As Pico Iyer wanders through Dharamsala, home for the past half-century to the Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual and political leader, he grows more and more thoughtful. One of the essential travel writers of our age, Iyer finds his senses "besieged by whole notions of possibility" in the steep streets of the Indian hill town.

At any moment, he notes, a visitor may come upon Jewish leaders explaining to His Holiness how they kept their culture alive after the destruction of the First and Second Temple, or U.S. civil-rights veterans telling stories about their struggle. Mexicans cross the Pacific to seek guidance about Chiapas while local guest houses overflow with philanthropists from Europe and North America who have roughed the 10-hour car ride from New Delhi to offer help.

With backpacker pilgrims from every continent likewise jamming the Internet cafés and a new garbage-collection system, funded by Richard Gere, easing the strain, Pico Iyer is ready to declare Dharamsala "as compressed and bittersweet an image of the global village as I have ever seen."

As such, the town is an experiment being conducted on behalf of arguably the fastest growing nation on the planet – "the land of the deracinated," he calls it – and at the behest of its accidental architect, a high-altitude Asian deity in permanent exile from the remote state he had once been expected to oversee in splendid, decidedly non-global isolation.

The Open Road, Iyer's wondrous essay about the Tibetan monk and globalism, is a rare union of writer and subject. The obvious reason for the match is biographical: Iyer has known the Dalai Lama for most of his life, thanks to his own father, a professor of religious studies who befriended the young ruler in the early days of his exile.

But even before his first actual meeting, Iyer had encountered His Holiness in the form of a "fairy tale," albeit one that was painfully real. Raised in Oxford, England, by Indian parents, the two-year-old Iyer thrilled to a bedtime story his father told about a current event of interest to only a handful in 1959. The tale concerned another little boy, born in a cowshed in the central Asian plateau, who was declared by passing monks to be the reincarnated leader of their Buddhist kingdom.

Though that child, anointed the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, grew up in a splendid palace and grew into a curious, progressive ruler, it didn't stop his backward country from being invaded by their colossus neighbour. He had to slip out of his own capital in disguise and cross the Earth's highest mountain range to safety. "Would right win a terrific victory?" Pico Iyer wondered as a small child.

As important to The Open Road, though, are the congruencies between Iyer's adult preoccupations and those both of the Dalai Lama himself and embodied in his improbable journey from thin-air deity to global icon. From his 1988 debut, Video Night in Kathmandu, to his 2004 essay collection Sun After Dark, Iyer has focused his questing spirit and preternatural eloquence on the consolidating post-nation-state tribe now commonly called after another of his books: 2000's The Global Soul.

The result is an affectionate but clear-eyed portrait of a great and goodly man that is simultaneously a meditation on the emerging shape of our new millennium. In a sense, it is a book by a visionary about a visionary, written, it turns out, when the patience and optimism of both are being more sorely tested than ever before.

In a typically buoyant mood, Pico Iyer decides that the Dalai Lama's pragmatism and hunger for reform, his "realistic radicalism" and desire to impart universal lessons, constitute a new vision of human society. Globalism, he declares, is itself a "reflection of human longing, in all its many forms."

But Iyer, while a believer in the connectedness of things, is far too astute and seasoned a traveller not to remark on the complications in overcoming differences. "The open road is always leading around the next corner," he writes, "calling for further investigation, even if no final destination is assured." He is also determined to demythologize his friend, the better to examine, and ultimately marvel, at his essence.

As chance would have it, The Open Road is being published into a flare-up of interest in Tibet's ongoing agony as the fragile back that China is only too happy to keep breaking with its whip. It can certainly be of assistance. If, for example, the Dalai Lama's response to the riots across Tibet has come as a surprise - he threatened recently to resign as political leader if the violence on "his" side did not cease, never mind the certainty of continuing lethal force by the oppressors - then the section of the book devoted to the internal politics of a long-beleaguered community will illuminate.

Many Tibetans, especially younger men who have never stepped foot in their homeland, are impatient with their (unelected) ruler's policies, in particular his unwavering vow of non-violence and commitment to negotiation. To talk about peace while Tibetans are dying, one dissident chides, is tantamount to manslaughter.

Likewise, Iyer wants to dampen the romanticism still clouding outside views of Tibet. "Tibetan culture," he notes, "is much closer than our own to the world of Shakespeare, in which every comet or cloud formation is a direct message from the gods to us." He explores the practises of Tantra, or esoteric Buddhism, an aspect of the Dalai Lama's formation that stands him well apart from other world religious leaders.

Few who come to His Holiness via Hollywood star support or "Free Tibet" rock concerts - or, simply, via his own effervescent character - may be aware that he continues to base many of his decisions on the divinations of state oracles, wisdom arrived at while locked in deep trances. "It was like nothing I had ever witnessed," Iyer writes of the ceremony.

The oracle ceremony is one of a dozen beautifully rendered scenes. Iyer is a graceful stylist, and his prose can be polyphonic in its ambitions while remaining supple and accessible. Similarly, though circumstance may assign The Open Road the status of "topical," be assured it is designed, both by craft and by spirit, to outlast the inevitable passing of events.

Once again, author and subject seem in union on this sore point. Patience and tolerance, counting on change as an inbuilt mechanism of the world, are central to the Dalai Lama's thinking, and to his justifiably celebrated optimism in the light of so much darkness. Iyer's own faith in the movable sensibility of globalism, the steady rise of fresh configurations of identity and even nation, is no less indomitable or, on occasion, sweetly tinged by idealism.

But that is the way with visionaries: They insist on seeing out beyond the present, and urging the rest of us to catch up and take a look.