The Open Road

I’ve noticed, whenever I follow the Dalai Lama around, that people’s faces don’t light up much when he says, “Dream— nothing!” in stressing to a questioner that for a resolution of her situation, “the main responsibility lies on your own shoulders,” or when he says, “We expect peace, compassion to come from the sky. Nonsense! Someone must start it,” in reminding us of the virtue of real action instead of daydreaming. Over and over, he counsels a practical realism and a refusal to get caught up in the lures and distraction of mindless optimism, least of all the kind that comes from indiscriminate faith. This emphasis on how much we can do ourselves lies at the heart of his own optimism and infectious confidence; yet it’s not always the part that most of us want to hear.

A pickpocket encounters a saint, the Tibetans say, and all he sees are the other man’s pockets.

Prayer, I recalled reading in Emerson—and it was perhaps the best definition I had met—is merely “the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view.”

The only real peace could arise from stilling something in yourself, going back behind the self, to someplace where you had no sense of “us” and “them” but instead saw everything linked in a pulsing network, which reminded you that the boss you cannot abide may in fact have been your mother in a previous lifetime— or, indeed, might become your mother in a future life. The only revolution, in that sense, came from reevaluation; to change a society or a system, you had to push back to its root causes in the mind. “Hate,” as Graham Greene memorably puts it in The Power and theGlory,“was just a failure of imagination.”

But the Dalai Lama impresses, or disarms, me by doing away with many of the categories with which we imprison ourselves. The only truths that can possibly make sense to us, he suggests, apply to all human beings, as much as Pythagoras’s theorem or the laws of thermodynamics do; if they pertain only to a specific tradition or culture, they’re not human truths at all. And the only thing that an Easterner—or Westerner—can offer is a window on these truths that allows the rest of us to see them more clearly than we have done before. To someone like me, who’s grown up in many cultures but refused to believe that lacking a physical home means lacking an inner center, this is all as encouraging to hear as the idea that we don’t have to define ourselves by differences.

People who win the lottery often profess themselves no better off than before—they don’t know who their friends are, they feel uncomfortable in their posh new neighborhoods, they spend all their time with lawyers; yet others, who are suddenly rendered paraplegic, after roughly a year of adjustment confess themselves really no worse off than before. The mind, as Milton puts it at the beginning of Paradise Lost,“can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.”