The Open Road is about “The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.” Pico Iyer is the author of six nonfiction and two fiction books; more importantly for this topic, he has been covering the Tibetan question for more than 20 years. He knows that not even the Dalai Lama can solve the conflicts of the world. However, he says that whereas no one man can have all the answers, it is the questions that the Dalai Lama “puts into play that invigorate.”

Although he likes to say that he is a “simple Buddhist monk,” he is the temporal leader of the Tibetans, organizing 50 exile communities around the world, “dealing every day with the two great powers of the day, Beijing and Washington, while living in the third, India.” He is also head of one of the major schools of Buddhism, who writes books, delivers lectures, and travels around the world. He is also a dedicated man of science.

Iyer’s father knew the Dalai Lama when they were both in their twenties. He met him in India when Tenzin Gyatso had fled the Chinese only a year before. Pico Iyer traveled to Dharamsala to meet him when Iyer was a teenager. They have conversed for 30 years in many different settings. He also had a number of interviews with the Dalai Lama’s brother.

The Dalai Lama meditates for four hours every morning. He also listens to the voice of America, the BBC East Asian broadcast, and the BBC World Service every morning. He has been the ruler of his people since he was five years old, and saw the turmoil of a civil war in his country when the was 12. Then, or course, while still young, he had to leave Tibet in front of the Chinese army.

Iyer tells his story while weaving in his own experiences as he tries to understand the religion and philosophy that make his subject interesting beyond his role as a world leader. “His very warmth and charisma are so strong that those who listen to him sometimes don’t see behind them to what is really lasting.” He is in the odd position of trying to tell us that he is real, as real as his country, bleeding and oppressed.

Iyer says that it is rare for him to say anything against the Chinese. He goes out of his way to forgive and try to understand. “The Dali Lama liked to talk of ‘human beings,’ nearly always preceded by the pronoun ‘we,’ but what he was really talking about was ‘human becomings,’ and the ways each one of us could travel along the open road to becoming more compassionate and responsible.”

Iyer has done an excellent job of meeting his goal of bringing “the Dalai Lama out of Tibet and Buddhism and into the larger community of ideas and thinkers, to show how much and how often his interests chime with those of other traditions and explorers.”

The Open Road is available at the Mary Willis Library.