so the Dalai Lama institution for him, I think, is a set of duties and especially responsibilities and certain customs. And he accepts that for Tibetans he does carry this superhuman significance, and he stands for something much larger than himself. But he feels that it’s important for non-Buddhists, who don’t subscribe to that religion, just to see him as a regular scientist or philosopher, and in fact he even describes the Buddha as a scientist, which is, as you said, one reason why he often says that if new science shows the Buddhist teachings (let alone the Dalai Lama’s teachings) to be imperfect or inaccurate … for him I think science always trumps faith.

Koval: He’s taken that back to the people who are responsible for the belief system, and changed a few things.

Iyer : He’s actually surprisingly radical. So he will startle other senior Tibetan monks by saying that the next Dalai Lama may be a woman, there may be no next Dalai Lama, that really anything is possible once science has shown it to be so. For example, I remember he was once pointing out to me some old Tibetan scrolls that showed the sun and the moon as equidistant from the Earth. He said, ‘Well, we now know that that’s not true. So they may have a symbolic value for certain other Tibetans and I respect that, but for me I really have no interest in those scrolls because they’re presenting a very inaccurate representation of the world.’ And I think maybe that’s one reason why so many of us from afar see the Dalai Lama almost as this fairy-tale figure from this very faraway kingdom who’s in possession of all these magical powers. And while some of that may be true, I think the Dalai Lama I see is really a realist. You’ll notice if you listen to him that at every point he’s always stressing investigation and analysis and research, including as to his own status. But whatever is going on he wants to take the scientific approach, I think.

Koval: You write about his most agonising and mounting conundrums, his decisiveness with respect to his opposition to Chinese oppression, his ideas about the religious principle of forbearance and looking for points in common. This puts him in a very difficult position when it comes to young Tibetans, for example.

Iyer : It does, especially because, as he is the first to acknowledge, his policy of forbearance and non-violence has actually borne no apparent fruit in the last fifty years. He has always extended the hand of forgiveness and friendship to the Chinese and all that’s happened is that the Chinese government has come down harder and harder on the six million Tibetans in Tibet. And so in fact when I travelled around Japan with him last year, over and over he said, ‘Well, my policy has failed. Please other Tibetans come up with different solutions to this problem.’

And I think he understands more than anyone that younger Tibetans, who’ve never even seen Tibet in most cases, feel the same impatience that you or I would feel if we were told just to sit in our rooms while our country was being wiped off the map and our cousins were being imprisoned and our parents were being killed, and they would say, ‘How can we begin to follow the way of forbearance when soon there will be no Tibet to protect?’

And I think the Dalai Lama has a very far-sighted and in fact a very pragmatic vision of things, and he realises that ultimately Tibet will be okay, but in the short run it’s heart-rending for him to see and hear his people express that very understandable frustration: ‘How, how, how can you ask us to practise non-violence when we’re being stripped of everything that human life consists of?’

Koval: But you also write about this idea of Shangri-La and the fairy tale and the myth of Shangri-La and that Tibetans know how to play the fairy tale.

Iyer : The Dalai Lama never plays that fairy tale and most of the more thoughtful and honest monks never would, but I spent a lot of time in Dharamsala in northern India where the Dalai Lama and his government in exile are centred, and it’s not so surprising that many of the Tibetans there have come over the mountains from Tibet, it’s difficult for them to find jobs in India, difficult for them to find lives anywhere and in some ways they’re severed from their homeland, and so the one thing that they have is this connection with the super-exotic place that the rest of the world has romanticised for so long, and the fact that many of them are nomads and come from a world that is hard for the rest of us to imagine.

So when you walk around the streets of Dharamsala one of the main things you see are these very, very handsome Tibetan guys with hair down to their waists and turquoise earrings and beautiful smiles and very sad stories, hypnotising really the young ladies of the world from Australia and America and France, because they’re very hunky and also because they come from this very poignant situation. And so like most of us, those guys know what their assets are and one of their main assets is to come from this fairy-tale land.

