Pico Iyer

The Open Road

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Pico Iyer has been engaged in conversation with the Dalai Lama (a friend of his father's) for the last three decades-a continuing 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 most remote, 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, rigour, 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.
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352 printed pages
Publication year
2009
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Quotes

  • Lobsang Tenpahas quoted9 years ago
    I’ve noticed, whenever I follow the Dalai Lama around, that people’s faces don’t light up much when he says, “Dream— nothing!” in stressing to a questioner that for a resolution of her situation, “the main responsibility lies on your own shoulders,” or when he says, “We expect peace, compassion to come from the sky. Nonsense! Someone must start it,” in reminding us of the virtue of real action instead of daydreaming. Over and over, he counsels a practical realism and a refusal to get caught up in the lures and distraction of mindless optimism, least of all the kind that comes from indiscriminate faith. This emphasis on how much we can do ourselves lies at the heart of his own optimism and infectious confidence; yet it’s not always the part that most of us want to hear.
  • Lobsang Tenpahas quoted9 years ago
    A pickpocket encounters a saint, the Tibetans say, and all he sees are the other man’s pockets.
  • Lobsang Tenpahas quoted9 years ago
    Prayer, I recalled reading in Emerson—and it was perhaps the best definition I had met—is merely “the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view.”
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