The Open Road by Pico Iyer

The Open Road is a book by Pico Iyer about the Four­teenth Dalai Lama. Iyer is a non-Buddhist jour­nal­ist who has cov­ered Tibet for pub­li­ca­tions like Time, The New Yorker and The New York Times for over 20 years, and has known the Dalai Lama for over 30. Per­haps because of this unique com­bi­na­tion, he’s able to give us an inti­mate yet crit­i­cal look into the Dalai Lama’s life.

I deeply enjoyed this book. I didn’t know much about the Dalai Lama, Tibetan Bud­dhism or the recent his­tory of Tibet before read­ing it, and The Open Road opened my eyes (par­don the pun) to the three top­ics. Iyer com­bines power and poetry in his writ­ing; he has the abil­ity to lay bare the real­i­ties behind the myths while never los­ing respect for his subject.

It’s not an easy task, espe­cially when Iyer doesn’t shy away from the mul­ti­ple para­doxes in the story. For exam­ple: How can the Dalai Lama encour­age non-violence while his own coun­try is being rav­aged by vio­lence? How can the Dalai Lama stress rea­son over faith while his entire exis­tence owes thanks to prophecy? He con­trasts how many want to see Tibet as Shangri-La – an oth­er­worldly heaven on Earth – with Tibet’s bloody his­tory – when the Four­teenth Dalai Lama was a small boy, civil war erupted and the monks of one of the great monas­ter­ies killed more than two hun­dred people.

An Inti­mate Por­trait of a Sin­gu­lar Life

When Iyer writes about the Dalai Lama, you feel as if you’re in the same room with him. It is as close a win­dow into the Dalai Lama’s life as most of us will be able to get, and Iyer man­ages to give you a strong sense of the human­ity behind the legend.

The book is a reveal­ing por­trait of the Dalai Lama, the spir­i­tual leader of his peo­ple who describes him­self as “a sim­ple Bud­dhist monk.” Iyer reveals the sim­ple human being behind a man many have called “a liv­ing Bud­dha” and the day-to-day strug­gles he has to go through, not least because many peo­ple see him as “a liv­ing Bud­dha.” Between uncov­er­ing the Dalai Lama’s life and the Tibet ques­tion, Iyer man­ages to cover vast areas of ter­ri­tory, cut­ting across sci­ence, pol­i­tics, reli­gion, media, phi­los­o­phy and Bud­dhism in an always enter­tain­ing book.

The Open Road is many things. It is a close-up account of Tibet’s recent his­tory and the changes that have been wrought upon it. It is a behind-the-scenes look into the life of a sin­gu­lar indi­vid­ual. But most of all it is a won­der­fully writ­ten book.

Related Posts

1. Anger is the Ulti­mate Destroyer
2. Fac­ing Vio­lence by Rory Miller