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Saturday 30 August 2008

Homage to His Holiness

George Fitzherbert on a selection of books about the Dalai Lama

The Dalai Lama is a controversial figure of late. The fury of millions of Chinese at the Tibetans’ sullying of China’s international reputation in the lead up to their beloved Olympic moment may be dismissed as nationalist hysteria, but the perception that he is, in Rupert Murdoch’s insinuating slur, ‘a very political monk in Gucci shoes’ has begun to take hold. However there is nothing in the recent glut of new books about Tibet’s spiritual leader to suggest that he is anything other than a sincere and diligent monk (who owns no Gucci shoes, but at least a couple of pairs of Hush Puppies).

Pico Iyer’s book-length essay on the Dalai Lama’s globalised Buddhism — a message of realism, moderation and ethical integrity — presents a figure of ‘immense personal purity’ (The Open Road: The Global Journey of the 14th Dalai Lama, Bloomsbury, £12.99, pp. 275, ISBN 9780747597261). The burly 70-year-old is ‘the very picture of vigorous attentiveness’:,an observant and open-minded monk- philosopher intent on giving his learning a universal humanist relevance. That the Dalai Lama is also political is, however, undeniable. Politics is a necessary part of the role thrust upon him by his people, as is clearly shown in Alex Norman’s marvellously readable exposition of the history of the institution of the Dalai Lamas (Holder of the White Lotus: The Lives of the Dalai Lamas, Little, Brown, £20, pp. 445, ISBN 97880316859882).

As the incarnation of Tibet’s patron deity, the figure of the Dalai Lama is the worldly manifestation of Chenrezig, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, who rescues his chosen people, the Tibetans, from the depths of ignorance, suffering and barbarity. The association between Tibet’s political leaders and Chenrezig is itself much older than the institution of the Dalai Lamas, and dates back to the period of the Tibetan empire in the 7th-9th centuries AD, when Tibet was first converted to Buddhism. The figure of the Dalai Lama (which is a Mongolian, not a Tibetan title) only came to occupy a central position in Tibet’s religio-political hierarchy in the mid-17th century, when the fifth Dalai, with the military assistance of a Dzungarian Mongol warlord named Gushri Khan, united much of the Tibetan plateau.

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