Why won't the Dalai Lama pick a fight?

The Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual and temporal leader in exile and the man Buddhists believe to be the fourteenth incarnation of the Buddha of Compassion, doesn't see himself as a miracle worker. "I'm a skeptic," he said at his recent sold-out appearance at the FleetCenter in Boston, Massachusetts. "If someone truly has healing power, I'd like to call about my knees."

It was a good quip--and the Dalai Lama has a few. But while he may not possess preternatural powers, there can be no argument that he has considerable international clout, at least potentially. Consider the following.

Before coming to Boston (primarily for a conference at Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Buddhism and science) as part of a twenty-day, five-city U.S. tour, the Dalai Lama met with President George W. Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and other U.S. leaders--an audience not always accorded to heads of state. The national press, as usual, covered his visit to the United States. His various books sell very well; The Art of Happiness, a collection of conversations with author Howard C. Cutler, sold more than 1.2 million copies and was on the New York Times bestseller list for nearly two years. Tickets for his talk at the FleetCenter, entitled "The Global Community and the Need for Universal Responsibility," ranged up to $100, with the scalpers outside doing a brisk trade. In New York City, his final stop, tickets for his teaching sessions were priced at $400 each ($1200 and $3000 for VIPs and big donors) and sold out well in advance. And then there's the fact that His Holiness won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.

As a man of peace, the Dalai Lama speaks often and long about the importance of compassion, "reducing destructive emotions," tolerance, "internal disarmament," restraint, and the role of intelligence in facilitating these things. But there seems to be a gulf between his expertise in these general precepts and his ability to condense and apply them in certain areas.

In The Art of Peace, a collection of topical papers by Nobel Peace Prize laureates, he states, "Non-violence and peace don't mean that we remain indifferent, passive." But at the FleetCenter, when asked about the U.S. invasion of Iraq, he said simply: "It is too early to say what will happen. Wait a few years. That is my opinion." And in a March 11, 2003, official statement on the same issue, he said, "All we can do is pray for the gradual end to the tradition of wars," adding, "I don't know whether our prayers will be of any practical help." Some might call this passivity.

By contrast, in statements made just prior to the invasion, he said explicitly that war is an organized and legalized form of violence that creates more problems than it solves. He also said, "I prefer [that] violence or war should not take place." He took a similar line in a 2001 letter to Bush just after the attacks on the World Trade Center, saying, "Violence will only increase the cycle of violence." But in the letter he offered no specific admonitions and closed mildly with, "I am sure you will make the right decision."

It would seem, then, that for all the indisputable good the Dalai Lama does in terms of spiritual guidance, he is reluctant to tread on any political toes. This raises the question: as an influential humanitarian, isn't it incumbent upon him at least to ask the tough questions of world leaders and, at most, to bring all conceivable pressure to bear on them as his conscience dictates?

This question is being asked more than one might think. While the Dalai Lama is universally loved as a man of peace and wisdom, he has his critics. Younger Tibetans are becoming frustrated with the lack of change in their homeland. And some scholars and political commentators wonder why the Dalai Lama doesn't weigh in on other issues of great political import, such as the current situation in Iraq.

"The world is overflowing with preachers and sages who can radiate their often-sincere spirituality," says media columnist Norman Solomon, coauthor of Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You. "Yet what we need most is engagement with struggles to halt the actualities of violence and suffering--we need willingness to risk offending the powerful." Solomon goes on to say that the war in Iraq and the current aspects of its occupation aren't abstractions, but are often treated as such by "those who stick to platitudes and evasions."

"Direct questions deserve direct answers," he notes. "Talk--even, and at times especially, spiritual talk--is cheap and easy, especially when the alternative would be forthright condemnation of those who, for instance, ordered 2000-pound bombs and cruise missiles to be fired on heavily populated areas of Iraq last spring."

In a Salon article of several years back entitled "The Bodhisattva of PR," commentator Chris Colin suggested that the Dalai Lama is "Gandhi meets P. T. Barnum, minus the elephants." More recently, Patrick French, author of Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land, wrote an article for the New York Times called "Dalai Lama Lite," in which he said that the Dalai Lama's U.S. tour "confirmed his status as the world's No. 1 feel-good guru."

Renowned historian Howard Zinn, author of the best-selling A People's History of the United States, is a little more charitable but no less forthright. He states:

   I've always admired the Dalai Lama for his advocacy
   of nonviolence and his support of the rights of Tibet
   against Chinese domination. But I must say I was disappointed
   to read his comment on the war in Iraq [i.e.,
   "Wait a few years"], because this is such an obvious,
   clear-cut moral issue in which massive violence has
   been used against Iraqis with many thousands of
   dead.... I wonder if the Dalai Lama knows enough
   about the history of U.S. foreign policy. If he did, he
   would understand the real motives of our invasion of
   Iraq and would not be ambivalent about the present
   war and occupation.

Certainly it isn't a case of a lack of intelligence on the part of the Dalai Lama. Indeed, at his Cambridge, Massachusetts, press conference of September 12, 2003, he spoke authoritatively about the interconnectedness of cosmology, neurobiology, psychology, and physics--clearly, he is streets ahead of most people in intellectual prowess.

So, given his intelligence and enormous sense of compassion, why doesn't the Dalai Lama question the U.S. president about the downside of globalization? About "Star Wars II" and his administration's flagrant disregard of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty? About the unlawful attack on Iraq and civilian body counts? Why doesn't he at least pose such questions rhetorically in the media? Could it really be that this esteemed sixty-eight-year-old monk is so focused on inner change (and the external environment as it pertains to scientific phenomena) that he hasn't done his homework on major political issues? When it comes to geopolitical and global economic matters, is the Dalai Lama living in peaceful ignorance in the suburbs of reality?

Undoubtedly, for many people, even to suggest such a thing is akin to booing Santa Claus. After all, the Dalai Lama is a very likeable human being. He is caring, witty, and almost cuddly. He is calm, wise, and even venerable. In short, he makes people feel good. The adoration at the FleetCenter was virtually palpable. But as political commentator Noam Chomsky has often said, to personalize an issue is to lose sight of the facts.

And the fact is that the Dalai Lama won't pick a fight--the good fight. For some reason, he won't respectfully ask Bush how he could invade a nation without the official consent of the United Nations. Nor will the Dalai Lama publicly speculate about the motivations for Bush's actions, which have yielded neither stashed weapons of mass destruction nor links to the 9/11 attacks. Furthermore, whenever the Dalai Lama broaches the topic at all, it is within the framework of the "U.S. response." The notion of U.S. culpability has never been an issue that the Dalai Lama has seen fit to approach directly--whether the topic is Iraq, Grenada, Nicaragua, East Timor, or developing-world sweatshops.

And, as Norman Solomon suggests, the act of not speaking out amounts to taking a political position. He adds, "Let the great spiritual teachers basking in acclaim today learn how to emulate Martin Luther King Jr., who in 1967 explicitly condemned 'racism,' 'militarism,' and 'economic exploitation' while also having the moral fortitude to denounce the Vietnam War."

The Dalai Lama had time to answer only six questions from the sizable audience at the Cambridge press conference, though many more people had questions to ask. And the official line was that he would give no private interviews during his tour--though, as it turned out, this wasn't strictly the case. Repeated attempts to get a response to this article through his New York media representative were met with a "too busy" response. Yet the New York Times reported that the Tibetan leader somehow found time for a photo op with pop star Ricky Martin. It makes you wonder.

Adrian Zupp is a freelance writer. He can be reached at [e-mail]