THE GOD IN EXILE

By PICO IYER/DHARAMSALA

Windows are broken and paths half paved in the ramshackle little town of Dharamsala, India, where the Dalai Lama lives. The absolute spiritual and temporal ruler of Tibet still has to drive 10 hours over roads crazy with scooters and cows every time he needs to take a flight (from New Delhi, 300 miles to the south). And when you call his tiny office, you usually hear that "all circuits are busy"--or the five-digit number changed yesterday, or, amid a blizzard of static, you get cut off in mid-sentence, the only small consolation being that you are put on hold to the tune of London Bridge Is Falling Down.

Yet to this makeshift exile center come moviemakers, camera crews and seekers from around the world, and from it, in the months before I returned to see him, the Dalai Lama had visited all five major continents, in his near desperate attempt to save occupied Tibet before it dies.

His predicament, in fact, is one for which I can think of no precedent or parallel. Trained for 18 years in the intricacies of Tibetan Buddhist metaphysics, one of the most accomplished philosophers in his tradition has spent most of the past half-century entangled in geopolitics, trying to protect and rescue his homeland from the Chinese forces that attacked in 1950 and drove him into exile nine years later. His cause is not made easier by the facts that much of the world is trying to court China, the world's largest marketplace, and that he is the guest of a huge nation with problems of its own that would rather he kept quiet. And, as church and state incarnate, the Dalai Lama, winner of the 1989 Nobel Prize for Peace, finds himself denied the privileges of a full-fledged political leader even as he cannot enjoy the peaceful immunity of a purely religious figure.

The ever pragmatic Tibetan has responded to this predicament by taking his cause directly to the world, traveling almost constantly (on a refugee's yellow "identity certificate"), answering questions in 20,000-seat pop-concert halls about everything from Jack Kevorkian to TV violence, and letting his speeches be broadcast live on the floor of London dance clubs. This has led to the unlikely sight of a "simple monk" (as he always calls himself)--born and raised in a culture that had scarcely seen a Westerner when the century began--now seeming as visible, and even as fashionable, a figure as Richard Gere. John Cleese speaks out for him in London, Henri Cartier-Bresson records his teachings around France, Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys interviews him in Rome for Rolling Stone. In the past few years he has opened 11 Offices of Tibet, everywhere from Canberra to Moscow, and last year alone provided prefaces and forewords for roughly 30 books. The 14th Dalai Lama is surely the only Ocean of Wisdom, Holder of the White Lotus and Protector of the Land of Snows to serve as guest editor of French Vogue.

At the time I revisited him, the Dalai Lama was contemplating the latest strange turn in this enforced interaction with the modern world: the $70 million Hollywood movie Seven Years in Tibet and Martin Scorsese's remarkable new film, Kundun, both of which tell the story of his early life. Sitting cross-legged in his armchair, rocking back and forth as he spoke and always keeping an eye out to make sure my cup of tea was full, the famously accessible doctor of metaphysics talked with full-bodied candor, for day after day, about his death, the increasingly public divisions within the Tibetan community and the new pressures of his spotlighted life. Accepting donations from Shoko Asahara, the head of the Aum Shinrikyo group in Japan that later allegedly planted deadly sarin gas in the subways of Tokyo, was, he says frankly, "a mistake. Due to ignorance. So this proves"--a mischievous gleam escapes--"I'm not a living Buddha!" He'd love to delegate some responsibilities to his deputies, he confesses, but "even if some of my Cabinet ministers wanted to give public talks, nobody would come." And the single most difficult thing in his life, he admits, is "meeting with politicians. Realistically speaking, it's just symbolic. They cannot do much." Yet, as Helen Tworkov, editor in chief of the New York Buddhist magazine Tricycle, puts it, the simple, paradoxical fact is that "he needs people with money, he needs people with power, he needs people with influence."

