Editeur - Casa editrice

Religione
Buddhismo
Vajrayana

Città - Town - Ville

Anno - Date de Parution

Pagine - Pages

Titolo originale

Lingua - language - langue

Edizione - Collana

Traduttore

One of the most acclaimed and perceptive observers of globalism and Buddhism now gives us the first serious consideration—for Buddhist and non-Buddhist alike—of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama’s work and ideas as a politician, scientist, and philosopher.
Pico Iyer has been engaged in conversation with the Dalai Lama (a friend of his father’s) for the last three decades—an ongoing exploration of his message and its effectiveness. Now, in this insightful, impassioned book, Iyer captures the paradoxes of the Dalai Lama’s position: though he has brought the ideas of Tibet to world attention, Tibet itself is being remade as a Chinese province; though he was born in one of the remotest, least developed places on earth, he has become a champion of globalism and technology. He is a religious leader who warns against being needlessly distracted by religion; a Tibetan head of state who suggests that exile from Tibet can be an opportunity; an incarnation of a Tibetan god who stresses his everyday humanity.
Moving from Dharamsala, India—the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile—to Lhasa, Tibet, to venues in the West, where the Dalai Lama’s pragmatism, rigor, and scholarship are sometimes lost on an audience yearning for mystical visions, The Open Road illuminates the hidden life, the transforming ideas, and the daily challenges of a global icon.

"Last november, travelling across Japan with the 14th Dalai Lama, I soon discovered that even dawn-to-dusk surveillance of the man meant missing one of his important daily activities: by 7.30 each morning he had already completed four hours of meditation, reflecting on the needs of the people around him, on his "Chinese brothers and sisters" occupying Tibet, and on his death.

The days got more fast-paced from there. One morning in Ise, after meetings with Japanese monks and a shy young woman running a youth magazine, we drove down to the nearby train station and set off for Nagoya. Upon arrival, we were greeted by five young Tibetans studying abroad and eager to talk to their exiled leader. After that brief encounter, we boarded another train and met two journalists waiting to question the Dalai Lama on the political complications associated with his freedom struggle and the refusal of Japan's leaders to meet him. We lunched with a Japanese politician and then went upstairs to a suite in a Yokohama hotel to meet a full roster of supplicants: scientists keen to share the results of research they'd done on compassion; the heads of a Buddhist organisation hosting the Dalai Lama at a conference with 5,000 guests the next day; emissaries from Japanese high society, offering him a book from the Empress Michiko; and a young television crew. Finally, he walked along a corridor at the top of the glossy hotel, strode into a conference room and found 60 people waiting for him. As soon as he entered, all of them began sobbing and prostrating themselves before him. Every one of the devout was, remarkably, a Han Chinese from the People's Republic of China.

By the end of the day - by the end of every day of the trip, in fact - I was exhausted. But for the 72-year-old Tibetan leader, this was the life he has known for six decades - and the life, I think, he will be leading on his next visit to Britain a few days from now."

Pico Iyer is the author of six works of nonfiction and two novels. He has covered the Tibetan question for Time, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and many other publications for more than twenty years.