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 enlarge | Author: Pico Iyer
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $24.00
Buy New: $13.00
You Save: $11.00 (46%)
New (43) Used (7) from $13.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  17 reviews
Sales Rank: 12931
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 5.7 x 1.2
ISBN: 0307267601
Dewey Decimal Number: 294.3923092
EAN: 9780307267603
ASIN: 0307267601
Publication Date: March 25, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
Take your time with this one. June 4, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
"The Open Road" is indeed about journeys - both physical and spiritual. The book is, of course, centered around the Dalai Lama and his public and private life, but it delves into other areas as well - the West's dreamlike vision of Tibet, life in India, dealings with China, various schools of Buddhism, politics, etc. Very clearly, it comes across that the Dalai Lama is at heart a realist, and much of this book addresses his strong desire to face the world straight-on and find real solutions to end war, pain, and suffering.
My only complaint about this book is that it does not flow well. There is no easy progression of going from point A to point B. It feels a little choppy. At times I was anxious to skip over paragraphs and move forward. I learned quickly, though, that this was a mistake. There is wisdom tucked away on every page. I learned to read the book slowly, stopping every few pages to let it all sink in. The author and his subject, the Dalai Lama, both have wonderful insights to share.
An enlightening read.
 wonderful and stimulating June 1, 2008
this book is great. it was easy to read and very enjoyable. it is a good introduction to the d.l. and his place in the world. iyer's writing style is very nice and it flows beautifuly. he has tremendous wit, compassion and insight and is not afraid to look at difficult problems and paradoxes and make sense of them. he can look at both sides of an issue and is a real truth seeker. anyone interested in buddhism or the d.l. will enjoy this great book which was obviously a labor of love for iyer.
Even Saints Have Smelly Underwear May 27, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
The Wizard of Oz didn't want Dorothy and her three knights to draw aside the curtain to see the little man who the denizens of Oz thought was as majestic as his booming voice. Pico Iyer has let us look behind the screen of the god king of Shangri-La and get a peek at the contradictions in the midst of which the Dalai Lama sits. Like the Dalai Lama, the Wizard is compassionate. He teaches that point-of-view, so to speak, makes the man (sic). The Wizard shows a machine, a simpleton and a coward, that they, respectively, have a heart and a brain and are heroic. According to Iyer, the Dalai Lama claims human unhappiness, as opposed to suffering, is a matter of attitude which can be changed. So the Chinese threat to Tibet will eventually be overcome with patience, non-violence, compassion, and appealing to the Chinese via the world at large that it is in their ultimate interest to grant Tibetans control over their own religion and landscape.
In pulling aside the curtain a bit Iyer has done a great service. Most of the people I know, who venerate the Dalai Lama, have completely fanciful ideas of the history of both Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism. The hint in one of the popular movies about the Dalai Lama that Tibet may have been an oppressive medieval theocracy before 1950 never recorded in their minds. The Dalai Lama is a saint; Tibet was Shangri-La; and Tibetan Buddhism has the power to end unhappiness. Iyer tells us that the Tibetans regard the Dalai Lama as a "god king," even if the Dalai Lama takes offence at Iyer's referring to him as a "living Buddha," and Tibetans don't want a democratic government. So they elect realized lamas despite the Dalai Lama's desire to make the government in exile secular. My friends refer to the Dalai Lama familiarly as HH, His Holiness and swoon when touched by him or receive a white scarf. They give up much of their independent judgment when it comes to the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan diaspora. Hopefully Iyer's book will bring the starry eyed a bit more down to earth. Yet his book and, more so, his public presentations pull punches. On the radio with Robert Thurman, Iyer was silent when Thurman made the absurd claim that the Chinese will leave Tibet because they become sick at the high altitude. In his book talks he underplays the opposition among Tibetans to what they take as the Dalai Lama's appeasement of the Chinese although his book teases out these themes more subtly.
