Hand In Hand With The Dalai Lama

In the lotus-strewn wake of the Dalai Lama's recent North American tour, anybody who is a somebody (and frankly, these days who isn't?) will have a how-I-met-the-Dalai-Lama story to tell. At the slightest instigation or with none at all, Catholic, Jew, atheist, they'll regale you with the encounter, eyes misting over. Often these turn out to be 30-second meetings in an elevator or hotel lobby. Even the shortest exchange takes on Greater Meaning. Such is the profundity of his presence and his ability to be so present with whomever he meets.

I listen politely to such stories. Then I struggle with my ego: should I trump theirs and tell mine? My ego usually wins, as it will here, because my meeting with his holiness was so touching and revealing.

I had scored a one-on-one 90-minute interview with the 14th Dalai Lama, largely – okay, solely – because I was writing about the growing popularity of Buddhism for one of his favorite magazines, National Geographic.

I was to meet him in Dharamsala, India, headquarters of the Tibet Government in Exile since 1959. His secretary recommended I ask questions that were not the run-of-the-mill sort he has fielded for some 50 years and who knows how many lifetimes. In preparation, I read his autobiography, My Land and My People. It begins: "I was born in a small village called Taktser, in the northeast of Tibet, on the fifth day of the fifth month of the Wood Hog Year of the Tibetan calendar – that is, the year 1935."
I stopped reading after the first paragraph, fixated on that village of his birth. This would be my unique angle. I convinced National Geographic to send me to Taktser, so that I could open the conversation with something like, "So I just happened to be in your old neighborhood, Holiness..." It might have been the most expensive icebreaker in National Geographic history. The village, it turns out, is one of the most humble I have ever seen. Dirt paths, tiny mud houses set against a cliff, not a Starbucks in sight.

At the top of a hill, I found the house where Lhamo Dhondrub was born and from which he was taken at age four to begin his life as a future Dalai Lama. Rebuilt in 1986 as a monastery, the structure is now administered by the Chinese Government, a superficial gesture to make Tibetans believe the Chinese actually care about them and their leader. The Chinese government's clear discomfort (to put it mildly) with the attention showered on him in the United States two weeks ago more accurately reflects their position.

Inside, I met the Dalai Lama's nephew, Gongbu Tashi, a man of 58 who the Chinese government pays to maintain the monastery. He told me more and more Westerners make the long pilgrimage to this now historic site. After he showed me around, we stood outside the monastery, overlooking the magnificent rolling green mountains of the Kunlun Range. My tape recorder running, I suggested he send his uncle a message that I promised to deliver personally. "What would you tell him right now?" I asked, putting the recorder to his mouth. He started: "Uncle, every day we are waiting and hoping and expecting you. You are my uncle and you are getting older and it's time for you to come home."

It was such a poignant moment because it was such a futile and implausible hope.