Read Online The Open Road by Pico Iyer - Free Book Online

community, and as widely heeded, as the singer-activist Bono or that other hero of oppressed peoples, Nelson Mandela. His face appears on bumper stickers in surfer towns (“Be Stoked”); in-flight magazines tell us (in an article on “cool”) that “the Dalai Lama is cool because he is.” The eccentric film director Werner Herzog brings out a book on him, and Hunter Thompson includes him in his “Honor Roll” of gonzo heroes. This bringing together of such different worlds (a larger reality and a smaller, perhaps) offers an opportunity and poses a question: when a monk comes out in front of the swarming cameras, how much do we see the monk, and how much only what the cameras construct?
    By the summer of 2005, I had grown accustomed, almost, to finding the Dalai Lama used as a comic prop in nearly every other Hollywood movie; in the space of two months I saw him alluded to in Monster-in-Law, The Wedding Crashers, In Good Company, and Uptown Girls (in which a bored Manhattan princess, applying for a job at the Fifth Avenue boutique Henri Bendel, gives as a reference “The Dalai Lama, Tibet”—a rather poignant error in light of the fact that Tibet barely exists now and the Dalai Lama hasn’t lived there in almost half a century). You can buy $200 limited-edition dolls of the monk these days, and a Broadway producer is talking of having a vampire dress up as him, for farcical effect. “Formerly,” as Oscar Wilde’s Gilbert noted more than a century ago, “we used to canonize our heroes. The modern method is to vulgarize them.”
    Yet what surprised me, repeatedly, in the middle of all this was that the Dalai Lama clearly saw things in a much more spacious way than I would: everything in the world could be used for some good was his position, even the publicity machine, the celebrity circus, the ever more intrusive media. It’s customary for some of us to think of the spiritual world, the realm of the monk, as pure, while the world of the flashbulb and the sound bite is compromised at best. And certainly liberties were taken with the Buddhist that I could rarely imagine being taken with the pope or even, these days, an Islamic cleric. But one of the striking arguments being advanced by this most visible of monks, as by a few like-minded souls, was that even these things of the world could be transformed by the purposes we bring to them. There is nothing good or bad, as Hamlet has it, but thinking makes it so.
    In the spring of 2004, therefore, I flew to Vancouver to see how the Dalai Lama would deal with clamorous crowds and media scrutiny much more intense than in low-key Nara. I wasn’t especially interested in his personality, glowing and moving though that personality was, in part because I didn’t feel he was very much interested in it and, more, because his public virtues were really just symptoms of the private practices and stillness that underlay them. But for decades now I had been interested in how globalism could acquire depths, an inwardness that would sustain it more than mere goods or data could, and how even the media might be able to address something more than just the passing events of the day. If our new way of living were to offer any real sustenance, I’d long thought, it would have to be invisible, in the realm of what underlies acceleration and multinationals.
    Weeks before I even set foot in British Columbia, the Web site specially set up for the event (as for just about every visit the Dalai Lama makes around the world these days) informed me that the city was already in a frenzy of excitement; the global order’s godfather, as he sometimes seems, had not been to Canada in more than a decade. His general talks on how to lead a kinder and more attentive life had already been relocated to the largest public arena in town—the Pacific Coliseum, long home to the ice-hockey–playing Canucks—after tickets had gone, months in advance, in just twenty minutes, and eight thousand people had