Biographic Novel Series 1: The 14th Dalai Lama
Tetsu Saiwai
Emotional Content, August 2008
224 pages, $15.95
It’s old news that comic books have grown up. Since at least 1992, when Art Speigelman released Maus, the Pultizer Prize–winning graphic memoir of his father’s captivity at Auschwitz, narrative sequential art has been more and more recognized as worthy of adult readership and critical respect. The genre has been most fervently embraced in Japan, where manga, as comics are called, are read by people of all ages and range in subject matter from romances to history.
With the publication of Tetsu Saiwai’s graphic rendering of the life of the Dalai Lama, biography can now be added to the manga hit list. Distributed in the United States and Japan by Emotional Content, this is the first “biographic novel” in a planned series. (Other subjects will include Mother Theresa, Che Guevera, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr.) This installment tells the story of the man who is not just a beloved spiritual figure, but a force in the ongoing dialogue between science and religion. It begins with the recognition of little Lhamo Döndrub as the successor of the previous Dalai Lama, who Tibetans believe to be a reincarnation of the Buddha. At just two years old, Lhamo was given a new name, Tenzin Gyatso, and taken from his family to live in a monastery in Lhasa, then the seat of the Tibetan government.
From then on Tenzin Gyatso was educated to be both spiritual touchstone and the head of a state that was independent but held in a three-pronged vice by China, India, and Nepal. As Saiwai’s illustrations show, Tenzin was from an early age interested not just in his Himalayan kingdom but in the wider world. Given a telescope by the German adventurer Heinrich Harrer, the young Dalai Lama used the device to watch the stars by night and the people beyond the monastery walls by day.
A good view of the world did not fully prepare him for it, however. When Chinese Communist forces invaded Tibet in 1949, the Dalai Lama was forced into exile. Fleeing on horseback across the mountains into India, he began his career as advocate and agitator for the rights of his people, those same farmers, laborers, and goat herders he so often watched from his monastic perch.
Such a dramatic story is well served by the conventions of the graphic genre, which are evident here in full force. Manga characters are often drawn with eyes as large as dinner plates; it’s a technique capable of portraying perfectly the innocence and dismay of a two-year-old forced to grow into a man who will lead a tiny mountain country against a rising superpower.
There is naturally much left unsaid about the Dalai Lama’s life and his unlikely role on the international stage. The fact that Tibet before its virtual absorption into the People’s Republic of China was an unabashed theocracy is strangely overlooked by many Western supporters of the “Free Tibet” movement, and likewise in these pages receives scant attention.
Yet in his exile from his homeland, the Dalai Lama has become a truly global figure. Raised to be merely a local monarch, he has been pushed by history to become something far more interesting. Forced to cross the borders of Tibet under cover of night, he now crosses cultural and religious borders openly.
In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, depicted here as one of the few scenes showing Tenzin Gyatsu as the bespectacled and smiling older man he is easily recognized as today, he outlined his understanding of how science and religion together can contribute to the betterment of both individuals and nations.
“Material progress is of course important for human advancement. In Tibet, we paid much too little attention to technological and economic development, and today we realize that this was a mistake,” he said. “At the same time, material development without spiritual development can also cause serious problems. I believe both are important and must be developed side by side so as to achieve a good balance between them.”
Peter Manseau is the editor of Search.
