Free The Open Road by Pico Iyer Page B

thinking about others, I feel tremendous satisfaction. Serving others, best way get one’s own deep satisfaction. In realistic way, I try to promote human values.”
    “Realism” again, I think. And complex ideas broken down into simple building blocks, as in a child’s construction kit (the Dalai Lama loved playing with Meccano sets as a boy in the Potala). In the five minutes he has, he must try to give the audience something practical and clear enough that people can both remember it and take it home.
    He speaks then, as ever, of his new favorite theme, of how Buddhism can offer something, perhaps, to “cognitive science and the study of consciousness,” and the fact that certain properties of mind and the emotions do not belong to his tradition but, tests are showing, to all mankind. We see a rope in our room and take it to be a snake, the Tibetans say, and we are terrified; but as soon as we look more clearly and see that it is just a rope, all our fears are calmed. Our terrors are of our own creation. The world itself is not so frightening, if only we can see it correctly. Then he speaks of his old friend Tutu.” I have only one difference,” he says, turning around to beam at the beaming archbishop. “Creator! But, same aim.” The audience is transparently won over by a transparent sincerity and lack of shadow: just one man obviously speaking from the heart, with no apparent wish to sell any position or philosophy, let alone himself.
    Yet what strikes me as much as the matter of the speech is its manner. The Dalai Lama begins his sentences in English, often, with “So, therefore,” as if to double-knot his propositions in a tight sequence of cause and effect. At the same time, he often ends his sentences with “That’s my view” or “That I really believe,” as if to acknowledge that this is only his thinking, not absolute truth. His sentences are crowded with careful qualifiers—“generally,” “perhaps,” “I think”—much as, in normal conversation, he always cites dates, and, on one occasion, making a small claim for Buddhism, he scrupulously offered me seven “maybe’s” in a single answer. The words he returns to over and over, I notice again, are “calm,” “sincere,” “healthy,” and “authentic,” and two of the words he also uses constantly are “heartfelt” and “unbiased,” as if, once more, to tell us that he seeks scientific objectivity, but not at the expense of the human heart.
    He also seems to be reverting often, this particular day, to the New Agey word “holistic,” which someone must have told him is the best way to capture the central Buddhist idea that everything is interconnected and nothing has an independent existence. It may be the right word for the idea, but still it sounds strange from a man who regularly writes off the New Age as lacking in rigor. “Wholeism” is really what he’s talking about.
    His translator, after twenty years of collaboration, conveys the few words of Tibetan into English very fluently, a small figure with almost crew-cut hair next to his bulky boss. As a onetime monk and professional philosopher, he knows how to keep up with the sometimes intricate and rarefied ideas behind the simple words. As he does so, the Dalai Lama, as in Nara, peers around the room, almost visibly taking notes, then looks up, with conspicuous eagerness, at the ceiling, for all the world like a small boy suddenly finding himself in a natural history museum. At one point, though, as the translator is speaking of “conversations with scientists,” the Dalai Lama breaks in quickly and I see that he has been paying attention all along. “No,” he says briskly. “Dialogues!” It is, I gather, an important term for him.
     

     
    In Tibet, and among Tibetans around the world, not least in his exile home of Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama is revered as a god, quite literally; every shop in Dharamsala has at its center a framed picture of him, and even the