Tibet's Living Buddha

By Pico Iyer/Dharmsala

Dogs bark in the Himalayan night. Lights flicker across the hillside. On a pitch-black path framed by pines and covered by a bowl of stars, a few ragged pilgrims shuffle along, muttering ritual chants. Just before dawn, as the snowcaps behind take on a deep pink glow, the crowd that has formed outside the three-story Namgyal Temple in northern India falls silent. A strong, slightly stooping figure strides in, bright eyes alertly scanning the crowd, smooth face breaking into a broad and irrepressible smile. Followed by a group of other shaven-headed monks, all of them in claret robes and crested yellow hats, the newcomer clambers up to the temple roof. There, as the sun begins to rise, his clerics seated before him and the solemn, drawn-out summons of long horns echoing across the valley below, the Dalai Lama leads a private ceremony to welcome the Year of the Earth Dragon.

On the second day of Losar, the Tibetan New Year, the man who is a living Buddha to roughly 14 million people gives a public audience. By 8 a.m. the line of petitioners stretches for half a mile along the winding mountain road outside his airy bungalow -- leathery mountain men in gaucho hats, long-haired Westerners, little girls in their prettiest silks, all the 6,000 residents of the village and thousands more. Later, 30 dusty visitors just out of Tibet crowd inside and, as they set eyes on their exiled leader for the first time in almost three decades, fill the small room with racking sobs and sniffles. Through it all, Tenzin Gyatso, the absolute spiritual and temporal ruler of Tibet, incarnation of the Tibetan god of compassion and 14th Dalai Lama in a line that stretches back 597 years, remains serene.

In Tibet, he explains later, Losar used to be conducted on the roof of the 13-story Potala Palace, with cookies laid out for the masses. "Every year I used to be really worried when the people rushed to grab the cookies. First, that the old building would collapse, and second, that someone would fall over the edge. Now" -- the rich baritone breaks into a hearty chuckle -- "now things are much calmer."

It was 29 years ago last week that the Tibetan uprising against China's occupying forces propelled the Dalai Lama into Indian exile. Yet the spirit of his ancient, fairy-tale theocracy is still very much alive in Dharmsala, a former British hill station 250 miles north of New Delhi. Here, attended by a State Oracle, a rainmaking lama, various medicine men, astrologers and a four- man Cabinet, the Dalai Lama, 52, incarnates all the beliefs and hopes of his imperiled homeland, much as he has done since first ascending the Lion Throne in Lhasa at age four.

Yet even as the "Protector of the Land of Snows" sustains all the secret exoticism of that otherworldly kingdom reimagined in the West as Shangri-La, he remains very much a leader in the real world. Since the age of 15, he has been forced to deal with his people's needs against the competing interests of Beijing, Washington and New Delhi. That always inflammable situation reached a kind of climax last fall, when Tibetans rioted in Lhasa, their Chinese rulers killed as many as 32 people, the Dalai Lama held his first major press conference in Dharmsala, and the U.S. Senate unanimously condemned the Chinese actions. Riots have erupted in recent weeks, but even before that, the modest man in monk's raiment had found himself not only the spiritual symbol linking 100,000 Tibetans in exile to the 6 million still living under Chinese rule, but also, more than ever, a political rallying point. "The 14th Dalai Lama may be the most popular Dalai Lama of all," he says, smiling merrily. "If the Chinese had treated the Tibetans like real brothers, then the Dalai Lama might not be so popular. So" -- he twinkles impishly -- "all the credit goes to the Chinese!"

On paper, then, the Dalai Lama is a living incarnation of a Buddha, the hierarch of a government-in-exile and a doctor of metaphysics. Yet the single most extraordinary thing about him may simply be his sturdy, unassuming humanity. The Living God is, in his way, as down to earth as the hardy brown oxfords he wears under his monastic robes, and in his eyes is still the mischief of the little boy who used to give his lamas fits with his invincible skills at hide-and-seek. He delights in tending his flower gardens, looking after wild birds, repairing watches and transistors and, mostly, just meditating. And even toward those who have killed up to 1.2 million of his people and destroyed 6,254 of his monasteries, he remains remarkably forbearing. "As people who practice the Mahayana Buddhist teaching, we pray every day to develop some kind of unlimited altruism," he says. "So there is no point in developing hatred for the Chinese. Rather, we should develop respect for them and love and compassion."

The 14th God-King of Tibet was born in a cowshed in the tiny farming village of Takster in 1935. When he was two, a search party of monks, led to his small home by a corpse that seemed to move, a lakeside vision and the appearance of auspicious cloud formations, identified him as the new incarnation of Tibet's patron god. Two years later, after passing an elaborate battery of tests, the little boy was taken amid a caravan of hundreds into the capital of Lhasa, "Home of the Gods." There he had to live alone with his immediate elder brother in the cavernous, 1,000-chamber Potala Palace and undertake an 18-year course in metaphysics. By the age of seven, he was receiving envoys from President Franklin Roosevelt and leading prayers before 20,000 watchful monks; yet he remained a thoroughly normal little boy who loved to whiz around the holy compound in a pedal car and instigate fights with his siblings. "I recall one summer day -- I must have been about seven -- when my mother took me to the Norbulingka Summer Palace to see His Holiness," recalls the Dalai Lama's youngest brother Tenzin Choegyal. "When we got there, His Holiness was watering his plants. The next thing I knew, he was turning the hose on me!"

