The Open Road Read Free Page B

few minutes. I come here often as a resident of Nara, but never have I seen it turned, as today, into a global throne room in the sun.
    The Dalai Lama moves along the path, stopping often to ask a question of some Westerners, to bless a baby, to chat with local kids; as someone who individually blessed seventy thousand people when he arrived in Lhasa at the age of four, he’s never felt out of place in crowds. After going into the temple and sitting quietly before the Buddha, then peppering his hosts (through a translator) with questions, he comes out again and offers a few words of thanks and greeting to the assembled, in an English as reassuringly ragged as their own.
    Then he is bustled toward the next stop on his itinerary, a meeting with the abbot of Todaiji at a subtemple around the corner, and he begins to move away, surrounded by forty or so bodyguards and secretaries and anxious hosts and hangers-on, such as Hiroko and myself. As he is heading away from the public space, suddenly, he sees something and veers off. The rest of us struggle to keep up. Alone at the far end of an empty colonnade, two Japanese women are standing above a girl of ten or so with a mop of black hair and thick glasses; her legs, in bright, striped socks, barely reach the ground from the wheelchair in which she is sitting.
    Within seconds, the Dalai Lama is by the girl’s side and leaning down to talk to her.
    “What is her problem?” he asks the women—a mother and a friend, I assume—and is told that her eyes are fine, but that the use of her legs is gone.
    For a long, long moment he looks into the little girl’s eyes. Then he leans forward and places his head against her cheek. Then, looking at her again, he says something else and tweaks her affectionately, before heading back toward his schedule.
    The mother of the girl, as he turns around, is dabbing at her cheeks with a tissue, saying, “Thank you. I’m so sorry. Thank you.” The woman beside her looks as if her face is about to crumple. The little girl is swinging her legs back and forth as if the day is just beginning.
     

     
    The Fourteenth Dalai Lama, when he is asked who he is, usually says (in exactly the same words deployed by the Thirteenth Dalai Lama) that he’s a “simple Buddhist monk.” This does not do justice to the fact that he’s the temporal leader of the Tibetans, organizing fifty exile communities around the world, dealing almost every day with the two great powers of the day, Beijing and Washington, while living in the third, India, making statements and decisions every hour, as every head of state must do. It does not really take in his practical obligations as head of one of the major schools of Buddhism, scholar and administrator and teacher, who has to deliver lectures, write books, and organize a highly complex hierarchy, now scattered around the globe. It does not even take into account the everyday person he is, worried constantly about his people, angry (he confesses to interviewers) if his time is not well used, moved to tears, he’s told me, when he hears the stories his people bring to him.
    And yet the answer is, as far as it goes, as precise as most of the other things he says. He really does live simply, decorating his bedroom when he travels with just a few pictures of his teachers and his family and a portable radio. He really is a full-time, lifelong student of the Buddha, who taught him that everything is illusory and passing, not least that being who declares that everything is illusory and passing. And he really does aspire, as every monk does, to a simplicity that lies not before complexity but on the far side of it, having not dodged experience but subsumed it. Even the name by which he goes—Tenzin Gyatso—is not his own.
    This Dalai Lama has, in only a few years, and unexpectedly, become one of the most visible figures on the planet. And yet, I sometimes think, that very visibility often gets in the way of the ideas he’s