Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 191: Alexander Norman on the Journey of Finding Voice, Ghostwriting, and the Dalai Lama
130 Plays5 years ago
Alexander Norman, author of The Dalai Lama: An Extraordinary Life (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020), joins me to talk about his new book and how he has struggled to find his voice as a writer.
Thanks to Bay Path University, HippoCamp2020, and my monthly newsletter for the support.
Recommended
Transcript
Childhood Dreams of Magic
00:00:00
Speaker
Every boy, every growing boy and presumably every growing girl would like to be a wizard and would like to make magic happen.
00:00:15
Speaker
ACNFers, you know what to do.
Creative Writing Education
00:00:19
Speaker
Discover your story of Bay Path University's fully online MFA and creative nonfiction writing. Faculty have a true passion for their work. Trying to do with every comment, edit and reading assignment. Instructors are available to answer all your questions and their years of experience as writers and teachers have made for an unbeatable experience. Head over to baypath.edu slash MFA for more information.
00:00:48
Speaker
Hmm... What do you say, CNFers? Wanna get after it? Let's do this. Yes.
Guest Introduction: Alexander Norman
00:00:59
Speaker
Alright, we've got Alexander Norman on the show today for episode 191. He wrote a thorough biography of the Dalai Lama.
00:01:12
Speaker
He's known the Dalai Lama for something like 30 years. I mean, we'll get into that. Title of the book, of course, is The Dalai Lama, An Extraordinary Life. It is published by Houghton Mifflin, High Court. That's how we pronounce it. That's how we do this. By the way, I'm Brendan
Podcast and Newsletter Introduction
00:01:33
Speaker
O'Mara. Hey, hey. And this is the creative nonfiction podcast, CNF Pod, if you're in the know, the show where I talk to badass writers.
00:01:40
Speaker
and filmmakers. Sometimes we try to get them about the craft of telling true stories. I tell you it's been a whirlwind of a week. How are you? You writing the thing? You rewriting the thing? You giving up? Don't give up. I should tell you that this coming Sunday after this CNF Friday
00:02:05
Speaker
is March 1st, 1st of the month. You know what that means, or do you? It means my newsletter goes out. Lots of fun things that I think are of service to you and your writing journey. So head over to BrendanOmera.com. Hey, hey. Once a month, no spam. As far as I can tell, you can't beat it. So get this.
Adopting Hank: A Personal Story
00:02:27
Speaker
We adopted a dog.
00:02:29
Speaker
yep it's almost been two years since our beloved smarty passed away and three years since our equally beloved Jackie passed and we weren't quite ready every time it was just comparing you know we didn't want to get into the game of feeling like we were replacing the older guys with the new one and it just never felt right it took a long time for us to mourn those guys because those are
00:02:54
Speaker
those are our boys that was like our first family and then when they died it's like kind of the family broke a bit you know and Melanie and I are cool of course but it was just like you know those those two guys they were they were it and so it took a long time definitely did and so
00:03:11
Speaker
Something clicked. Something clicked and we were ready to start looking at adopting a dog. Hopefully two, but one for starters. I think we were in some ways also tired of some of the self-destructive behaviors that we were routinely into speaking for myself, certainly not the misses, but some excessive drinking and eating, stuff that we gladly
00:03:40
Speaker
put aside when we're caring for another critter sometimes you don't know where to direct that energy and sometimes it goes with you know the couple we met one was definitely male averse so definitely came from some abusive background there so you know that probably wasn't gonna happen but it was
00:03:59
Speaker
Still, it was like sad to see all these other dogs barking. They're all scared. And then it was dredging up feelings of our dogs that had passed away too. So it was like pretty heavy. At least Oregon's a no-kill state, but still kind of tough to be there. That was Sunday.
Reflections on Dog Adoption
00:04:17
Speaker
And all these pups were abandoned one way or another, and it's bullshit. But that's why we're passionate about adopting of right now.
00:04:24
Speaker
So many of the dogs are in the one to two year range, which makes me think that people just get tired of them after no longer puppies. It's my theory. It just made me mad. But in any case, so we went back on Tuesday because we were clued in that there were some other dogs that would kind of meet and resonate with our kind of lifestyle, hiking, running, walk, lots of walking, weekend warrior type stuff.
00:04:47
Speaker
So so we go we go back and we met with one really cool dog named radar but he had a hold on him already and he was really really excited and young and really rambunctious and it was cool and he would definitely would have been fun to take home but he was going to be adopted so but then the young woman who
00:05:06
Speaker
you know brought him out like oh we got this other dog who's just surrendered today and he's like super sweet and you should you know you could check him out if you want like yeah sure of course we'll meet him so he lopes in and he's he's kind of clumsy he's kind of looks like a very small great thing still big dog
00:05:26
Speaker
But kind of kind of clumsy and we pet him for about 10 minutes. He was a little aloof And it was like but then after a while He just laid down at my feet and rolled over and let me rub his belly and and like that did it I was like, all right, that's done I went down on the ground with him and rubbed his belly for another 10 minutes and it was he was even falling asleep So at that point we put a deposit down and went to the store bought him a ton of shit and
00:05:55
Speaker
What's his name? You're asking. Roy Peter Clarke right now would be beating the shit out of me because he's always like, get the name of the dog, right? And his name is Hank. He's a Catahoula mix, something of a southern water dog.
00:06:10
Speaker
He's five years old, about 75 pounds. He's a big goofball and his butt wags really hard when he sees you and he's excited to see you. So we brought him to his forever home Wednesday, Wednesday night. And we haven't been able to stop thinking about him and playing with him and taking pictures of him and drawing him because I'm a weirdo like that.
00:06:31
Speaker
We're in love, and I think he loves us. So, plenty of dog stuff over on my Instagram, at Brendan O'Mara. I'll keep the dogs off off the CNF pod feed, maybe. But, uh, so yeah, how's that social media sabbatical treating you now, hmm? Hey, I got a nice, new, shiny review over on Apple Pods to read.
Listener Engagement and Gratitude
00:06:55
Speaker
If you leave a kind review, I'll be sure to read it on air. It means a lot for the show to get them, it really does. And I want to show my appreciation for you by giving the best of shout outs here in the intro. This one from Sourdough the Biscuit.
00:07:12
Speaker
titled Great Conversations. I found Brendan's podcast through his conversation with novelist Tim O'Brien. I appreciated Brendan's informed questions and how the talk between Tim and Brendan was natural and free flowing. Subscribe and looking forward to listening to more of Brendan's podcast conversations.
00:07:35
Speaker
awesome and even better name sourdough the biscuit that is freaking awesome thank you for the review like I said they mean a ton for the packaging of the show and you know we're all in this we're all in this mess together so if we can support each other in any way possible you know that's why that's what I try to do and by you submitting reviews of that kind you are in turn supporting what we do here at CNF pod HQ
Announcements and Services for Writers
00:08:00
Speaker
Did you also know that registration for Hippocam 2020 is open? There's no more early birds. Worms are gone, but there's still a way to save some dough. Visit hippocam2020.hippocampismagazine.com. It's going to test your typing skills and use the promo code CNFPA2020 to get $40 off your fee. In fact, I'm going to use the promo code myself.
