Star power

The Dalai Lama, speaking this weekend at a sold-out Brandeis arena, is becoming a genuine celebrity in America. But is his message getting lost in the lights?

by Jason Gay

Helmut Kohl has zero buzz. Sure, some loyal German-Americans may request last-minute tickets; a few black-red-and-gold flags may fly in his honor; a handful of Volkswagens might honk as his motorcade whizzes along the Mass Pike. But when the chancellor of Germany delivers the commencement address at Brandeis University later this month, he's unlikely to be bathed in public adulation. In America in 1998, a campus visit from the most powerful politician in Europe might be an event, but it's not an Event.

Tenzin Gyatso's visit to Brandeis, however, will be an Event. Gyatso, a bespectacled 62-year-old better known as His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual and secular leader of Tibet, arrives on the Waltham campus this Friday, May 8, and will stay for two days of activities, culminating Saturday in a sold-out speech in a university auditorium for more than 7000 paying customers. Thousands more, it is expected, will be camped outside the auditorium, listening to the Dalai Lama's speech piped through remote speakers, hoping to catch a glimpse later of the maroon-and-saffron-robed Nobel Peace Prize winner whose closest followers consider him to be a deity. Television news crews will blanket the area; Boston's academic, corporate, and cultural glitterati will use whatever juice they have to secure a private audience with His Holiness. Celebrity sightings are possible. A Richard Gere warning will be placed on the entire premises for 24 hours.

"It's an enormous, exciting moment," says Brandeis professor Laurence Simon, whose Sustainable International Development Program was largely responsible for bringing the Dalai Lama to campus. "The Dalai Lama is very different from any other foreign dignitary or head of state."

He's right. Helmut Kohl might oversee the largest economy in Europe, but he's not going to get the kind of rock-star treatment that His Holiness will receive this weekend -- or the Game Seven-like anticipation at Brandeis. One might suppose, from all this, that the Dalai Lama's visits are rare, but they aren't especially; he travels frequently from his home in northern India and was last in Boston just three years ago. Likewise, the Dalai Lama is hardly the only world figure -- or the only Nobel Peace Prize winner -- to visit the area; largely because of its 50-plus colleges and universities, Greater Boston has grown almost jaded about the parade of presidents, prime ministers, and other global heavyweights streaming through town. Brandeis itself has played host, over the years, to John F. Kennedy, Harry Truman, and Shimon Peres, among others.

What this visitor has, though, is certifiable star power. He rides into Boston this weekend on an unprecedented wave of global attention and fame. His Holiness is a movement unto himself. To Tibetan Buddhists worldwide, he is the 14th reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, the most compassionate of spiritual leaders, a scholar and visionary without peer. At the same time, he is the most prominent symbol of Tibet's fight for freedom from Chinese occupation, a dedicated advocate for nonviolence in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

But here in America, the Dalai Lama is also the object of growing mainstream fascination. He's a cultural icon -- the subject of Hollywood films, magazine cover stories, umpteen paperbacks, and even billboard advertisements for home computers. The Dalai Lama and Tibetan Buddhism are unquestionably hip, especially among young people. But although this attention serves to promote his mission, there is mounting concern among his followers that fame, American-style, may be inappropriate for a spiritual man leading a human-rights struggle. "There is definitely more interest and awareness in the Dalai Lama these days," says Lobsang Sangay, a Tibetan doctoral student at Harvard Law School. "But he isn't supposed to be fashion."

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If you want the Dalai Lama to visit your college campus, it's a bit more complicated than, say, getting Carrot Top to crack jokes in the student lounge during orientation week. His Holiness is in the highest of demand; he receives thousands of invitations every month from institutions and organizations worldwide. But Brandeis made sure its invitation was seen: the university put the envelope in the hands of a Tibetan graduate student who traveled to the Dalai Lama's headquarters in Dharmsala, India, last August to deliver it in person. "I don't think that made the Dalai Lama accept," says Laurence Simon, who points to Brandeis's status as a Jewish-sponsored institution as another lure; His Holiness sees similarities between the Jewish diaspora and Tibet's plight. "But it may have gotten us to the top of the pile."

When the Dalai Lama confirmed his visit in late December, many people at Brandeis were unaware of the magnitude of their catch. At first, administrators suggested that he speak in one of the smaller auditoriums on campus. But once word of the visit was announced, the school's switchboard was swamped with inquiries; Saturday's address at the Gosman Center has been sold out for several weeks. "This has really snowballed beyond what the administration thought at first," says Brandeis sociology professor Gordon Fellman, who, along with Simon, has led the on-campus organization effort for the Dalai Lama's visit.

Indeed, for more than a month it has been nearly impossible to walk around the hilly, well-groomed Waltham campus without seeing a reminder of His Holiness's impending arrival. Simon and Fellman (who also directs the school's Peace Studies program) together crafted an educational program, titled Seven Weeks on Tibet, to immerse the student body in all things Dalai Lama. Campus buildings are plastered with Tibet posters and primers, and students have responded enthusiastically. "It's such a rare opportunity," says Ashley Blick, a senior who is the president of Brandeis's chapter of Students for a Free Tibet. "This is the Gandhi of my generation."

