Dalai Lama: Man, Monk, Mystic
Tibet is sometimes referred to as “the roof of the world.” Squeezed between India and China, this plateau has been rising for millions of years as the Indian plate has pushed up against the Eurasian plate. Inch by inch, Tibet rises imperceptibly out of sight and perhaps out of mind.
While Mayank Chhaya’s workmanlike authorized biography of the Dalai Lama can do nothing to slow Tibet’s tectonic rise, it does make visible the central role that one monk has played in the up-and-down Tibetan struggle for autonomy from China. Exiled in 1959 from his homeland, the Dalai Lama has sought a nonviolent return to Tibet. But as his role model Mahatma Gandhi demonstrated in the first half of the 20th century, nonviolent resistance requires great patience. Concurrent with his wait-full and mind-full resistance, the Dalai Lama has had to keep the Tibetan way of life alive in McLeod Ganj, Dharamshala, India, his adopted home away from home: “We also had to preserve centuries of our spiritual knowledge and Tibetan Buddhist teachings. I knew that the Chinese were bent upon erasing our culture and heritage forever. I had to find a way to preserve it in India.”
Chhaya successfully interweaves many such quotes from the Dalai Lama to keep the narrative moving and make his subject’s humanity accessible. As suggested in the book’s subtitle, the Dalai Lama is a man, monk, and mystic. Because of the Tibetan struggle, he has had to be a man very much in the world of politics and governance. With Chhaya focusing primarily on Dalai Lama the man, this 30-chapter book only provides a peripheral glance at the mystic and the monk: there are a couple of introductory chapters on the mystical way in which 4-year-old Lhamo Thondup became the reincarnation of the Buddha; and there is also an intriguing chapter which illuminates the celibate monk’s views on human sexuality. But for the most part, this book serves as an insightful primer on the realpolitik of an oppressed people, their oppressors, and the indifferent observers who stand on the sidelines.
With China’s powerful ascension, Tibet is of little economic or strategic importance to the United States and other Western nations or India and other Asian countries. It appears that morality in foreign policy has taken a back seat to profitability in a growth market of more than one billion Chinese. As Chhaya suggests, “Short of divine intervention or a catastrophe of staggering proportions China is unlikely to give up Tibet.”
This does pose a dilemma. A common man might passively throw up his hands in exasperation or perhaps take up arms in an insurgent battle; and a person given to mysticism might hope for supernatural powers to angrily substitute for the superpower nations’ amoral silence. These potential responses to oppression are tinged with a muted hopelessness for the Tibetan people—be they (wo)men, monks, or mystics. In the end, as they look wistfully and wishfully to their lost home at the top of the world, refugees like the Dalai Lama may find succor in the Buddhist aphorism that “one is one’s own refuge.”
| After a long run in the corporate world, Rajesh C. Oza now balances his life between family and friends, organizational alignment and consulting, reading and writing, India and America. He has published fiction and nonfiction and is presently writing a memoir about his childhood in India, Canada, and the United States. Raj can be reached at raj_oza@hotmail.com |