A Monk's Struggle

(3 of 5)
Exile and Opportunity
What could be called a global movement on behalf of post–identity thinking seems one of the brightest hopes of our new world order and one often advanced by such close friends and admirers of the Dalai Lama as Vaclav Havel and Desmond Tutu. Yet what has made the Dalai Lama's example particularly striking—and what was perhaps partly responsible for his receiving the 1989 Nobel Prize for Peace—is that he has had to live these principles and put them to the test during almost every hour of his 72 years. He came to the throne in Lhasa, after all, when he was only 4 years old, and he was receiving envoys from F.D.R. with intricate questions about the transportation of military supplies across Tibet during World War II when he was just 7. He was 11 when violent fighting broke out around him in Lhasa, and by the time he was 15—an age when most of us are stumbling through high school—he was the full-time political leader of his people, having to negotiate against Mao Zedong. After he fled Tibet at age 23, when Chinese pressure on Lhasa seemed certain to provoke widespread violence, he had to remake an entire ancient culture in exile.

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The result of all this is that he is as rigorous and detailed a realist as you could hope to meet. His life has never allowed him the luxury of talking abstractly or wishfully from a mountaintop. He follows the news more closely than many journalists do and cheerfully confessed to me more than a decade ago that he is "addicted" to the bbc World Service broadcast every morning. When he speaks around the world, one of his favorite lines is "Dream—nothing!" or some other expression to stress that instead of looking outside ourselves for help or inspiration, we should act right now because "responsibility for our future lies on our own shoulders."

This makes for a novel way of practicing the art of politics—one inspired, you could say, by the prince called the Buddha more than by the one described by Machiavelli. The central principle of Buddhism is the idea of interdependence—the notion that all sentient beings are linked together in a network that was classically known as Indra's Net. Thus, calling Chinese individuals your enemy and Tibetans your friend, the Dalai Lama might suggest, is as crazy as calling your right eye your ally and your left your adversary; you usually need both to function well, and all parts of the world body depend on all other parts. "Before," I heard him say last November, "destruction of your enemy was victory for your side." But in our globalized world, where ecology enforces our sense of mutual dependence, "destruction of your enemy is destruction of yourself."

The other essential idea of Buddhism (more accurately called a science of mind than a religion) is that we can change our world by changing how we choose to look at the world. "There is nothing either good or bad," as Hamlet said, "but thinking makes it so." For most of us, for example, exile means disruption and loss. But the Dalai Lama has decided that exile is his reality and therefore should be taken as opportunity. Almost as soon as he left Tibet in 1959, he started to draw up a new democratic constitution for Tibetans, allowing for the possibility of impeaching the Dalai Lama. He threw out much that he regarded as outdated or needlessly ritualistic in the Tibetan system while gradually bringing in reforms so that women are now allowed to study for doctoral degrees and become abbots (which they could not do in old Tibet) and science is part of the monastic curriculum. Tibetan children in exile take their lessons in Tibetan until they are 10 or so—to make sure they are strongly rooted in their own tradition—and then in English ever after (so as to be connected to the modern world).

This has made the Tibetan exile community one of the success stories among refugee groups in recent decades. But no less important, perhaps, it has offered a possibility to many others on a planet where there are, by some counts, as many as 33 million official and unofficial refugees. By showing how Tibet can exist internally, in spirit and imagination, even if it is barely visible on the map, the Dalai Lama has been suggesting to Palestinians, Kurds and Uighurs that they can maintain a cultural community even if they have lost their territory. Communities can be linked not by common soil so much as by common ground, a common foundation.