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closeBestselling author and world traveler Pico Iyer talks about his book, "The Open Road," and about his 30-year, ongoing discussion with the 14th Dali Lama and the plight of modern-day Tibet.
QUESTION: The title of your book has so many implications and interpretations, for both you and the Dalai Lama — the idea of the Buddhist path, the hope of freedom, the Dalai Lama's openness to other ideas (spiritual and political and geographic), and the idea of some soul forever wandering in search of a home. Why did you choose it, and what does it implies for you and for the Dalai Lama?
ANSWER: It was important to me to use a title that drew on Western writers, to show that the ideas I was trying to share in my book were not exotic, faraway, foreign — the province of Tibet or Buddhism alone — but were human and universal. So I was happy to invoke a phrase that came from a British novelist (D.H. Lawrence) writing on an American poet (Walt Whitman).
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MEET THE AUTHOR
Pico Iyer
"The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Dalai Lama"
7 p.m. Wednesday
Village Books
1200 11th St.
671-2626
I wanted to catch the Buddhist idea of a "path," a constant becoming, the sense of a road that will perhaps never end. I needed to catch, of course, the sense of a journey, the constant evolution the Buddha speaks for and the Dalai Lama embodies. and I liked the fact that the phrase in Whitman refers to democracy, so central an idea for Buddhism and the Dalai Lama — just soul meeting soul along the path.
Finally, for people who have read me before, I wanted to take them back to the third chapter of my first book, "Video Night in Kathmandu," in which I invoked the idea of the open road, Lawrence and Whitman, while describing the global community of foreigners gathered in Tibet itself.
Q: Much of the news in recent days has been on the various factions protesting the Olympics taking place in China this August. I would like to know more about the Dalai Lama's "middle way" and his advocacy of nonviolence and more details about his thoughts and feelings about the Olympics/protests/boycotts.
A: The Dalai Lama knows that violent confrontation of the Chinese will only bring more violence upon Tibetans who have suffered too much already. As one who has been dealing with China's leadership since the early days of Mao Zedong's leadership 58 years ago, he knows how China's leadership works better than any other Tibetan. And, always practical and realistic, he knows that 6 million Tibetans cannot sway 1.2 billion Chinese through force or gestures alone. Since China and Tibet are neighbors, it's important for Tibet to advance its rightful claims and its need for genuine freedom without demonizing or antagonizing a China that will always be part of Tibetan destinies.
Q: Lately there seems to be some attempts from the Chinese government to talk (if not reconcile) about the situation in Tibet. Why is that encouraging to the Dalai Lama, and why does he see that as important? I would hope you could address some of the issues of the repression (lack of freedom of speech, of religion) that is felt both by the Chinese and by those in exile.
A: The only hope is dialogue, and as Presidents Clinton and Bush have both urged the Chinese, simply opening the door to the Dalai Lama and talking to him should not be so fearful — and could be very helpful. The Tibetan situation may not be resolved easily or soon, but it can be resolved only by Tibetans and Chinese working together, not least because the majority of residents in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa are Chinese. As you wonderfully suggest, Chinese people are suffering under the same unblinking government as Tibetans, and the Dalai Lama knows that their needs, as humans, have to be attended to as well a Tibetan needs.
That's why he calls for autonomy, not full independence. Tibet, as a poor and materially backward nation, needs economically to be part of the People's Republic, he said again, repeatedly, when I traveled across Japan with him five months ago. But Tibet's basic needs for freedom of thought and speech must be heeded and taken care of. Tolerance, as he always says, does not mean accepting what is wrong.
Q: What are some parallels between your life as a wanderer and the Dalai Lama's exile, with some of his people never really knowing or having visited their homeland?
A: One of the exciting things about the Dalai Lama's example is that he has lived most of his life as an exile, and, as he says, in losing his own country, has gained a home in the globe and in almost every one of its nations. Most of us are inclined to think of exile in terms of disruption, loss, severance from the past.
He is the rare being to see it as opportunity, an opening for the future. And what he has done with Tibetans in exile, showing them how it doesn't matter if they lose Tibet on the map so long as they can keep alive what is valuable in Tibet within, has not only allowed and encouraged them to construct a sense of home inwardly, but also offered a model for Palestinians, Kurds, Uighurs, many of the rest of us.
This is, by some lights, the age of the exile, with more than 30 million official and unofficial exiles in the world, and all of us are struggling to create a home outside the territory that was our own. He offers an inspiring and pragmatic model of how the process works.
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