Biography

Biography of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso

Tenzin Gyatso, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, is the spiritual and temporal leader of the six million Tibetan people. He was born Lhamo Dhondup on July 6, 1935, in a small village called Taktser in northeastern Tibet. Born to a peasant family, His Holiness was recognized at the age of two. In accordance with Tibetan tradition, as the reincarnation of his predecessor the 13th Dalai Lama, His Holiness is an incarnation of Avalokiteshvar, the Buddha of Compassion.

Educational Background

The Dalai Lama began his education at the age of six and completed the Geshe Lharampa Degree (Doctorate in Buddhist Philosophy) when he was 25 in 1959. (At 24, he took the preliminary examinations at each of the three monastic universities: Drepung, Sera, and Ganden, outside Lhasa, the Tibetan capital city). The final examination was conducted in the Jokhang Temple in Lhasaduring the annual Monlam Chenmo or the great Prayer festival, held in the first month of the Tibetan calendar year. In the morning, he was examined by 30 scholars on logic. In the afternoon, he debated with 15 scholars on the subject of the Middle Path, and in the evening 35 scholars tested his knowledge or the canon of monastic discipline and the study of metaphysics. His Holiness passed the examination with honors, conducted before the 20, 000 monk scholars. In addition to Buddhist subjects, he studied English, Sciences, Geography and Mathematics.

Leadership Responsibilities

In 1950, at 15, His Holiness was called upon to assume full political responsibility (head of the state and Government) when Tibet was threatened by the might ofChina. In 1954, he went to Beijing to hold peace talks with Mao Tsetung and other Chinese leaders including Chou En-Lai and Deng Xiaoping. In 1956, while visiting India to attend the 2500th birth anniversary of the Buddha, he had a series of meetings with Indian Prime Minister Nehru and Premier Chou about the deteriorating situation in Tibet.

His efforts to bring about a peaceful solution to the Sino-Tibetan problem were thwarted by Beijing’s ruthless policy in eastern Tibet, which ignited a popular uprising. This resistance movement spread to other parts of the country, and onMarch 10, 1959, the capital of Tibet, Lhasa exploded with a massive demonstration. The demonstrating Tibetans called on China to leave Tibet and reaffirmed Tibet’s independence.

His Holiness escaped to India where he was given political asylum. Some 80, 000 Tibetan refugees at the time managed to follow His Holiness into exile. Today there are more than 120, 000 Tibetan refugees in India, Nepal, Bhutan, and in the West. Since 1960, His Holiness has resided in Dharamsala, a small town in Northern India, aptly known as “Little Lhasa,” the seat of the Tibetan Government-in-exile.

In the early years of exile, His Holiness appealed to the United Nations on the question of Tibet, resulting in three resolutions adopted by the General Assembly in 1959, 1961, and 1965, calling on China to respect the human rights of Tibetans and their right to self-determination.

With the re-establishment of the Tibetan Government in India, His Holiness saw that his immediate and urgent task was to preserve Tibetan culture. He founded 53 large-scale agricultural settlements for the refugees to live on. As an economic base developed, he oversaw the creation of an autonomous Tibetan school system (there are over 80 Tibetan schools in India and Nepal today) to raise refugee children with full knowledge of their language, history, religion and culture. The Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts was established in 1959 while the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies became a university for Tibetans in India. He inaugurated several cultural institutes to preserve Tibet’s arts and sciences and helped re-establish more than 200 monasteries to keep alive the vast corpus of Buddhist teachings, the essence of the Tibetan spirit.

In 1963, His Holiness promulgated a democratic constitution, based on Buddhist principles and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as a model for a future free Tibet. Since then, His Holiness has been the most rigorous advocate for the refugees’ own democratic experiment, while consistently reaffirming his desire not to hold political office once Tibet regains its independence. His Holiness continues to present new initiatives to resolve the Tibetan issue. At the Human Rights Caucus of the US Cong ress in 1987, he proposed a Five Point Peace Plan as a first step toward resolving the future status of Tibet. This plan calls for the designation of Tibet as a zone of non-violence, and end to the massive transfer of Chinese into Tibet, restoration of fundamental human rights and democratic freed oms, and the abandonment of China’s use of Tibet for nuclear weapons production and the dumping of nuclear waste, as well as urging “earnest negotiations” on the future of Tibet.

