Although my life has been intimately connected with the Dalai Lama’s for almost as long as I can remember, I have never been asked so much about the beginning of the connection as this summer, when all the world looked (for a few months, at least) at Tibet, and more people began to wonder how the spiritual and temporal leader of the Tibetans can speak for patience, forbearance and dialogue while the Chinese government continues to sentence Tibetans to six years in prison just for carrying pictures of their exiled leader, to flood Tibet with Han Chinese (“demographic aggression”, as the Dalai Lama calls it) and in effect to wipe a distinctive and ancient country off the map. This is Tibet’s last hope, many in the exiled Tibetan community have been shouting, in the months leading up to this month’s Olympics in Beijing; if we don’t act now, Tibet as we know it will be gone forever.

The Dalai Lama clearly worries about this every day, and when last I travelled with him, for a week across Japan last November, he spoke constantly about the need for China to restore basic freedoms of speech and thought, even if it were to remain officially in control of Tibet. “Premier Hu Jintao’s slogan of `Harmonious Society’,” he said at one point, “I fully support! But harmony cannot come from the barrel of a gun.” As the leader responsible for all Tibetans – and a leader whom Tibetans regard as an incarnation of a god (of compassion, no less) – he clearly lives out everything his people go through, and understands their impatience and frustration after 49 years of seeing their land overrun. And yet as a monk, committed to both the wider view and to the good of all beings, Chinese as well as Tibetan, he knows that any defiant gesture will only provoke more brutality from a notoriously prideful and prickly government and that violence against China will only bring more violence and suffering upon Tibetans – and Chinese – who have suffered too much already. The only way to protect Tibetans – and Chinese – is to wait until the leadership in Beijing comes to its senses. Isolating China will only have the most dangerous consequences for all.

The first time I met the Dalai Lama in person – when I was a teenager, in 1974, travelling up to his modest yellow house at the end of the road in a makeshift settlement, surrounded by pine trees, in the Indian hill station of Dharamsala – I knew nothing about the fact that he had already been negotiating with Chinese leaders, particularly Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, for more than 20 years; had recently (in a move that prefigured what we saw this year) told the CIA-sponsored Tibetan guerrillas waging a violent resistance against the Chinese to lay down their arms (after Washington had come to a detente with Beijing) and was working towards sending fact-finding delegations to Chinese-occupied Tibet a few years later. All I could see was the thick monsoonal fog that blanketed his house as he talked with my father about emptiness, reality and compassion. It seemed to ignorant me as if these two philosophers were sitting above the clouds, thrashing out ideas that Plato or Plotinus might have recognised.

In truth, the Dalai Lama is a hyper-realist, who constantly enjoins people not to hope or wait or pray for a miracle to come, but to look at reality closely, unblinkingly, as through a scientist’s microscope, and then see what can be done with it. His favourite adjectives, as you may notice when you listen to him speak, are “logical”, “realistic” and “practical”; and his own life, being enthroned at the age of four, receiving envoys from Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the age of seven and facing a monastic civil war in Lhasa when he was 11, has never allowed him to traffic in abstractions or to sit above the clouds. The fiercest I have ever seen him came once when, 20 years ago, I carelessly referred to him as a “Living Buddha” and a “god-king” in an article I wrote. The whole point of Buddha’s teaching, and therefore of his own, he reminded me next time I saw him, was that all of us are humans, trying our hardest to awaken the potential we have within us, while acknowledging that all of us are mortal, flawed and always works-in-progress. “Lord Buddha I really consider to be a scientist,” he said last year in Japan, invoking once more his empirical, scientist’s contention that every word of the Buddha’s, let alone the Dalai Lama’s, should be thrown out if it were shown to be faulty by new research. If there is any blind faith involved in this contest between a spiritual and a material view of the world, it is on the side of the latter.