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As ever, few of his supporters are equally ready to acquiesce in such lese majeste. (When I ask a group of Tibetan officials if this one will be the last Dalai Lama, they all say anxiously, "No, no.") And even relatives have sometimes found it hard to countenance his policy of forgiving the Chinese (he once described Mao as "remarkable," has referred to himself as "half Marxist, half Buddhist," and has 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, he argues, all but banging his fist on the arm of his chair, "to isolate China is totally wrong. China needs the outside world, and the outside world needs China."
When I left Dharamsala at dawn, the Dalai Lama was leading his monks in a three-hour ceremony while the sun came up behind the distant snowcaps. 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 known as the "Forbidden Kingdom" now faces machine guns on the one hand and Chinese discos around the Potala Palace on the other. While Tibet is eroded in its homeland, it threatens to be commodified--or turned into an exotic accessory--abroad.
Yet to this state-of-the-art challenge the Dalai Lama brings, in his own words, a "radical informality," a gift for cutting through to the heart of things and an unusually open and practical mind. If I had to single out one sovereign quality in him, it would be alertness, whether he's reminding me of a sentence he delivered to me seven years before or picking out a friend's face in the middle of a jam-packed prayer hall.
This mindfulness, as Buddhists might call it, is particularly critical these days as the Dalai Lama finds himself more and more appealing to people who know nothing of his philosophy--and may even be hostile to it. The Tibetan has delivered lectures on the Gospels, celebrated the Internet as a talisman of human interdependence and, especially, mastered the art of talking to ordinary people in ordinary human terms, about "spirituality without faith." As his longtime friend the composer Philip Glass says, "He talks about compassion, he talks about right living. And it's very powerful and persuasive to people because it's clear he's not there to convert them."