Free The Open Road by Pico Iyer Page A

and they were words that had taken me aback at first. “I am not an optimist,” he wrote. “Optimism relies on appearances, and very quickly turns into pessimism when the appearances change. I see myself as a realist.” Instead of just placing a Band-Aid on a wounded society, he was trying (as his Tibetan friend might echo) to undertake radical heart surgery. Living for sixty-two years without being able to vote in his own country had trained him in the hollowness of just wishing things might be otherwise, and when he had urged the world to boycott his country, he had essentially been saying that he and his parishioners were ready to go without everything if it could finally effect a change in a government that could transform their lives at the core.
    I looked at Ebadi, sitting firmly in her chair, and recalled how she had, at times, in protecting dissidents, uncovered lists of troublemakers to be assassinated on which her own name featured prominently; death threats were her daily bread. And I saw the Dalai Lama craning forward in his seat and picking out faces in the crowd, and recalled that he was still traveling, after almost fifty years, on the yellow identity certificate of a refugee. 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 very notion of a “spiritual celebrity” is an odd one, of course, and yet in a world where celebrity is ever more a global currency, the spiritual celebrity is the one who can actually change the coin of the realm into something more precious or sustaining. All three of the visitors were here because they refused to turn away from the clatter and commotion that is the real and daily world; and yet all three were also here because they were determined to find in that clatter the seed or outline of something more worthwhile. Their job now was to give this audience a human, living sense of contact that no audience could get from a screen (the crowd, after all, had been waiting for this day for months); and yet they had to leave behind them something that would outlast them, and maybe help people return to the clatter and commotion a little differently, in part by seeing how they could change the world by changing the way they looked at the world.
    After Tutu has sat down, the president of the university comes up to the podium and reads from a prepared statement. “There is no one in our society today,” she intones, “who represents love, compassion, and altruism as much as the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.” Then she invites him to step forward. A fairly routine formulation, I think, but what moves me is that “our”: if the Dalai Lama has some relevance to those in Vancouver, it will come only if they see him as part of their world and he sees them as part of his. Precisely, in fact, the kind of connection that was impossible when Tibet was set behind the highest mountains on earth, a fantasy place for most of us, and full of people who perhaps saw the rest of us as not quite real.
    The Tibetan steps to the front of the stage and offers a few words in English, always a handy way of at once putting his listeners at ease and reminding them, with his uncertain grammar, that he’s just one of us, no different. Then he says, “I need a walking stick for my broken English,” and summons to his side his translator for the session, a famously learned Tibetan scholar and philosopher, with doctorates from both Tibetan institutes and Cambridge, who now lives in Canada, trying to bring Tibet to the world and vice versa. “So long as space remain, so long as sentient being remain,” the Dalai Lama says in English, invoking his favorite prayer, from the eighth-century Indian philosopher Shantideva, “I will remain, to serve.”
    “I believe that,” he continues. “That is my fundamental view. This is not holistic view; this is selfish view. Because