The Dalai Lama is the most influential person in the world, according to Time magazine. He draws crowds that no other spiritual leader or politician could hope to match, and sits there laughing, exuding an infectious joy, despite the suffering that he and the Tibetan people have known. Unique, celibate, idealistic, compassionate, exotic - he seems to look at life in a different way to everyone else. What is his secret? According to these two books, it lies in the fact that his mind was trained from an early age in an abstruse religious tradition that makes no distinction between the spiritual and temporal worlds.

Unlike the plethora of Hollywood meditators and their celebrity appendages who claim friendship with the Dalai Lama, Alexander Norman has known him well for two decades. As the ghostwriter of his autobiography, Freedom in Exile, and the ethical guidebook Ancient Wisdom, Modern World, he spent more than 250 hours interviewing him. In the eccentric world of Tibetology, it may not be strange that Norman also happens to be a practising Roman Catholic, a former British Army officer and a vintage-aircraft enthusiast.

Starting from the first principle that the Dalai Lama is a series of reincarnations of the Bodhisattva Chenrezig, his book sets out to examine the historical roots of the lineage. It is not always a pretty story. Several Dalai Lamas were murdered at a young age, and one was a notorious seducer who drank hard, wore his hair long and refused to take monastic vows. Norman seems at times to be shocked by the fruits of his own research. His starting point is the savage murder in 1997 of one of the Dalai Lama's closest allies in a doctrinal dispute, which he calls “a case of hitting the goat to scare the sheep”. Delving into Tibet's past, he examines a complex interplay of sorcery, reincarnation, divination and the assertion of worldly power. The establishment of the institution of the Dalai Lamas in 1578 arose out of a rivalry between monasteries, regional warlords and the Mongolian descendants of Genghis Khan, who all needed spiritual sanction for their actions.

The story that follows is some distance from what we are used to in contemporary political discourse: we meet a protector deity who emerges from a lotus flower, “his mouth open with warm blood bubbling at the corners”, a key religious text that has been hidden under a rock for several hundred years, and a group of monks who recite a mantra more than 21m times in order to save the life of a sickly Dalai Lama (they were not successful). Even at the time of the Chinese communist invasion in 1950, Buddhist monks “made mystical bombs, in the form of dough pellets charged with spells and incantations, and tossed them in the direction of the advancing troops”.

Some of the most interesting material is in the footnotes; the author has an endearing willingness to present the Dalai Lama's statements at face value. So when he asked the exiled Tibetan leader about the references to “flying monks” in early travel texts, Norman was informed that “from a traditional Tibetan perspective, the idea of one man levitating was just about conceivable, but the idea of 400 people flying through the air in an iron bird would have been dismissed as completely unimaginable”.

The Dalai Lama has a curiously sceptical faith in his own cultural background. He has swept aside many of the arcane traditions of old Tibet, and is fascinated by modern science. But he is still willing to rely on the pronouncements of oracles. He spends the first five hours of each day in prayer and meditation and, in accordance with his monastic vows, never eats meals after midday (although he will sometimes sustain himself with a biscuit). It is this interplay between different eras in the person of one man that Pico Iyer examines in The Open Road. He, too, has known the Dalai Lama for many years, and has watched him with a keenly perceptive eye as he has travelled round the world.

Iyer has made a reputation as an analyst of the social changes that are arising in the wake of globalisation. He notices and admires the Dalai Lama's ability to reach out across many cultures, his knack for reading faces in a crowd or the calming effect he can have on a disturbed person. Trailing His Holiness in Japan, Iyer is struck by the way he is able to switch “at lightning speed from monk to head of state to philosopher-scientist to regular man”. This success as a communicator comes in part from a childlike ability to notice simple things. The Dalai Lama tells Iyer that his pet dog has adopted a rabbit from his garden: “Even the rabbit is trying to suck at the dog's teats. Of course, a little disturbing for the dog!” For most of us, this is a funny story; for the Dalai Lama, it is a lesson in compassion, almost an instruction in better social behaviour for us human animals.

The Open Road jumps cleverly between the Dalai Lama, the people around him and the community of exiled Tibetans based in Dharamsala in India. Iyer describes, for instance, the government-in-exile's state oracle being attached to a giant metal hat as he begins to enter a trance: “The odd impression was of an astronaut being prepared for a long and dangerous journey, less into outer than into inner space.” Throughout, he seeks to comprehend the mental world of the Dalai Lama, but is aware of the impossibility of doing so, since “what I was brought up against again was an almost unimaginable otherness at the centre of him. Much of what he did, I was reminded, was invisible”.

Iyer is careful not to offend anybody in his writing, skirting sensitive issues such as the shoddy treatment of new arrivals in Dharamsala by the established Tibetan exiles, who regard the refugees as too “Chinese” in their language and behaviour. Dazzled by the stars he has encountered in the Tibetophile orbit, Iyer makes embarrassing paeans to the likes of U2 and Richard Gere. He avoids tackling the central question thrown up by the Dalai Lama's decision to become a lama to the globe: has his strategy of being a ubiquitous man of peace while simultaneously encouraging the western pro-Tibet lobby brought any real benefit to the 6m Tibetans who continue to live under Chinese communist rule, or has it alienated the hard-faced men in Beijing still further? Since The Open Road is so interesting and well written, I was hesitant to express this reservation until I read a splendid piece of philosophy in Iyer's book. He says, “Why despair, indeed, when you can change the world at any moment by choosing to see that the person who gave your last book a bad review is as intrinsic to your wellbeing as your thumb is?

Holder of the White Lotus by Alexander Norman
Little, Brown £20 pp464 Buy the book £18.00 plus free delivery
The Open Road by Pico Iyer Buy the book £11.69 plus free delivery
Bloomsbury £12.99 pp288

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