THE GOD IN EXILE

(4 of 7)
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."