00:08:25
Speaker
Best money you'll spend on a conference this year, I promise you. Not throwing shade at other conferences, like one that might be coming up in a week or so. I'm not doing it. I'm not gonna throw that shade. I'm not throwing that fastball, high chin music. I'm just saying, Hippo Camp, do it.
00:08:48
Speaker
And also that reminds me too, we all need editors, right? We all need editing. We all need accountability. And that's where I want to step in. If you've got an essay or a book that needs coaching, I'd be honored and thrilled to serve you in your work. Sometimes you just need someone in your corner, you know, toweling you off. Cut me, Mick.
00:09:08
Speaker
You know what I mean? Something of that nature. Email me brendan at brendanomeira.com and let's start a conversation because the world needs your work. We need you to show up and I want to help. I want to help you show up and I want to get the most, help you get the most out of your work. I get out of breath sometimes, man.
Writing Craft with Alexander Norman
00:09:30
Speaker
i don't know what that is my mama will sometimes we gotta breathe mom cancer you don't have cancer mom how do you know i'm maybe one you've had a good long life mom it's okay if you have got alexander norman hailing from the uk so that's cool i've had a quite a few brits on the show actually it's uh... kind of amazing they have for whatever reason i get a lot of pitches from
00:10:00
Speaker
From from the UK and I love talking to them. I love speaking to them They got a great way of talking. It's always nice to hear that accent in your ears. He's got some great insights into ghost writing Finding voice and writing and how after 30 years of writing he's still finding the voice yeah, so it's ongoing and so that's pretty cool and
00:10:22
Speaker
surrendering, surrendering your own ego and your own voice to the story of others. So the story stands tall. It's good stuff. I hope you enjoy this chat with Alexander Norman. How have you cultivated your writing practice in a place that's fairly, at least through my estimation, fairly remote? Interesting question. Well, first of all, I would say that I'm I've always been a bit of a vagrant.
00:10:50
Speaker
Although I originally came from the Isle of Wight, I can't even say that I've really settled back here. I've kind of had a rather peripatetic existence, living in different parts of the Isle of Wight, sorry, different parts of Britain and also different parts of Europe and travelling a lot in the Indian subcontinent and indeed in the States as well. So I would say that
00:11:18
Speaker
Some writers managed to settle in one place. I never have managed it. And would you say that writing in general as a practice and as a discipline, was it something that you were drawn to or that you chose, or did writing in a sense kind of choose you? Yeah, I think I'm in the Bernard Shaw camp here. Bernard Shaw, who said that he'd wanted to be an engine driver, a train driver.
00:11:46
Speaker
almost anything except being a writer, and I think I'm possibly in the same cut from the same cloth. I think it finds you out. I think it finds you out. I think you find that you can't actually do anything else. That tends to be what happens, or at least that's what happened to me.
00:12:03
Speaker
Do you have a particular moment where that kind of hit you over the head, a book or a series of books or a writer or a chance encounter with an author and how the writing choosing you manifested itself? Yeah. Well, I can mention the title of the book. It was The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, which I read when I was about
00:12:27
Speaker
24, I should think, and it suddenly opened up a whole new vista of what literature could be. I had a fairly conventional upbringing, and I never really completed my education until I was much later, much later than 24. I didn't actually go to university until I was in my 40s, having been in the meantime an army officer for five years.
00:12:55
Speaker
a journalist, a sort of jobbing journalist for about 10 years. But it was, yeah, it was that moment when you come across a work that completely explodes the notion of what literature is, that gave me a little bit of confidence to have a go on my own. But in a way, I suppose, as a writer, I've been
00:13:25
Speaker
I've been 30 years trying to find a voice and whether I do it in this book or not, I don't know, but I aspire one day to have a unique voice and to be able to tell a tale that nobody else could tell. And of course, you know, different writers mean different things at different times. And I suppose I would cite other major influences as
00:13:58
Speaker
I'm particularly drawn to, for example, the writings of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. I'm afraid I've never read in French apart from the Little Prince. My French isn't good enough to manage all his work in the original language, but in translation. Amongst the British writers of the sort of
00:14:23
Speaker
genre, I suppose, that I work in, which you could call which part from biography is history, travel, and so forth. The sort of, I mean, I perhaps I flatter myself the literary end of those disciplines. I think the standout writer is James, later Jan Morris, who, like myself, was an army officer, a cavalry officer, as a young man, married, had five children,
00:14:51
Speaker
and became one of the early trans people, wrote magnificently both as a travel writer and as an historian. His Venice was one of the most remarkable, I think, travel books of the 20th century. And his history of the British Empire, the three-volume Pax Britannica trilogy, is one of the best things in my view that's ever been written about that period in Britain's history.
00:15:22
Speaker
And the autobiography Conundrum is one of the most remarkable, slight, it's quite a slight work, and it's challenging. But Morris, he and she brings to history and brings to travel writing an elegance and a color that I think was lacking
00:15:52
Speaker
Certainly in historical writing, I suppose Robert Byron is the other great travel writer that one could think of who wrote about these whose book, for example, First Russia Then Tibet gives an example of what I consider to be in it.
00:16:10
Speaker
great literary travel writing. What would you say, or what would you attribute maybe the influence of having been an army officer on the experience that you bring to the page as a writer? That's a difficult question. I find it easier to answer the question, you know, how's it influenced me and my relationship with the Dalai Lama and with my Tibetan friends? And the answer to that would be, I think that
00:16:39
Speaker
I was instantly recognizable. I was the type with which they were familiar, with which they'd grown familiar during the 30s and 40s and 50s. It's not well known that there was a British political mission in Tibet from the early 20s until 1947. And of course, the British influence in India, although it ended formally and officially in 1947 with independence,
00:17:07
Speaker
actually carried on much longer than that. Many of the Tibetan aristocracy of the Dalai Lama's generation and a bit younger, for example, his younger brother, many of his nephews and nieces, were educated in British private schools that were set up in India during the time of the Raj. So in that sense to them, I think I was an
00:17:36
Speaker
instantly recognizable, I don't want to say cliche, but I looked something familiar. But how it's played out in my writing is a much more difficult question. Maybe it's been a constant effort to break out of that mindset, if you like. Although, I mean, the number of
00:18:05
Speaker
army officers turned writer are quite extensive. I mean, even war was himself a cavalry officer during the Second World War. And there are many others who experienced the discipline of the army. So I think, yeah, I would say that it's, if anything,
00:18:27
Speaker
as a writer, indeed as a person, I suppose, in a way, I've been engaged in an effort to overthrow or to break out of or to get beyond what was after all, you know, in the experience of anybody who's done it, you know, you're a young man, and it takes up, you know, it's a very vivid part of one's life. You know, if you do it for five years, as I did from the age of 19 to 24, 25, actually,
00:18:57
Speaker
It stamps you indelibly. There's no question about that. It colours your experience. It colours your entire life. Whatever you do, I think, between the ages, you know, during your formative years, it's bound to have a massive and lasting effect.
