"Gurus and Groups "

READING

The reading today comes from a new book titled “The Open Road,” by Pico Iyer. In it he explores the private and public personas of the Dalai Lama; and the conundrum of being a spiritual leader in a political role in a shrinking global arena. It is a great book to learn more about the current situation in Tibet, about the life of a Buddhist monk and about the dangers and frustrations of leadership.

“In Tibet, and among Tibetans around the world, not least in his exile home of Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama is revered as a god, quite literally; every shop in Dharamsala has at its center a framed picture of him, and even the most renegade Tibetans, jiving before Western girls to the latest song from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, grow silent, almost teary-eyed, if asked about the Dalai Lama (who is, to some extent, their homeland, as well as their faith and their sense of self). In the Tibetan community the Dalai Lama still officially settles every institutional dispute, has ordained a whole generation of monks, and carries such ritual authority that even the most cocky, Columbia-educated kids (I have seen) are too nervous to translate for him and reflexively bow their bodies before him, as subjects used to do before kings. In exile, more than ever, he’s the Tibetans’ main external asset.

“But in the larger world the Dalai Lama is merely an icon, a secular divinity of sorts, and for that there is less precedent. The Dalai Lama remains intensely pragmatic about the uses the world makes of him – if it helps people to use his smiling face as a screen saver, he says, or if it does some substantial good to broadcast his speeches on the dance floors of London discos, then let them use him or anything that is ‘beneficial’; beyond a point he can’t control the ideas people have of him or the hopes they bring to him, and a physician’s job is to try to offer help wherever he is needed. Still, one effect of this is that he offers forewords even to books about young Tibetans’ impatience with his policies and, as one close friend asserts, ‘answers questions he shouldn’t answer.’

“It might almost, I sometimes think, be a kind of riddle that people of this kind pose for us: how much will we respond to their essence, the changeless core of what they are saying, and how much will we merely read them through the keyhole of our own priorities? . . . Everyone we meet we tend to cast in the light of our own tiny concerns.”

Pico Iyer. “The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.” New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008, pp. 69-70.

SERMON

Growing up in New Jersey, most of my friends and I had relatives in New York, but none of them were as interesting as Patsy’s grandmother. She lived alone at One Fifth Avenue, a residential hotel – an apartment building with room service. My sixth grade imagination reveled in this storied place. Patsy and I would nibble our tuna fish sandwiches sent up and spread out for us on a hotel table in her grandmother’s living room. It was unlike any living room I had ever seen. A magnificent Buddha reposed in the fireplace.

Patsy’s grandmother traveled in international Quaker circles and lived an adventurous life. I learned that she had even met the Dalai Lama. Whenever we visited One Fifth Avenue, I felt we entered another world – a world of travel and holy people and mystery and room service. Something about the connection, however tenuous, with a holy person intensifies everything within its luminous reach. “It’s funny,” one religion journalist said to Pico Iyer, while they were covering a public appearance by the Dalai Lama. “There are people who don’t believe in anything, but they will die just to see the Dalai Lama. It’s almost like they feel if he touches them, if they get his blessing, they’re set up for life.”[i] Both Pico Iyer and the Dalai Lama – who have known each other for more than thirty years – are intimate with this phenomenon. Iyer comments that “when we hear [the Dalai Lama] talk about projection and delusion, we do not, most of us, have to look very far to find examples.”[ii]

It’s been an ambiguous year for religious leaders like the Dalai Lama. Perhaps every year is ambiguous when you are the object of projection and delusion. But this year things have been heating up for the exiled Tibetan holy man, as the Olympics and the plight of his homeland take the world stage and the Dalai Lama seeks a sympathetic audience. Globalization penetrates every far corner these days. It drives even further from its roots the ancient culture he seeks to preserve A savvy leader, the Dalai Lama understands that he must embrace contemporary trends even when time is not on his side. Yet it seems like a losing proposition. Tibetan Buddhism is already irrevocably altered by exile, by oppression, by religious tourism, and by media coverage.

The Dalai Lama, for all his experience of the world, is still something of a mismatch for public life. Pico Iyer describes an encounter in which “the CEO of a large company, clearly a sincere man eager to do something useful with his power, engages the Dalai Lama in a series of discussions. Early on, speaking of leadership, he suddenly asks the Tibetan monk whether he feels closer ‘to John Lennon, the dreamer, or to Gandhi, the politician,’” a question the Dalai Lama has no idea how to answer. “The man perseveres, and gets him to read out the lyrics of John Lennon’s’ anthem ‘Imagine.’ The Dalai Lama, asked again and again what single role he chooses for himself says, ‘I don’t know.’ Then suddenly,” Iyer relates, [the Dalai Lama] starts talking about his work with his people and says, ‘This makes me feel very sad.’ He has ‘neither power nor country,’ he says, ‘but I can’t help it – I feel responsible for all these Tibetan refugees . . . .’ He can’t always be what the interviewer wants, he might be saying, and he isn’t always able even to be what his people ask of him. He’s human.”[iii]

This man who by tradition is revered as a god must feel every waking hour the disappointment and the dissonance of being, in the end, only himself. He is a stellar human being. But given his role, it can never be enough.

