Picoreading
Travel writer and veteran Time journalist Pico Iyer stopped by Harvard Book Store tonight to read from his new book The Open Road, a profile of the Dalai Lama. He said that five years ago when he began his book, he planned its release for this spring because he knew Tibetans would be protesting around the Beijing Olympics.
Iyer is slim, elfin and speaks in the cadence and tone of a British public television presenter. He’s charming, with an open face and intelligent eyes, and lives in Japan. At the reading, he laid out a couple of very interesting themes in the Dalai Lama’s decades-long chess game with China:
- Tibet is strategic to China. It’s two-thirds the size of Western Europe, sites a hundred nuclear missiles and encompasses the headwaters of four major Asian rivers.
- Unlike Mohandas Gandhi’s struggle, Tibetans are outnumbered by Chinese approximately 200 to 1: there are around 6 million people in Tibet and around 1.2 billion Chinese. With those numbers, the Dalai Lama has no choice but to enlist the outside world for support. And that requires being a model of comity and transparency.
- The Dalai Lama is genuinely interested in hitching Tibet’s economic development to the growth engine of China. He sees the rail link as a potentially helpful tool with no intrinsic morality.
- He’s not averse to a Tibet which turns even two-thirds ethnic Chinese, if the Chinese are also Buddhist. Many of the Chinese tourists visiting Lhasa come to pay their respects at Buddhist shrines.
- China kidnapped the next Panchen Lama, a six-year-old boy, and put an impostor in his place, conducting Buddhist rituals even though the Communist Party itself is atheist. The Dalai Lama said that there may be no next Dalai Lama, or the Lama may be female. But either way, he said, a Lama who moves away from the current Dalai Lama’s principles is inherently illegitimate, rituals or no.
- China’s communists are duplicitous and project that upon the Lama. They are suspicious of him, and there’s little that can be done to dissuade a reflexively distrustful party of its wariness.
- That China has been reduced to name-calling shows that it has little genuine reason not to talk with the Dalai Lama. Their justifications are laughable — he’s clearly neither separatist nor ‘against the interest of the Tibetan people.’
- Iyer claimed Tibetans are the most successful refugee community; he name-checked Rangzen restaurant in Central Square.
The audience was of a certain age — silver-haired Iyer fans, Dalai Lama admirers and Buddhists. My friends both bought copies for their mothers. A Tibetan woman from Dharamsala greeted Iyer warmly, but I saw only one man who looked like he might be Chinese.
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