A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East. Tiziano Terzani
When Chang Choub left, it felt as if we had known each other much longer than three days. He believed that at the Dalai Lama’s press conference we had simply found each other again. It cost me an effort to accept that ‘again’, but I too felt that we were joined by many, many threads which I would have liked to continue disentangling. Talking about his life had made me look again at my own; talking with him, I began for the first time to think seriously about meditation. I had seen the possible connection between the mind, trained through meditation, and powers including that of prescience. For the first time I had heard someone talk about techniques of meditation, and had been encouraged to try them out. It may be strange, but it is so. How many times had I seen advertisements for courses in Transcendental Meditation, or heard of young people going to meditate at a temple in southern Thailand? I paid no attention; it seemed to belong to another world, a world of weird, marginal people in search of salvation. I felt that it had no relevance for me personally.
Chang Choub, with the life he led, brought all this before me again, and made me think that it might have something to do with me. When he left Turtle House, with his half-empty purple sack over his shoulder, it was as if he left behind a trail of little white stones – or breadcrumbs? – to show me the way towards new explorations.
We promised to meet again in India. I have felt for years that India is in my future. In origin the reason was simple. I had grown up politically in the 1950s, when anyone interested in the Third World came up against two great myths, Gandhi and Mao – two different solutions to the same problem, opposing bets on the destinies of the two most populous nations on earth, two hypotheses of social philosophy from which it seemed that we in the West also had something to learn. Having spent years among the Chinese, trying to understand what a disaster the myth of Mao had been for them, it seemed logical to go one day to India to see what had happened to the myth of Gandhi. Living in Peking or Hong Kong, whenever we felt fed up with the prosaic pragmatism of the Chinese, or noticed ourselves reacting in a Chinese way, Angela and I would say to each other: ‘India. India.’ For us India had become the antidote to the mal jaune, that poison concocted of love and disappointment, of endless small irritations and great faith, which afflicts all those who put down roots for a while in the Middle Kingdom and then find that they cannot tear themselves away.
I would have liked to move to India in 1984, when the Chinese took a decision for me that I would never have been able to take on my own, and thus did me an enormous favour: they arrested me and expelled me from their country. But at the time I did not manage it, and more years went by. To my original reason for wanting to go to India a new and more important one has been added: I want to see if India, with its spirituality and its madness, can resist the disheartening wave of materialism which is sweeping the world. I want to see if India can solve the dilemma and preserve its uniqueness. I want to see if in India the seed of a humanity with aspirations beyond the greedy race for Western modernity is still alive.
Living in Asia, I have told myself again and again that there is no culture with the capacity to resist, to express itself with renewed creativity. Chinese culture has been moribund for at least a century, and Mao, in the effort to found a new China, murdered the little that remained of the old. With nothing left to believe in, the Chinese now dream only of becoming Americans. Students marched in Tiananmen Square behind a copy of the Statue of Liberty, and the old Marxist-Leninist rulers erase the memory of their crimes and their lust for power by letting the people run after illusions of Western wealth.
Which Asian culture has preserved its own springs of creativity? Which is still able to regenerate itself, to develop its own models, its own alternatives? The Khmer culture, which died with Angkor eight centuries ago and was once again killed by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in their absurd attempt to revive it? The Vietnamese culture, which can define itself solely in terms of political independence? Or the Balinese, now packaged for tourist consumption?
India, India! I said to myself, nursing the hope – or perhaps the illusion – of a last enclave of spirituality. India, where there is still plenty of madness. India, which gives hospitality to the Dalai Lama. India, where the dollar is not yet the sole measure of greatness. That is why I made plans to go to India, and meet there my fellow Florentine escapee, Chang Choub.
A rich woman from Hong Kong came to see me. She was in Bangkok to meet her guru, a Tibetan monk and follower of the Dalai Lama, ‘a very advanced teacher’. He belongs to the international jet set, at home in New York, Paris and London, and he has a following of such women, usually rich and beautiful, in constant attendance. He plays the guru and the women pay the bills, buy his air tickets, organize his life. ‘He’s the reincarnation of a great teacher. He can’t be bothered with such things,’ said the understanding lady, a consenting victim – perhaps like Chang Choub? – of Tibet’s great, subtle, historic vengeance.
Quite extraordinary, Tibet! For centuries it remained closed and inaccessible, removed from the world; for centuries, in isolation, cutting itself off from any other field of study, it practised the ‘inner science’. Then came the first explorers. At the beginning of the twentieth century the British entered Lhasa; fifty years later the Chinese occupied the country and made it a sort of colony. A hundred thousand Tibetans fled, but that diaspora lit the fuse for the time bomb of revenge.
Tibetan Buddhism, first practised exclusively in the Himalayas and Mongolia, has been spreading throughout the world. Tibetan gurus have settled everywhere, from Switzerland to California, displacing the yogis who had formerly conquered the soul of Europe in its quest for the exotic. Their dogmas, once secret, have become best-sellers. Young gurus claiming to be reincarnations of old Tibetan teachers have become the mouthpieces of this ancient wisdom. With thousands of followers all over the world, they are looked after by little circles of rich lay nuns. Bernardo Bertolucci’s advisor on his film Little Buddha was one of these young gurus, born and raised outside Tibet, but a reincarnation of a great teacher. The capital of the Dalai Lama in exile, in Dharamsala, north of Delhi, has become a place of pilgrimage for thousands of young Westerners, and he has acquired the stature of a sort of second Pope, not only a spiritual leader, but also the head of the Tibetan government in exile.
By occupying Tibet, the Chinese have indirectly sown the seeds of Tibetan Buddhism throughout the world, thus practically planting a bomb in their own house. Sympathy for the Tibetan cause is growing, and interest in the spiritual aspect has become political. The Dalai Lama is welcomed as a guest in the centres of world power. He has become the symbol of the struggle against Peking’s totalitarian regime.
The other side of the coin is that the gurus, with their mythical roots amid the Himalayan peaks and their role as representatives of an oppressed people and bearers of spirituality, provide a perfect alibi for people who pursue redemption while remaining completely enmeshed in materialism. Because of the widespread disorientation from which our culture suffers, people have lost their natural scepticism. Today any charlatan can sell his spiritual potions if he gives them an exotic name.
Am I too a victim of this phenomenon? Is that why I spend days listening to Chang Choub, why I obey the prophetic warning not to fly, and say ‘yes’ when invited to see a new fortune-teller?
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