In Strasbourg, France on June 15, 1988, he elaborated on this Five Point Peace Plan and proposed the creation of a self-governing democratic Tibet “in association with the People’s Republic of China.” In his address, the Dalai Lama said that this represented “the most realistic means by which to re-establishTibet’s separate identity and restore the fundamental rights of the Tibetan people while accommodating China’s own interests.” His Holiness emphasized that “whatever the outcome of the negotiations with the Chinese may be, the Tibetan people themselves must be the ultimate deciding authority.”

However, on September 2, 1991 (Tibetan Democracy Day), the Tibetan Government-in-exile released a statement declaring the Strasbourg Proposal no longer binding and added: “His Holiness the Dalai Lama made it very clear in his statement on 10th March this year that because of the closed and negative attitude of the present Chinese leadership he felt that his personal commitment to the ideas expressed in the Strasbourg proposal became ineffectual, and that if there was no new initiatives from the Chinese he would consider himself free of any obligation to the proposals he had made in his Strasbourg address. He, however, remains firmly committed to the path of non-violence and in finding a solution to the Tibetan issue through negotiations and understanding. Under these circumstances His Holiness the Dalai Lama no longer feels obligated or bound to pursue the Strasbourg Proposal as a basis for finding a peaceful solution to the Tibetan problem.”

Since 1967, His Holiness has initiated a series of journeys that have taken him to some 42 nations. In February, 1990, His Holiness was invited toCzechoslovakia by President Vaclav Havel. President Havel and His Holiness issued a joint statement urging “all politicians to rid themselves of the restrictions of particular private or group interests and to lead their minds by their conscience and their feeling and responsibility for truth and justice.” In 1991, His Holiness met President George Bush of the United States, Neil Kinnock, the British Opposition Leader, the Swiss and French Foreign Ministers, the Chancellor and President of Austria, as well as other senior foreign government officials. In meetings with political, religious, cultural and business leaders, as well as before large audiences at universities, churches and town halls, he has spoken of his belief in the oneness of the human family and the need for each individual to develop a sense of universal responsibility.

His Holiness said, “We are living today in an interdependent world. One nation’s problems can no longer be solved by itself. Without a sense of universal responsibility, our very survival is in danger. Basically, universal responsibility is feeling for other people’s suffering just as we feel our own. I have always believed in the need for better understanding, closer cooperation and greater respect among the various nations of the world. Besides, I feel that love and compassion are the moral fabric of world peace.”

His Holiness met with the late Pope Paul VI at the Vatican in 1973, and with His Holiness Pope John Paul II in 1980, 1982, 1986, 1988 and 1990. At a press conference in Rome, His Holiness the Dalai Lama outlined his hopes for the meeting with John Paul II: “We live in a period of great crisis. It is not possible to find peace without security and harmony between peoples. For this reason, I look forward with faith and hope to my meeting with the Holy Father; to an exchange of ideas and feelings, and to his suggestions, so as to open the door to a progressive harmony between peoples.”

In 1981, His Holiness talked with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Robert Runcie, and with other leaders of the Anglican Church in London. He also met with leaders of the Roman Catholic and Jewish communities and spoke at an interfaith service held in his honor by the World Congress of Faiths. In October 1989, during a dialogue with eight rabbis and scholars from the United States inDharamsala, India, His Holiness remarked: “When we became refugees, we knew that our struggle would not be easy; it would take a long time, generations. Very often we would refer to the Jewish people, how they kept their identity and faith despite such hardship and so much suffering. And, when external conditions were ripe they were ready to rebuild their nation. So you see, there are many things to learn from our Jewish brothers and sisters.”

His talks in other forums focused on the commonality of faiths and the need for unity among different religions: “I always believe that it is much better to have a variety of religions, a variety of philosophies, rather than one single religion of philosophy. This is necessary because of the different mental dispositions of each human being. Each religion has certain unique ideas to techniques, and learning about them can only enrich one’s own faith.”

Recognition and Awards

Since his first visit to the west in 1973, His Holiness’s reputation as a scholar and man of peace has grown steadily. In recent years, a number of universities and institutions in the world have conferred Peace Awards, honorary Doctorates and fellowships on His Holiness in recognition of distinguished writings in Buddhist philosophy and of his distinguished leadership in the service of freedom, peace and nonviolence. One such Doctorate was conferred by Seattle University,Washington, USA.

