Forget the Dalai Lama’s photo ops and repeated grip ‘n’ grins with celebrities, writes RON GRAHAM, because the mission at the heart of his much-hyped visit to Canada was something even greater than the campaign for a free Tibet. To Western eyes, his odd pronouncements and constant giggles seemed strange, but the ritual that unfolded once the media had packed up and left was something to behold — enlightening, in fact
By RON GRAHAM
It was typical of Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, to play down the significance of his 19-day stay in Canada, which came to an end on Thursday.
“I just whiz around,” the Tibetan spiritual leader said in his halting English. “Half dream, half reality. Old Tibetan expression: ‘We come and go and leave no trace, like a crow that has taken off from a rock.’ I talk some words, then I leave.” And he laughed as though at the emptiness of it all.
His Holiness often seemed incapable of resisting the comedy of life, much to the bewilderment of those who see it as a tragedy. But he wasn’t oblivious to the seriousness of his purpose, or to the remarkable amount of public adulation and media attention that he had received in Canada.
His celebrity sparked the news coverage, of course, and the news coverage in turn fanned the flames of his celebrity. But, aside from the presence on our shores of a Tibetan version of the Pope, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and a countercultural superstar all rolled into the body of a charming personality who had known Mao, Nehru and Thomas Merton, the story wasn’t at all clear.
In the absence of any sexual or financial scandals, which are the religious reporter’s bread and butter these days, the obvious hook was politics. And what a dramatic hook it was: the unjust invasion of Tibet by China in 1950, the savage killing of more than a million Tibetans, the wanton destruction of more than 6,000 religious institutions, the ongoing suppression of the Tibetan language and culture, and the Dalai Lama’s own 45-year exile in India.
Almost all the reporting leading up to his arrival in Vancouver on April 17 and his subsequent visit to Ottawa hung upon the question of whether Prime Minister Paul Martin would disregard the fire-breathing threats from the Chinese embassy and become the first Canadian leader to meet officially with the man China has denounced as a “splittist” and “wolf in monk’s clothing.” Editorialists unanimously called for Mr. Martin to show some backbone, and more than half the members of Parliament signed a petition calling for Canada to broker a solution.
The last-minute compromise was more devious than defiant. To placate the Chinese, the Prime Minister agreed to greet the Dalai Lama in a spiritual “frame,” which turned out to be a gathering of local religious leaders at the home of the Roman Catholic archbishop of Ottawa. Then, to placate the Tibetan lobby, he agreed to include human rights in his discussion of things spiritual — if discussion is the right term to use in describing a private exchange that lasted all of 15 minutes. It was enough, however, to let the Canada Tibet Committee exploit the photo op as a historic breakthrough.
With the political story now played out, the parliamentary media caravan moved back to the sponsorship scandal and the timing of the federal election. But the frenzy in Vancouver and Ottawa had served to generate 205 requests for press accreditation in Toronto and to boost ticket sales for His Holiness’s public address April 25 at the SkyDome.
Indeed, the number, diversity and attentive silence of the 29,039 people who lined up outside the stadium for hours in the bone-chilling rain to hear him discuss The Power of Compassion became the next story: He came, he spoke, he conquered.
There was no easy explanation, however, of why such a wide cross-section of generations and cultures had elevated the Dalai Lama to the pantheon of those very few human beings who seem to embody such simple virtues as non-violence, love, self-discipline and secular ethics. And his words, which one 14-year-old described as “life-transforming,” tended to come across as naive and trite when pulled out of context and separated from the warmth of his presence. The only option for the reporters, given the lack of hard news, was to fall back on soft copy about his giggling at his own jokes and hugging Justin Trudeau.
“The media have important role for promotion of human values and religious harmony,” he said at a news conference in the Royal York Hotel a few days later. “People get impression world more violent, everything much worse, based on media. Can’t see whole picture. Media need long nose like elephant to smell front, back, top part, bottom part [another giggle] to know reality.”
By that point, however, media interest was understandably exhausted, as was the man himself. He had been up since 3:30 a.m., praying, meditating and teaching for nearly 12 straight hours. Half the chairs in the room were empty, and the event garnered almost no coverage. Despite his reputation as a master politician, the Dalai Lama showed no signs of having grasped the efficacy of the sound bite. His answers tended to be long-winded and rambling, and they weren’t helped by his frequent hesitation for the right word in English or sudden lapses into Tibetan.