00:19:11
Speaker
It's what strikes me about that.
Cultural Insights and Writing
00:19:13
Speaker
Orwell comes to mind, Ernest Hemingway, and being young men stationed abroad, having some armed experience, and it put them in contact with the world and other cultures. And so, in a sense, as writers and artists, sometimes the struggle is what to...
00:19:32
Speaker
to develop a rich enough palette from which to write from. And I think the military, it forces a different geography on you for sure and puts you in touch with different people and then gives you some experience from which to draw from. I think that's true. I guess as far as to say, it puts you in touch with different cultures, even if you don't leave your own
00:19:58
Speaker
hometown in a sense, by which I mean you're forced to meet and deal and have commerce with people who you wouldn't ordinarily come across in your, if you want to put it that way, station in life. I mean, if, as most British army officers were, and to a lesser extent still are, you come from a relatively privileged, privately educated background,
00:20:29
Speaker
you're suddenly forced into close proximity with people who've come from very different and often very challenging backgrounds. If you're to retain your humanity, you have to learn to deal with and be real with and present yourself to people whose outlook on life may be very, very different and somehow form with them a kind of community that
00:20:56
Speaker
through which, you know, yeah, it's a community through which you can fare forth into the world, if you like, whether it be the world of armed combat or simply, I don't know, being in a barracks or something, or for that matter, traveling abroad as I did with some of my soldiers from time to time. So yeah, I think it forces you into situations
00:21:25
Speaker
into unfamiliar situations, unfamiliar relationships, which are bound to have an effect on you later in life. And I certainly see that in my experience with my Tibetan friends. You know, here I'm confronting people with whom I've not much in common apart from my humanity. You know, I have friends who, Tibetan friends whose life story, whose narrative has been so
00:21:55
Speaker
vastly different from mine that you could hardly imagine anything more disparate and yet through that common humanity and through the experience, the shared experience of being in a particular place at a particular time, there's a tremendous opportunity for mutual enrichment.
00:22:21
Speaker
something you said earlier about voice and that's always the challenge as writers and filmmakers or whoever to have that sort of unique vision that it's a struggle and a challenge for sure and it's sometimes a lifelong career long thing to really manifest and
00:22:41
Speaker
Some people, I think, they want that voice right away, and it's very hard to come across and sometimes very hard to pin down. So what has been your struggle and your journey of finding your voice on the page, which by all accounts still feels ongoing for you? It very much feels ongoing. The first book that I wrote was actually a collaborative work. It was the Dailama's own autobiography. I was the ghostwriter.
00:23:14
Speaker
And that goes true for the second and third books that I did. In fact, I've ghostwritten four books and I've only actually written two on my own account. I think that I was, in a way, I suppose when you're ghostwriting a book, you're trying to put yourself out of the picture as much as possible.
Challenges in Ghostwriting
00:23:35
Speaker
You want it to be as faithful. You want to capture somebody else's voice.
00:23:41
Speaker
suppress your own to the maximum extent possible uh and i was especially conscious of this of course writing the Dalai Lama sort of biography because you know i mean you could argue that ghost writing is an exercise in impersonation i don't see it that way myself uh i see it as an exercise in trying faithfully to represent or to uh to
00:24:10
Speaker
give voice to another person to another human being. But in a way, you know, you could argue that the ghost writer is somebody who doesn't have the confidence in his own voice, who doesn't have the, who doesn't have the maybe the courage indeed, to, to speak on their own voice.
00:24:35
Speaker
and has to adopt somebody else's. That's one way of looking at it, certainly. I think that's a valid way of looking at it, and it's certainly true in my case. I didn't think I had anything to write about, or if I did think I had anything to write about, I didn't think that it was, I didn't think that it was that interesting or important, whereas the life of the Dalai Lama seemed extremely interesting and extremely important. And it was something that I willingly did. So I was setting aside my own
00:25:05
Speaker
my own voice to the extent that I could in order to be as faithful as possible to somebody else's.
00:25:14
Speaker
And how did you navigate the years as a journalist, post-military, given that you have this knack for wanting to provide voice to other writers? But I imagine for a time, as a reporter and journalist doing the kind of journalism you were doing at the time, there was an Alexander Norman nature to what you were doing at that time. So what was that like for you? Well, I started out writing a few political pieces about
00:25:43
Speaker
defense matters. I think when you're writing that kind of doing that kind of work, again, you're not going to have much of a voice in as much as you're, you're trying to, I suppose, at least what I was doing my, in my short stint as a, as a defense, as a, as a freelance defense correspondent, various newspapers like The Spectator, The London Spectator, and The Daily Mail.
00:26:11
Speaker
I was trying to put across a point of view. And I think that, you know, sometimes voice, especially in journalism can get in the way of that point of view. So again, it was a bit of an exercise in suppression. I think in my travel writing that I did during that period, that was more I was able to develop more of my own voice, if you like. But I certainly don't think that I've ever
00:26:40
Speaker
rarely succeeded. I mean, it's an ongoing. I think, you know, some writers will arrive with a voice, you know, ready formed. For others, I think it's a lifelong struggle. I think probably for most. I think, and one has to wonder whether the ones that do arrive with a kind of natural voice, is it really them? How authentic is it?
00:27:09
Speaker
I'm not sure. I wonder if I could think of any that, you know, that, I mean, it's often the case, and for example, I mentioned Robert Byron, I would say that his writing is, and he's got a, he's got a voice for
Writing Style and Voice
00:27:23
Speaker
sure. But it's, at best, you know, he transcends the mannerisms and the affectations that as a very young man, he brings to the page.
00:27:35
Speaker
You know, he does like even more, you know, he finds it very difficult to write a bad sentence. And that is something I think that very few people are born with, but he was one of them. But that doesn't make up for the yeah, for the infelicities of some of his writing. You know, I mean, I think he's quite gauche. I think he's quite pleased with himself. I think that he's he's a bit
00:28:05
Speaker
a bit full of himself. But, you know, he's a great travel writer. There's no question about it. And his very best writing and some of it can be found in that book, in his book about Tibet or the half of his book, First Russia, Then Tibet. He turns some wonderful sentences, evokes some genius, creates some genius descriptions that evoke
00:28:35
Speaker
admiration not only for his ability as a writer to construct near perfect, beautiful, evocative sentences, but also communicate something about the situation that he's in that seems pretty pitch perfect.
