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At the time I revisited him, the Dalai Lama was contemplating the latest strange turn in this enforced interaction with the modern world: the $70 million Hollywood movie Seven Years in Tibet and Martin Scorsese's remarkable new film, Kundun, both of which tell the story of his early life. Sitting cross-legged in his armchair, rocking back and forth as he spoke and always keeping an eye out to make sure my cup of tea was full, the famously accessible doctor of metaphysics talked with full-bodied candor, for day after day, about his death, the increasingly public divisions within the Tibetan community and the new pressures of his spotlighted life. Accepting donations from Shoko Asahara, the head of the Aum Shinrikyo group in Japan that later allegedly planted deadly sarin gas in the subways of Tokyo, was, he says frankly, "a mistake. Due to ignorance. So this proves"--a mischievous gleam escapes--"I'm not a living Buddha!" He'd love to delegate some responsibilities to his deputies, he confesses, but "even if some of my Cabinet ministers wanted to give public talks, nobody would come." And the single most difficult thing in his life, he admits, is "meeting with politicians. Realistically speaking, it's just symbolic. They cannot do much." Yet, as Helen Tworkov, editor in chief of the New York Buddhist magazine Tricycle, puts it, the simple, paradoxical fact is that "he needs people with money, he needs people with power, he needs people with influence."
And so the man who would clearly be happier just meditating finds himself turning to Democrats and Republicans, instructing 140,000 exiled Tibetans in the ways of the world, and winning all the admiration and attention he doesn't particularly need, while making scant headway in his cause. Last September some reporters openly criticized the (non-Tibetan) organizers of his trip to Australia because of their $20 T shirts and official sponsorship from Nike, Thai International Airlines and Ford. I must confess, though, that I know of this only because the Dalai Lama told me of it--and a caustic clipping about the "Dalai Lama Show," the only item up on the bulletin board of the Dolma Ling Nunnery in Dharamsala.
To appreciate fully the incongruities of Tenzin Gyatso's life in the celebrity age, you have to recall that he was born in a cowshed in a tiny farming village in what was locally known as the Wood Hog Year (1935). The previous Dalai Lama, the 13th, had been one of the great reforming spirits of a tradition whose leaders had all too often been ineffectual boys manipulated by regents. Beset by imperialists of all stripes, the farsighted Lama, in his last written testament, predicted a time in Tibet's history, soon, when "monks and monasteries will be destroyed...[and] all beings will be sunk in great hardship and overwhelming fear."