A Date with Mr. Lama

It's not so often you get to be right up close with one of the most famous people in the world.

My 'List of Famous People I've Interacted With So Far' is good supporting evidence of this fact:

1. Wayne Gretzky (at golf course in Edmonton)
2. Nelly Furtado (at Los Angeles International Airport)
3. Queen Elizabeth (at Glasgow Cathedral)

Pretty crappy list, eh? Well, the good news is that I recently was able to add another name to the illustrious roster. But before we talk about that, let's open our history books to the year 1959.

Tibet.
A landlocked country of dusty deserts and misty mountains where 633,000 people reside, nearly all of them Buddhist. For Tibetans, life is simple, bucolic, family-oriented and centered around a deeply ingrained collective sense of spirituality. Their leader, both politically and religiously, is a man chosen not by democracy but by prophecy, a man who is said to be the reflection of the Buddha himself in human form - a man we all know as the Dalai Lama.

At any given time, there is only one Dalai Lama, but the interesting fact is that according to Tibetans, he is the 'same guy' over and over. Each time one Dalai Lama passes on, Tibetan political leaders and their oracles undertake a massive nationwide search in order to find the child who has been chosen as his replacement - by reincarnation. The child must prove his worth by undergoing a series of tests, one of which is to correctly identify sacred objects owned by previous Dalai Lamas. Once the child is found, he is immediately spirited to Lhasa and trained to be the leader of Tibet. A man known as the Regent fills in the gap until the child is ready. It doesn't take long - by age 12, he's pretty much running the country.

The current Dalai Lama (born Tenzin Gyatso) is the 14th in his line. The chain remained unbroken so long as Tibet was a peaceful country, which it has been in accordance with Buddhist philosophy for quite some time. Unfortunately, in 1959, things changed.

Enter Mao Tse Tung. Mao was a bit of a prick, and felt that since Tibetans were a bunch of reactionary farmers, he had a right to move in and industrialize them. The Tibetans, unsurprisingly, weren't too keen on having their religion abolished and their lives managed by people in Peking, and so they staged massive protests. Mao played ball for a little while and attempted to make the Tibetans' transition into China a peaceful one, but soon he got fed up with the level of dissent in the ranks of his new subjects, and decided to release the hounds. Troops and tanks entered Tibet and began to lay waste to sacred monasteries, murder monks and jail anyone thought to oppose the new regime. The Dalai Lama, who was only fifteen at the time but had already ruled Tibet for several years, was powerless to do anything. Tibet had no army and no way to fight back. And so, at the bequest of his political advisers, the Dalai Lama eventually fled his palace in Lhasa under cover of night, and marched himself into exile in neighbouring India.

Enough of the past. I sometimes wonder if you guys don't get annoyed with my frequent historical annotations. The point is that it's now 49 years later, and the Dalai Lama is still in India, living in the remote Himalayan outpost of McLeod Ganj. China has changed hands a few times, but the Dalai Lama has never returned to his beloved Tibet, which is now an occupied territory. Fortunately, the man has never abated in his quest to raise awareness worldwide for the atrocities committed by the Chinese, nor has he ever doubted the fact that someday he would return to his palace in Lhasa and be with his people.

For now, he lives in a temple, perched on the side of a slope in the snowy mountains, where he runs his operation remotely. McLeod Ganj has become a strange place in his presence, one half filled with monks and the other half with curious tourists. It's a bit of a singular experience to walk around a town and have monks everywhere you look, be it sitting next to you in an internet cafe, shouting into a cell phone on the streets, or getting their heads shaved in a barber shop. One monk came by our hotel every night, lit a fire in the courtyard, and proceeded to dry his white underwear over the flames. There are even quite a few Caucasian monks.

Seeing the Dalai Lama is usually a tall order. He is an extremely busy man and travels widely, so to just show up in McLeod Ganj and have him there is a low-probability occurrence. Much lower when you show up just in time to hear him talk at the palace, which he does 9 days out of each year. During this time, people come from all over the world to hear the man read from his texts, so that the palace is full to the gills with both monks and tourists alike.

To get in, Dominic and I staked out the temple for a few days, until one morning we finally were granted an audience. We sat down on a cold, hard concrete floor, and along with hundreds of other pilgrims (and a lot of dredlocked poseurs who think sitting cross-legged, saying OM and not showering is cool), we waited. Soon, people began to stir, and sure enough the gates opened a moment later and in he strolled.

He was not what I expected. I'd imagined a stoic, serious man, seeing as he's supposed to be the Buddha and all, but in fact he was quite jovial. He wore traditional orange robes, big round glasses and had an enormous grin on his face. Everyone bowed in reverence, and through his compassionate smile I could see that he didn't really think all the pretense was necessary... it was as if he was saying "Ok, let's dispense with the formalities. I am just a man."

The teaching lasted three hours. It was done in Tibetan, but foreigners could listen to the English interpretation in real-time on an FM radio. I zoned out for most of the duration, inasmuch as my ass was asleep and I had no idea what he was talking about. There was a lot of mention of an elephant and some trees and babbling brooks and snowy peaks and monkeys and quiet pontification, but it was all too complicated. Who cares. I quickly dispensed with the earpiece and just watched the man as he sat on his throne, calmly turning the pages of his giant book, and preaching to people about how they can attain inner harmony.

I'm not a spiritual person by any means. You all already know that. Still, this is a man who has gone through a half-century long personal struggle, a man whom the whole world should be rallying behind, and I felt honoured to be in his presence.

Mao Tse Tung was an anus.