A Monk's Struggle

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As the world prepares for the Olympic Games in Beijing this August—and as Tibetans (and those in other occupied areas across China, like Xinjiang) inevitably use the world's attention to broadcast their suffering—a farmer's son born in a stone-and-mud house in a 20-home village in one of the world's least materially developed countries has, rather remarkably, become one of the leading spokesmen for a new global vision in which we look past divisions of nation, race and religion and try to address our shared problems at the source. Acts of terrorism, he said when I saw him in November, usually arise from some cause deep in the past and will not go away until the root problem is addressed. He could as easily have been talking about the demonstrations of discontent being staged in his homeland nearly a half-century since he saw it last.

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I have been visiting the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala regularly since 1974 and have been listening to him speak to psychologists, non-Buddhist priests and philosophers—from Harvard to Hiroshima and Zurich to Malibu—since 1979. I'm not a Buddhist myself, only a typically skeptical journalist whose father, a professional philosopher, happened to meet the Dalai Lama in 1960, the year after he went into exile. But having spent time watching wars and revolutions everywhere from Sri Lanka to Beirut, I've grown intrigued by the quietly revolutionary ideas that the Dalai Lama has put into play. China and Tibet will long be geographic neighbors, he implies, so for Tibetans to think of the Chinese as their enemies—or vice versa—is to say they will long be surrounded by enemies. Better by far to expunge the notion of "enmities" that the mind has created.

Among fellow Buddhists, the Dalai Lama delivers complex, analytical talks and wrestles with doctrinal issues within a philosophy that can be just as divided as anything in Christianity or Islam, but he has decided after analytical research that when he finds himself out in the wider world talking to large audiences of people with no interest in Buddhism, the most practical course is just to offer, as a doctor would, simple, everyday principles that anyone, regardless of religion (or lack of same), might find helpful. Since material wealth cannot help us if we're heartbroken, he often says, and yet those who are strong within can survive even material hardship (as many monks in Tibet have had tragic occasion to prove), it makes more sense to concentrate on our inner, not our outer, resources. We in the privileged world spend so much time strengthening and working on our bodies, perhaps we could also use some time training what lies beneath them, at the source of our well-being: the mind.

His own people, inevitably, have not always been able to live according to these lucid precepts, and if you walk along the crowded, gritty streets of Dharamsala, you find as many Tibetans looking to the West for salvation as you find Westerners looking to Tibet. Melancholy signs in the Tibetan government-in-exile compound say Tibetan Torture Survivors' Program and Voice Of Tibet (Voice For The Voiceless), and many young Tibetans feel they have spent all their lives dreaming of a country they've never seen. In Tibet, meanwhile, I remember—visiting in 1990, when the shadow of martial law hung over the capital—seeing soldiers on the rooftops of the low buildings around the central Jokhang Temple and tanks stationed just outside the city limits.

Yet the larger sense of identity being proposed by the Dalai Lama—and many others from every tradition—has special relevance today because, as the Tibetan leader likes to say, we are living in a "new reality" in which "the concept of 'we' and 'they' is gone." And if the terrorist attacks and wars of the new millennium have made some people on every continent wary and skeptical of religion, they have also made them ache, more palpably than ever, for precisely the sense of moral guidance and solace that religions traditionally provide.