#253: PURSUING TIBET.  In “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” Richard Dreyfuss’s character Roy, after having been terrified, considered hallucinatory, estranged from his family and pursued by the armed forces, comes to the top of a mountain, where he sees an army landing site which confirms all of what he has seen and suspected about some unidentified flying objects.  Stopped cold, he says to the woman with him (who’s had a similar experience, including having her son kidnapped by aliens), “Do you see that?”  The woman catches her breath and says, Oh, yes.”  A brief pause, and Roy says simply, “Good.”  Sometimes you just want a bit of corroboration.

        I had something of that experience (only the corroboration, mind you, not the crazy-making ordeal) on reading Pico Iyer’s book The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama (Vintage Books, 2008).  The year before this book was published, I’d had the chance to spend time in Tibet; it was just a few short months before the beginning of the Tibetan wave of self-immolations, in protest of the Chinese rule and aimed at embarrassing China as they hosted the Olympics; some of the monastic sites now more difficult to access were open then to casual visits.  This was in the high heat of world interest in the Dalai Lama, which has eased off a bit since he left political office; at the time he was a high-profile media subject.  The translation of the texts of Vajrayana Buddhism has made extraordinary progress in the last fifty years, since I first took up the interest; but even in 2007 popular perception of it was badly infected with the woo-woo, and on returning I got many variants of the question “Did you feel really mystical while you were there?”  I used to call it Shangri-lamaism.

        On the ground in Tibet, the country stops being anyone’s fantasy, and becomes simply (or complexly) itself, with the everyday taking over from the colorfully imagined.  People are not just people, they’re individuals—the nice ones, the not-nice ones—for as much as you can get to know them short-term.  You see extraordinary sculptures and thangkas and monastery stone walks smoothed by centuries of travelers; you also try not to slip on steps slippery with melted wax and butter, and occasionally clean the dung off your sneakers.  You try and figure out how to dress for a day that can be warm and a night that can freeze your parts off.

      And yet, and yet.  Pico Iyer, in his essay “On the Footbridge,” which I’ve quoted before, writes, “What exactly you believe, and how much, and why, is a question Tibet asks you more searchingly than any place I know….‘Tibet’ is the name we give to whatever we wish to believe, or can’t quite credit.”  Tibet was just a place, its people were just people, but I also felt—and still feel, more than fifteen years later--that it was a fantastical place, different from any other I’d seen, even India.  In The Open Road, Iyer captures this quality—the muck-stained mundane next to a sidereal strangeness—better than anyone else I know.  His characterization of the Dalai Lama—whose acquaintance he has had since childhood—captures all the impossible complexities of a man who is in both a political and spiritual role of enormous importance to more than an entire nation.  He asks the most challenging question possible—what good has the Dalai Lama’s efforts, and his insistence on non-violent resistance, done the Tibetan people, still under Chinese rule?—because the Dalai Lama has been fearless about asking it of himself.  It’s a portrait of a culture, a country under the rule of cruel and capricious power, and of an individual with impossibly contradictory demands placed on him.  In his marvelous Beginner’s Guide to Japan—after living in Nara, it’s plain that Iyer still finds himself a beginner—he wrote, “Being in Japan has taught me to say “I wonder” more often than “I think,” and it is just this quality that has allowed him to write so complex a book on so complex a topic, as good a book for the common and curious reader on the subject of Tibet as I’ve found.  Read this, read this, read this.