The following extract from the University’s citation reflects a widely held view of His Holiness’ stature: “In the realm of mind and spirit, you have distinguished yourself in the rigorous academic tradition of Buddhist universities, earning the Doctor’s degree with the highest honors at the age of 25. In the midst of governmental and diplomatic affairs you nonetheless found time to teach and record in writing your keen insights in philosophy and the meaning of the contemplative life in the modern world. “Your books represent a significant contribution not only to the vast body of Buddhist literature, but to the ecumenical dialogue of the great religions of the world. Your own dedication to the contemplative life of the Buddhist monk has won the admiration and awe not only of the Buddhist, but of Christian contemplatives as well, including the contemplative monk Thomas Merton, whose friendship and conversation with you were mutually cherished.”

In presenting the Raoul Wallenberg Congressional Human Rights Award, Congressman Tom Lantos said, “His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s courageous struggle has distinguished him as a leading proponent of human rights and world peace. His ongoing efforts to end the suffering of the Tibetan people through peaceful negotiations and reconciliation have required enormous courage and sacrifice.”

The Nobel Peace Prize

The Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decision to award the 1989 Peace Prize to His Holiness the Dalai Lama won world wide praise and applause. In its citation, “the committee wants to emphasize the fact that the Dalai Lama in his struggle for the liberation of Tibet has consistently opposed the use of violence. He has instead advocated peaceful solutions based upon tolerance and mutual respect in order to preserve the historical and cultural heritage of his people. The Dalai Lama has developed his philosophy of peace from a great reverence for all things living and upon the concept of universal responsibility embracing all mankind as well as nature. In the opinion of the Committee the Dalai Lama has come forward with constructive and forward-looking proposals for the solution of international conflicts, human rights issues and global environmental problems.”

On December 10, 1989, in Oslo, Norway, His Holiness accepted the prize on behalf of the oppressed everywhere and all those who struggle for freedom and work for world peace and the people of Tibet. In his remarks, he said, “The prize reaffirms our conviction that with truth, courage and determination as our weapons, Tibet will be liberated. Our struggle must remain nonviolent and free of hatred.”

He also had a message of encouragement for the democracy movement in China. “In China the popular movement for democracy was crushed by brutal force in June of this year. But I do not believe the demonstrations were in vain, because the spirit of freedom was rekindled among the Chinese people and China cannot escape the impact of this spirit of freedom sweeping in many parts of the world. The brave students and their supporters showed the Chinese leadership and the world the human face of that great nation.”

His Holiness often says, “I am just a simple Buddhist monk—no more, no less.” His Holiness follows the life of a Buddhist monk. Living in a small cottage in Dharamsala, he rises at 4 A.M. to meditate and pursues a busy schedule of administrative meetings, private audiences and religious teachings and ceremonies. He concludes each day with further prayer before retiring. In explaining his greatest sources of inspiration, he often cites a favorite verse, found in the writings of the renowned eight century Buddhist saint Shantideva:

“For as long as space endures
And for as long as living beings remain,
Until then may I too abide
To dispel the misery of the world.”

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Making Kindness Stand to Reason

A profile of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama by Pico Iyer (from Sun After Dark: Flights Into the Foreign, published by Knopf in 2004)

Although the Dalai Lama is increasingly famous as a speaker, his real gift, you see as soon as you begin talking to him, is for listening. And though he is most celebrated around the world these days for his ability to talk to halls large enough to stage a Bon Jovi concert, his special strength is to address 20,000 people—Buddhists and grandmothers and kids alike—as if he were talking to each one alone, in the language she can best understand. The Dalai Lama’s maxims are collected and packaged now as books to carry in your handbag, as calendar items and advertising slogans, but the heart of the man exists, I think, in silence. In his deepest self he is that being who sits alone each day at dawn, eyes closed, reciting prayers, with all his heart, for his Chinese oppressors, his Tibetan people, and all sentient beings.

Yet the curiosity of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama’s life—one of the things that have made it seem at once a parable and a kind of koan—is that he has had to pursue his spiritual destiny, for more than half a century, almost entirely in the world (and, in fact, in a political world whose god is Machiavelli). His story is an all but timeless riddle about the relation of means to ends: in order to protect six million people, and to preserve a rare and long-protected culture that is only years away from extinction, he has had to pose for endless photos with models and let his speeches be broadcast on the floors of London dance clubs. To some extent, he has had to enter right into the confusion and chaos of the Celebrity Age in order to fulfill his monastic duties. The question that he carries with him everywhere he goes is the simple one of whether the world will scar him before he elevates it: in three centuries, after all, no Ocean of Wisdom, Holder of the White Lotus, and protector of the Land of Snows before him has ever served as guest editor of French Vogue.