00:28:56
Speaker
Yeah, that's the fine tightrope to balance between that sort of voice that really kind of pops and makes us want to keep coming back and rereading those sentences versus, you know, surrendering to the story a bit. And I think probably a skill that you've cultivated through, you know, this sort of suppression of voice in a way because you're getting yourself out of the way to let the story elevate. So there's always that fine balance between
00:29:23
Speaker
fireworks and making sure that ultimately the story stands tallest. I think that's a very good point. I think it's often the case that the greatest stories are the ones that are the most universal. The greatest stories are the ones that transcend the limitations that the writer brings to them.
00:29:54
Speaker
And it's the story itself that carries the reader. And this always works best, of course, when the writer is a master of her or his craft, such as James and John Morris. That's someone who is a master prosthetist, in my view.
00:30:23
Speaker
And when you get this combination of the two, when you get the story communicated in perfect, limpid prose, such as you'll get in Evelyn Moore, for example, that is when you see real genius.
00:30:44
Speaker
Yeah, and what you said about ghostwriting, or what kind of struck me is that it wasn't impersonating so much as giving voice to the person who maybe doesn't have, as you were saying, the confidence or probably even the skill to manifest a written story.
Ghostwriting Techniques
00:31:05
Speaker
What's your approach to that? Technically speaking, are you recording a tape recorder and then trying to distill that in the best way possible in their words, if possible as well? I'd love to hear your mechanics about that. Yeah, well, two things. One is, yeah, I'm sure I worked with a tape recorder and
00:31:32
Speaker
a notebook and I recorded hours and hours and hours and hours of conversations. And then I tried to pick out typical words and phrases and try and work them into a text that was authentic. And one of the other things that I did was, for example, when I worked on a book called Ethics for the New Millennium, which was the Dalai Lama's book on a sort of secular ethics,
00:32:02
Speaker
The way that I did that, apart from the hours and hours and hours of interviews, and apart from the reams and reams of notes that I took, I also went to his published works, which, 99.9% of which are all simply edited transcripts of public talks, or public or private talks that he's given over the years. And I tried to find all those instances where he'd spoken about a particular topic,
00:32:31
Speaker
and I literally would get a pair, I would get the book, I would highlight it, I would copy it, I would then have a document which was say 10 pages long with maybe 150 quotations. Many of them very, very similar in both in the words that they used in the constructions and also the thoughts behind them, but I would then
00:33:01
Speaker
cut them out having having having typed them out I would then cut them out and then I would try and construct a narrative using these these so effectively I was cutting I was literally cutting and pasting so I was filling in in between these these these sentences I would provide the connecting thought if you like
00:33:28
Speaker
So I was trying as far as possible to use the Dalai Lama's own words and his own constructions and indeed his own arguments. So my job was really just, I was a super-catterer and pastor and I tried to be nothing more.
00:33:45
Speaker
Yeah, that's fascinating. I love paper habits and, you know, being real analog about things, especially in the digital age. So that's that real tactile thing, right? Yeah, it is. It is like that. And I have to say that, you know, having done this and having constructed a text, the next thing to do was to go back to the dilemma with the with the manuscript and go through it with him line by line, word by word. And
00:34:14
Speaker
It wasn't just me and him. Well, occasionally it was just the two of us together. But by and large, it was with several other people who were interpreting and helping in translation. I mean, the work was all conducted in English. I spoke in Tibetan. It's not nearly good enough to be able to do this kind of work in Tibetan. So there would be a team of us working.
00:34:43
Speaker
And as I said, we would go through the text line by line, word by word. It was terrifically good fun and often hilarious. And we would have huge, not huge, but heated arguments about the use of words or phrases or whatever would often be there, not often, but occasionally it would be that he'd misunderstood the meaning of an English word and was using it in completely the wrong or even any part of the wrong.
00:35:12
Speaker
sense and I would point this out to him and and then occasionally you know that one of the other people present would chip in and say oh yes but you know have you considered it in this sense and so on and so we would have heated debates about about the language that was being used and he was always for simplicity he's always trying to cut things down to the
00:35:35
Speaker
to the least demanding, the least, or the most, that's not the least demanding because often the ideas are quite demanding or very demanding even. But he wants them put across as simply and as directly and as, yeah, unadorned as possible. He's not a flowery thinker and he's not a flowery, he's not a flowery writer even in Tibetan.
00:36:04
Speaker
This was part of the discipline, was trying to keep out those little flourishes that as a writer, one's always trying to, not trying to, but, you know, that as a writer, yes, we have these little flourishes, these little literary sallies that we like to make. So it was often a question of,
00:36:32
Speaker
cutting those out, and again, yeah, so discipline, suppression, I guess. Yeah, there's such a surrendering of ego sometimes with the work is sometimes you feel so proud about, you know, I turn a phrase, but ultimately it's like sometimes the lean, the shortest sentences, the leanest words, the tightest words do the, they can, they are the ones that stand, that can do the heavy lifting and convey the message in, in a much more clearer way, which ultimately is,
00:37:00
Speaker
Might not feel as you know artistic, but if this is a communicative medium Nothing communicates better than lean language short sentences The devoid of flourish and it sounds like that's a great point of connection between you and the Dalai Lama Yeah, I think I think that's right. I I was admire what term Neil Gaiman once said, you know, the children's writer Neil Gaiman British children's writer he once said that
00:37:29
Speaker
something to the effect that the writer should pay the reader per word, not the other way around. In other words, you know, the less words that you can use to get the smaller the number of words that you can use to get the idea across, the better or more powerful it will be. And I certainly think there's something in that. On the other hand, there's a huge tension there between that and the kind of, I mean, in biography, for example, which is
00:37:59
Speaker
book that I've just worked on. You know, you're trying to get across a lot of information in a biography that is trying as mine was trying to be both readable and to a degree scholarly, you're trying to get off, you're trying to get over huge amounts of information. And sometimes, you know, short sentences just don't cut it. You just can't do it in six or eight or 10 words, you know, you might need
00:38:27
Speaker
You might need sentences that are several lines long and paragraphs that are half a page or more. They can't always be done. But it's a good thing, I think, to bear in mind as a writer that economy is your friend, not your enemy.
00:38:45
Speaker
Yeah, I think, and people I've spoken to and mentors I've had, it's like when the stakes or the drama in a story is the highest is when you need to turn the volume down on the language you use. You don't need to dial it up with language because the emotive elements and the story elements in place will carry you along. You basically just have to grease the skids just a little bit and the story will take care of itself. It's like you don't need to, you know,
00:39:14
Speaker
hammer it home too much. You actually need to show restraint. I think that's totally true. And I think that comes back to this idea of discipline and suppression of ego.
Meeting the Dalai Lama
00:39:24
Speaker
And the better you can do that, often the more effective your writing will be. And, you know, I'd love to get a sense, I think, in a way, I've kind of buried the lead a bit. I'd love to know how you came to meet the Dalai Lama, you know, roughly 30 years ago. How did that encounter happen?