And so there’s an interesting kind of circle of dreams that you see in the Tibetan exile situation where most Tibetans are, of course, desperate to come to Sydney or New York or Paris, and many young people from Australia, America and France are desperate to partake of the mystery of the East, and so they circle around one another, each projecting his or her illusions a little bit upon the other. And then the Dalai Lama sits removed from all that, just working very hard to try to protect his people, and can’t really afford to be distracted by that dance taking place around his temple.

Koval: You write of Dharamsala, ‘I could be walking through a Buddhist text on suffering and need and decay and illusion.’ What did you find there?

Iyer : It’s a very poignant place because most of us from other countries race to Dharamsala because we think of it as little Lhasa, the closest we can get to this long-inaccessible kingdom of Tibet. But most of the Tibetans there are hoping that it will disappear. All they want to do is to go back to Tibet. So they’re there in a very reluctant and provisional and temporary fashion. What you see among the Tibetans, as among any refugee populations anywhere understandably, is restlessness, indirection, and they have the Dalai Lama to centre them and they cling to him, as to their culture itself. But apart from him, they don’t really know who or where they are, they’re caught up in that exile bind.

So I feel there’s a lot of longing and there’s a lot of illusion and obviously there’s a lot of wistfulness and projection in this city, which has been so wonderfully created by the Dalai Lama as a kind of Buddhist city on a hill, about cutting away illusion and looking past projection and seeing reality for what it is. And I think that speaks just for my larger sense, which is that to me he is an impressive man who has done almost everything he can to bring clarity and realism to his life and to the world, but we are human beings and it’s the nature of humanity to traffic in illusions and to have romances and not always to want reality. I think TS Eliot said humankind cannot bear too much reality. And so I see in Dharamsala almost this tug and tension between a very rigorous and clear-sighted philosopher and the confusion of the rest of us, including, of course, me.

Koval: Pico, let’s talk about the Dalai Lama and his family, which was another very interesting part of your book. His relationships between his older brothers and his sister … there seems to be some tensions in the family.

Iyer : Yes, again it’s an interesting illustration that even this very exalted person, as I see him, is surrounded by the regular stuff of human existence. So his eldest brother, who actually passed away last September, who was himself an incarnate lama, in other words a very high monk within the Tibetan system, he always felt that Tibet should completely hold out for independence, shouldn’t make any agreement with China at all, shouldn’t begin to come up with compromise solutions the way the Dalai Lama has. So the Dalai Lama’s own eldest brother was one of the Dalai Lama’s critics in terms of his policy of forbearance.

At the same time his second brother, who also of course is an elegant man who has seen a lot of the world, speaks fluent Chinese, was married to a Chinese woman, was largely based in Hong Kong and is one of his main unofficial emissaries to Beijing. So just within his two eldest brothers you’ve almost got the two extremes of the Tibetan situation; one person calling out for never even beginning to talk to China, the other holding out for a much more pragmatic response and saying we’ve got to find the common ground with China. And it’s just a small reminder of how almost unimaginably complicated the Dalai Lama’s life is.

It’s a wonderful thing that I think if you were to ask most of your listeners what they associate with the Dalai Lama, probably the first thing they’d say is his infectious laugh and his smile and his air of optimism, which I think is at the very core of him. But that’s more impressive to me because when you look at him close up you see how at every level, from his family to his community to, of course, his relations with China, he has the most difficult life of anyone I can imagine, more difficult than the Pope or than that of President Obama, I think.

Koval: You also remind us that if you dig a little deeper there’s a lot of group rivalry within the Buddhist groups, and quite a bloody history. Can you talk a little bit about that? The Shugden group rivalry, for example?

