The Open Road by Pico Iyer

then, after a great deal of fanfare and contention, putting it in the left. Talking about friends and enemies is a little like holding on to this hair on your arm and claiming it as a friend, because you see it daily, and calling the hair on your back an enemy, because you never see it at all. Talking of how you are a Buddhist and therefore opposed to the Judeo-Christian teaching is like solemnly asserting that your right nostril is the source of everything good, and your left nostril a place of evil. The doctrine of “universal responsibility” is not only universal but obvious: it’s like saying that every part of us longs for our legs, our eyes, our lungs to be healthy. If one part suffers, we all do.
    Simple, you may say, but “it takes more courage than we imagine,” as Thomas Merton wrote, “to be perfectly simple with other men.” And from this basic proposition flow many other truths, as naturally as the fact that 2 + 2 = 4 tells you that 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 = 8. Of course you will want to forgive others, in the same way you will want to stop punching your own side. Of course you will look in terms of the larger good, the wider perspective (the word “wider” is a favorite of the Dalai Lama’s), because a hair may be cut off tomorrow, but the body as a whole can keep functioning no worse than before. There’s no great need to mourn the loss of that toe-nail; the foot as a whole is still moving and, besides, at some point every part of the body is going to grow old and die.
    This mention of an extended sense of kinship, even identity, is as global, as ecumenical, as loving your neighbor as yourself. But where Buddhism differs from other philosophies is in saying that the architect, the administrator, the guardian of this whole body is not Allah or God or the swarm of deities of the Hindu pantheon; it is a network of which we are part (that is a part of us). That is why the Buddha did not speak of “praying ceaselessly,” as Saint Paul did, but of “striving ceaselessly.” Buddhists do not (or need not) seek solutions from outside themselves, but merely awakening within; the minute we come to see that our destinies or well-being are all mutually dependent, they say, the rest naturally follows (meditation sometimes seems the way we come to this perception, reasoning the way we consolidate it).
    If you believe this, human life offers you many more belly laughs daily, as the Dalai Lama exemplifies. Why run around the world, to Lourdes or Tuscany or Tibet, when in truth the source of all your power, your answers, lies right here, inside yourself? Why give yourself a hard time and proclaim your own worthlessness when in fact the keys for transformation are within? Why despair, indeed, when you can change the world at any moment by choosing to see that the person who gave your last book a bad review is as intrinsic to your well-being as your thumb is?
    To understand the Dalai Lama, or any serious, full-time follower of the Buddha, especially if (as in my case) you come from some other tradition, perhaps it’s most useful to see him as a doctor of the soul. The Buddha always stressed that he was more physician than metaphysician; when you find an arrow sticking out of the side of your body, he famously said, you don’t argue about where it came from or which craftsman fashioned it—you simply pull it out.
    A practical, immediate cure for suffering and ignorance is what he offered; when asked about the existence of the soul or other lofty philosophical questions, the Buddha customarily said nothing, as if to suggest that such disquisitions were beside the point when a patient was lying on his deathbed and you had the chance to help him. As Somerset Maugham, the onetime medical student and lifelong traveler who had a rare gift for entering other characters, put it, the Buddha “made only the claim of the physician that you should give him a trial and judge him by the results.”
    The Dalai Lama, always so faithful to