This is a good review of Pico Iyer's new book on the Dalai Lama from the New York Times Book Review.
Do you get the impression that the Dalai Lama is not exactly the brightest bulb in the room?” a journalist asked Pico Iyer after both men left a speaking event by His Holiness. We know what he’s getting at. At a certain angle, the chirpy aphorisms, the generous stream of book forewords, the Hollywood entourage, all conspire to cast a hue of superficiality that few global pop icons escape.In that light, it is possible to forget that the Dalai Lama is, in fact, a titan: a head of state, a doctor of metaphysics, a prolific author, a hyperrealist, a newshound, a godhead to the Tibetan people and the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize — a man who embodies a “simplicity that lies not before complexity but on the far side of it.”
In “The Open Road,” Iyer takes a long, hard look at the many meanings of this deceptively simple man. At first blush, one might wonder why Iyer, best known as the author of many travel memoirs including “Video Night in Kathmandu” and “Sun After Dark,” would take on such a subject. The answer lies in the understanding that Iyer is not just a travel writer, and the Dalai Lama is not just a monk.
Iyer has set out to examine Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, as a part of a larger set of ideas and thinkers — a towering example of the cross-cultural interconnectedness that has been the author’s particular subject. Iyer has long wondered “how globalism could acquire depths, an inwardness that would sustain it more than mere goods or data could.” And “if our new way of living were to offer any real sustenance,” he posits, “it would have to be invisible, in the realm of what underlies acceleration and multinationals.”
Confused? Me too. A bit. But that’s O.K., because when you have a formidable writer who says I’m curious, catch me if you can, and a subject as rich as the Dalai Lama, it’s best to just hang on for the ride.
Read the rest.
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