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Friday 5 December 2008

Homage to His Holiness

George Fitzherbert on a selection of books about the Dalai Lama

The Dalai Lamas since then, cloistered from youth in the fortress depths of the Potala Palace, have been a motley bunch, several of whom died or were murdered before attaining their majority. Some were disenchanted by their fate, such as the sixth Dalai Lama, who wept upon hearing the news that he was to be recognised as Tibet’s top ecclesiast and later refused to accept his monk’s vows. He became notorious for his drunken and amorous adventures, and was eventually driven from his position and probably murdered. His love songs, however, have earned him an enduring place in Tibetan hearts. We also hear of ‘the Great 13th’, whose vigorous and pragmatic qualities betrayed his peasant stock and who, in the early decades of the 20th century, set about modernising Tibet and asserting its independence from nationalist China, not least by acquiring an arsenal of modern weaponry from the British for his nascent Tibetan army. Alexander Norman’s work is especially adept at navigating the intricacies of Tibet’s relations with its neighbours — the series of Mongol warlords and emperors who played the role of kingmakers in Tibet from the 13th to the 18th centuries; Tibet’s close relations with the Qing dynasty during the 18th century, during which time it must be considered as having been part of the Manchu empire; and more recently, Tibet’s ambivalent relations with the British, whose 1904 invasion Norman describes as ‘one of the least glorious feats of British arms in the history of the Empire’.

Pico Iyer’s very different book is a companionable reflection on the present (14th) Dalai Lama, a man who has been forced to give his institution, steeped as it is in medieval intrigue, a modern and global relevance. The Dalai Lama is counterpoised with his good friend and ally on the international stage, Archbishop Desmond Tutu. While Tutu, with his undulating and passionate rhetoric, brings us into communion with a transcendental god, the Dalai Lama is seen as exhorting us to a logician’s engagement with the nature of reality and the human condition, asking us to look into ourselves to begin a process of personal transformation. But despite this apparent rationalism, and the absence of any will to proselytise (‘I am not interested in making more Buddhists’ he says), there is a side to the Dalai Lama which for Pico Iyer is unfathomable. He depicts him as a man who frequently retreats behind a ‘closed door’ beyond which lies the inscrutable world of Tibetan superstition and esoteric occultism. Entranced oracles play a central role in the his decision-making and wrathful deities, which Western audiences are told to understand as symbolic, are still real and powerful enough that the Dalai Lama has even felt it necessary to ban the propitiation of one such deity, to the fury of many within his own monastic community.

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