00:39:44
Speaker
So how I came first to meet the Dalai Lama is quite simple. I went to interview him for a London-based magazine, The Spectator, which was a sort of political, literary, weekly magazine for which I'd started writing not very long before.
00:40:09
Speaker
But how that actually came about is a slightly longer story, which begins funnily enough. Well, I guess my fascination with Tibet began with, when I was very young, I came across a book called Seven Years in Tibet by Heinrich Harrer, who was this German, well, actually Austrian adventurer who met the Dalai Lama during the 1940s.
00:40:37
Speaker
having escaped from a British prison camp in India, on whom I subsequently got to know many years later in the 90s. But he'd written this amazing book called Seven Years in Tibet, which, as you may know, was turned into a film by Brad Pitt, starring Brad Pitt. So that was my first encounter with Tibet. But then in my teen years, I came across a series of books
00:41:06
Speaker
which I found totally captivating and beguiling. And they were a series of books written by somebody by the name of Lobsang Rampa. The thing is that when I was a kid growing up, we didn't have Harry Potter. We didn't have Harry Potter. But J.K. Rowling's genius was to see that every
00:41:35
Speaker
every boy, every growing boy and presumably every growing girl would like to be a wizard and would like to make magic happen. And the thing about Rob Lobsang-Rampa was that he purported to have experience of learning the magical arts in Tibet.
00:42:02
Speaker
And he wrote this series of books, starting with a book called The Third Eye, which was a massive bestseller in the early 1950s and was immediately denounced by Tibetan scholars of the day in which he purported to be a Tibetan monk who at a young age had been chosen for a career of magic and prophecy and
00:42:32
Speaker
communicating with the astral plane. Anyway, to me, these books were absolutely, you know, enthralling. I think I realized about halfway through the second one that I was being spun a yarn, but it didn't matter. They were just charming and captivating stories that had me enthralled. And many people that you find who, not many,
00:43:03
Speaker
perhaps not so many today, but certainly 20 years ago, a lot of the people who you would meet in Tibetan circles, even in Tibetan scholarly circles, would have been brought into the fold by their reading of Lobsang Rampa. Lobsang Rampa, in fact, turned out to be a prosthetic salesman from the southwest of England.
00:43:30
Speaker
who impersonated or claimed to have had an encounter with a Tibetan lama and to have been the subject of Tibetan practice known as Poa. Poa is the transference of consciousness from one living being into another. So, Lobsang Ramper, he claimed to have had an accident climbing a tree and to have had this encounter following
00:43:59
Speaker
this accident with a Tibetan Lama and he agreed to give up his body to the Tibetan Lama who then transferred his consciousness and he began writing these books as Lobsang or Emperor. So I was completely captivated by these and so I had, so there were those two influences, I suppose, early influences on the seven years in Tibet, the stirring adventure story of Heinrich Harrer and the sort of mystical
00:44:29
Speaker
the governments of Lobsang Rampa, which came together when, just after I'd left the army, actually, I met with my godfather, who himself was an army officer and was the British recruiting officer of the Gurkha regiment.
Tibetan History and Influences
00:44:49
Speaker
I don't know if you know about the Gurkhas, but the Gurkhas are a brigade, in fact, of
00:44:57
Speaker
soldiers recruited exclusively from the highlands, the uplands of Nepal, and the British army still has several thousand of these Gurkhas under arms, and the Indian army has tens of thousands of them to this day.
00:45:19
Speaker
Anyway, my godfather was a recruiting officer for them, which meant that he spent a lot of time in Nepal and he would interview and assess these young likely lads who wanted to be members of the British army or badged into the British army as gherkas. And anyway, to cut a long story short, I bumped into him and he said to me, oh, what are you doing these days, Alexander? And I said, oh, not a lot less than that, writing a bit. He said, oh, well, why didn't you come and see me in Nepal?
00:45:49
Speaker
I said, well, yeah, why not? I'd love to do that. So I went off to see him. And it was whilst there that I first encountered some Tibetan monks. And I had the idea of trying to get an interview with the Dalai Lama, who at the time was a completely unknown character. I mean, he was very little, very little written about in the Western press in those days. And people who were interested in him were tended to be tended to be
00:46:19
Speaker
people who are interested in Buddhism, rather than in the politics of Tibet. That all changed, of course, with the Nobel Prize in 1989, sorry, 1990. But prior to that, the Dalai Lama was very little known and very little understood. I would argue that today he's extremely well known, but still very little understood. And that's one of the things that I've tried to do in my biography, which is to
00:46:48
Speaker
provide, if you like, a third dimension. It seems to me that a lot of what is written about the Dalai Lama and a lot of what is thought to be known about him is very two-dimensional and doesn't really tell you very much about him, what he believes, what he's done. So I've tried to show that, in my view, the Dalai Lama is far more interesting than most people even begin to realize. He's had a life such as
00:47:15
Speaker
practically no human being alive on this planet today has had anything like as astonishing a life story as the Dalai Lama. I mean, it is one of the great lives of the last hundred years without question. I mean, you know, he is up there with Winston Churchill or I don't know, who would you want to say?
00:47:43
Speaker
His is a great life, an astonishing life, an extraordinary life. And that is something that I've been fascinated with for the 30 years that I've known him. And for the 20 years,
00:47:59
Speaker
that I knew about him before I knew him, if you see what I mean. What was it like for you making the transition of being a co-writer with him early on and then essentially stepping over the line to be more of an independent biographer of him for this latest book? What was that like for you and how did you navigate those two poles of the story? Yeah.
00:48:29
Speaker
Well, I suppose I had a practice run with a book which was published in the States as Secret Lives of the Dalai Lama, the Untold Stories of the Men Who Shaped the History of Tibet, rather long in the Bose title. And in fact, I think I even gave it to you wrong. But anyway, Secret Lives of the Dalai Lama is what it was published as. And it was published in Britain as Holder of the White Lotus.
00:48:57
Speaker
And this is a history of the institution of the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama, the present Dalai Lama, is the 14th. He's the 14th incarnation in a lineage that goes back, stretches back to the end of the 14th century. The first Dalai Lama, Gundungu, was born in 1391. But he, in turn, traces, or his lineage, as it's called, can be traced back
00:49:27
Speaker
through historical figures at least until the seventh century. And then a sort of series of apocryphal lives right back to the time of the Buddha. And he in turn, the one who first manifested on earth during the time of the Buddha, is said to have had an incarnation 900 eons ago
00:49:56
Speaker
before the life of the Buddha. So the idea is that it's a very, very long and well-attested historical lineage. So my book was to try and didn't go back to ancient, I mean, to prehistory, but I went back to, I traced the lineage back to two and a half thousand years ago, the time of the Buddha, these early apocryphal lives. And then I picked up the story in the seventh century
00:50:25
Speaker
And it was a straightforward run, if you like, through these various incarnations, bringing the story up to the present day. So that was my dry run, if you like. It wasn't a biography. It was, if you like, a series of biographies that were enfolded into a narrative history of Tibet. That's what it amounted to. And I was able to weave
00:50:55
Speaker
a kind of hagiographical anecdote with historical material with, in many cases will indeed, in each case, in the case of all the Dalai Lama's incarnations in Tibet, and then right back to the seventh century, there are well-attested primary sources that can be consulted. So we get a very good picture of the history of Tibet through this.
