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Review: The Dalai Lama: An Extraordinary Life by Alexander Norman

Hindustan Times | ByThubten Samphel
Mar 27, 2020 02:22 PM IST

A new biography of the Dalai Lama shows how the spiritual leader has won millions of followers worldwide for Buddhism in the Tibetan tradition

410pp, ₹799; HarperCollins

Tibet scholar Alexander Norman’s biography of the Dalai Lama is the most detailed and comprehensive one so far. The author examines the Tibetan leader’s spiritual and political life and covers his worldwide travels; travels to either provide spiritual ministry or to speak about conditions in Tibet and his vision for the country. These travels include the two consequential early ones he made to China and India.

Norman recounts the visits in some detail. For the young Dalai Lama, isolated in the Potala Palace in a country out of touch with the rest of the world, these two journeys were ones of discovery and learning. Both countries were then undergoing transformation and revolution. During his visit to China between 1954 and 1955, the young Dalai Lama was informed of the virtues of socialism. He met Mao several times. Norman writes, “It seems that both men had similar opinion of each other as key players in their respective domains. Mao saw the Dalai Lama as crucial to winning over the Tibetans. The Dalai Lama… understood that his strategy should be to develop a strong personal relationship with the Chinese leader.”

The Dalai Lama fleeing Tibet on horseback into exile in India in March 1959. (Francis Apesteguy/Getty Images)
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During his visit to India in 1956, the Dalai Lama discovered the freedom that upheld India’s messy and vibrant democracy. These two visits shaped his own political worldview. After escaping to India in 1959, the Dalai Lama, under the tolerant gaze of the government of India, engineered two revolutions of his own. He democratized the Tibetan administration in exile. These were reforms that he had wanted to gradually carry out in Tibet. His plans were thwarted by the Chinese overlords who thought this would take the wind out of their revolutionary sails. Many years later, the Dalai Lama devolved his political authority to a democratically-elected leader.

By these two acts, the 14th Dalai Lama made Tibet whole once again. Though old Tibet was homogenous by ethnicity, language, religion and culture, one third of it was administered under a central authority. The rest, north-eastern and eastern Tibet, was divided along tribal fault lines and owed some form of shaky allegiance to whichever capital, Lhasa or Beijing, imposed less tax.

By giving Tibetan refugees the gift of democracy and by handing all his traditional political authority to an elected leadership, the Dalai Lama regrouped not only his people but his culture into a transnational effort. This was done through intense political and cultural connectivity and interaction.

Norman writes, “When he was followed into exile by eighty thousand destitute refugees, he might have hoped, at best for their rapid absorption into Indian society while the Dalai Lama himself went on to establish one or more small Buddhist centres either in India or elsewhere. For him to have presided over an establishment of a widely successful, broadly cohesive diaspora that numbers now perhaps a quarter of million individuals and scattered across the world, and besides this to have won for Buddhism in the Tibetan tradition a following in the millions worldwide, is quite astonishing and certainly without parallel in the modern world.”

The other accomplishment of the Dalai Lama is his active encouragement of a sustained conversation between Buddhism and science. He believes ancient India’s exploration of psychology and the workings of the human mind has much to offer to science whose understanding of the relations between consciousness and mind he teasingly describes as “at the kindergarten level.” Professor Robert Thurman, formerly of Columbia University’s department of religion, and once listed by Time magazine as among the 100 most influential individuals in America, believes the Dalai Lama has “become one of the world’s greatest scientists.”

Author Alexander Norman (Courtesy HarperCollins)

Alexander Norman’s book on the Dalai Lama is great story telling. However, there are one or two jarring notes which, hopefully, will be corrected in future editions. During his visit to China, the Tibetan leader celebrated the Tibetan New Year with the top Chinese leaders, including Mao. Besides, Mao, the photo in the book shows the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama seated with Zhou En-lai, the premier, and Liu Shaoqi, the chairman of the People’s Republic. In the photo caption, Liu Shaoqi is identified as Zhu De, China’s top general.

Read more: Recreating Tibet Outside: Early Years of the Refugee Community

Elsewhere, Norman writes that Xi Zhongxun, the father of the present Chinese Xi Jinping, was posted in Tibet. This was not the case. But the senior Xi became close to the Dalai Lama during the Tibetan leader’s China visit in the 1950s.

Alexander Norman’s biography is a tribute to a great Tibetan and a greater human being who has revitalized his cultural universe from exile. Given the present mess of our world, one marvels that someone like him walks the earth.

Thubten Samphel is an independent researcher and a former director of the Tibet Policy Institute.

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