Jeffrey Paine

Re-enchantment

An excerpt

On any day of his life, no matter his age (at least since his maturity), regardless of which country he is in, the Dalai Lama reveals a man seemingly operating on a different principle—a principle that, if nothing else, allows him to do a greater variety of different things and usually do them with some grace. When he first visited Washington, D.C., in 1993, for example (after long being denied a visa to the United States), a roomful of senators met with him—mainly because he had won the Nobel Prize for Peace. The senators were unsure of the politics involved, though, and an awkward silence burdened the room. Then the Dalai Lama began to giggle, and next the senators were giggling, and the meeting went quite well. Afterwards a photographer came to photograph the Dalai Lama but was so nervous he kept dropping his equipment. The Dalai Lama's response was to go over and hug the photographer. Later that afternoon a couple had an audience with him, bringing their two-year-old conveniently at his nap time. The boy remained wide-awake, plucking grapes from a huge bowl of fruit on the coffee table, much to his parents' embarrassment. The Dalai Lama got on his knees and began also plucking grapes, flicking them with his finger across the room, as the child gleefully retrieved them. That meeting went very well, too. He often handles situations with a finesse a diplomat would envy, but the above are hardly the calculated gestures of a Tallyrand or Disraeli.

Or, to take another example, he was the same constantly revved engine of often unexpected action when he first visited Mexico in 1988. Security had to be arranged, but because his visit was privately arranged and funded, that security was quite low budget. Those security guards or matones (killers) resembled caricatures of Pancho Villa, swearing and drinking, and boasted nicknames like "El Angel" because they looked anything but. The matones had not a clue who the Dalai Lama was, and his Mexican hosts prayed nothing too terrible would happen. By the second day, though, the guards were tearful as they explained to the hosts that the Dalai Lama was the sweetest person in the world. They began fetching their mothers so the Dalai Lama could bless them. By the end of his visit, those mangy lions had turned into pussycats: They fingered their newly acquired malas and were chanting Om Mani Padma Hum. What is peculiar is that the Dalai Lama did not speak Spanish, nor did the guards speak English. He would pinch their cheeks and otherwise find wordless gestures to communicate with them. His hosts marveled: Those guards offered the Tibetan cause nothing, they had no money or influence, but the Dalai Lama was every bit as interested in them as in the political and religious VIPs he was meeting. (Curiously, there is a superstition in Mexico that its dormant volcano the "Sleeping Lady" will rumble into life and the country with it, once the Tibetans arrive.)