00:51:26
Speaker
So I would say that this work was first and foremost a history into which all of that were enfolded, these many biographies and the different incarnations. So that was my dry run. So the question of how I negotiated the transition from ghost writer to biographer.
00:51:52
Speaker
I didn't find too hard, to be honest. But I suppose when you're writing a biography, I mean, of course, there are lots of ways of writing a biography. But the way that I chose to write it was to try and let, again, other voices do most of the work. I didn't want to rely on my own, my own
00:52:17
Speaker
Encounters with the dilemma. I mean after all I've only known him for less than half his life But I didn't want that to come into it. I think that's that would be I mean that could possibly be the subject of some other piece of work, but what I was trying to do in this book was to Again give voices to other sources not just I guess not just I
00:52:46
Speaker
What am I saying? I was trying to give voices to other people who'd encountered him over the years, over the decades. Starting with, for example, there was a great American journalist called, and here, of course, I can't remember what his name was, Archibald,
00:53:14
Speaker
Steele Archibald Steele of the Chicago Daily News was the first Western journalist to encounter, indeed the first Westerner to encounter the Dalai Lama in in kumbum monastery in 1939, I think it was. And his are the first known photographs of the Dalai Lama. He would have been about two years old at the time, right?
00:53:43
Speaker
That's right. He had just been placed in the monastery by his parents and was not yet acknowledged as the Dalai Lama, although it was being openly spoken of him, but he seemed a highly likely candidate, a highly plausible candidate. So Steele comes along there and photographs this child prodigy and writes about him and then subsequently met him
00:54:11
Speaker
about 12 years later when he went to Tibet proper, again, on assignment from the Chicago Daily News. And after he died in the 90s, as I recall, his widow put together a biography of steel, and he presents this wonderful picture of Tibet in the late 30s, early 40s. So I was able to use sources like this, which are very little known outside Tibetan circles,
00:54:41
Speaker
you know, the very narrow circle of Tibetan, non-Tibetan historians, and was able to weave these into the narrative. So, yeah, recovering a lot of voices that might otherwise have been forgotten. And that's one of the joys, I think, of writing, of doing this sort of work. You know, you get these little nuggets, you get these little,
00:55:09
Speaker
little snippets, little evocations of the past that, you know, that seem completely authentic and completely perfect in their way. They capture the atmosphere in a way that, you know, the sort of more, you know, the kind of chronicles of the time just can't do.
Historical Narratives and Challenges
00:55:32
Speaker
The same is true if you think there was a, when the Dalai Lama went to Tibet, not Tibet, when the Dalai Lama went to India,
00:55:39
Speaker
in the early 1950s. He was appointed as his liaison officer, his political liaison officer, a Cambridge-educated Indian official who was in fact Parsi, a Zoroastrian, who writes wonderfully about how people reacted to him, both Tibetans and Indians,
00:56:05
Speaker
and how the adulation, the mass adulation of people and how there's this wonderful scene where he's riding in a car with actually the pension lama who was accompanying the Dalai Lama, but it could have been the Dalai Lama. It didn't matter. The point was that the enthusiasm of the people for him imperiled the safety of their car.
00:56:31
Speaker
you know, they were wanting to, they practically turned it over, you know, the press of the crowd was so wild and so insistent, you know, and there were so many thousands of people and things came whizzing in through the window and, you know, you just get the, you just get this sense of unbridled joy as the Dalai Lama comes into India for the first time. So yeah, it's wonderful to give voice to these
00:57:03
Speaker
to these people, these otherwise forgotten people. What struck me about the story as well was the relationship between Tibet and the Dalai Lama going back 14 incarnations and the relationship to violence too. It's a very violent history that's tethered to the Dalai Lama going back centuries. That struck me, that surprised me. Yeah, well, I think it will surprise most people.
00:57:32
Speaker
After all, our image of Tibet is of a Pacific kind of Shangri-La kind of, we think of monks meditating in the mountains and the serenity and the natural beauty and harmony of the country. Yeah, Facebook image of Tibet as you say in the afterword. Yeah, the Facebook image of Tibet. The Tibet of historical record is very, very different.
00:58:02
Speaker
I think this is one of the most interesting things about the Dalai Lama. It's the way that he has been associated. I wouldn't say that he's associated himself, because I think this all happens around him. But the way that he's become associated with an idea of Tibet, which is so far from the reality, is to bear almost no resemblance whatsoever. It's remarkable.
00:58:31
Speaker
I haven't really gone into it too much in the book, but what lies behind this is an important question. How on earth is it that we've persuaded ourselves to bear? And indeed Buddhism itself is this wonderful, ironic religion or this harmonious place when the facts are so widely different.
00:59:01
Speaker
On the other hand, I do make the point that, you know, whilst it's extremely shocking to learn, for example, that when the Dalai Lama was a child, you know, one of his, one of the government cabinet ministers had his eyes put out for treason, or that the Dalai Lama's regent was murdered by poisoning, or indeed the Dalai Lama's own father seems to have almost certainly been assassinated.
00:59:26
Speaker
Or much more recently, you know, the late 90s, one of his closest associates was horribly murdered in exile in India. You know, these deeply shocking incidents. And yet from the Tibetan perspective, you know, nobody's going to turn around and deny them or say that they weren't shocking. But they will say that, you know, well, these are isolated incidents, you know, and that's one of the
00:59:55
Speaker
That's one of the challenges, or one of the, I don't know, challenges is probably the wrong word, but this is one of the, this is one of the dangers, I think, of history and biography. Because after all, when you write a biography, or you're writing a piece of history, you're telling a story. You're trying to say, you know, what this person did on such and such an occasion, and to some extent what that person is like,
01:00:24
Speaker
And what that person may have meant by what they said or did, or if you're writing a piece of history or trying to say, well, this happened and that happened. And the reason this happened was because of this and this and this. And the consequence of that happening was X, Y, and Z. But in order to do this, in order to do this in an interesting way, something that captivates the reader, obviously you're going to have to highlight
01:00:49
Speaker
You know, the most colorful incidents, you're going to be using the anecdotes that are most, you know, you're going to use the brightest colors. You're not going to use the drab and the gray. You're going to go for the spectacular sunsets, if that's not mixing the matter too far.
01:01:18
Speaker
Yeah, so you can easily give the impression that life in Tibet was one long series of horrendous incidents in which people suffered terribly. And this is certainly the Chinese narrative. This is exactly what the Chinese will tell you. The pre-liberation Tibet was a hell for the ordinary, for the common man and woman, of course.