Iyer : Yes, it’s a very bloody history because Tibet until recently was living really in something akin to medieval times and fraught with all the tensions and rivalries, both philosophical and geographical, that we might have found in medieval Europe. And I think that’s why the Dalai Lama is always one of the first people to say, ‘I don’t want to go back to the way Tibet was in 1950, there was much that was wrong with it,’ and I think …

Koval: What was wrong with it?

Iyer : It wasn’t a very democratic society and also the eastern Tibetans were resentful of central Tibetans, and there were four main schools of Tibetan Buddhism and they were all going off in opposite directions. So in terms of the Shugden group, they are one small group that actually about fifteen, twenty years ago came into direct conflict with the Dalai Lama because he felt that they were more or less turning this very rational scientific philosophy of Buddhism into folk worship and simply trying to placate this supernatural deity, which went against the central principles of Buddhism. And he also felt that they were speaking for a much more divided Buddhism. They were saying ‘our group is right and the other groups of Tibetan Buddhism are wrong’.

So he asked his followers not to propitiate that deity and he said, ‘Those of you who do want to be part of that group, please don’t come to my teachings because it can damage psychically the people from other groups who are attending my teaching.’ And so they started picketing his teaching and calling him a tyrant for wanting to impose his vision of Buddhism upon all other Tibetans. And suddenly this conflict, which eighty years ago would have just been a remote thing that none of us would have heard about taking place in Lhasa, was of course playing out on a global stage and splashed across the newspapers of the world.

And I think as soon as the Dalai Lama came into exile, he saw this as an opportunity for Tibetans to band together, as they didn’t in old Tibet, and to begin to dissolve some of their rivalries because they all now have a common purpose in trying to keep Tibet going in exile. So he’s worked hard to bring all the four schools of Buddhism together, but it is an uphill task and there are always going to be other groups who of course have their own agendas.

Koval: You describe the daylight and the night-time side of Tibetan Buddhism. What goes on in the night-time side?

Iyer : Well, it goes back to what you asked so well a few minutes ago about his position on reincarnation, which is to say that the Dalai Lama, when he speaks to you or me in Australia or the US will always emphasise reason, science, the ecumenical side of Buddhism, but of course there’s a whole other series of … set of rites and customs and even belief within the Buddhist community itself that are much more esoteric and mystical and that make no sense to us.

Wherever he goes he travels with certain ceremonial objects that he downplays when he’s speaking to you or me, but that come from these mysterious rites that to us would seem to be the stuff of superstition, just like any religion, starting with Christianity. Christianity has the Sermon on the Mount and the gospels, which I think people from any tradition can respond to, but they also have Mass and the sacramental offerings that are very peculiar to Catholicism, which to an outsider they would think ‘Why are you drinking blood? Why are you taking that wafer to be the body of your saviour?’ And of course Tibetan Buddhism has its equivalents to that.

Koval: And do you know what they are?

Iyer : No, partly because I am not a Buddhist and not a Tibetan, but every now and then I get an intimation just of how little I know. I’ll even ask the Dalai Lama if what has happened to Tibet in its recent history is the result of karma (in other words, the law of cause and effect that is the central principle of Buddhism), and he’ll always say to me, ‘Well, it’s very mysterious’ or, ‘It’s very complex,’ which I think is his gracious way of saying, ‘It’s much too complicated for you as an outsider to understand, and to begin to understand it you’d really need to know the intimate mysteries of Buddhism.’

Koval: You say the Dalai Lama shields the wider world from esoteric Buddhism, the way one might keep a loaded gun in a locked cabinet so the kids don’t start to play with it and it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.

Iyer : Yes. For example, an important school within Buddhism is Tantra, which involves intoxication and sexual rites and all kinds of things that, taken out of context, are very, very inflammatory. If you are an extremely enlightened lama and you know how to use sexual intercourse as a means to enlightenment, then probably it makes absolute sense. But if it’s you or me who is dabbling in these practices that we don’t fully have an understanding or a context for, then it’s very likely to backfire.

