A simple universal ‘Doctor of the Soul’

Raaja Bhasin

The Dalai Lama and the Pope are the world’s two greatest living religious leaders. Beyond their public appearances and talks, very little is known about what they actually do. A common perception is that they spend their time praying and when they are not doing that, they smile and bless people. That, however, is the ‘common perception’. Reality is far more complex.

Unlike the Pope of today, the Dalai Lama continues to hold both temporal and spiritual strands of leadership of his followers. While he is not the abbot of a monastery and is a ‘simple lama’, as he describes himself, the Dalai Lama is the earthly manifestation of Chenresig, the Bodhisattava of Compassion. Chenresig is considered to be the father of all Tibetan people. This is not an abstract theological construct, but is essential to the self-identity of the Tibetan people. The present one, born Tenzin Gyatso in 1935, is the fourteenth Dalai Lama. He heads the powerful mystic tradition that came to hold sway in both spiritual and temporal matters across Tibet.

Alexander Norman’s powerful and intense biography of the Dalai Lama goes beyond the life-recording of one of the world’s most extraordinary men and his extraordinary life. It is also an articulate exploration of the phenomenon that is the Dalai Lama, whom for good reason, we call ‘His Holiness’ — though that is a sobriquet that Norman consciously avoids using in the book. Norman may well be the best qualified to write this biography. He has closely collaborated with the Dalai Lama on many of his books — some of which have been international bestsellers — like Freedom in Exile, The Secret Lives of the Dalai Lama and Beyond Religion. He has also authored the acclaimed history of the Dalai Lama, Holder of the White Lotus. It would have been all too easy for this to have become a hagiography full of platitude and praise. On the contrary, it is well balanced and carefully worded.

There are aspects of the Dalai Lama’s life that many of us are familiar with — like how he led his people into India after the Chinese invaded Tibet and of how, he and the Tibetan Government in Exile, are settled in McLeodganj or Upper Dharamsala. There is the award of the Nobel Prize and perhaps more importantly, the Templeton Prize for Spiritual Progress. There are rarely told incidents like of the time when the Great Thirteenth, the earthly predecessor of the present Dalai Lama, visited the village of Taktser in 1907 and promised to return. It was here that the rebirth took place. Rich in anecdotes, numerous incidents like this are placed in a broad structural frame that divides the book into four sections. The first two are set in Tibet and the second two are of the time when the Dalai Lama came to India.

The second half of the book that begins with the section: Freedom in Exile and flows into The Bodhisattava of Compassion is powerfully compelling. Here, the second part of this second section comes as close to being publishable to present-day events as a book on the life of someone still living can. These pages describe with considerable sensitivity and insight, his life in McLeodganj and the travels and talks of the Dalai Lama in various places. Here, Norman appears as much of an insider as an ‘outsider’ can be. His description of the complex rituals and their profound impact is remarkable; to use one of Norman’s lines: ‘Bear eloquent testimony to the power of metaphysics to move human beings.’

One of the more interesting sets of pages is the one that followed the Dalai Lama’s forceful words in 1996, when he publicly repudiated the worship of the deity, Shugden. This led to considerable tension within the Tibetan community and the shocking murder of Lobsang Gyatso, a close associate of the ‘Precious Protector’ — which is one of the Dalai Lama’s many titles and honorifics. There is a look at the politics and skulduggery behind many events and power-plays, a peek behind the pulls and pressures within the Tibetan tradition — and its present-day implications.

Going beyond a biological lifetime, Norman goes into a basic background that contextualises the Dalai Lama in a historical framework. The note on the Fourteen Dalai Lamas and the glossary are especially useful. Norman looks at the supposed contradictions, (doesn’t existence itself contradict itself?) or at least the conundrums that are seemingly resolved by dialectics within the philosophy that came out of the

Roof of the World.

This is not just a biography of the Dalai Lama, but encompasses the far wider and far greater tradition of Buddhism as practised in Tibet and other areas of the Himalayas.

A universal ‘Doctor of the Soul’ was how Pico Iyer, quoted by Alexander Norman, once described the Dalai Lama — even though Buddhism denies the existence of the soul. What will always remain are perhaps the words of the Precious Protector: ‘Compassion, reconciliation and forgiveness’.