I went to visit the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala not long ago, as I have done at regular intervals since my teens. I took the rickety Indian Airlines flight fromDelhi to Amritsar, and from there took a five-hour taxi ride upto the foothills of the Himalaya. As I approached the distant settlement on a ridge above a little town—the roads so jam-packed with scooters and bicycles and cows that often we could hardly move (the Dalai Lama has, for security reasons, to drive for ten hours along such roads every time he wishes to take a flight)—Dharamsala came into view, and then disappeared, like a promise of liberation, or some place that didn’t really exists. Most of the time—the car collapsing on a mountain road, a group of villagers assembling to push it hopefully forward, night falling, and each turn seeming to take us farther from the string of lights far off—I felt sure we’d never get there.

As soon as you arrive at the dusty, bedraggled place, however, you realize you are very far from fairy tale, in the realm of suffering and old age and death. Windows are broken and paths half paved in the rainy little village where the Dalai Lama has made his home for more than half his life now; even the happy cries and songs of the orphans at the Tibetan children’s Village on one side of town have a slightly wistful air, as the sun sets behind the nearby mountains. When you call the Dalai Lama’s office, you will hear that “All circuits are busy” or that the five-digit number changed yesterday. Sometimes my call got cut off in mid-sentence, amidst a blur of static; sometimes I got put on hold—for all eternity, it seemed—to the tune of “London Bridge Is Falling Down.”

The Dalai Lama has a singular gift for seeing the good in everything and seeming unfazed by all the madness that swirls around him; he is always thoroughly human and always thoroughly himself. Sometimes, as you wait to see him, his exuberant new friend, a very puppyish German shepherd, runs into the room and starts jumping over a group of startled Tibetan monks here for a serious discussion, licking the faces of the Buddhist teachers before romping off into the garden again. Sometimes, a pair of English hippies is in attendance, since the Dalai Lama is ready to take advice and instruction from anyone (and knows—such is the poignancy of his life—that even the most disorganized traveler may know, firsthand, more about contemporary Tibet, and the state of his people, than he does). When a photographer asks him to take off his glasses, pose with this expression, sit this way or sit that way, he seizes the chance to ask the young man about what he saw when he photographed uprisings in Lhasa many years before.

As I sit across from him in his room with its large windows, looking out on pine-covered slopes and the valley below–thangkas all around us on the walls—the Dalai Lama makes himself comfortable, cross-legged in his armchair, and serves me tea. He always notices when my cup is empty before I do. He rocks back and forth as he speaks, the habit acquired, one realizes, over decades of punishing hours—long meditation sessions, often in the cold. And part of his disarming power (the result, no doubt, of all that meditation and the dialectics of which he is a master) is that he launches stronger criticisms against himself than even his fiercest enemies might.

When he first met Shoko Asahara, he tells me one day (referring to the man who later planned the planting of deadly sarin gas in the Tokyo subway system), he was genuinely moved by the man’s seeming devotion to the Buddha: tears would come into the Japanese teacher’s eyes when he spoke of Buddha. But to endorse Asahara, as he did, was, the Dalai Lama quickly says, “a mistake. Due to ignorance! So, this proves”—and breaks into his full-throated laugh–”I am not a `Living Buddha’!” Another day, talking about the problems of present-dayTibet, he refers to the fact that there are “too many prostrations there,” and then, erupting into gales of infectious laughter again, he realizes that he should have said “too much prostitution” (though, in fact, as he knows, “too many prostrations” may actually constitute a deeper problem). He would love to delegate some responsibility to his deputies, he says frankly, “but, even if some of my cabinet ministers wanted to give public talks, nobody would come.”