I think that’s one reason why the Dalai Lama, when he travels around the world actually as the world’s most visual Buddhist, tells foreigners not to take up Buddhism because I think he’s seen so much get lost in translation, and he knows that if you or I were to reach for Buddhism today we might be reaching for the exoticism of it or for everything that we don’t understand rather than for what we do understand, and in the process we might damage ourselves as well as damaging Buddhism.

Koval: So he’s got two constituencies, he’s got his own people and the wider world.

Iyer : Yes, exactly.

Koval: And what about this idea about attachment and non-attachment, and being attached to Tibet?

Iyer : Yes, and I think he is strikingly unattached to Tibet in the sense that he always says that Tibet has everything to gain from being part of China, he doesn’t want to be separate from China. And he always stresses, too, that the most important parts of Tibet are invisible, having to do with sets of values and certain cultural traditions and language, that can be carried out in other countries as much as in the geographical entity of Tibet itself.

But again, his people are understandably attached to their country, and they’re like people who have suddenly been thrown out of their house and all they want to do is go back to their house. And he and other philosophical counsellors can tell them, ‘Well, you shouldn’t be attached to the house, the most important thing is your children or your community,’ but they’re regular human beings like the rest of us and do feel that attachment, even though the first law of Buddhism almost is that desire and longing bring suffering. So I think he’s like any religious leader really, trying to lay down reminders and principles, but aware that it’s always hard for all of us to listen to them.

Koval: Pico, you say you’ve spent much of your adult life in monasteries, what attracts you to these places and have you ever been tempted to join one?

Iyer : What attracts me might be all that boarding school training I had in England as an impressionable youth that formed or deformed me for life. I grew up as an only child, 6,000 miles away from the nearest relative, my parents were in California and my family was in India, so I’ve always had a very strong solitary tendency, which of course is ideal for a writer and a traveller. I have been tempted to spend time in monasteries.

In fact, I’ve probably made every mistake that I was describing earlier, which is to say, I was working for Time magazine in New York City when I was in my twenties and I left all that in order to come to Kyoto, Japan, to live for a year in a Zen temple. My year in the Zen temple lasted all of a week because as soon as I arrived I found that it wasn’t just depthless contemplation of the moon and writing haiku and pondering impermanence, it was scrubbing and cleaning and cooking and scrubbing and cleaning some more. So I didn’t last very long.

And yet a few years later I found a Benedictine monastery just up the road from my parents’ house in California, and now I do spend a lot of time there, without of course being a Benedictine. I think the reason I go to those places is that, especially as the world gets more and more accelerated and all of us know that we’re surrounded by beeping cell phones and twinkling laptops and more and more distraction devices, the greatest luxury of all for me us just stillness and silence.

Koval: And what’s your next work on?

Iyer : Well, it’s I suppose a bit of a sequel in that I’m writing a book on Graham Greene who has haunted and inspired me for many years. And I think, as you can tell from the way we’ve been talking, the thing that really impresses me about the Dalai Lama is that he’s never been a holy man up on the mountaintop, he’s always had to bring those high philosophical principles into the middle of the real world, realpolitik, as you said. And I think Graham Greene for me speaks for the same thing, which is how do you find any clarity or hope or faith in the middle of the confused, fallen world around us? So I see them very much in the same breath as people who have looked at the world very undilutedly and see it in all its confusion and silliness but also feel that there is a place for hope and a place for compassion in it.

Koval: Graham Greene was a man who had religion close to his heart but was kind of flawed; he never quite made the heights that perhaps he aspired to.

Iyer : ‘Close to his heart’ is a very good way of putting it. I think Catholicism was the mistress that he was constantly raging against but never fully embraced his entire life. Even at the end of his life he called himself a Catholic agnostic and said he wished he had faith but couldn’t get there.

This is an abridged transcript of an interview broadcast on ABC Radio National’s The Book Show. The full transcript and audio of Koval’s interview with Iyer can be found at www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2010/2786351.htm.