Short of an assassination attempt or a monk caught drunk with a hooker, therefore, the press leapt off His Holiness’s bandwagon, leaving him to carry on doing whatever it was he was doing down at the National Trade Centre with the thousands of Buddhist followers who had come to Toronto from four dozen countries, including 28 from China.
If the general public knew that he was still in town, few seemed to realize that, for the price of admission, the events were open to everyone of any faith, or no faith, and even fewer understood what a fascinating story was unfolding in their midst.
According to Tibetan tradition, after the man who became known as the Buddha attained his enlightenment in the sixth century BC, he taught a variety of meditation techniques to his students, depending on the qualities of their mind, so that they also might realize the knowledge and bliss he had experienced.
Some of the more esoteric teachings, having been passed down through secret initiations over the centuries, were preserved by Sanskrit scholars in India and then taken to Tibet more than 1,000 years ago. For traditional reasons, one of them — the Kalachakra or Wheel of Time — was made available to anyone whose heart feels ready to receive it, whether as a method of mental transformation, a powerful blessing, or a wish for world peace.
The Toronto Kalachakra, the first ever held in Canada, was only the 29th that the Dalai Lama has conducted. In recent years, more than a quarter-million people have gathered in India whenever he presides over the 11 days of rituals, which centre on the construction of an extremely intricate, highly symbolic mandala made of coloured sand.
Every line, circle and square of its exquisite geometric design represents some part of the Buddhist cosmology, and the whole is used as both an object of meditation and as a “palace” for the 722 Tibetan deities who are considered manifestations of aspects of consciousness and reality.
Exhibit Hall C at the National Trade Centre, as huge and impersonal as an aircraft hangar, seemed a rather surreal venue for such a spiritual happening. About 7,500 chairs were lined up in six separate sections, from the lowly one-day spectators at the back (who, nevertheless, had had to pay $90 a ticket, $75 for seniors and children) to the VIPs, sponsors, patrons, monks and nuns in the roped-off area up front, though most days the room was only half-filled even though it was such a rare opportunity.
Flanked by two gigantic screens, there loomed a raised stage, lit, miked and decorated with five painted silk banners as the backdrop, a square altar-like platform under a golden canopy, two dozen monks squatting in maroon and saffron robes, a gilded throne emblazoned with flames and demonic-looking figures, and upon its brocade seat His Holiness, Kundun, the Presence.
To put its strangeness into perspective, The Ultimate Guy’s Show – “Big Toys for Big Boys” — was competing across the road.
The first three days, from 7 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon with only an occasional pause for tea and 90 minutes at lunch, felt like the Ring Cycle without program notes or Surtitles, except that Wagner would have been more melodic and much, much shorter.
Hour after hour passed in meditation and prayer, a rapid, deep-bass, monotonic mumble amplified over the loudspeakers and interspersed with the clanging of cymbals, the clattering of drums, and the ringing of bells. After the ground had been purified and the deities pacified, dancers in flamboyant embroidered robes and tall red crowns conjured up an invisible protective ring by revolving in slow, balletic steps, with precise hand gestures and trance-like chanting, non-stop for an hour and a half.
However much this might have resembled a theatrical production, of course, it wasn’t supposed to be just an extension of the many celebrations of Tibetan dance, song, art, medicine, cuisine and fashion that were being put on concurrently at Harbourfront. It was an ancient preparatory ceremony that made no concessions to such modern notions as attention span or mass entertainment.
For long periods, in fact, the Dalai Lama did not lead the prayers from his throne, but from a seat facing the rear of the stage with only the swaying top of his bald spot visible to the passive audience — not a few of whom seemed as bored and perplexed by what was going on as someone who had just walked in off the street.
After lunch on the fourth, fifth and sixth afternoons, however, while four monks continued work on the sand mandala with an intense concentration and a gentle chiselling noise, the Dalai Lama ascended his throne, put on an orange Callaway Golf sun visor to shade his eyes from the spotlights, and proceeded to deliver a series of three-hour lectures that finally unveiled the philosophical, psychological and spiritual sophistication of Tibetan Buddhism.
