Sun After Dark

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Authors: Pico Iyer
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and goes.”
    As ever, few of his supporters are equally ready to acquiesce in such lèse-majesté (when I ask a group of Tibetan officials if this one will be the last Dalai Lama, they all say anxiously, “No, no”). And many of them, too, have found it hard to countenance his policy of forgiving the Chinese (he has referred to Mao as “remarkable,” called himself “half-Marxist, half-Buddhist,” and stepped back from his original demands of independence to calling only for an autonomous “Zone of Peace”). The pressure on him to forswear his policy of nonviolence has intensified as the years go by, and Chinese repression comes ever closer to rendering Tibet extinct.
    “In one way, yes,” he tells me, “my position has become weaker, because there’s been no development, no progress. In spite of my open approach, of maximum concessions, the Chinese position becomes even harder and harder.” Last year, all photographs of the exiled leader were banned in Tibet, and monks and nuns continue to be imprisoned and tortured at will, in what the International Commission of Jurists long ago called a policy of genocide. Yet the Dalai Lama takes heart from the fact that more and more Chinese individuals have been speaking out for Tibet (as they would not have done, he feels, if he’d been more militant); not long ago, he gave a special three-day initiation in Los Angeles expressly for those of Chinese descent.
    “To isolate China is totally wrong,” he tells me forcefully. “China needs the outside world, and the outside world needs China.” Besides, even China stands to gain from a freer Tibet. “If the Tibetan issue can be resolved through dialogue, and if we remain happily in the People’s Republic of China, it will have immense impact in the minds of another six million Chinese in Hong Kong and, eventually, twenty-one million Chinese in Taiwan. The image of China in the whole world will, overnight, change.”
    That is the position he must take, of course, and a skeptic would say, confronted with his stubborn optimism, that it can be a little perverse to celebrate clouds just because they show us silver linings. Yet it’s worth recalling that the Dalai Lama’s policy of forgiveness is not an abstract thing. When he speaks of suffering, it’s as one who has seen his land destroyed, up to 1.2 million of his people killed, and all but 13 of his 6,254 monasteries laid waste. When he talks of inner peace, it’s as one who was away on the road, struggling for his cause, when his mother, his senior tutor, and his only childhood playmate, Lobsang Samten, died. And when he speaks of forbearance, it’s as one who is still publicly called by Beijing a “wolf in monk’s robes.”
    As I left Dharamsala, in fact—at dawn, with the Dalai Lama leading his monks in a three-hour ceremony while the sun came up—it struck me that the man has lived out a kind of archetypal destiny of our times: a boy born in a peasant village in a world that had scarcely seen a wheel has ended up confronting the great forces of the day, exile, global travel, and, especially, the mass media; and a man from a culture we associate with Shangri-La now faces machine guns on the one hand, and a Lhasa Holiday Inn on the other, while J. Peterman catalogues crow, “Crystals are out! Tibetan Buddhism is in!” It says much about the challenges of the moment that a spokesman for an ancient, highly complex philosophy finds himself in rock-concert arenas obliged to answer questions about abortion and the “patriarchal” nature of Tibetan Buddhism.
    Yet to these twenty-first-century conundrums, the Dalai Lama is aiming to bring a state-of-the-art solution. Tibet’s predicament, he tells me with practiced fluency, is not just about a faraway culture hidden behind snowcaps five miles high. It’s about ecology, since the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Mekong, and Yellow Rivers all have their sources in Tibet. It’s about natural resources, since, “according to

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