And so the man who would clearly be happier just meditating finds himself turning to Democrats and Republicans, instructing 140,000 exiled Tibetans in the ways of the world, and winning all the admiration and attention he doesn't particularly need, while making scant headway in his cause. Last September some reporters openly criticized the (non-Tibetan) organizers of his trip to Australia because of their $20 T shirts and official sponsorship from Nike, Thai International Airlines and Ford. I must confess, though, that I know of this only because the Dalai Lama told me of it--and a caustic clipping about the "Dalai Lama Show," the only item up on the bulletin board of the Dolma Ling Nunnery in Dharamsala.

To appreciate fully the incongruities of Tenzin Gyatso's life in the celebrity age, you have to recall that he was born in a cowshed in a tiny farming village in what was locally known as the Wood Hog Year (1935). The previous Dalai Lama, the 13th, had been one of the great reforming spirits of a tradition whose leaders had all too often been ineffectual boys manipulated by regents. Beset by imperialists of all stripes, the farsighted Lama, in his last written testament, predicted a time in Tibet's history, soon, when "monks and monasteries will be destroyed...[and] all beings will be sunk in great hardship and overwhelming fear."

Upon his death, the senior monks of Lhasa set about finding his successor in the traditional fashion. The regent went to the sacred lake of Lhamoi Lhatso, famous for its visions, and saw in its waters an image of a gold-roofed, three-story monastery beside a winding path. Other signs appeared. The embalmed body of the departed ruler seemed to move from pointing south to pointing toward the northeast. And auspicious cloud formations also appeared in the northeast. When a search party of monks arrived at the 20-family settlement of Takster, in the northeastern province of Amdo, its members were startled to find a gold-roofed, three-story monastery beside a winding path. They were even more taken aback when a two-year-old boy greeted them with familiarity and addressed their leader, disguised as a servant, by the name of his temple in distant Lhasa. The mischievous toddler, who slept in the kitchen of a mud-and-stone house, would become the 14th Dalai Lama.

At the age of four he was installed upon the Lion Throne in Lhasa and inducted into a formidable course of monastic studies. By the age of six he was choosing his own regent, and by the time he was 11 he was weathering a civil uprising. The Dalai Lama has written with typical warmth about his unworldly boyhood in the cold, dark, thousand-room Potala Palace, playing games with the palace sweepers, rigging up a hand-cranked projector on which he could watch Tarzan movies and Henry V, and clobbering his only real playmate--his immediate elder brother Lobsang Samten--serene in the knowledge that no one would readily punish a boy regarded as the incarnation of the god of compassion. Yet the dominant characteristic of his childhood was its loneliness. Often, he recalls, he would go onto the rooftop of his palace and watch the other boys of Lhasa playing in the streets. And each time his brother left, he remembers "standing at the window, watching, my heart full of sorrow as he disappeared into the distance."

Tibet itself (with an army of just 8,500) was in an equally vulnerable state of remoteness when Chinese forces, newly united by Mao Zedong, attacked its eastern frontiers in 1950. Hurriedly, on the advice of the State Oracle (who delivered counsel while in a trance), the 15-year-old boy was invested with full political authority, and while still in his teens, he traveled to Beijing in 1954, against the wishes of his protective people, to negotiate face to face with Mao.

Five years later, when angry Tibetans rose up ever more fiercely against Chinese aggression, their young leader consulted the State Oracle again and, one night, dressed as a humble soldier, slipped out of his summer palace, with his family and some bodyguards. For two weeks the party traveled over the highest mountains on earth, dodging Chinese planes and moving only under the cover of darkness, until at last, suffering from dysentery and on the back of a hybrid yak, the Dalai Lama arrived in India and began a new life in exile.

That parting lives within him still, and when I asked him last year about the saddest moment of his life, he looked into the distance and recalled how "I left the Norbulingka Palace that late night, and some of my close friends, and one dog I left behind. Then, just when I was crossing the border into India, I remember my final farewell, mainly to my bodyguards. They were deliberately facing toward the Chinese, and when they bade farewell, they were determined to return. So that means"--his eyes are close to misting over--"they were facing death or something like that." Since then, he has never seen the land he was born to rule.

