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Executive Times |
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2008 Book Reviews |
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The Open
Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama by Pico Iyer |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Descriptive Pico
Iyer’s new book, The Open
Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, presents the
subjective from a variety of perspectives. Iyer first met the Dalai Lama
thirty years ago through his father, an Oxford don from India. After decades
of observation and engagement, Iyer describes the Dalai Lama as a monk, as a
politician, as a philosopher, and as a global icon. The sum of these
descriptions present the simplicity and complexity of the Dalai Lama for
readers to sort out. Here’s an excerpt, pp. 69-71: In Tibet, and among Tibetans
around the world, not least in his exile home of Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama
is revered as a god, quite literally; every shop in Dharamsala has at its
center a framed picture of him, and even the most renegade Tibetans, jiving
before Western girls to the latest song from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, grow
silent, almost teary-eyed, if asked about the Dalai Lama (who is, to some
extent, their homeland, as well as their faith and their sense of self) . In
the Tibetan community the Dalai Lama still officially settles every
institutional dispute, has ordained a whole generation of monks, and carries
such ritual authority that even the most cocky, Columbia-educated Tibetan
kids (I have seen) are too nervous to translate for him and reflexively bow
their bodies before him, as subjects used to do before kings. In exile, more
than ever, he's the Tibetans' main external asset. But in the larger world the
Dalai Lama is merely an icon, a secular divinity of sorts, and for that
there is less precedent. The Dalai Lama remains intensely pragmatic about the
uses the world makes of him—if it helps people to use his smiling face as a
screen saver, he says, or if it does some substantial good to broadcast his
Speeches on the dance floors of London discos, then let them use him or
anything that is "beneficial"; beyond a point he can't control the
ideas people have of him or the hopes they bring to him, and a physician's
job is to try to offer help wherever he is needed. Still, one effect of this is that he offers
forewords even to books about young Tibetans' impatience with his policies
and, as one close friend asserts, "answers questions he shouldn't
answer." It might almost, I sometimes
think, be a kind of riddle that people
of this kind pose for us: how much will we respond to their essence,
the changeless core of what they are saying, and how much will we merely read
them through the keyhole of our own priorities? I remember, in my own case,
being moved and humbled, meeting him the day after his Nobel Prize had been
announced, when the Dalai Lama spoke to me as openly and directly as if we
were equals, not even stopping to remove any barrier between us, as if he seemed
to see none. But the incident I probably spoke of more widely that year was
his fifty-fourth birthday party in the hills of Malibu, a few months
earlier, when mortals like me got to stand for hours next to such figures of
glamour as Cindy Crawford and Tina Chow. Everyone we meet we tend to cast in
the light of our own tiny concerns. As I watch the Dalai Lama and
Tutu proceed out from the large auditorium and follow them into a small room
nearby where they will be conducting two TV interviews (with Ebadi, also) for
consumption across Canada, I cannot help but notice how they speak for the
"same aim" but in radically different voices. Tutu uses the whole
register of his rolling, musical voice in English to call upon powers hidden
in the language that bring Shakespeare in union with the King James Bible; he
gets the audience to move in by making his voice very soft, and then he
steadily raises the volume so we climb and climb with him. The Dalai Lama
speaks, especially in English, much more slowly and carefully, in precise,
rounded phrases, as if offering the stones out of which he's built his thinking.
Tutu is a figure of jokes and flights, of silvery expansiveness and shine,
and the effect of listening to him, as he repeats and repeats phrases, is of seeing
light stream through a stained-glass window; the Dalai Lama speaks as
logician more than as poet and (true to his Buddhist principles) offers
statements that seem almost simplistic until you dig beneath each word to see
the reasoning behind it. And
yet the biggest difference between the two visitors, at this point in
history, is simply that they're standing on opposite sides of the struggles
they stand for. Archbishop Tutu's task is to some extent
over; his battle has been won. Thanks to his efforts, and those of Nelson
Mandela and many others in South Africa and outside, apartheid has been
lifted, and although the violence and danger and confusion in the country may
at times be even worse than before, the outside world has done its bit to put
power back in the hands of the majority. So when he goes up to the podium,
what he says is "Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you."
Thanks to those in Canada and elsewhere, he says, South Africa is celebrating
its tenth anniversary of freedom a week from now. It's hard not to glow when
such a dignified man offers thanks. The
Dalai Lama, by contrast, is saying, "Please." Please help my people
in Tibet even though you may seem to lose the support of the world's largest
nation in the short term. Please rise to your highest selves in seeing that
responsibility is an assertion of enlightened self-interest. Please try to
see that if you think we really inhabit a global universe, then your welfare
depends on that of Tibet, as much as its welfare depends on you. No
one likes to hear a plea, especially from a guest, and least of all from a
man she likes and respects; the natural impulse is to look past the plea to
the liking and respecting (especially if that man seems so in command of
himself and his philosophy that it's easy to imagine he can help you much
more than you can help him) . The very fact that the Dalai Lama tells the
world he needs it moves many in the world to assume that he must, in fact, be
above it. Any
reader intrigued by the Dalai Lama will enjoy reading The Open
Road. Steve
Hopkins, July 18, 2008 |
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Go to Executive Times Archives |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the August 2008 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The Open Road.htm For Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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