Seduced by the Dalai Lama

He may be a global icon of goodness, as Pico Iyer's biography reminds us. But is the Dalai Lama the political leader Tibet needs?

By Louis Bayard

Read more: Religion, Books, China, Tibet, Dalai Lama, Buddhism, Reviews, Book reviews

March 25, 2008 | "Dalai Lama for Prez '08!"

The woman wearing that particular T-shirt was in the middle of a lat pull-down when I saw her, so I couldn't pose the question that came straight to mind: "Doesn't the guy already have a job?"

But as events of the past two weeks have shown, the 14th Dalai Lama may just be looking for a new line of work. A series of violent Tibetan protests against Chinese rule has provoked a massive counteroffensive by the Chinese government. Hundreds of alleged protesters and sympathizers now sit behind bars; Tibetan exiles have demanded a United Nations investigation of China's crimes, past and present; and calls are mounting for an international boycott of the Beijing Summer Olympics.

It's a volatile situation, getting only worse, and as ever, Tibet's spiritual leader has hewed to his "middle way," critiquing the extremism of both Tibetan rioters and Beijing riot breakers. While the Chinese government has gone to its usual hysterical lengths to paint the Dalai Lama as an instigator, it becomes clearer with each passing day how little he is consulted by young Tibetan radicals chafing after years of inaction.

In short, the future of Tibet, as a nation and as a people, could well be decided by parties other than the Dalai Lama, and this may be a happier development than many Tibetophiles realize. It might even make a happy man of the Dalai Lama. While still in his 30s, he was complaining to Trappist monk Thomas Merton about having to set aside spiritual devotions for the hard work of politics, and in recent years, he has talked repeatedly of stepping down -- even hinting that he may be the last of his reincarnated line.

Can the Dalai Lama, considered by many of his followers to be a living god, really fire himself? This question has real urgency for Tibetan Buddhists and, for the rest of us, some poignancy. As Pico Iyer's fortuitously timed biographical essay, "The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama," reminds us, Tenzin Gyatso never asked to be anything. "He was found at the age of two by a search party of monks, led to him after rainbows arced across the northeastern skies of Lhasa, a star-shaped fungus appeared on the pillar of the Potala Palace, and the head of the corpse of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama repeatedly moved in a northeasterly direction."

Rainbows ... swiveling heads -- there was no gainsaying omens of that order. But no one could have guessed that the god-child who emerged from such a shamanistic web would reemerge years later as such a globalized figure: earthy and earthly, amiable and enigmatic.

In part, we can attribute the Dalai Lama's transformation to his innate Catholicism. As Iyer writes, he "takes as his political model a Hindu (Gandhi), works closely with many Christians (Tutu, Václav Havel, Jimmy Carter), and lives in a country (India) that has the world's second-largest Muslim population."

More than enlarging his theology, though, he has opened his appointment book, making himself available (or so it would seem) to anyone who wants him. Today, nearly half a century after being forced out of his Himalayan enclave, he is in constant touch with world leaders, he is regularly feted by Hollywood and lionized by Madison Avenue, and his instantly recognizable face is plastered across T-shirts, bumper stickers and Apple ads. Children and CEOs and even Bobby Brown vie to touch his maroon robes. He's a touchstone of unassuming goodness, a giggling, belly-poking saint.

Iyer's challenge, then, is to get a private fix on a man who belongs, in some measure, to everyone. Iyer, a highly regarded essayist and novelist, has a knack for domesticating the exotic, and he's particularly gifted at setting scenes, which may be why his first instinct is to map his subject's terrain. In the performance of this task, his tread is both light and telling. His descriptions of Tibet convey, better than any propaganda, that region's steep decline. (The Potala Palace is now circled by swan boats, and Chinese officials, seeking to substitute flesh for spirit, have flooded Lhasa, the capital city, with hundreds of karaoke parlors and brothels, creating "a look that would not be out of place in Atlantic City.")

Even finer is Iyer's description of the Tibetan exile community in Dharamsala, India, a "wild bazaar of the sacred and profane" where monks stream out of Internet cafes, shops bristle with Tibetan tchotchkes, and a meditation center offers the following schedule: "Breakfast/ Impermanence and Death/ Suffering/ Selflessness/ Dinner/ Equanimity." Tibetan lads use their martyr mystique to woo girls and sponsors; signs like "Tibet Memory" and "Lost Horizon" wallow in old-fashioned Orientalism; and a thriving industry of beggars feeds off blissed-out Western tourists. (Not just Americans, either. At certain times of year, fully half the population of upper Dharamsala is Israeli.)

It's when Iyer turns his lens directly on his subject that he begins to lose footing. So rapidly that we may now conclude that the Dalai Lama cannot be directly observed without changing the observer. His charm, of course, is formidable, and he has added to it a component indispensable to good P.R.: access. Even Iyer, who has known the Dalai Lama a good long time, is dazed from the memory of meeting him the day after His Holiness won the Nobel Peace Prize and being spoken to "as openly and directly as if we were equals." And then to be invited to the Dalai Lama's 54th birthday party in the Malibu, Calif., hills! Famous faces crowding on every side! Cindy Crawford! Tina Chow!

Yes, one way or another, with or without his consent, Iyer has been seduced, and the language decays accordingly. The Dalai Lama, we are told, moves "at lightning speed from monk to head of state to philosopher-scientist to regular man." He is "a doctor of the soul" ... "on twenty-four-hour call for life" ... facing an "unending rush of emergency cases."

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