To those who had been on the verge of dismissing the incomprehensible practices as so much pagan superstition, the lectures revealed the majesty of Buddhism as an expression of the human imagination and of mankind’s quest for knowledge, something as profound as Plato and Einstein, as stirring as Beethoven and Michelangelo.
To those who may have been ready to write off the Dalai Lama as so much New Age hype, they revealed him as a teacher and scholar who excelled in the exposition and analysis of the arcane text inscribed on oblong sheets that lay like musical scores upon his lap. He was animated, confident and forceful, often using his fingers to emphasize a point or breaking into funny anecdotes to illustrate an idea.
Compared with his talk at the SkyDome, where he hadn’t even mentioned the word Buddhism, there was nothing simplistic or obvious in what he had to say about Fundamental Stanzas on the Middle Way by Nagarjuna, the great second-century Indian master.
These were dense, intellectual discourses in which His Holiness articulated the fundamentals of his beliefs with a clarity and rationality that made them accessible to all. And no matter how long or obtuse his thoughts were in Tibetan, they were transformed into elegant English by the astonishing virtuosity of his translator, Thupten Jinpa, a handsome and nattily dressed ex-monk now living in Montreal.
“Non-Buddhists can just listen,” the Dalai Lama said at the start, “and take what they want for their life,” and he urged his own followers to maintain a high degree of skepticism, objectivity and study.
Very simply put, at the core of all three lectures were the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths. The truth that existence is suffering, dissatisfaction, impermanence. The truth that suffering is the cause and effect of ignorance, attachment, desire for pleasure and aversion to pain. The truth that there is a way to end suffering. And the truth of how to end it, which is the cultivation of the mind and the heart to penetrate through the impermanence, the ignorance, the attachments, the desires and the aversions, to reach Selflessness, Emptiness, Nirvana, for the benefit of all beings, human or not.
This was the story the media hadn’t, perhaps couldn’t, cover in focusing on the Dalai Lama as a celebrity. Yet it was the most essential thing about him.
In his role as the revered leader of the Tibetan people, for example, he had inherited the burden of being the poster boy, chief fundraiser and most effective spokesman for their liberation from China’s ruthless domination. “He’s all we’ve got,” one veteran campaigner admitted.
And a great deal of His Holiness’s international popularity, especially among the young, has been his insistence on the individual’s moral responsibility to engage in the pressing issues of the world, whether war, poverty, population or environmental destruction.
But when he speaks of liberation as a Buddhist teacher, he is speaking of liberation from the suffering of a deluded, afflicted ego through wisdom and compassion. And when he speaks of responsibility, he means working for the happiness of everybody, rich or poor, good or bad, friend or foe.
That is why, no matter how brutal the oppression of Tibet, he cannot condone any hatred or violence toward the Chinese without violating his religious vows. He goes further by asserting that our greatest enemies are, in fact, our greatest friends. Nor can he wallow in the sorrow and nationalistic yearnings of his compatriots without undermining the virtues he preaches of equanimity and renunciation.
“Once I was ordained,” he said at the news conference, “I was cut off from family and society. Tibetan saying: ‘Wherever you find happiness, that’s your home.’
“Yesterday, driving in car from university, road worker waves. I put down window and shake his hand. Not very clean hand, but I feel very happy. One hundred per cent innocent. Only motive sharing human friendship. So Canada my home for last few days.”
It is the realism of his Buddhist training, too, that led him to abandon all demands for Tibet’s independence and plead only for a self-governing democratic province within China, even while his more impatient supporters keep up the cry for a free Tibet and others say it’s time for armed resistance. And rather than pushing for Tibet’s freedom in order to right a historic wrong or establish an ethnic state, his goal is to create a peaceful, tolerant society for the mutual welfare of everyone, including the Chinese.
He even understands the indisputable irony that the Chinese invasion of Tibet, for all its horrors, set into play the conditions that forced the separation of Tibetan Buddhism from a corrupt, feudal and historically militant state and allowed it to spread for the first time throughout the world.
