The Open Road Read Free Page A

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.
    I follow along as he moves down the white-gravel paths of central Nara and notice, as people reach toward him to try to get a blessing or a handshake, how he is switching, as always, at lightning speed from monk to head of state to philosopher-scientist to regular man. But what is more striking, I realize, is that he’s pushing all these roles together, as if they were all intertwined, to see how one might throw light on the others. I don’t know many monks who are so keen to affirm only what stands up to scientific testing. And there are even fewer politicians who try to speak from the collected stillness and attention of a monk. Pope John Paul II, the Dalai Lama’s good friend, is also traveling more and more in the global order, using planes and cars to take him everywhere; but when he travels, he tends to visit fellow Catholics, to proclaim his faith and to offer doctrinal guidance. The Dalai Lama, by comparison, seems to exult in meeting people from different traditions than his own—Catholics, neuroscientists, even Maoists—and seeing what they have in common beneath their designations.
    I can’t help but think this is an interesting response to an age in which some kill others in the name of Allah, some in the name of the Christian God. But just as I am thinking all this, I see the tanks that surrounded me in Ethiopia not long ago, the armed soldiers I met in Arabia who were scrambling after pennies. I remember the guerrillas who came into the room where I was sitting in El Salvador, during its civil war, the shacks I saw in Soweto where philosophical ideas seemed unlikely to bring any food to the table. I can’t say, after twenty years of covering wars and revolutions as a journalist, that any one man is likely to have all the answers (and the Dalai Lama, I know, would not say that either); it’s the questions he puts into play that invigorate.
     

     
    After a quick lunch break at the Nara Hotel, his home for the day, the Dalai Lama comes out again into the bright afternoon, for what will surely be the high point of his visit: a trip to Todaiji, in the deer park, the great temple that is often described as the largest wooden building in the world. It was from here that the Japanese monk later known as Kobo Daishi traveled to China twelve centuries before, and brought back a form of Buddhism—Shingon—that might be a rough translation of the Tibetan kind; and for more than a millennium, a great Buddha, more than fifty feet tall, has sat at the heart of the prayer hall.
    The place is always crowded with sightseers from around the globe, trying to catch the giant Buddha on their cell-phone cameras or posing for pictures within its enormous courtyard, but on this day I realize that for a Buddhist its meaning may be something deeper. Two times the great structure has burned to the ground, and two times it has come up again. The Buddha’s hands date from the sixteenth century, its head from a later period, and other parts of the body have been here ever since the first construction. In that way, it’s not so different from the Dalai Lama: the vehicle, the physical vessel, is clearly very perishable. But the message it speaks for goes on and on.
    When the Dalai Lama gets out of his car at the outermost gateway to the compound—usually closed but thrown open today—Hiroko and I follow him up the short flight of stone steps that lead to the formal entrance, and for a moment I am involuntarily silenced. Everywhere across the great expanse of the courtyard there are people. Mothers holding up their toddlers so they can catch a glimpse of the famous visitor. Tibetans from across Japan extending ceremonial white silk scarves. Foreigners in tribal hippie gear and high-heeled girls with Vuitton bags asked to postpone their visits for a