The result is that it all comes down to him. The Dalai Lama is rightly famous for his unstoppable warmth, his optimism, and his forbearance—”the happiest man in the world,” as one journalist-friend calls him—and yet his life has seen more difficulty and sadness than that of anyone I know. He is representing the interests of six million largely unworldly and disenfranchised people against a nation of 1.2 billion whom nearly all the world is trying to court. He is the guest of a huge nation with problems of its own, which would be very grateful if he just kept quiet. He travels the world constantly (on a yellow refugee’s “identity certificate”), and, though regarded by most as a leader equivalent to Mother Teresa or the Pope, is formally ostracized as Muammar Qaddafi or Kim Jong Il. He is excited when meeting Britain’s Queen Mother—because he remembers, from his boyhood days, seeing news clips of her tending to the poor of London during the Blitz—but the world is more excited when he meets Sharon Stone.

And so a serious spiritual leader is treated as a pop star, and a doctor of metaphysics is sought out by everyone, from every culture, who has a problem in his life. As a monk, he seems more than happy to offer what he can, as much as he can, but none of it helps him towards the liberation of his people. I ask him one day about how Tibet is likely to be compromised by its complicity with the mass media, and he looks back at me shrewdly, and with a penetrating gaze. “If there are people who use Tibetans or the Tibetan situation for their own purposes,” he says, “or if they associate with some publicity for their own benefit, there is little we can do. But the important thing is for us not to be involved in this publicity, or associate with these people for our own interests.”

The razor-sharp reasoning is typical, even if it does not quite address the conundrum in which he finds himself. For precisely in order to satisfy his inner and outer mandate, the Dalai Lama is obliged to traffic in the world incessantly. He has to listen to a reporter asking him how he would like to be remembered—which is, in the Buddhist context is akin to asking the Pope what he thinks of Jennifer Lopez. (“I really lost my temper,” he tells me, of the question, “though I did not show it.”) He has to answer for every scandal that touches any of the many, often highly suspect Tibetans and Tibetan groups around the world. And he has to endure and address every controversy that arises when his image is used by the Apple Computer, or when younger Tibetans deride him as an out-of-it peacenik who has done nothing to help Tibet for 40 years.

As we spoke day after day in the radiant fall afternoons, young monks practicing ritual debating outside his front door, the snowcaps shinning in the distance, and the hopes of Tibet poignantly, palpably in the air around the ragged town of exiles, the time the Dalai Lama most lit up, in some respects, was when he spoke of some Catholic monks he had run into in France who live in complete isolation for years on end and “remain almost like prisoners” as they meditate. “Wonderful!” he pronounced, leaving it to his visitor to deduce that, left to his own devises, that’s how he would like to be.

At this point, after two Dalai Lama autobiographies and two major Hollywood films telling the story of his life, the other-worldly contours of the Dalai Lama’s life are well known: his birth in a cowshed in rural Tibet, in what was locally known as the Wood Hog Year (1935); his discovery by a search party of monks, who had been led to him by a vision in a sacred lake; the tests administered to a two-year-old who, mysteriously, greeted the monks from far-off Lhasa as their leader, and in their distant dialect. Yet what the mixture or folktale and Shakespearean drama does not always catch is that the single dominant theme of his life, a Buddhist might say, is loss.

To someone who reads the world in terms of temporal glory, it is a stirring story of a four-year-old peasant boy ascending the Lion Throne to rule one of the most exotic treasures on earth. To someone who really lives the philosophy for which the Dalai Lama stands, it could play out in a different key. At two, he lost the peace of his quiet life in a wood-and-stone house where he slept in the kitchen. At four he lost his home, and his freedom to be a regular person, when he was pronounced head of state. Soon thereafter, he lost something of his family, too, and most of his ties with the world at large, as he embarked on a formidable 16-year course of monastic studies, and was forced, at the age of six, to choose a regent.

The Dalai Lama has written with typical warmth about his otherworldly boyhood in the cold, 1,000-roomed Potala Palace, where he played games with the palace sweepers, rigged up a hand-cranked projector on which he could watch Tarzan movies and Henry V, and clobbered his only real playmate—his immediate elder brother Lobsang Samten—in the knowledge that no one would be quick to punish a boy regarded as an incarnation of the god of compassion (and a king to boot). Yet the overwhelming feature of his childhood was his loneliness. Often, he recalls, he would go out onto the rooftop of his palace and watch the other little boys of Lhasa playing in the street. Every time his brother left, he recalls standing “at the window, watching, my heart full of sorrow as he disappeared into the distance.”

