The Open Road Read Free

possibility.” But there would be nothing lost in trying. “Because usually even representatives of the United Nations, people not much trust. Always suspicion.”
    As the local translator renders the words into Japanese, the Tibetan visitor looks around the room with the interest of a newcomer. He pulls out a silver pen from within his capacious robes at one point, and makes a note. He sits in front of the scientists as unself-consciously as if sitting alone in his room at home. People always talk about his smile and his almost palpable charm; but if his ideas are really going to have some effect, I think, they must arise from acuity and alertness.
    “The great home of the Soul,” D. H. Lawrence once wrote, in a typically pinwheeling account of Walt Whitman, “is the open road. Not heaven, not paradise. Not ‘above.’” The soul, in Lawrence’s vision, is “a wayfarer down the open road,” and “true democracy” flowers in that place “where soul meets soul, in the open road.” In that sense, the road also seems the natural home of someone who is visibly pressing along a path, to talk to anyone he meets along the way and to see how foreigners, specialists, fellow travelers can instruct him.
    As soon as the Dalai Lama has finished speaking, the experts around the table, one after another, offer responses, generally in the form of dry and somewhat formal readings of prepared statements. Then, however, one man—the youngest in attendance, perhaps in his late thirties—suddenly addresses the Dalai Lama directly. “I am a realist,” he says. “All this talk of ahimsa and nonviolence, it’s all well and good, but how has it really helped the world?” People are dying in Iraq, in Afghanistan, all over, he hardly needs to add. Instantly, the Dalai Lama comes to life, as in one of the debates that his school of Tibetan Buddhism cherishes as a way to sharpen the mind and cut through fixed assumptions. Governments are slow to catch up with the possibilities that individuals discern, he says; and in any case, it takes time to change and slough off the habits of old. The answer comes with such assurance that I begin to wonder if this, too, isn’t one of the many questions the Dalai Lama asks himself every day.
     

     
    A religious teacher who is telling people not to get entangled or distracted by religion; a Tibetan who is suggesting that Tibet does not have all the answers; a Buddhist who, more and more, is urging foreigners not to take up Buddhism but to study within their own traditions, where their roots are deepest: at the very least, something quite radical is being advanced, it seems. The world at the beginning of the new century is more divided than I have ever seen it, and its strongest power is fractured by loud disputes; in the middle of this, the head of Tibetan Buddhism is urging people not to listen to doctrine, which can so often be a source of divisions of its own, but to push behind it to something human, in which ideas of “clashing civilizations” can seem remote.
    As the burly Tibetan walks out into the broad sunlight—people are holding up signs saying FREE TIBET along his path and waving the Tibetan flag, now banned in Tibet—I realize there’s something incongruous about this skeptical journalist and nonbelonger (myself) devoting so much of my time to trying to figure out what this man is saying.
    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 an angle 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