Phil Haslanger: Dalai Lama doesn't stuff beliefs into tidy boxes

Phil Haslanger  —  7/09/2008 5:22 am

He's been to the Madison area so often, you might start thinking about giving him residential status.

The Dalai Lama is coming to this area again in a few days to give a public lecture, offer extended teachings, and participate in ceremonies at the Deer Park Buddhist Center near Oregon.

Yet as often as he has been here, for most area residents he probably remains pretty much an enigma. He's thought of in quick images: a Buddhist monk in a brown and orange robe with a gentle lesson, an aura of deity, and an international profile in the struggle over the occupation of his Tibetan homeland by the Chinese.

So along comes travel writer Pico Iyer with a fascinating and revealing portrait of the man, the ideas he has developed, and the controversies that swirl around him. This new book, "The Open Road: The Global Journey of the 14th Dalai Lama," is remarkable because it combines a personal relationship that goes back to Iyer's youth along with the astute observations of a veteran journalist and a willingness to grapple with the contradictions that surround this spiritual rock star.

Even folks immersed in the life and teachings of the Dalai Lama, I think, will find fresh insights in this book. For the rest of us, it provides a very accessible introduction to a man whose message can seem both overly simplistic and overly complex, whose life seems far removed from daily life in America, and yet whose presence seems to have gripped people here and across the globe.

It was Iyer's father, born five years before the Dalai Lama to Hindu parents in Bombay, India, and trained in British Catholic schools, who first made the connection to the newly exiled Tibetan leader. Iyer's father was researching the life of Mohandas Gandhi, the leader of the nonviolent campaign for India's independence. The Dalai Lama, too, was fascinated by Gandhi, and the writer and the monk began a lifelong friendship. That included Pico Iyer spending part of his boyhood hanging out with the Dalai Lama.

There is no doubt that Iyer is an admirer of the Dalai Lama -- an admiration built around both their personal relationship and his respect for the intellectual depth and curiosity of this man. But just because the book has an admiring tone does not mean that Iyer ignores the hard questions that surround the Tibetan leader.

The recent uprisings in Tibet happened after this book was completed, but some of the most compelling parts of this work are Iyer's reports on the debates within the Tibetan community in exile over whether the Dalai Lama's patient and compromising approach to China makes sense any more. You could hear that same theme in the news reports during the uprising.

No one captures the frustration with the Dalai Lama better than Lhasang Tsering, a bookstore owner in the Tibetan exile community of Dharamsala in northern India, the same community where the Dalai Lama has his headquarters. "I don't think it is fair for us to ignore Tibetans who are suffering in Tibet," he tells a group of young American students who have come to visit.

Then Iyer paraphrases Tsering's message: "To talk about peace while Tibetans were dying was, he suggested, tantamount to manslaughter."

Tough words, but grounded in the hard reality facing the Tibetans. As Iyer writes: "The Dalai Lama had been practicing nonviolence and moving the world with his example for almost half a century ... but he had moved China not at all, and Tibet was now almost gone."

Still, the dissidents among the Tibetans face what Iyer calls a core predicament: "Even those not completely convinced of the wisdom of the Dalai Lama's political policy defer to him as their leader, their hero, and the incarnation of a god it would be near sacrilege to go against."

Iyer draws on his experiences in other war-torn zones of the world -- Beirut in Lebanon, Haiti in the Western Hemisphere -- and skillfully weaves scenes there with the Dalai Lama's words: "We notice a larger number of humanity really showing a desire for peace."

The author makes no effort to provide a neat resolution to these contradictions, but then neither does the Dalai Lama, who himself is clearly aware of the swirling debates everywhere about the best way to respond to oppression.

"His job," Iyer says of the Dalai Lama, "is to mix agnosticism with faith: to recall that he knows nothing of what will come tomorrow, and yet to remain confident that it will have meaning and will fit into a larger logic."

Maybe that's part of what is so appealing to so many people about the Dalai Lama. He does not try to fit everything into tidy boxes. He clearly has plumbed spiritual depths within himself and he is committed to helping others on their journeys as well.

That's part of what he will be doing in Madison this month. At the same time, his presence here just a few weeks before the opening of the Olympics in China will be a vivid reminder of the plight of Tibet, of the difficulty of nonviolent resistance, and of the eternal hope he has that there will be a change that will reflect the noblest aspirations of humanity.

Phil Haslanger is a minister in the United Church of Christ and former managing editor of The Capital Times who writes this column as well as a blog on the Cap Times Web site.

The Dalai Lama will be in the Madison area July 19-24.

He will give a public lecture on Saturday, July 19, at 3 p.m. at the Alliant Energy Center's Memorial Coliseum. Tickets are $25 through Ticketmaster.

He will conduct teachings at the Coliseum on July 20-23 and will be part of special ceremonies there on July 23 and 24. Details are online at www.dalailama2008na.com.

Wisconsin Public Television will broadcast a special program, "The Teacher's New Temple," taking viewers inside the newly refurbished Buddhist temple at Deer Park near Oregon, at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, July 24, with a rebroadcast at 9:30 p.m. Friday, July 25.

Phil Haslanger  —  7/09/2008 5:22 am