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The Dalai Lama spends much of his time reflecting on how Tibetan Buddhism can teach, and learn from, other disciplines. He believes, for example, that Buddhism can show Marxism how to develop a genuine socialist ideal "not through force, but through reason, through a very gentle training of the mind, through the development of altruism." He sees many points of contact between his faith and "psychology, cosmology, neurobiology, the social sciences and physics. There are many things we Buddhists should learn from the latest scientific findings. And scientists can learn from Buddhist explanations. We must conduct research, and then accept the results. If they don't stand up to experimentation," he says, beaming subversively, "Buddha's own words must be rejected."
Such quiet radicalism has at times unsettled followers so devout that they would readily give up their lives for their leader. In the draft constitution he drew up in 1963, the God-King included, against his people's wishes, a clause that would allow for his impeachment. Now he is considering new methods for choosing the next Dalai Lama -- adopting an electoral system similar to the Vatican's, perhaps, or selecting on the basis of seniority, or even dispensing with the entire institution. "I think the time has come -- not necessarily to take a decision very soon, but to start a more formal discussion, so that people can prepare their minds for it."
In the meantime, the exiled leader will continue to pursue a simple, selfless life that is close to the Buddhist ideal of the Middle Way -- neither hostile to the world nor hostage to it. Buddhism's supreme living deity still refuses to fly first class and thinks of himself always, as he told the press last fall, as a "simple Buddhist monk." Though he is one of the most erudite scholars of one of the most cerebral of all the world's philosophies, he has a gift for reducing his doctrine to a core of lucid practicality, crystallized in the title of his 1984 book, Kindness, Clarity and Insight (Snow Lion Press). "My true religion," he has said, "is kindness."
It is, in fact, the peculiar misfortune of the Chinese to be up against one of those rare souls it is all but impossible to dislike. Beijing has felt it necessary to call him a "political corpse, bandit and traitor," a "red- handed butcher who subsisted on people's flesh." Yet everyone who meets the Dalai Lama is thoroughly disarmed by his good-natured warmth and by a charisma all the stronger for being so gentle.
To an outsider, the life of a living Buddha can seem a profoundly lonely one. In recent years, moreover, nearly all the people closest to the Tibetan ruler -- his senior tutor, his junior tutor, his mother and the elder brother who in youth was his only playmate -- have died. Yet this, like everything else, the Dalai Lama takes, in the deepest sense, philosophically. "Old friends pass away, new friends appear," he says with cheerful matter-of- factness. "It's just like the days. An old day passes, a new day arrives. The important thing is to make it meaningful: a meaningful friend -- or a meaningful day."