The Dalai Lama has never pretended that he does not have a human side, and though it is that side that exults in everything that comes his way, it is also that side that cannot fail to grieve at times. When the Chinese, newly united by Mao Zedong, attacked Tibet’s eastern frontiers in 1950, the 15-year-old boy was forced hurriedly to take over the temporal as well as the spiritual leadership of his country, and so lost his boyhood (if not his innocence), and his last vestiges of freedom. In his teens he was traveling to Beijing, overriding the wishes of his fearful people, to negotiate with Mao and Zhou En-lai, and not long thereafter he became only the second Dalai Lama to leave Tibet, when it seemed his life might be in peril.

At 24, a few days after he completed his doctoral studies, and shone in an oral in front of thousands of appraising monks, he lost his home for good: the “Wish-Fulfilling Gem,” as he is known to Tibetans, had to dress up as a soldier and flee across the highest mountains on earth, dodging Chinese planes, and seated on a hybrid yak. The drama of that loss lives inside him still. I asked him one sunny afternoon about the saddest moment in his life, and he told me that he was moved to tears usually when he talked of Buddha, or thought of compassion—or heard, as he sometimes does every day, the stories and appeals of the terrified refugees who have stolen out of Tibet to come and see him.

Generally, he said, in his firm, prudent way, “sadness”, I think, is comparatively manageable.” But before he said any of that, he looked into the distance and recalled: “I left the Norbulingkha Palace that late night, and some of my close friends and one dog I left behind. Then, just when I was crossing the border into India, I remember my final farewell, mainly to my bodyguards. They were deliberately facing the Chinese, and when they made farewell with me, they were determined to return. So that means”—his eyes were close to misting over—”they were facing death, or something like that.” In the 39 years since then, he has never seen the land he was born to rule.

I, too, remember that drama: the fairy-tale flight of the boy-king from the Forbidden Kingdom was the first world event that made an impression on me when I was growing up; a little later, when my father went to India to greet the newly arrived Tibetan, he came back with a picture of the monk as a little boy, which the Dalai Lama gave him when he talked of his three-year-old in Oxford. Since then, like many of us, I have run into the Tibetan leader everywhere I go—at Harvard, in New York, in the hills of Malibu, in Japan,—and have had the even stranger experience of seeing him somehow infiltrate the most unlikely worlds: my graduate-school professor of Virginia Woolf suddenly came into my life as editor of a book of the Dalai Lama’s talks about the Gospels; at the Olympics, a longtime friend and sportswriter for the New York Times started reminiscing about how he covered the Dalai Lama on the Tibetan’s first US tour, in 1979, and found him great because he was so humble. “It sounds like he considers you first part of the family,” a friend once said, when I told her that the Dalai Lama and his equally mischievous younger brother call me “Pinocchio.” But really, his gift is for regarding all of the world as part of his family.

At the same time, the world itself has not always been very interested in the details of his faraway country, or of a tradition that seems to belong to another world. When Tibet appealed for help against China to the newly formed United Nations, it was Britain and India, its two ostensible sponsors, who argued against even hearing the motion. And as recently as the 1980s, I remember, the Dalai Lama’s press conferences in New York were almost deserted; when once I organized a lunch for him with a group of editors, one of them phoned a couple of days before to call it off, because no one really wanted to come into the office on a Monday just to chat with a Tibetan monk. When first I visited him in Dharamsala, in 1974, I really did feel as if I were looking in on one of the deposed emperors of China or Vietnam, sitting in a far-off exile. As we sat drinking tea in his modest, colorful cottage, clouds passed through the room from the rains outside—all we could see through the large windows was mist and grey—and it seemed as if we were truly sitting in the heavens, at least a mile above anything that felt real.

Yet one of the paradoxes of the Dalai Lama’s life—a paradox to answer the koan that has been his fulfillment of a spiritual duty in the world—is that it was, it seems, his monastic training that allowed him to be so focused and charismatic a presence in the world. In his early years in India, the Dalai Lama used the world’s neglect of him to organize his exiled community and to write his country’s constitution (in part to allow for his own impeachment). Even exile could be a liberation, he was saying (and showing his compatriots): it freed him from the age-old protocol that so shackled him in Tibet and it brought forever feuding groups of Tibet together in a common cause. Most of all, he used his free time to go on long meditation retreats, enjoying solitude that could never have been his in Tibet (or can be, now, in Dharamsala).

