The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, a new book by travel writer Pico Iyer recounts his observations of the Tibetan leader over the past 30 years. Time Magazine this week published an adaptation of the book for its cover story, along with several accompanying reports about the current situation in Tibet:
As soon as you start talking to the Dalai Lama, as I have been doing for 33 years, you notice that his favorite adjectives are logical and realistic and the verbs he returns to are investigate, analyze and explore. The Buddha was a “scientist,” he said the last time I saw him, which means that a true Buddhist should follow the course of reason (recalling, perhaps, that anger most harms the person who feels it). Contact and communication are the methods he always stresses—to this day, he encourages every possibility for dialogue with China and in places even urges Tibetans to study Buddhism under Chinese leaders whom he knows to be capable.
This determination to be completely empirical—as if he were a doctor of the mind pledged to examine things only as they are, to come up with a clear diagnosis and then to suggest a practical response—is one of the things that have made the current Dalai Lama such a startling and tonic figure on the world stage. There are few monks in any tradition who speak so rarely about faith while rejecting anything that has been disproved by scientific inquiry; on his desk at home, he keeps a plastic model of the brain with detachable parts so that he can take it apart, put it together again and see how it works.
In the New Yorker, Pankaj Mishra also wrote a lengthy review of the book. See also:
– A review from the Economist of Iyer’s book and another book titled “Memories of Life in Lhasa Under Chinese Rule
– An interview on NPR’s Fresh Air with Pico Iyer.
– An interview with Iyer on World Hum.
– An excerpt of the book from the publisher Knopf.
– An essay about the recent unrest and review of the book by Tibet scholar Robbie Barnett from the New York Review of Books.
