The Dalai Lama

by Alexander Norman

  Other than these, the Great Thirteenth gave few indications of his intention to withdraw his mind from earthly existence. Ordinarily, high lamas can be expected to do so. But the only other sign the Great Thirteenth vouchsafed was his recent summoning of a Nepalese photographer operating in Lhasa at that time to come and take his portrait, a gesture in which some saw significance. His passing was therefore as great a shock to his attendants as it was to the general populace. So swift was his decline that there were even whisperings of foul play.*

  His portrait was taken at the Norbulingka Palace in November 1933. A few weeks later, the Precious Protector developed a cough, though he continued to work as usual. After about a week without improvement, the Great Thirteenth failed to appear at the public audience scheduled at the Upper Tantric College on the twelfth of December. By now he had developed a high fever. Then, on the sixteenth, the Precious Protector broke with his usual routine of letter writing in the morning and took first to his chair and then to his couch. That night he refused the two bowls of soup he normally took before going to bed.

  Sometime after 10 that night, the Lord Chamberlain sounded the alarm. Summoning the other attendants, he instructed them to call the three senior-most members of the court, including the chief secretary and the treasurer. Not having been informed of the Dalai Lama’s illness before this moment, they were surprised to learn that the Precious Protector was suddenly very unwell. On arrival, they immediately prostrated themselves and, as is customary whenever a high lama falls ill, begged the Dalai Lama to remain in his body. It is believed that this is under his control and that how and when he dies is a matter of his choosing.

  An hour later, the Nechung oracle was ordered to attend—this being the state oracle and the government’s go-to supernatural counsel and support. The medium arrived in such a hurry that one account claims he did not even have time to dress properly. He subsequently went into a trance, during which he administered some medicine. It seems that the Dalai Lama tried to refuse this, but the medium forced it on him.

  When Nechung came out of his trance, the Precious Protector’s doctor contended that the “Seventeen Heroes for Subduing Colds” that the oracle had administered was far too strong for the Dalai Lama’s present condition, which, as if in direct confirmation, worsened immediately. By noon the following day, he was unconscious.

  A deputation of high lamas was now admitted to the Presence to entreat him further to remain in the body. But he opened his eyes only briefly, breathing his last sometime around 6:30 P.M.

  The first that most people knew of the Dalai Lama’s passing was when butter lamps were lit on the roofs of the Potala Palace and of nearby Sera Monastery. It was many more days before the news made its way to the farthest reaches of Tibet. Meanwhile, it became incumbent on the government to appoint a regent who would steer the ship of state on a steady course until the new Dalai Lama could be found and educated to the point where he was able to take over the helm. In light of the degree to which the Great Thirteenth had centralized power into his own hands, and the level of involvement he maintained in all aspects of both spiritual and temporal affairs, it is at first sight remarkable that he seems not to have given much thought to his own succession. One might even argue that such negligence is evidence of a certain megalomania. The devout would simply counter that, foreseeing all things, the Dalai Lama merely withdrew his spirit for a brief period in order that he be young and vigorous when it came to meeting the challenges that lay ahead.

  Besides, the Dalai Lama did leave a final testament as a guide to those responsible for selecting the regent and looking after the welfare of the Tibetan people until the moment when his successor would reach his majority. It is remarkable for its prescience. Isolated from the world he might be, but the Great Thirteenth had a firm grasp of the great movements of the day. He understood clearly the danger communism spelled to the free practice of religion. Despite the deep misgivings of the monasteries, which were hostile to the notion of a standing army (when necessary they would supply armed monks), he was adamant that Tibet needed a strong and independent military establishment:

  If we are not able to protect our own country, then everyone . . . will be wiped out so completely that not even their names will remain. The estates and property of the monasteries and monks will be annihilated . . . [and] we will be forced to wander the land as servants of our enemies. Everyone will be subjected to torture, and both day and night will be an unending round of fear and suffering. Such a time as this will come for sure!

  His words fell on deaf ears, however, and, within a matter of days, a bitter struggle for power broke out.

  Ordinarily the regent was chosen from among the high lamas of four particular monasteries, but the Great Thirteenth had caused one of these to be destroyed for its treachery during the recent occupation of Lhasa by a Chinese army. Furthermore, any one of the three most powerful men in Tibet at the time of the Great Thirteenth’s demise was in a strong position to seize power from the monasteries. These were Kumbela, the Lord Chamberlain; Tsarong, the former army commander; and Lungshar, an ambitious aristocrat with modernizing tendencies who was Tsarong’s implacable foe. Langduen, the ultraconservative but ineffectual chief minister, was not one of them. There was, however, one entity still more powerful than these three men: the combined influence of the three great monasteries in the Lhasa region—those of Ganden, Drepung, and Sera—also known as the Three Seats. As it happened, Tsarong was absent from Lhasa at this time and, not desiring to join the fray, played no part in the events that followed.

  It was thus a straightforward contest between Kumbela and Lungshar, with the Three Seats casting the deciding vote. Lungshar’s strongest suit in this regard was his professed hostility to the idea of an independent army. At first, however, Kumbela’s position looked impregnable. During the last years of the Dalai Lama’s life, his authority had been supreme, and for the few days after the Precious Protector “withdrew his spirit,” most seem to have anticipated that Kumbela would assume the regency. Besides being the Great Thirteenth’s most trusted servant, to whom was delegated the day-to-day running of the household, Kumbela was de facto commander in chief of the tongdra, the Dalai Lama’s personal bodyguard, which he had formed just a few years previously.

