wheel of time

One reason that the Dalai Lama is on my mind a lot lately is that, just over a week ago, I finally watched the Werner Herzog documentary Wheel of Time. The film is memorable not just for its portrayal of an aborted Kalachakra initiation in Dharamsala, and a successful one in Austria, but also for the images of hundreds if not thousands of Tibetan pilgrims making the kora at Mt. Kailash. I don't believe that I've seen any other film footage of the remote mountain (remote enough that in my three weeks in Tibet I didn't have the time or wherewithal to make the trip).

But the Dalai Lama. I've been thinking about him a lot lately. I think he's become a spiritual hero to me, despite my own misgivings. A couple of years ago, before my own three-week sojourn in Tibet, I studied Buddhism for a semester at the university where I work, and wrote a paper that contained some measured criticism of His Holiness. I wrote about "some ways in which a Western-favoured construction of Buddhism... is not purely a Western projection but has been shaped, encouraged, and indeed sold to the West by key Eastern figures, especially the Dalai Lama."

These include Buddhism as: “world religion” analogous to Christianity; in “dialogue” with Christianity rather than proselytizing; ethical/non-violent, thereby conducive to social reform; atheistic/rational and fully compatible with science; and having meditation as its essential practice.

Let's not even get into the D.L.'s homophobia and general sex-phobia (I know, I know, cut the guy some slack, he's a monk).

OK, OK, James, but having conceded all that, don't you have to admit that, hey, you are Western, you consider yourself a progressive, and at some level you really dig what the D.L. has to say?

Yup. Lately, when I hear His Holiness talking about tolerance and compassion, it does my strife-tired heart good. I think it's probably too cynical to say that he is simply pandering to the West. What's more, I really like what he has to say about personal spiritual development and how to learn about other religious traditions.

In a nutshell, the Dalai Lama says that you don't need to leave the tradition you were raised in to acquire an understanding of other traditions. You can remain a Christian, say, while acquiring the religious insights that Buddhism, for example, has to offer. Don't convert, he seems to say. Extend. Dialogue. Visit the world's spiritual sites. Read the world's spiritual classics. With understanding comes compassion and peace.

How can I argue with that? I don't know what it has to do with Buddhism as actually practiced in Tibet, say, but I dig the bit about cross-tradition pilgrimage, though I've only just begun to travel, really. Borobodur, the Wailing Wall, Al-Aqsa, are all on my before-I-die checklist.

Though no specific religious tradition lays a claim on it, I consider the Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima to be the most spiritually significant site that I've visited. Yet it didn't turn me into a pacifist in the strong ideological sense (give me another few years?). Tibet's oldest monastery, Samye, left a mark on me that I believe will be lifelong. Yet I feel no urge to convert to Buddhism.

Which fact prompts a side note. When I tell people that I went to Tibet and visited ten Buddhist monasteries, they ask me if I'm a Buddhist or if I plan to convert, as if that's perfectly cool. When I tell people that I've read the Qu'ran, am learning Arabic and continue to study Islam, people sometimes say, "So are you going to convert?" as if it's a joke, or sometimes: "You aren't converting, are you?" I wouldn't describe any of these individual people as bigots by any stretch, but the pattern that emerges is pretty ethnocentric/prejudiced, wouldn't you say?

And that brings me back to the sacred sites. Sometimes, I wish that I didn't need to be a Muslim to make a pilgrimage to the Kaaba. I don't imagine I'm going to make it there in my lifetime, much as would love to merge with those Muslim pilgrims the way that I was able to join the Tibetan Buddhist faithful at places like the Jokhang in Lhasa. (1000 metres above Lhasa, at the mountain-top site of Ganden Monastery, I touched the transcendent while making the kora with a Tibetan lama and monk and a Chinese nun, without being able to exchange more than a few words.) But I realize that all religions don't work the same way, and I respect that. And I have come to believe, despite frequent appearances to the contrary, that peace and compassion are at the core of all of the major traditions. Just as the Dalai Lama would say.