Homage to His Holiness
George FitzHerbert
The Dalai Lama is a controversial figure of late. The fury of millions of Chinese at the Tibetans’ sullying of China’s international reputation in the lead up to their beloved Olympic moment may be dismissed as nationalist hysteria, but the perception that he is, in Rupert Murdoch’s insinuating slur, ‘a very political monk in Gucci shoes’ has begun to take hold. However there is nothing in the recent glut of new books about Tibet’s spiritual leader to suggest that he is anything other than a sincere and diligent monk (who owns no Gucci shoes, but at least a couple of pairs of Hush Puppies).
Pico Iyer’s book-length essay on the Dalai Lama’s globalised Buddhism — a message of realism, moderation and ethical integrity — presents a figure of ‘immense personal purity’ (The Open Road: The Global Journey of the 14th Dalai Lama, Bloomsbury, £12.99, pp. 275, ISBN 9780747597261). The burly 70-year-old is ‘the very picture of vigorous attentiveness’:,an observant and open-minded monkphilosopher intent on giving his learning a universal humanist relevance. That the Dalai Lama is also political is, however, undeniable. Politics is a necessary part of the role thrust upon him by his people, as is clearly shown in Alex Norman’s marvellously readable exposition of the his tory of the institution of the Dalai Lamas (Holder of the White Lotus: The Lives of the Dalai Lamas, Little, Brown, £20, pp. 445, ISBN 97880316859882).
As the incarnation of Tibet’s patron deity, the figure of the Dalai Lama is the worldly manifestation of Chenrezig, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, who rescues his chosen people, the Tibetans, from the depths of ignorance, suffering and barbarity. The association between Tibet’s political leaders and Chenrezig is itself much older than the institution of the Dalai Lamas, and dates back to the period of the Tibetan empire in the 7th-9th centuries AD, when Tibet was first converted to Buddhism. The figure of the Dalai Lama (which is a Mongolian, not a Tibetan title) only came to occupy a central position in Tibet’s religio-political hierarchy in the mid-17th century, when the fifth Dalai, with the military assistance of a Dzungarian Mongol warlord named Gushri Khan, united much of the Tibetan plateau.
The Dalai Lamas since then, cloistered from youth in the fortress depths of the Potala Palace, have been a motley bunch, several of whom died or were murdered before attaining their majority. Some were disenchanted by their fate, such as the sixth Dalai Lama, who wept upon hearing the news that he was to be recognised as Tibet’s top ecclesiast and later refused to accept his monk’s vows. He became notorious for his drunken and amorous adventures, and was eventually driven from his position and probably murdered. His love songs, however, have earned him an enduring place in Tibetan hearts. We also hear of ‘the Great 13th’, whose vigorous and pragmatic qualities betrayed his peasant stock and who, in the early decades of the 20th century, set about modernising Tibet and asserting its independence from nationalist China, not least by acquiring an arsenal of modern weaponry from the British for his nascent Tibetan army. Alexander Norman’s work is especially adept at navigating the intricacies of Tibet’s relations with its neighbours — the series of Mongol warlords and emperors who played the role of kingmakers in Tibet from the 13th to the 18th centuries; Tibet’s close relations with the Qing dynasty during the 18th century, during which time it must be considered as having been part of the Manchu empire; and more recently, Tibet’s ambivalent relations with the British, whose 1904 invasion Norman describes as ‘one of the least glorious feats of British arms in the history of the Empire’.
Pico Iyer’s very different book is a companionable reflection on the present (14th) Dalai Lama, a man who has been forced to give his institution, steeped as it is in medieval intrigue, a modern and global relevance. The Dalai Lama is counterpoised with his good friend and ally on the international stage, Archbishop Desmond Tutu. While Tutu, with his undulating and passionate rhetoric, brings us into communion with a transcendental god, the Dalai Lama is seen as exhorting us to a logician’s engagement with the nature of reality and the human condition, asking us to look into ourselves to begin a process of personal transformation. But despite this apparent rationalism, and the absence of any will to proselytise (‘I am not interested in making more Buddhists’ he says), there is a side to the Dalai Lama which for Pico Iyer is unfathomable. He depicts him as a man who frequently retreats behind a ‘closed door’ beyond which lies the inscrutable world of Tibetan superstition and esoteric occultism. Entranced oracles play a central role in the his decision-making and wrathful deities, which Western audiences are told to understand as symbolic, are still real and powerful enough that the Dalai Lama has even felt it necessary to ban the propitiation of one such deity, to the fury of many within his own monastic community.
Norman’s book, by contrast, opens that closed door, and allows us to see the long history of Tibet’s peculiar brand of ‘religion and politics combined’. Having ghostwritten the Dalai Lama’s autobiography, Freedom in Exile, Norman knows the Dalai Lama probably better than any Englishman alive. By putting His Holiness in his own historical context, his book sheds light on the tightrope he walks between the arcane world of traditional Tibet and the globalised and often disenchanted modern world. His exile since 1959 in Dharamsala, Himachal Pradesh, has given him the opportunity to make his Buddhist learning (he has been studying Buddhist philosophy intensively since the age of six) relevant for all humanity. The problem is that this globalised ‘stadium Buddhism’, stripped of its ritual and esotericism, can become as bland and obvious as the moral platitudes available at any Sunday school. So it is the occult, the magic, which in the end attracts the world to the Dalai Lama. Despite his disavowal of blind superstition and of his own deification — ‘I am just a simple Buddhist monk’ he is often heard to say — the Dalai Lama still has a magical presence for his devotees. People go to him for blessings more than lessons. In the annals of the Dalai Lamas, the 14th will surely go down as one of the holiest. In the political annals of Tibet, however, unless a long-prayed-for volte-face is forthcoming from the Chinese government, his tenure will be recorded as one of failure and disappointment.
Two other books on the Dalai Lama are published this month. Mayank Chhaya’s Dalai Lama: The Revealing Life Story and his Struggle for Tibet (I. B. Tauris, £8.99, pp. 360, ISBN 9781845117634) is a somewhat melodramatic, but nevertheless informative account of the Dalai Lama’s life, with interesting discussions of, for example, Nehru’s ambivalent position towards the plight of Tibet in the 1950s. Also published is The Leader’s Way, a work co-authored by the Dalai Lama with Laurens van den Muyzenberg, a Dutch management consultant, a somewhat bland manual on the relevance of Buddhism to corporate ethics and leadership in business (Nicholas Brearley Publishing, £16.99, pp. 202, ISBN 9781857885118).
George FitzHerbert has a DPhil in Tibetan Studies from Oxford University. His first book on the Tibetan national epic of Gesar is soon to be published by Oxford University Press.
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