When I look in on the Dalai Lama one morning this past spring and ask him what qualities Tibetans can offer fellow refugees around the globe, he says, after a careful pause, "Maybe, first, hope and determination." Drawing, as is his way, on recent encounters with other exiled groups in Chile, Germany, Australia and the U.S., he talks about the value of nonviolence and his eagerness for democracy and modern education, and then stresses the difference between cultural props that can be discarded and those that remain essential. "If you make the effort, for example, to keep Tibetan-style long hair in the heat of India—unrealistic!" The famous laugh breaks out, as he contemplates the absurdity of holding onto what is no longer useful and not moving with the times. But in terms of a way of thinking, not just of living—a language and a set of ideas—"these things are worthy of being preserved, and can be preserved."

The fruits of this practical optimism are everywhere in Dharamsala. One bright afternoon I watch large groups of nuns, many of them newly escaped from Tibet, practice classical Tibetan Buddhist debating in the courtyard of the elegant new Dolma Ling nunnery, as they could never have done in old Tibet; in exile, for the first time in their history, nuns are receiving doctoral degrees in Tibetan Buddhism, training to become abbots, and producing their own magazines. A few days later I pick up a book, Muses in Exile, that represents the first anthology of Tibetan poetry written in England ever to be published. And on a sunny spring day, Jetsun Pema, the Dalai Lama's younger sister, sits in the brightly colored Tibetan Children's Village she has long overseen and tells me of plans to build a Tibetan university on land now bought near Bangalore. Tibetan publications even come out these days in Japanese, and the government-in-exile maintains offices even in Taipei, Moscow and Pretoria.

The idea that lies behind all the activity is a planetary one: Tibetans can offer a model to Kurds, Palestinians and many others who have lost their own homelands, by showing that cultures can be sustained in exile as long as they are constructed inwardly. Tibet has certain advantages over other places—in the charisma of its leader, the historical pull of its otherworldly homeland, the natural magnetism of its exotic ways. But its people are working constantly to find new ways to mix cherished traditions with the world's realities. The students at the Tibetan Children's Village, for example, take all their classes in Tibetan until around the age of 10, then all their subsequent classes in English. One of the Dalai Lama's translators for philosophical discourses, in the same vein, got his doctoral degree in Tibetan Buddhism, then took another doctorate in philosophy at Cambridge.

As I begin making my way through the book of poems, though, I am quickly reminded of the other side to the hopeful visions and high ideals offered by the Dalai Lama. "The collective conscience expressed by [exiled Tibetan youth] today," the introduction to the book announces, unflinchingly, "has a root of deep resentment directed towards the U.N. and the exile government for their failure to find a workable political solution to the dilemma of Tibet's occupation." Talks with Beijing are ongoing over the possibility of Tibet's preserving some degree of cultural and religious autonomy. Yet more and more young Tibetans feel that their homeland is being destroyed day by day, and that their government, currently led in its Middle Way policy of forbearance by the gentle scholar-monk Prime Minister Samdhong Rinpoche, has made no headway at all in protecting it. In the meantime, Tibetans who have never seen Tibet have found themselves turning into strange, hybrid creatures (this is the theme of many of the poems, nearly all of them sad) that speak Hindi but have no real connection with Hindu culture, that possess Western friends and languages but no great prospects in the West, and that lack a homeland and even passports linking them to a place to call their own.

"Ever since our holy and revered Prime Minister said there is only one way to deal with the Chinese and the way is—no surprise—compassion, I said, 'I can't support this any longer,'" says Lhasang Tsering, a onetime worker in the government-in-exile (and a guerrilla) who now sits in his Bookworm bookstore, lamenting the ineptness of his leaders. At almost every turn in Dharamsala, one bumps into this debate between those who follow the Dalai Lama's position—of trying only to "save," not "free," Tibet—and those who say that a Tibet without freedom is no Tibet. "If peace with China means saying we are not equal to the Chinese," Tsering tells me over tea, "I am sorry, I will not say that."

The more I walk around Dharamsala, the more I find Tibetans torn on a central contradiction. They will never say anything against the Dalai Lama. He is their country, in effect, their great hope and the incarnation of their god of compassion; as long as he is around, they can believe that Tibet might survive. Yet his policies of patience and forgiveness are more than some less patient Tibetans can live up to. I go one day to see Lobsang Yeshi, vice president of the Tibetan Youth Congress, traditionally known as the "militant" voice of Tibet in exile (and also its largest NGO, comprising 30,000 of the 130,000 Tibetans outside Tibet), and watch the acrobatics in action. "His Holiness is our strength, our power, our ground; everything," says Yeshi. But then he says (as his beloved leader would never say): "Now is the time to act."

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