And though he is most celebrated around the world these days for his ability to talk to halls large enough to stage a Bon Jovi concert, his special strength is to address twenty thousand people—Buddhists and grandmothers and kids alike—as if he were talking to each one alone, in the language she can best understand. The Dalai Lama’s maxims are collected and packaged now as books to carry in your handbag, as calendar items and as advertising slogans, but the heart of the man exists, I think, in silence. In his deepest self he is that being who sits alone each day at dawn, eyes closed, reciting prayers, with all his heart, for his Chinese oppressors, his Tibetan people, and all sentient beings.Yet the curiosity of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama’s life—one of the things that have made it seem at once a parable and a kind of koan—is that he has had to pursue his spiritual destiny, for more than half a century, almost entirely in the world (and, in fact, in a political world whose god is Machiavelli).