Robert Thurman, the professor of Tibetan studies at Columbia (and father of actress Uma), remembers first meeting the Dalai Lama in 1964, when he, full of spiritual ambitions, cross-questioned the young Tibetan about Shunyata, or voidness, while the Dalai Lama questioned him, no less eagerly, about Freud and the American bicameral system. “It was fun,” Thurman says, using the word people often use of the Dalai Lama. “We were young together.” At the same time, the answers that the monk only in his 20s then gave to complex theological questions were less good, Thurman feels, than those offered by more senior monks.

When the Tibetan leader emerged from his retreats, though, and came out into the world—Thurman saw him on his first US tour, in 1979—”I almost keeled over. His personal warmth and magnetism were so strong. In the past, of course, he had the ritual charisma of being the Dalai Lama, and he has always been charming and interesting and very witty. But now he had opened up some inner wellspring of energy and attention and intelligence. He was glorious.”

And yet that air of responsibility—the word he always stresses in the same breath as “compassion”—has never left him. I remember going to see him the day after he won the Nobel prize, when he happened to be staying (as is so typical of his life) in a suburban ranch house in Newport Beach. What struck me at the time was that, as soon as he saw me, he whisked me (as he would no doubt have whisked any visitor) into a little room, and spent his first few minutes looking for a chair in which I would be comfortable—as if I were the new Nobel laureate and he the intrusive journalist.

But what I also remember from that moment was that, even as the world was feting him—congratulatory telegrams and faxes pouring in the rec room downstairs—he could not let himself off the hook. “Sometimes,” he confessed, “I wonder whether my efforts really have an effect. I sometimes feel that unless there is a bigger movement, the bigger issues will not change. But how to start this bigger movement? Originally, it must come from individual initiative.”

The only way, he concluded, was through “constant effort, tireless effort, pursuing clear goals with sincere effort.” Every time he left a room, he said, he tried to switch off the light. “In a way, it is silly. But if another person follows my example, then a hundred persons, there is an effect. It is the only way. The bigger nations and more powerful leaders are not taking care. So we poor human beings must make the effort.”

Meeting him now, I find him a lot more businesslike than he was in those days (and, of course, much more fluent in English); when TV crews come to interview him, he knows how to advise them on there to set up their cameras (and when we begin talking, he is quick to point out that my tape recorder is moving suspiciously fast). He is not less jolly than before, perhaps, but he does seem more determined to speak from the serious side of himself, as the years go on, and Tibet draws ever closer to oblivion. Where he used to greet me with an Indian namaste, how he does so with a handshake, through the Dalai Lama does not so much shake your hand as rub it within his own, as if to impart to it some of his warmth.

As we talk, though—every afternoon at two, for day after day—he takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes; his aides say that in recent years, for the first time ever, they have seen him exhausted, his head slumped back in his chair (this the man usually seen leaning into the conversation, as if to bring to it all his attention and beady-eyed vigor). He does not have much time for spiritual practice now, he tells me—only four hours a day (his duties increasing as he becomes a more senior monk). He still likes to do “some repair work, for watches and small instruments,” and he still loves tending to his flowers. One of the longest and most animated answers he gives comes when I ask after his “four small cats”. But these days the only real break he can take comes in listening to the BBC World Service, to which he cheerfully confesses himself addicted.

This is the tendency of an engaging, still-boyish character alight with curiosity; but it is also the confession of a man whose duties are almost entirely tied up with the dealings of the world, on a minute-by-minute level. One thing the Dalai Lama is not is otherworldly. He can explain in precise detail why the Tibetan cause is weaker than that of the Palestinians, or how globalism is, at its best, advancing a kind of Buddhism in mufti. His references nearly always come from the day’s most recent news, and he watches everything—from the fall of the Berlin wall to the tragedy of Rwanda—both to see how it illuminates some metaphysical theory and to see what other kind of teaching it can impart. Exile has allowed him, he will tell you, to become a student of the world in a way no earlier Dalai Lama could, and to see a planet that previously he, and the Dalai Lamas before him, could glimpse only through the parted curtains of a palanquin. The best aspect of his traveling is that he can schedule meetings with scientists and psychologists and Hopi leaders, all of whom, he believes, can help him refine his understanding of his own tradition. Buddhists can and should learn Catholics, from physicists, even from Communists, he is quick to tell his startled followers—and if the words of the Buddha (let alone of the Dalai Lama) are not borne out by evidence, they must be discarded instantly.