01:01:45
Speaker
But that would be ridiculous. There's absolutely no evidence of that whatsoever. But the danger is that in writing, in trying to portray these sunsets and all their vivid colors, you actually overlook the fact that most of the time people lived, they did indeed, live largely contented lives, even if the system is not one that we might choose for ourselves today.
01:02:13
Speaker
So yeah, it is a difficulty and I acknowledge that. And certainly in the life story of the dialogue, I've picked out those incidents that are the most, you know, that will be of most interest to the reader. I mean, a narrative is sustained by the, not only by the drive from the beginning to the end of the narrative, but also
01:02:44
Speaker
the incidents and the little appel su and the little snapshots that we get along the way. Those are what keep you wanting. That's what gets the reader turning the page, one hopes. So for example, I put in the incident when Allen Ginsberg visits the Dalai Lama in early 1962, now in the life of the Dalai Lama.
01:03:12
Speaker
You know, that's barely worth a footnote in a way. I mean, it certainly didn't make any difference to the Dalai Lama. But it made a big difference to Allen Ginsberg. And indeed, it tells us something about, tells us, I guess, something about the beats, perhaps. So in the instant we've got Ginsberg and German Kiger
01:03:41
Speaker
and Gary Snyder and Peter Olofsky, who was Ginsberg's lover at the time, going to Tibet and having an interview with the Dalai Lama. And Joanne Kiger writes about it in her journal, which is published 30 years later. And you get this picture of Ginsberg asking the Dalai Lama whether he'd like to try some of his magic mushrooms. And Snyder arguing with the Dalai Lama and telling him to shut up because he's just being boring.
01:04:11
Speaker
So to me, this is a hilarious and magnificent incident that deserves to be wider known. But in the context of the Dalai Lama's own personal life, well, it means practically nothing. It was just a bunch of hippies who'd come to see him. And it took up 20 minutes, half an hour of his time. And I dare say that he forgot about it almost immediately.
01:04:41
Speaker
You have this disparity between the importance of the event on the life of the individual who you're writing about and the importance of the event or the way that this event illuminates an aspect of Tibetan culture, for example, and Western culture. You've got this collision. You've got this collision between the kind of the hippie quest for spiritual will
01:05:11
Speaker
we could call it the hippie. But actually what we're really talking about is the human quest for spiritual nourishment, which the beats of the first two, perhaps, or among the first two, take to the east. So one gets the sense that
01:05:37
Speaker
that these are individuals who come from a society, from a culture, which is tired. It's tired. It's tired of its own spiritual heritage, if you like. And it's looking for some other source of spiritual nourishment. And, you know, the fact that, you know, you could argue that many of the people who went on this quest were a bunch of wack-ups, you know, clearly many of them weren't, many of them were,
01:06:07
Speaker
were, you know, had very sincere and, and, you know, noble motives. But you do get this clash, and it's illuminating on both sides, I think it shows us, it shows us on the one hand, it shows us something about the Tibetan cultural tradition, and it shows us how the West
01:06:35
Speaker
itself has been changed by this older tradition. I mean, I think one of the things that I claim in my book is that the Dalai Lama's influence has been far greater than we ordinarily acknowledge.
Buddhism and Reality
01:06:50
Speaker
And politically, as he often says, you know, his life has been a failure. You know, he's tried to he's tried to negotiate a rapprochement between the Tibetan people and the Chinese, and that's completely failed.
01:07:05
Speaker
Tibet is no more independent today than it was when he left over 60 years ago. But on the other hand, the world has been changed by its encounter with the Dalai Lama, in my view. The very word compassion, for example, with which he so closely identified, has come to mean so much more in the last 50 years. And it's impossible, I think, to imagine this happening
01:07:33
Speaker
without the Dalai Lama, without his not only his advocacy of compassion, but also his his explication of Buddhism in terms of compassion. And I think that the Dalai Lama has been at the forefront of the encounter between Buddhism and the Western world. And I think it's had a massive impact. It's had a massive impact, you know, starting with the obviously starting with the
01:08:02
Speaker
Huge numbers of people who have joined the Buddhist centers that have grown exponentially throughout the Western world in the last half century. But also, you know, the mindfulness movement, you know, which must encompass millions and millions of people. And it has a trickle down effect.
01:08:29
Speaker
you know, we see it in education, we see kids, I don't know about so much in the States, but certainly in Europe, we have a considerable openness now towards the Eastern traditions. And I'm sure it's the same in America too, of course, it has an openness towards the Eastern traditions that was unimaginable 50 years ago. And I think throughout this, the Dalai Lama has been at the forefront, he has been
01:08:57
Speaker
And certainly for the last 30 years, since he came to the attention of the West following his award of the Nobel Peace Prize, he's been at the forefront of that movement. So I think his influence has been very considerable indeed.
01:09:14
Speaker
As I opened up a Chrome tab, it's just kind of a weird coincidence, if you will. I get these quotes that pop up, and today it was actually a quote from the Buddha, and it was like, alright, well that's kind of tangentially related to what we're talking about today. And the quote was, you know well what leads you forward and what holds you back, and choose the path that leads you to wisdom.
01:09:38
Speaker
And speaking to what you just said about human quest for symbolic nourishment, and given what we've spoken about in terms of your writing in your life, and of course this biography you've written, I'd extend to you maybe, these days, what leads you forward, and maybe with your work or your life, what leads you forward and what do you feel holds you back? Interesting question. What leads me forward, I suppose. One of the things that I
01:10:08
Speaker
One of the things that I take from my whole encounter with the Dalai Lama, with Tibetan culture, and my experience with many Tibetan friends over the last three decades, is the way to which we misconstrue reality. And I think this is at the heart of Buddhism itself.
01:10:34
Speaker
is the claim that we completely don't get it right. We completely get it wrong. In fact, it's not at all as it looks. And I think that's true in what I call the Facebook image of Tibet. It absolutely isn't the case that people in Tibet were uniquely peaceful. They lived a uniquely harmonious life that the monks were
01:11:01
Speaker
uniquely Pacific and diligent meditators. In fact, they were some of the most, some of the most determined resistors to the Chinese military takeover of Tibet in the 1950s. I mean, it's the monks themselves who, who, who provide the frontline troops. And by that, I mean armed with rifles, you know, we go out, you know, we see them go out, you know,
01:11:31
Speaker
and hook up with these agents trained by the CIA in Virginia in the States. And indeed, many of the CIA agents trained by the Americans were ex-monks. So it's completely not the case that Buddhism is a uniquely peaceful religion.
01:12:01
Speaker
We've got that completely wrong. But you could just stop there. You could say, oh, well, then Buddhism is like every other religion. And in some ways, that's certainly true. Every religion claims to be a religion of peace. But when we dig a little deeper, we find that's very far from the case. But does that mean to say that, well, therefore, religion is a bad idea? No, I don't think it does. I don't think it does.