For Brandeis, the Dalai Lama's visit is clearly a coup. But wisely, the school realized it could not restrict the weekend to the university community alone. In forming an organization committee for the visit, the university included members of Boston's Tibetan community, which has grown substantially in the past five years and now numbers more than 250 people, many of whom live in Somerville and around Cambridge's Central Square. These local Tibetans have constructed a welcoming gate for His Holiness's arrival, and the community is expected to meet the Dalai Lama for a private audience.

But if there are fewer than 300 actual Tibetans in Boston, who else has snapped up all those $17.50 tickets for the Gosman Center speech? Some, of course, have been purchased by students, as well as by Tibetans traveling from as far away as Canada and California. Some have been bought by relative newcomers interested in the Dalai Lama's spiritual and political messages; they are intrigued not only by Tibet, but also by this farmer's son who teaches a pleasurecentric, antimaterialist philosophy. Other ticket holders, no doubt, simply want to see what all the fuss is about.

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It's like this almost everywhere the Dalai Lama goes these days; the Brandeis visit is one stop on a 15-day American tour that began last Thursday in New York and includes stops in New Jersey, Atlanta, and Madison, Wisconsin. In each US city, his arrival is met with increasing anticipation, fascination, and media hype.

Much of this excitement, no doubt, is a byproduct of the growing mutual affection between His Holiness and pop culture, especially the entertainment industry. Tibetan Buddhism's message of never-ending compassion may seem a strange fit with Hollywood, but it has been adopted wholesale by prominent American stars. From Richard Gere, who urged Oscar-night audiences in 1993 to channel their thoughts toward a free Tibet, to the summertime Tibetan Freedom concerts organized by Beastie Buddhist Adam Yauch, to recent films like Seven Years in Tibet (with Brad Pitt) and Martin Scorsese's Kundun, celebrity support has continued to boost the Dalai Lama's profile on this side of the globe. It is a relationship the Dalai Lama himself encourages and nurtures; one of the first official events on his current tour was a Manhattan "Light of Truth" tribute to Scorsese.

Lobsang Sangay, the Harvard Law student, thinks this celebrity attention is mostly good, because it builds the public awareness so essential to a political cause. He regularly visits Massachusetts public schools to speak to students about Tibet, and just two years ago, only a handful of kids would show up at his presentations. "But now, everywhere I go, there are hundreds of students," Sangay says. "And many more teachers, too."

In addition, American policymakers -- after years of ducking the issue -- are slowly waking up to Tibet. The status of Tibet was one of the topics last week during Secretary of State Madeline Albright's two days of talks with Chinese leaders in Beijing. It is expected to be on the agenda when President Clinton himself visits China for a summit in late June. And though American business interests are drooling over China's economic potential, the White House has repeatedly declined to lift some sanctions against China until it resumes talks with the Dalai Lama. "It's amazing any of this is taking place," says Tashi Rabgey, an organizer with the Tibetan Association of Boston and a Harvard doctoral student. "I remember a few years back, you could barely get anyone to talk about Tibet and China."

Nevertheless, there is an inherent risk in hitching one's wagon to celebrity: what if this popular awareness is less a permanent breakthrough than a fleeting trend? "I'd say the Dalai Lama is taking a risk by courting Hollywood," says Brandeis's Fellman. America's attention span is notoriously short, and Tibet could vanish from our cultural radar just like the rain forest and fur coats and other 1990s causes du jour. Indeed, Tibet may have already reached its cultural apex; both Seven Years in Tibet and Kundun bombed at the box office.

"If the only way people can come to this issue is through pop culture," says Sangay, "then that's really sad for the Tibetan people."

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Undaunted, the Dalai Lama continues to attend the glitzy fundraisers; he approves the dissemination of his story in books and film; he okays the use of his image in Apple Computer's inescapable "Think Different" advertising campaign. He believes that this hypervisibility does much more good than harm for the cause of Tibet, and he has been right so far.

Still, the Dalai Lama's pop-culture profile is a strange fit with his role as a spiritual leader. A Boston woman who follows his teachings tells this story: recently, she was throwing out a pile of magazines when she noticed the Dalai Lama's Apple Computer ad on the back of a discarded copy of Time. Ordinarily, she says, she would never willingly throw out a photograph of His Holiness; when she spent time teaching in a Tibetan school in Dharmsala, images of the Dalai Lama (which are officially banned in China) were considered sacred. Was the Apple ad, with its enormous Dalai Lama photograph, sacred? Or was it just an ad? She rescued the magazine from the recycling bin, just to be safe.

Tibetan Buddhism is a diverse, complicated stew of different sects, leaders, and monastic orders, but the Dalai Lama is its preeminent leader. Born in 1935 to a peasant family in the Tibetan village of Takster, he was enthroned at age five; even when he was forced to flee Tibet in 1959 after a national uprising against the Chinese, he retained his spiritual grip upon his homeland and its people, while taking his message of compassion around the globe.