It was at this time too that the precocious boy first displayed his prodigious gift for things scientific, teaching himself the principles of the combustion engine and fixing the palace's generator whenever it went on the blink. To satisfy his insatiable curiosity about a world he was permitted to glimpse only through the silk-fringed curtains of his golden palanquin, the young ruler set up a projector by which he eagerly devoured Tarzan movies, Henry V and, best of all, home movies of his own capital. Often, he recalls, he would take a telescope onto the palace roof and wistfully gaze at the boys and girls of Lhasa carelessly going about their lives.

In 1950 the isolation of the "Wish-Fulfilling Gem" and his mountain kingdom was shattered as the Chinese attacked from eight different directions. Suddenly the teenage ruler was obliged to take a crash course in statesmanship, traveling to Beijing to negotiate with Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong. Finally, in March 1959, when a bloody confrontation seemed imminent as 30,000 steadfast Tibetans rose up against Chinese rule, the Dalai Lama slipped out of his summer palace dressed as a humble soldier and set off across the highest mountains on earth. Two weeks later, suffering from dysentery and on the back of a dzo, a hybrid yak, the "Holder of the White Lotus" rode into exile in India.

Since then, his has been a singularly delicate balancing act, the guest of a nation that would prefer him to remain silent and the enemy of a nation that much of the world is trying to court. Undeterred, the Dalai Lama has organized 53 Tibetan settlements in India and Nepal and set up institutes to preserve his country's arts, its scriptures and its medical traditions. In recent years he has begun to race around the world like a Buddhist John Paul II -- lecturing at Harvard, meeting the Pope and attending to his flock, be they unlettered peasants or the American actor Richard Gere (a student of Buddhism since 1982). Always inclined to see the good in everything, he feels that exile has in some respects been a blessing. "When we were in Tibet, there were certain ceremonial activities that took up a lot of time, but the substance was -- not much. All those exist no longer. That's good, I think. Also, because we are refugees, we have become much more realistic. There's no point now in pretending."

Many young Tibetans would like their leader to be more militant. Angrily noting that there are more than 3,000 political prisoners in central Tibet alone and that Beijing has at least 300,000 troops on the "Rooftop of the World," they advocate violence. But the Dalai Lama refuses to be intemperate. "Once your mind is dominated by anger," he notes thoughtfully, "it becomes almost mad. You cannot take right decisions, and you cannot see reality. But if your mind is calm and stable, you will see everything exactly as it is. I think all politicians need this kind of patience. Compared with the previous Soviet leaders, for example, Gorbachev, I think, is much more calm. Therefore, more effective."

Pacifism, however, does not mean passivity. "Ultimately," he continues, "the Chinese have to realize that Tibet is a separate country. If Tibet was always truly a part of China, then, whether Tibetans liked it or not, they would have to live with it. But that's not the case. So we have every right to demand our rights."

The Dalai Lama spends much of his time reflecting on how Tibetan Buddhism can teach, and learn from, other disciplines. He believes, for example, that Buddhism can show Marxism how to develop a genuine socialist ideal "not through force, but through reason, through a very gentle training of the mind, through the development of altruism." He sees many points of contact between his faith and "psychology, cosmology, neurobiology, the social sciences and physics. There are many things we Buddhists should learn from the latest scientific findings. And scientists can learn from Buddhist explanations. We must conduct research, and then accept the results. If they don't stand up to experimentation," he says, beaming subversively, "Buddha's own words must be rejected."

Such quiet radicalism has at times unsettled followers so devout that they would readily give up their lives for their leader. In the draft constitution he drew up in 1963, the God-King included, against his people's wishes, a clause that would allow for his impeachment. Now he is considering new methods for choosing the next Dalai Lama -- adopting an electoral system similar to the Vatican's, perhaps, or selecting on the basis of seniority, or even dispensing with the entire institution. "I think the time has come -- not necessarily to take a decision very soon, but to start a more formal discussion, so that people can prepare their minds for it."

In the meantime, the exiled leader will continue to pursue a simple, selfless life that is close to the Buddhist ideal of the Middle Way -- neither hostile to the world nor hostage to it. Buddhism's supreme living deity still refuses to fly first class and thinks of himself always, as he told the press last fall, as a "simple Buddhist monk." Though he is one of the most erudite scholars of one of the most cerebral of all the world's philosophies, he has a gift for reducing his doctrine to a core of lucid practicality, crystallized in the title of his 1984 book, Kindness, Clarity and Insight (Snow Lion Press). "My true religion," he has said, "is kindness."

It is, in fact, the peculiar misfortune of the Chinese to be up against one of those rare souls it is all but impossible to dislike. Beijing has felt it necessary to call him a "political corpse, bandit and traitor," a "red- handed butcher who subsisted on people's flesh." Yet everyone who meets the Dalai Lama is thoroughly disarmed by his good-natured warmth and by a charisma all the stronger for being so gentle.

To an outsider, the life of a living Buddha can seem a profoundly lonely one. In recent years, moreover, nearly all the people closest to the Tibetan ruler -- his senior tutor, his junior tutor, his mother and the elder brother who in youth was his only playmate -- have died. Yet this, like everything else, the Dalai Lama takes, in the deepest sense, philosophically. "Old friends pass away, new friends appear," he says with cheerful matter-of- factness. "It's just like the days. An old day passes, a new day arrives. The important thing is to make it meaningful: a meaningful friend -- or a meaningful day."