01:12:29
Speaker
you know, I don't think that's a valid argument, you know, because you only have to look at what happens when you take religion out of the picture, you know, so, you know, consider Mao's China or Pol Pot's Cambodia or Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia, you know, the results are not so much better, are they? So I'm, I'm drawn forward. What I'm actually working on at the moment is a novel.
01:12:59
Speaker
in which I tried to I tried to create a world which on the surface of it seems to be one thing but actually turns out to be another and how the central character navigates this this this gradual realization so I suppose that what draws me forward is this sense that yeah
01:13:27
Speaker
the Dalai Lama's right, the world is not as it seems. And what holds me back? I suppose one of the things that holds me back is the danger that is attendant on this view. I mean, one of the big difficulties that I encountered writing this book
01:13:55
Speaker
was writing about the violence, the unsettling amount of violence that we do encounter in the history of Tibet right up to the present day. And I've often wondered, oh my goodness, shoot the messenger. This is bad news. So I think lack of courage might be one of the things that
01:14:25
Speaker
that would hold me back. Do you really want to be the purveyor of bad news? Or do you dare be the purveyor of bad news if you're telling people that things are not quite as they thought they were? On the other hand, as I say, it's a question of, you've got to get beyond the bad news. You've got to see that, in my view, in the case of Tibetan, the Dalai Lama, for example, that the bad news of him, for example, being
01:14:55
Speaker
well aware that the Tibetan resistance movement was being supported by the CIA throughout the late 50s and early 60s. And he certainly did nothing to hinder that operation, which perhaps you might have expected him to do. In a way, that's bad news. That tells us that perhaps the Dalai Lama isn't quite as
01:15:27
Speaker
otherworldly as we might like to believe. But on the other hand, in my view, we need to go beyond that recognition that, yeah, so the Dalai Lama was, if not involved, certainly implicated in certain historical events that we might prefer him not to have been implicated in. Another case in point is the
01:15:54
Speaker
is Indra Gandhi's dirty war in Bangladesh in 1971. So you've got this absolutely frightful juxtaposition of George Harrison's concert for Bangladesh in Madison Square Garden in November 1971, at almost exactly the same time as the Dalai Lama is giving his permission to General S.S.Uban, the Indian Special Forces General,
01:16:23
Speaker
to use Tibetan troops in what effectively was a dirty war on India's eastern border in what was then East Pakistan and subsequently became Bangladesh. So you've got this terribly ironic situation where the Dalai Lama is placed in an impossible position, it has to be said.
01:16:54
Speaker
by the Indian Prime Minister. And he really has nothing. He's got no option in one way. But on the other hand, you might argue, well, if the Dalai Lama was really this man of total peace, then he would have stood up and he would have said, over my dead body.
Dalai Lama's Stance on Resistance
01:17:15
Speaker
And one might think that somebody like Mahatma Gandhi might have done that, might have said,
01:17:23
Speaker
you know, if the tanks roll, they've got to roll over me before they get to the enemy sort of thing. And I think that, you know, it would be foolish just to stop at that question of perhaps, no, let me rephrase that. I think that it would be, you know, we have to try to think beyond the events themselves. We have to try to put them in context. We have to understand
01:17:53
Speaker
the tradition, we have to understand the culture, we have to understand how this could be. How could it be that the Dalai Lama acquiesced in these military operations? And the answer to the question is, well, he is, if you like, the epitome, the apotheosis of the Tibetan cultural tradition. Let's look at that cultural tradition. Let's see what it says. Let's see what it tells him to do. Let's see what
01:18:23
Speaker
it expects of him. And I think that's where you have your answer. And the answer is that the Dalai Lama, as a Buddhist, is committed to the view that, ultimately, the world is a world of illusion. The world is no more substantial than the reflection of the moon in a puddle of water. He's committed to that view. Now, if that's correct, if he's correct in that view,
01:18:53
Speaker
Then things like whether Tibetan troops do or do not go into Bangladesh, whether or not the CIA supports Tibetan troops, whether the CIA does not support the Tibetan resistance, is a matter for them. It's not a matter for him. So long as the individual practitioner himself or herself is not consciously
01:19:19
Speaker
involved in an action that results in violence, then that individual doesn't create the negative karma that accrued such an action. So the Tibetan tradition, the Tibetan cultural tradition, doesn't demand that the Dalai Lama, for example, I don't know when the Chinese come into Tibet, it doesn't demand that he become like Custer, you know,
01:19:49
Speaker
He's not the last man standing. It is absolutely right from the perspective of the Tibetan tradition that the Dalai Lama withdraws. He withdraws from conflict. He doesn't engage in conflict. He may, on occasions, acquiesce in it, but he does not engage in it. And I think this is what we have to take away. We have to understand that these seeming paradoxes are
01:20:19
Speaker
these ironies that come up in history are not what they seem. The claim that the Dalai Lama, for example, as the Chinese would say, he's a wolf amongst robes. Just as if I tell you, yes, the Dalai Lama's Lord Chamberlain was the CIA's link man.
01:20:48
Speaker
in Tibet during the 1950s. I mean, that seems quite shocking. But if you then place it in context, if we look at it in the round, we begin to understand. Similarly, when we learn that the Dalai Lama did not oppose his brothers, who were determined to call on American help for violent
01:21:15
Speaker
resistance against the Chinese in the 1950s. He didn't oppose them. There are different ways of looking at this. You could take the view that he was approving it by not disapproving of it, or you could take the view that he was simply not engaging in it. And that is what the tradition expects, that he doesn't engage. And it's a subtle but important difference between condoning by not disapproving
01:21:43
Speaker
and simply not engaging, which is actually what he was doing.
01:21:49
Speaker
Well, I think we could talk for five hours about what you've written here because it's dense and rich and nuanced with tons of shades of gray. And I think you've accomplished something masterful here with a big Titanic project.
Episode Conclusion
01:22:04
Speaker
So thank you for the work, Alexander. And where can people maybe find you online and find a way to find you on the internet and get more familiar with your work in the book?
01:22:15
Speaker
Well, actually, the truth matters. I'm practically invisible online, although my children are trying to persuade me to do something about that. So maybe there will be a homepage one of these days. But no, I would ask readers to look. I think people wanting to know more about the Dalai Lama, yes,
01:22:41
Speaker
Of course, I'd be delighted if they read my biography, but they should also read the Dalai Lama's autobiography. And in fact, he wrote two autobiographies and they're both very worthwhile.
01:22:53
Speaker
We did it. We made it CNF-ers. Thank you so much for listening. Be sure you're subscribing to the show. Of course, this crazy show is produced by me, Brendan O'Mara. I make the show for you. I hope it made something worth sharing. And if you really dig the show, leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Show notes are at BrendanO'Mara.com.
01:23:13
Speaker
Follow the show on the various social media channels at cnfpod across them all. Get that newsletter at my website. Win books, win zines, hang out with your buddy BO. Once a month, no spam, can't beat it. Are we done here? We must. Because if you can do interview, see ya!