I came to appreciate this commitment to reality, and how quietly the Dalai Lama was advancing a quite radical political position, only when I began listening and talking to him as a journalist in the early 1980s. Nearly every politician I have covered in my quarter-century of journalism, travelling from North Korea to El Salvador to Beirut to Tibet, speaks of the future (and the promises he offers) or the past (and the grievances he promises to redress). The Dalai Lama was the rare leader who seemed committed to the present. The future is unknowable, he suggests, although we must always plan for it, so as best to work in harmony with it, and the past is history, no longer subject to change. Insofar as we have potential to find better solutions, it takes place right now, right here, and nowhere else.

Twelve years ago, when we held a series of conversations in his home in Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama confessed that he was “addicted” to something. What could it be, I thought? Impermanence? Non-attachment? No, he said: he was addicted to the BBC World Service broadcast every morning; he listened to it during his four hours of morning meditation, and if he was travelling and could not catch the news, he “really felt something was missing from my day”. When you listen to him address journalists, you notice that he takes pains over dates, has a scholar’s particularity about terms (like, in fact, “Living Buddha”), and draws his references from the Korean war, which he remembers; his talks with the mayor of Shanghai in 1955 and what he learned about carbon footprints from a scientific authority just yesterday. It’s well-known that he is the rare religious figure who loves to talk to scientists to learn what neuroscience and biology can teach him about the human condition; but what is more significant is that he uses that scientific procedure in his work as a politician.

It is this rigorous investigation of things as they are that often gets lost when you look at his counter-intuitive political positions in recent months – many Tibetans, and millions across the world, have been calling out for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics, and agitating to confront China directly, while he says the Games should go on as planned. The Dalai Lama always remembers that the Tibetan people are outnumbered by the Chinese by 215 to one, and so romantic gestures or Gandhian protests won’t work. Unlike most Tibetans in exile, he has spent a year travelling across China, and has seen how Beijing’s leadership works and thinks, having been trying to negotiate with it for 58 years. Besides, the majority of people in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa now are Chinese; so no resolution of the Tibetan issue will mean nothing unless and until it takes in the rights of the Chinese, who are everywhere in Tibet.