It’s strange, how we want people to be gods and are disappointed when they are not. This train of thought began for me when I read the obituary of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of the Transcendental Meditation movement. The Maharishi died in February, leaving an ambiguous legacy. As a young man, he received instruction in meditation from the Hindu swami Guru Dev. Following a long apprenticeship and a two-year retreat in the Himalayas, the Maharishi emerged ready to introduce meditation to the secular world. His program, Transcendental Meditation, became popular with students and celebrities, of whom the most famous were no doubt the Beatles. They even traveled to India to be with him.

According to the “Los Angeles Times,” “TM officials discount reports that the legendary foursome became disenchanted with the Maharishi during their visit, [but] Beatles chroniclers have said that the group was dismayed by the guru’s megalomania and doubted his claims of celibacy.”[iv] And then there were the flying. You may recall: “The Maharishi refused to allow public demonstrations of the flying, which only hardened doubters, but he insisted when performed by a critical mass of the population it would reduce tensions in the world and lead to peace.”[v] People took it seriously. I had a friend at Divinity School who was studying Transcendental Meditation. He boasted that he would soon be able to levitate.

In any case, some people became publicly disenchanted. Deepak Chopra, “who had been one of the Maharishi’s top assistants,”[vi] broke away and built a career even bigger than his teacher’s. The Beatles did not last long either. “‘We made a mistake,’ [Paul] McCartney told an interviewer later. ‘We thought there was more to him than there was. He’s human. We thought at first that he wasn’t.’”[vii]

Arnold Lobel, author of the fable we heard earlier, writes that the moral of the story is that “It is the high and mighty who have the longest distance to fall.” In the story, King Lion makes himself top-heavy with medals and jeweled crown, and brings himself down when he leans over to check whether one of his subjects, a beetle, is bowing.

In the story of human leaders, whether anointed by tradition or self-made, reconciling their flaws with their elevated role is neither easy nor humorous. For the Dalai Lama, who has lived every day with awareness of the expectations others have placed on him, keeping his balance amid the projections and delusions has become a spiritual practice in itself. He appears to have done this with grace and compassion. Yet his political enemies revile him, young Tibetans chafe under his exhortations of non-violence, and the Dalai Lama himself admits his position has grown weaker.[viii] Pico Iyer notes that there is “a kind of riddle that people of this kind pose for us: how much will we respond to their essence, the changeless core of what they are saying, and how much will we merely read them through the keyhole of our own priorities?”[ix]

The Christian monk Thomas Merton wrote, “In order to be remembered or even wanted, I have to be a person that nobody knows.”[x] He had his own meeting with the Dalai Lama once, in 1968, when he ventured out of his Kentucky monastery for the first time in twenty-seven years. They had a few things in common, monk to monk. Iyer notes that “Merton’s account of the Tibetan leader served to open the door for the West to a being who had previously appeared to belong to exotic books in a foreign tongue.”[xi] But Merton also saw for himself just how esoteric the Tibetan tradition really was.

Most of us know the Dalai Lama from his public persona, the charming man who laughs easily, makes no distinctions between the powerful and the powerless, and refuses the idea that one religion is better than another. “He delights listeners everywhere,” Iyer writes, “by being the rare spiritual figure to say there’s no need for temples or scriptures, let alone for an immersion in his own tradition; but then he disappoints them, often, by suggesting that there is a need for old-fashioned ethics and all the things your grandmother told you were good for you.”[xii] He falls short on his views about homosexuality, having inherited a religious code that forbids it, although he is quick to denounce prejudice. The Dalai Lama is a textual conservative, Iyer points out, an observer of “what he calls ‘the original, classical, authentic teaching’” of Buddhism, which is not easy for people from the West to understand or practice. For most of us, the public person is all we need or want to know.

Which leaves this man, the Dalai Lama, alone with himself and his hope, struggling to stay true to his tradition and watching it ebb away from the world at the same time. The truth, in his case, is sad. Perhaps the situation in Tibet will change, with renewed attention and some powerful advocacy. But I am left with the feeling that whatever happens – and the Dalai Lama will promise you – change will happen, the projections and delusions that converge on this one human being will always be with him, part of the great and tragic lineage a holy man must carry.

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[i] Pico Iyer. “The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.” New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008, p. 73.

[ii] Ibid., p. 73.

[iii] Ibid., p. 76.

[iv] Elaine Woo. “Guru brought meditation West.” “Los Angeles Times,” February 6, 2008, p. B7.

[v] Ibid.

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] “The Open Road,” p. 236.

[ix] Ibid., p. 69.

[x] Cited in “The Open Road,” p. 141.

[xi] Ibid., p. 147.

[xii] Ibid., p. 146.