This is one reason why he seems much more interested in asking questions than in giving answers, and much more comfortable as a student (which he has been, in the context of Tibetan Buddhism, most of his life) than a teacher. It is also why I would say his sovereign quality is alertness: watch the Dalai Lama enter a crowded auditorium, or sit through a long monastic ceremony that has many others nodding off, and you will notice him looking around keenly for what he can pick up: a friend to whom he can unselfconsciously wave, some little detail that will bring a smile to his face. Alertness is the place where the slightly impish boy and the rigorously trained monk converge, and though the world at large most responds to his heart—the pleasure afforded by his beam and air of kindness and good nature—the specific core of him comes no less from his mind, and the analytical faculties honed in one of the world’s most sophisticated metaphysical technologies. It is not unusual, I have come to see by now, for the Dalai Lama to remember a sentence he has delivered to you seven years before, or to complete an answer he began 90 minutes ago, while lacing up his sturdy mountain boots. Sometimes, in large gatherings, he will pick out a face he saw in Lhasa 40 years before. Once, as we were talking, he suddenly remembered something an Englishmen had said to him 20 years before—about the value of sometimes saying “I don’t know”—and asked me, searchingly, what I thought of it.

Again, the irony here is that the mindfulness he has cultivated in meditation—on retreats, and at the hands of pitilessly strict teachers—is what has helped him in his travels; spiritual training—this is one of the lessons of life and his example—has constant practical application in the world. Much of the time he is speaking to people who know nothing about Buddhism—who may even be hostile to it—and he has mastered the art of speaking simply, and ecumenically, from the heart, stressing, as he does, “spirituality without faith—simply being a good human being, a warm-hearted person, a person with a sense of responsibility.” Talking to his monks, he delivers philosophical lectures that few of the rest of us could begin to follow; speaking to the world, he realizes that the most important thing is not to run before you can walk. The title of a typical book of his mentions not “enlightening” the heart but, simply, “lightening” it.

In a sense, he has turned his predicament to advantage in part by learning about Western religions, and meditation practices in other traditions, as earlier Dalai Lamas could seldom do. And he has also had to deal with a worldwide stampede toward a Buddhism for which the world may not be ready (to such a point that, more and more as the years go on, he tells Westerners not to become Buddhists, but just to stick to their own traditions, where there is less danger of mixed motives, and certainly less likelihood of confusion). Listening to him speak everywhere from Sao Paulo to Chicago, Philip Glass says, “The word `Buddha’ never came up. He talks about compassion, he talks about right living. And it is very powerful and persuasive to people because it is clear he is not there to convert them.”

Pragmatism, in short, trumps dogmatism. And logic defers to nothing. “Out of 5.7 billion people,” he tells me one day, his eyes glittering with the delight of a student immersed in one of Tibet’s ritual debates, “the majority of them are certainly not believers. We cannot argue with them, tell them they should be believers. No! Impossible! And, realistically speaking, if the majority of humanity remains nonbelievers, it does not matter. No problem! The problem is that the majority have lost, or ignore, the deeper human values—compassion, a sense of responsibility. That is our big concern. For whenever there is a society or community without deeper human values, then even one single human family cannot be a happy family.”

Then—and it is not hard to see the still-eager student playing his winning card—he goes on: “Even animals, from a Buddhist viewpoint, also have a potential of showing affection towards their own children, or their own babies—and also towards us. Dogs, cats, if we treat them nicely, openly, trustingly, they also respond. But without religion, they have no faith!” Therefore, he says triumphantly, kindness is more fundamental than belief.

Yet the deepest loss of all in the Dalai Lama’s often-bright and blessing-filled life is that all the friends he’s made worldwide, all the presidents and prime ministers he’s won over, all the analytical reasoning with which he argues for compassion and responsibility have not really helped him at all in what is the main endeavor of his life: helping the people of Tibet and sustaining a Tibetan identity among a scattered population, six million of whom have not seen their leader for two generations and the other 140,000 of whom have not, in many cases, seen their homeland.  Many of those who witness him flying across five continents in a year (in business class) and delivering lectures to sold-out halls don’t know that he’s working with a staff drawn from a population smaller than that of Warren, Michigan, and with a circle of advisors who’d never seen the world, or known much about it, before they were propelled into a premature exile.