By now everyone knows of the luminous charisma of the friendly philosopher, intensified, friends say, by the long retreats he enjoyed while the world had no interest in him. His particular strength lies in his ability to make one-on-one contact even in the most crowded and impersonal of settings. "I don't like to play artificial," he tells me. "I really feel it's wasteful." In recent years his English has grown notably more fluent, and eight years of post-Nobel interviews mean that he can now tell television crews where to set up their cameras. The Dalai Lama may not be less jolly than before, but he is, I think, more determined to speak from the serious side of himself; and where he used to greet me with an Indian namaste, he shakes my hand now--though it's still the case that he doesn't so much shake your hand as rub it within his own as if to impart to it some of his warmth.

Now and then, as we talk, he takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes, and close aides say that recently, for the first time, they've seen him slumped back in his chair, exhausted. He still arises every morning at 3:30, he says matter-of-factly, and every day recites four hours of scriptures (while taking walks, praying for the Chinese and riding his exercise bike). "I still love flowers," he says, "and occasionally do some repair work, of watches and small instruments." But mostly the only breaks he can take regularly are to listen to the BBC World Service. "I am addicted," he confesses happily.

Yet his biggest problem may still be simple isolation. Most Tibetans, after all, continue to regard him quite literally as a god, to the point where even fluent English speakers are too intimidated to serve as his translators. He works with a painfully inexperienced staff drawn from an exile population smaller than that of Peoria, Ill. (two generations of whom have never even seen Tibet). And as fast as the Dalai Lama tries to push democracy on his people, they try to press autocracy on him, leading to an ungainly tug-of-war in which most Tibetans are unswervingly obedient to the Dalai Lama in every matter except that of the Dalai Lama's fallibility.

In that context he must operate alone and rely on a few trusted friends and relatives, such as his younger brother Tendzin Choegyal, who lives down the road in Dharamsala and speaks his mind with fearless rigor. Thus, while the Dalai Lama officially professes to be unconcerned about all the complications that have arisen as Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism have suddenly spread around the world, his brother openly calls it "a hell of a hodgepodge" and notes that too many lamas take advantage of their impressionable Western admirers, who, in search of instant enlightenment, are prey to what he calls "the Shangri-La syndrome."

This is a particularly vexed matter because Tibetan Buddhism is an unusually charged and esoteric set of practices uncommonly difficult to translate, "a unique blend," as the Buddhist scholar Christmas Humphreys once wrote, "of the noblest Buddhist principles and debased sorcery." Its core, as with all Buddhism, is a belief in suffering and emptiness, and the need for compassion in the face of those. But unlike the stripped-down austerities of Zen, say, Tibetan Buddhism swarms with animist spirits, vivid symbolic depictions of copulating bodies, and Tantric practices of magic and sexuality that, taken out of context or practiced without the right training, are inflammable.

The Dalai Lama's very refusal to be dictatorial and his calm assurance that Tibetan Buddhist centers, unlike their Roman Catholic counterparts, "have no central authority" and are "all quite independent" have left him somewhat powerless as all kinds of questionable things are done in the name of his philosophy (a prominent lama was slapped with a $10 million sexual-harassment suit in California). And his wish to make peace among the four main schools of Tibetan Buddhism has so infuriated a few that earlier this year three members of his inner circle were found murdered in their beds, apparently by a breakaway sect.

Though the Dalai Lama deals with such problems serenely, having endured insurrections for a half-century, the issues of delegating responsibility and authorizing the reincarnations of departed lamas take on particular urgency as he passes through his 60s. The finding of a new Dalai Lama when all Tibet is in Chinese hands would in the best of circumstances be treacherous; but it became doubly so two years ago, when Beijing unilaterally hijacked the second highest incarnation in Tibet, that of the Panchen Lama, by placing the Dalai Lama's six-year-old choice under house arrest and installing a candidate of its own. (The Panchen Lama is the figure officially responsible for authorizing the Dalai Lama's own incarnation--and the maneuver suggested that the Chinese may have few qualms about coming up with their own puppet as the next Dalai Lama.)