"He's not just the leader of Tibetans," says Tashi Rabgey. "He has Tibetan Buddhist followers around the world."

And he has no shortage of followers here in America. Americans have embraced Tibetan Buddhism for (among other reasons) its reliance upon free thinking and meditation, its emphasis on compassion, and its promises of self-fulfillment. "The goal of Buddhism is happiness and joy, and that is something people can immediately relate to," says Tim McNeill, the publisher at Wisdom Publications, a Buddhist publishing house in Somerville's Davis Square. "It's not about rewards in the hereafter or avoiding punishment; it's really geared toward ending suffering."

McNeill, who hosted the Dalai Lama at his home in 1991, thinks that Americans are drawn to Buddhism for what he calls its "secular spiritualism"; it's seen as a religion without the usual rigid boundaries and constraints. The Dalai Lama, for instance, encourages newcomers to dip their toes into Buddhism gradually; in his estimation, there is nothing wrong with layering the faith on a Judeo-Christian foundation.

But some Buddhists are concerned that in today's climate of Dalaimania, Americans are taking that idea too far and treating Buddhist teachings like a self-help salad bar, not as a complete philosophy for living.

"It's kind of a dumbing down of Tibetan Buddhism, although with good intentions," says Dan Barrett, the vice president of Shambhala Press, a Boston-based publisher of books on eastern philosophy and spirituality. "Americans may identify it with the traditions of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and while that's true, it doesn't mean people understand one whit about Tibetan Buddhism, much less about Tibetan Buddhism as a culture."

The fear is that when Tibetan culture is divided into parts, its message is diluted. It's easy for Americans, with their tendency to separate the religious from the secular, to assume that the Dalai Lama's mission as freedom fighter for Tibet can be distinguished from his status as a holy leader. But Tibetan Buddhism does not draw a clear divide between the spiritual and the political; for Tibetans especially, the two are inextricably linked. "You cannot separate the spiritual from the political," Tashi Rabgey insists.

Maintaining this balance, says Rabgey, is essential to understanding the difficulties of Tibet and its people. Tibetans roll their eyes at Western visions of their homeland as a utopia where cuddly, colorfully dressed monks, nuns, and followers live in peace-loving concert below a bedsheet of snow and bright stars. This stereotype does little justice to the actual human suffering taking place in Tibet -- where, according to records of the exiled government, more than one million people have been killed during the Chinese occupation. "Sure, Tibetan culture is unique," says Lobsang Sangay. "But no one should look at Tibet as some kind of Shangri-La. It never was one, and it never will be one."

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Early on Friday evening, the Dalai Lama is expected to make a little history at Brandeis. Over the past three weeks, seven Tibetan nuns have labored inside a dark, high-ceilinged hall adjoining the school's main library, constructing a sacred sand mandala. The ornate, multilayered mandala, which Buddhists see as a model of a symbolic universe, looks like a spectacularly colorful top to a birthday cake; it is painstakingly assembled by hand, almost grain by grain, by pouring sand into a chalk-outlined design. Mandala construction ranks among the most sacred of Tibetan skills; for centuries, it was performed exclusively by Buddhist monks. Beginning five years ago, nuns have been taught the practice as well.

Upon the completion of a mandala, tradition holds that the creation be destroyed and emptied into a river, so as to symbolize the impermanence of life. Barring last-minute complications, the Dalai Lama is expected to arrive at the library hall around 5 p.m. and dismantle the mandala -- the first time His Holiness has performed this ceremony for nuns in the Western world. This would be the most sacred of moments for the nuns, who are visiting America from Kathmandu, Nepal. "If His Holiness comes, it will be the greatest," says one nun, a tiny, kind-eyed woman named Ngawang Tendol. "But I just pray."

An inspired work like the sand mandala is just the sort of mysterious, exotic artifact that piques Westerners' interest in Tibetan Buddhism. But the mandala isn't a pretty logo for a flavor-of-the-month belief; it's a 2500-year-old religious practice with a specific meaning and purpose. Similarly, the teachings of Dalai Lama -- and the struggle in Tibet -- are serious and urgent in a way that isn't always well served by the flashy, disposable ethos of pop culture. When the kleig lights shut off, the Dalai Lama remains a devoted advocate of a very human ideal: hope.

A little more than a week ago, the seven nuns traveled from Brandeis to Cambridge to meet with more than 100 local Tibetans for a march and candlelight vigil in Harvard Square. The event was originally planned as a show of solidarity with six Tibetan monks on hunger strike in India as a protest of the Chinese occupation of Tibet. But it became a somber commemoration when news arrived that Thupten Ngodup, another Tibetan monk, had set fire to himself in New Delhi in support of the hunger strikers.

As he lay dying in a New Delhi hospital, Thupten Ngodup had a visitor: Tenzin Gyatso, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. The visit didn't merit a mention on the nightly news; no one is likely to record it in a motion picture. But to these marchers in Cambridge half a world away, the moment was every bit as important as the coming weekend in Waltham.

"This is a very intense time for Tibetans," says Tashi Rabgey. "Everything seems to be happening at once."

Jason Gay can be reached at jgay[a]phx.com.