“I am a simple Buddhist monk,” he kept repeating, to little avail. “My personality more spiritual nature.” As a consequence, he often sees events in terms of centuries, if not eons, and his activism is not driven by any ordinary thirst for power. He has already passed his political authority to the elected leaders of the government-in-exile, although the presence of his “prime minister” in Toronto garnered much less attention than the presence of Richard Gere, and he happily looks forward to the day when he can hand his temporal power to a democratic government in Tibet.
That day will never come, many observers argue, and even the Dalai Lama has had to admit that Tibet’s prospects appear “hopeless” from a certain angle. Economic development, the militarization of the Tibetan plateau and the coming of the new railway threatens to bring 20 million more Chinese immigrants within the next 10 years.
The land is already being destroyed by dams and deforestation; the towns are already booming with brothels and bars; and it may only be a matter of time before Tibet is assimilated as irreversibly as Manchuria and Mongolia.
But that doesn’t mean that Tibetan Buddhism and the Dalai Lama have to be written off as lost causes as well. “Tibetan civilization now resides with the 120,000 Tibetans outside Tibet,” said Lodi Gyari, who was His Holiness’s special envoy on two recent negotiations with the Chinese government, “though we hope to transplant it back some day, bringing the wonderful gift of democracy with us.”
For all its woe and dislocation, Tibetan civilization certainly looked a lot more vital this time than it did 14 years ago, when the Dalai Lama last visited Toronto. Public sympathy for the Tibetan cause has grown around the world, His Holiness’s books and videos are mega-sellers, and the ninth and 10th days of this Kalachakra saw the numbers double to more than 6,000 a day. About one-third were families from Ontario’s small and mostly middle-class Tibetan community who had volunteered thousands of hours over the past two years, raised $1.8-million to cover the expenses of the event, and recovered almost $2.6-million in total revenues.
By the end, too, His Holiness looked even stronger, given a physical stamina and mental strength that belied his 68 years. There was nothing downtrodden or weary about his quick, muscular gait, and he never appeared to frown or complain about anything except the bright lights (“What about my human right?” he cried) or a lack of sleep. Technical breakdowns struck him as funny, his own liturgical mistakes even funnier, and he radiated a sincere lightheartedness, humility and optimism throughout it all.
There were flashes, however, when he also appeared as vulnerable and alone as a child in a forest of wolves. For all his fame and position, he remained just a penniless monk, after all, loose in a mean age of materialistic greed and military might, with no power base other than the affection of millions of people around the world, still as dependent on the kindness of others as he had been when taken from his peasant farm as a boy and later from his palace as a young man. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, to whom he is often compared, never had to stand up to the barbarity of Chinese communism, and even they were gunned down.
“As a Buddhist, I take refuge in the Buddha,” he said, “but as a Tibetan, I take refuge in international support.”
On the final day of Kalachakra 2004, when more than 7,200 people showed up for the closing blessing, they all recited the Prayer for the Long Life of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. “We offer our prayers with intense devotion,” they chanted in Tibetan, “that Tenzin Gyatso, protector of the great Land of Snow, may live for a hundred eons. Pour on him your blessings that his aspirations may be fulfilled.”
And then there was little more to do but sweep away, as a symbol of impermanence and non-attachment, the sand mandala that had been built so meticulously. The palace that had been home to the deities for the past 11 days was destroyed and they were freed to return whence they had come. The sacred sand was taken to Battery Park, just below Lake Shore Boulevard near Ontario Place, where His Holiness came with a dozen monks to pour it into the water. The wind blew hard and cold that afternoon, and no one lingered once the 15-minute ritual was done.
Back at the trade centre, His Holiness, off to France the next day, bade farewell to the Tibetans, many of whom were in tears. The stall keepers at the Kalachakra Marketplace were packing up their books, beads, paintings and carpets. Friends new and old were making arrangements to meet up when the Dalai Lama makes an appearance in Florida next September. The organizers were already beginning to take apart the stage and put away the precious objects.
And down at the lake, where just an hour before the reporters and photographers had been jockeying for the best position, the last remnants of the sand mandala bobbed on the waves and soon dissolved into nature once again, coming and going, and leaving not a trace.
Toronto writer Ron Graham is the author of God’s Dominion, a study of religion in Canada, and has practiced Buddhism for 30 years.