In response to this, the man trained for 18 years in dialectics has been canny. More than a decade ago, he reminds me, he said that "if I die in the near future, and the Tibetan people want another reincarnation, a 15th Dalai Lama, while we are still outside Tibet, my reincarnation will definitely appear outside Tibet. Because"--the logic, as ever, is rock solid--"the very purpose of the incarnation is to fulfill the work that has been started by the previous life." So, he goes on, "the reincarnation of the 14th Dalai Lama, logically, will not be a reincarnation that disturbs, or is an obstacle to, that work. Quite clear, isn't it?" In any case, he says cheerfully, "at a certain state the Dalai Lama institution will disappear. That does not mean that Tibetan Buddhism will cease. But the institution comes and goes, comes and goes."

As ever, few of his supporters are equally ready to acquiesce in such lese majeste. (When I ask a group of Tibetan officials if this one will be the last Dalai Lama, they all say anxiously, "No, no.") And even relatives have sometimes found it hard to countenance his policy of forgiving the Chinese (he once described Mao as "remarkable," has referred to himself as "half Marxist, half Buddhist," and has stepped back from his original demands of independence to calling only for an autonomous "Zone of Peace"). The pressure on him to forswear his policy of nonviolence has intensified as the years go by, and Chinese repression comes ever closer to rendering Tibet extinct.

"In one way, yes," he tells me, "my position has become weaker, because there's been no development, no progress. In spite of my open approach, of maximum concessions, the Chinese position becomes even harder and harder." Last year all photographs of the exiled leader were banned in Tibet, and monks and nuns continue to be imprisoned and tortured at will, in what the International Commission of Jurists long ago called a policy of "genocide." Yet, he argues, all but banging his fist on the arm of his chair, "to isolate China is totally wrong. China needs the outside world, and the outside world needs China."

When I left Dharamsala at dawn, the Dalai Lama was leading his monks in a three-hour ceremony while the sun came up behind the distant snowcaps. It struck me that the man has lived out a kind of archetypal destiny of our times: a boy born in a peasant village in a world that had scarcely seen a wheel has ended up confronting the great forces of the day--exile, global travel and, especially, the mass media; and a man from a culture known as the "Forbidden Kingdom" now faces machine guns on the one hand and Chinese discos around the Potala Palace on the other. While Tibet is eroded in its homeland, it threatens to be commodified--or turned into an exotic accessory--abroad.

Yet to this state-of-the-art challenge the Dalai Lama brings, in his own words, a "radical informality," a gift for cutting through to the heart of things and an unusually open and practical mind. If I had to single out one sovereign quality in him, it would be alertness, whether he's reminding me of a sentence he delivered to me seven years before or picking out a friend's face in the middle of a jam-packed prayer hall.

This mindfulness, as Buddhists might call it, is particularly critical these days as the Dalai Lama finds himself more and more appealing to people who know nothing of his philosophy--and may even be hostile to it. The Tibetan has delivered lectures on the Gospels, celebrated the Internet as a talisman of human interdependence and, especially, mastered the art of talking to ordinary people in ordinary human terms, about "spirituality without faith." As his longtime friend the composer Philip Glass says, "He talks about compassion, he talks about right living. And it's very powerful and persuasive to people because it's clear he's not there to convert them."

The Dalai Lama is unbending on this point. "Out of 5.8 billion people in the world," he tells me, "the majority of them are certainly not believers. We can't argue with them, tell them they should be believers. No! Impossible! And, realistically speaking, if the majority of humanity remains nonbelievers, it doesn't matter. No problem! The problem is that the majority have lost, or ignore, the deeper human values--compassion, a sense of responsibility. That is our big concern. For whenever there is a community without deeper human values, then even one single family cannot be a happy family." For if we merely want to be happy, he says--though he has been forced from his homeland, seen 1.2 million of his people killed and had nearly all his 6,000 monasteries destroyed--it pays to be kind. Kindness, he says over and over, only stands to reason.