The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. Pico Iyer. The nexus of the coming summer Olympic Games and the weather catastrophes of recent months in China and Burma have opened a new window of curiosity and interest to the issues of Buddhism, Democracy, Globalization, Compassion and Spiritual leadership. Few are bettered positioned to provide insights than Iyer who met the Dalai Lama through visits with his father when a child and whose curiosity about the “East” has sustained him as a writer for decades, include frequent circlings through the presence of the Dalai Lama and Dharmasala.

The one passage that I am drawn back to repeatedly, in the face of repetitious innuendo that the Dalai Lama has political goals for an independent Tibet, is this one, which has both specific and general implications about paths to reconciliation and peace in the world:

“The Dalai Lama’s hope was to bring some of the light and clarity of the monk’s domain, “ultimate reality,” into the politician’s world of conventional reality; to be able, in effect, to stage a kind of Copernican revolution by getting us to see that the world does not revolve around the self, but the other way around. It was as if, seeing the forest through the trees, seeing the pattern and order, the possibility within the seeming chaos, he was arguing for a complete reorientation of the center of gravity in politics; while politicians squabbled about whether to paint the vehicle of society red or green, he was calling for a rewiring of the engine.

“O course we could win small victories against the Chinese, he was essentially saying to young Tibetans, as guerrillas do in Northern Ireland and Spain and Peru; but in the long term we would be losers, by squandering the respect of the world and sparking the rage of a nation two hundred times more populous than our own. Of course, we can see the Chinese as enemies, but if we do so, we are saying in effect, that we are going to spend all our lives in the midst of enemy forces; the better solution is to change how we think of the situation, perhaps by seeing that our real enemies are our own habitual tendencies toward thinking in terms of enemies. We can always see the decisive effects of action; but what underlies action, in the way of viewpoint and motivation and feeling, is where the real change has to come.” P. 226