Windows are broken and paths half paved in the ramshackle little town of Dharamsala, India, where the Dalai Lama lives. The absolute spiritual and temporal ruler of Tibet still has to drive 10 hours over roads crazy with scooters and cows every time he needs to take a flight (from New Delhi, 300 miles to the south). And when you call his tiny office, you usually hear that "all circuits are busy"--or the five-digit number changed yesterday, or, amid a blizzard of static, you get cut off in mid-sentence, the only small consolation being that you are put on hold to the tune of London Bridge Is Falling Down.
Yet to this makeshift exile center come moviemakers, camera crews and seekers from around the world, and from it, in the months before I returned to see him, the Dalai Lama had visited all five major continents, in his near desperate attempt to save occupied Tibet before it dies.
His predicament, in fact, is one for which I can think of no precedent or parallel. Trained for 18 years in the intricacies of Tibetan Buddhist metaphysics, one of the most accomplished philosophers in his tradition has spent most of the past half-century entangled in geopolitics, trying to protect and rescue his homeland from the Chinese forces that attacked in 1950 and drove him into exile nine years later. His cause is not made easier by the facts that much of the world is trying to court China, the world's largest marketplace, and that he is the guest of a huge nation with problems of its own that would rather he kept quiet. And, as church and state incarnate, the Dalai Lama, winner of the 1989 Nobel Prize for Peace, finds himself denied the privileges of a full-fledged political leader even as he cannot enjoy the peaceful immunity of a purely religious figure.
The ever pragmatic Tibetan has responded to this predicament by taking his cause directly to the world, traveling almost constantly (on a refugee's yellow "identity certificate"), answering questions in 20,000-seat pop-concert halls about everything from Jack Kevorkian to TV violence, and letting his speeches be broadcast live on the floor of London dance clubs. This has led to the unlikely sight of a "simple monk" (as he always calls himself)--born and raised in a culture that had scarcely seen a Westerner when the century began--now seeming as visible, and even as fashionable, a figure as Richard Gere. John Cleese speaks out for him in London, Henri Cartier-Bresson records his teachings around France, Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys interviews him in Rome for Rolling Stone. In the past few years he has opened 11 Offices of Tibet, everywhere from Canberra to Moscow, and last year alone provided prefaces and forewords for roughly 30 books. The 14th Dalai Lama is surely the only Ocean of Wisdom, Holder of the White Lotus and Protector of the Land of Snows to serve as guest editor of French Vogue.