The Dalai Lama presides over a medieval religion and the tensions which that created in traditional Tibet. In fact, as shown in Melvin Goldstein's book, The Snow Lion and the Dragon: China, Tibet, and the Dalai Lama on which Iyer draws, it may be that very tradition along with the anger of refugees from Eastern ethnic Tibet (over which China does have a traditional claim) which brought the Chinese repression of 1959 and alter prevented the Dalai Lama from seizing the opportunity for settling with both Mao and the proconsul of Tibet in 1979 both of whom advocated going slow and accommodating religion as opposed to Chinese hardliners. Again, the movie version of the diaspora has Mao as the hardliner. Goldstein sees China and the Dalai Lama both as captives of their ideologies. The former poured resources into Tibet to bring the people around to modernism which would make tradition irrelevant while the latter cannot see around the image he has helped create among movie stars, and followers in the West. Chinese modernization has not broken Tibetan adoration of the Dalai Lama. And the Dalai Lama can not fully accept the reality of the modernization of Tibetan or the impatience and violent of young. Iyer touches on these themes but his literary sensibilities and his personal relationship with the Dalai Lama keeps him circling around the conflicts rather than painting them starkly.
A month ago I walked out of the meditation hall where a well known lama was presenting some Tibetan ideas about meditation. He was laying the foundation of right view for a particular practice which he, himself, admitted he was not a master of. It was the third or fourth time I had heard his presentation. As I walked out of the hall filled with awe struck meditators, the word that popped into my head was again, medieval. I conveyed that sentiment to someone who had seen me in the hall. She paid no attention to my comment and said how lucky I had been that I had been in the hall when the lama had conducted the particular empowerment. I felt like I was talking to a fundamentalist Christian. The Dalai Lama says that it is the essence of the teaching not all the bells and incense that matters and yet he encourages all the ritual and wants to preserve the culture (despite what he knows are its drawback). In the presence of a lama who invokes the mystery and authority of traditional Tibet, my awed meditator friend has no interest in discriminating wisdom.
Reading Iyer's book brings one face to face with insolvable problems in the world. He is right that cosmopolitan Beirut devolved into a hell of communal fighting with no solution in sight (although he leaves out outsiders' meddling). And he may be right that despite the impatience of the young Tibetans and what has been effective appeasement, that there is no other course. Gandhi wanted the Jews to commit mass suicide so the world would see the horror of Hitler's extermination. Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age That would have been their nonviolent action. Did either submitting to being herded or the Warsaw Ghetto uprising make any difference in the end? Who knows? As Iyer hints, by the time Martin Luther King was assassinated history had passed him by. His moral authority, though hallowed, ran no writ in the streets.
The New York Review of Books review of Iyer's book seems to imply the Dalai Lama may be in much the same situation. He can take wonderful moral stances for the world at large, but he no longer influences events in Tibet. It may be, as Iyer states, the exile Tibetan community is the most successful groups of exiles in the world (How about the Chinese on Taiwan, Israel, etc. etc.?). But the reviewer also thinks Iyer does not see that in Tibet there is a growing and vibrant Tibetan culture which presumably has accommodated to Chinese overlordship and is making a new place for itself as part of China. Iyer keeps saying that cultural Tibet is dead. It may be for the best that old Tibet with its fighting monks, arcane theology, worship of the Dalai Lama and oppression of peasantry, is going in Tibet itself and will only survive as sentiment for the past with exile monasteries. As Iyer implies, though he constantly reiterates he is no Buddhist, all is impermanent. Us Westerners will have a Tibetan exile community to look up to. It has lots of movie stars to lionize it and religious mysteries to replace our own.
Iyer's book is a good place for all of the Dalai Lama's admirers to begin to look behind the curtain. The realities do not make him any less a compassionate saint. It does make him more human in complex world.
Charlie Fisher, author of Dismantling Discontent: Buddha's Way Through Darwin's World
 Boring May 8, 2008
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
This book is ok. I feel the author could have written in a more personal manner about the Dalai Lama then about his own interaction with him. I feel he was talking about his own feelings instead what the Dalai Lama is really about.
Timely insight May 4, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Mr Iyer provides a tender, yet seemingly detached view of the Dalai Lama himself and the context in which he lives and has to try to balance his spiritual and political duties. Very insightful and without some of the spiritually breathless language that sometimes obscures accounts of the leader of the Tibetan people. Eminently readable!
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