Pankaj Mishra writes a detailed review of Pico Iyer’s new book, The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, in the recent issue of the New Yorker. Mishra’s review makes it evident that Iyer has elicited a far more complex story of the Dalai Lama than is typically shoveled to and slurped up by the West. Instead of treating him merely as a figure to be awed, Iyer describes him as “Forrest Gumpish,” simple yet revolutionary. He is a religious leader who is actively attempting to weaken the dogma of his own religion:
Last November, a couple of weeks after the Dalai Lama received a Congressional Gold Medal from President Bush, his old Land Rover went on sale on eBay. Sharon Stone, who once introduced the Tibetan leader at a fundraiser as “Mr. Please, Please, Please Let Me Back Into China!” (she meant Tibet), announced the auction on YouTube, promising the prospective winner of the 1966 station wagon, “You’ll just laugh the whole time that you’re in it!” The bidding closed at more than eighty thousand dollars. The Dalai Lama, whom Larry King, on CNN, once referred to as a Muslim, has also received the Lifetime Achievement award of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America…Precepts such as “violence breeds violence” or “the quality of means determine ends” may be ethically sound, but they don’t seem to possess the intellectual complexity that would make them engaging as ideas. Since the Dalai Lama speaks English badly, and frequently collapses into prolonged fits of giggling, he can also give the impression that he is, as Iyer reports a journalist saying, “not the brightest bulb in the room…” [Link]
But, would a “dull bulb” espouse an idea as revolutionary as this:
The most famous Buddhist in the world, he advises his Western followers not to embrace Buddhism. He seeks out famous scientists with geekish zeal, asserting that certain Buddhist scriptures disproved by modern science should be abandoned. [Link]
Can you imagine the Pope coming out to say to Catholics, “Yeah. I guess science and statistics do show that condoms are a good idea after all. Let’s git rid of the whole no birth control part of the religion.”
The Dalai Lama’s ideas are rooted in the fact that he believes that globalization is unstoppable and the interconnectedness of the world demands that we loosen our strict dogmas. You can either seek to rebel against the oneness, trying to maintain local culture and beliefs by any means necessary (including violence), or you can seek to truly understand the connectedness of everyone and become better off (spiritually and economically) because of it.
“For the first time in history,” Hannah Arendt wrote in 1957, “all peoples on earth have a common present… . Every country has become the almost immediate neighbor of every other country, and every man feels the shock of events which take place at the other end of the globe.” Arendt feared that this new “unity of the world” would be a largely negative phenomenon if it wasn’t accompanied by the “renunciation, not of one’s own tradition and national past, but of the binding authority and universal validity which tradition and past have always claimed…” [Link]
That “binding authority and universal validity” is what we see in radical Islam and in other movements marked by their turn-back-the-clock attitude. Arendt wrote, and the Dalai Lama has recognized, that one can maintain their traditions without considering them to be a last wall of defense to keep at bay the common present. The Dalai Lama also recognizes that a religious leader is really just a politician. They do not have some divine moral authority or clairvoyance which makes them closer to God. Why not admit that and just elect them like any politician?
Recently, he offered his most radical idea yet, one that overturns nearly half a millennium of tradition: that the next Dalai Lama be chosen by popular vote. [Link]
If you look deeper though you begin to realize that perhaps his ideas are not that revolutionary. Perhaps they are nothing more than Buddhism applied to the present:
In his public appearances before English-speaking audiences, he prefers to speak of “global ethics” rather than of the abstruse Buddhist concept of Nirvana. Doubtless he doesn’t want to put off the largely secular middle-class Americans in weekend casuals who crowd Central Park to listen to him, but, as Iyer points out, this is also a reaffirmation of a Buddhist philosophical vision in which all existence is deeply interconnected. Indeed, this notion may be why the Dalai Lama was early to grasp the existential and political challenges of globalized human existence, decades before they were underlined by the disasters of climate change…Iyer’s book makes it plausible that the boy from the Tibetan backwoods may be outlining, in his own frequently Forrest Gumpish way, “a process of mutual understanding and progressing self-clarification on a gigantic scale”—the process that Arendt believed necessary for halting the “tremendous increase in mutual hatred and a somewhat universal irritability of everybody against everybody else…” [Link]
Imagine that, Buddhist philosophy might be made more relevant by a man who seeks to give up much of his religious authority.