  In recruiting the rank and file of this bodyguard, Kumbela’s strategy had been to do so solely from among the gentry. His thinking was that, having a better education than the lower orders, they would make better soldiers. Kumbela saw to it that they were well fed and wore specially tailored uniforms, paying for their gold-embroidered insignia out of his own pocket and personally ordering the officers’ uniforms from Calcutta. The officers (themselves all members of the aristocracy) even went for training in machine gunnery at the British garrison still stationed at Gyantse. When the Dalai Lama died, it thus seemed certain that Kumbela would exploit his position. Yet for reasons that are not at all clear, he made no attempt to do so. Perhaps he saw his appointment as regent as a foregone conclusion.

  Lungshar was quick to exploit this inaction.

  Of all the high officials within the late Dalai Lama’s government, Lungshar was the most worldly wise, having traveled widely outside Tibet. When the Great Thirteenth came up with a scheme whereby five boys from the gentry class were sent to England for schooling, it was Lungshar who accompanied them. He subsequently visited several European countries, taking careful note of the political systems of each. What seems particularly to have impressed him was the way in which Britain had managed to avoid the violent revolutions against monarchy that had afflicted Europe during the course of the previous century. On returning to Tibet, he therefore set about gathering support for a constitutional settlement that would see some of the Dalai Lama’s temporal power vested in a secular authority organized according to democratic principles.

  But if his sympathies were for government elected by popular vote, Lungshar’s methods were decidedly Machiavellian. When the National Assembly took up th
e question of Kumbela’s culpability in the Precious Protector’s unexpected demise, Lungshar cleverly used the occasion to instigate revolt among the Dalai Lama’s bodyguard.

  In the end, the erstwhile Lord Chamberlain was charged not with murder but with the lesser crime of failing to keep the National Assembly informed of the Dalai Lama’s health. For this he was stripped of office, relieved of all his property, and banished to a remote district far from the capital.

  With Kumbela out of the way, Lungshar and his supporters could argue for a regency by a council made up of the existing prime minister and two more officials, one monastic and one lay—the layman in question being Lungshar himself. The National Assembly was, however, dominated by the abbots of the Three Seats. While there was considerable support for Lungshar’s idea among the more progressive elements of the aristocracy, the conservative faction was bound to take sides with the religious authorities. The result was a stalemate. This in itself was a victory for the conservatives since the inevitable outcome was recourse to the deities. The matter of who should be appointed regent would be decided by divination, while each of the candidates would be a leading figure within the monastic community.

  A grand religious ceremony was duly held, which the entire government of several hundred officials attended. Presiding was the ex-abbot of Ganden Monastery. From a total of three possibilities, the name that emerged was that of the youngest, the twenty-four-year-old Reting Rinpoché.

  Of all the candidates for regent, Reting Rinpoché was unquestionably the most charismatic. Born to a humble family in central Tibet, he had quickly displayed signs of exceptional ability. It is held that, when he was around five years of age, the young prodigy became angry with his elder sister, stamping his right foot on the ground with such force that it imprinted itself on the very rock on which he was standing. A second indication of genius came not long afterwards, when his mother left him to watch over a pot of thukpa (meat broth with noodles) while she went to milk the family cow. After some time, the little boy came running and announced that it was about to boil over so he had closed up the pot. When she came back, his mother saw that he had taken off one of his bootlaces and used it to tie off the neck of the earthenware vessel. A third sign of the boy’s high spiritual attainment came on an occasion when he drove a wooden peg into solid rock. He explained that this was to tie his horse to—even though his family did not then own one. This must therefore be a portent, since only the aristocracy and high lamas had horses. The boy had subsequently been recognized by the Great Thirteenth himself as the authentic reincarnation of one of his foremost teachers.

  As to the character of the Rinpoché, as a young man he was—according to the testimony of one of his nieces—kind, playful, and solicitous. She also attests to a characteristic of his that many took to be a sign of the highest spiritual attainment, a “delicate fragrance about his person.”

  Some of the foreigners who met Reting Rinpoché, a man slightly below average height, with enormous protruding ears and a perpetual frown, were less than favorably impressed. Hugh Richardson, then British political officer for Tibet, described him as “gauche,” “self-centred,” and “immature,” while General Sir Philip Neame, who undertook a military inspection of the Tibetan army (at the request of the Tibetan government itself) in 1936, described him as “a very mediocre personage of little personality, brains, or education, and of no particular family, chosen . . . [for] being a nonentity.”

  Whatever his true qualities, the new regent had been selected by the gods themselves. It might have seemed to some of Lungshar’s supporters, therefore, that nothing was to be done. But Reting was young and Langduen, the chief minister, who continued in office, was weak and indecisive. Commenting on the recent installation of electric light in the capital’s more important houses (including his own), Langduen timorously remarked that “new things only bring misfortune.” If Lungshar acted fast enough, there remained a good chance that he could seize the initiative and achieve the end he desired.

  Today, the more secular-minded remember Lungshar as power-hungry and self-serving. To the more pious, he is simply seen as wicked and to have gotten the fate he deserved. What tends to be overlooked is the fact that he seems genuinely to have taken to heart the late Dalai Lama’s concerns for the fate of Tibet. Like the Dalai Lama himself, he had acquired from his travels a sense of the momentous events taking place elsewhere in the world. To the east, the Chinese were attempting to reunify following a disastrous civil war and invasion by the Japanese. To the west, Russia, having overthrown dynastic rule by the tsars, was in the process of a violent collectivization of agriculture and industry. To the south, Indian opposition to British rule was increasingly forthright. To the north, Inner Mongolia, although nominally independent, was effectively under Russian control. It was clear to Lungshar that if Tibet were to survive as an independent state in the modern era, it would need to concern itself with the modern world.

  The reforms Lungshar had in mind would see the power of the great landed families redistributed among the more numerous (and more progressive) minor aristocracy. This was revolutionary in itself. But what made his ambition especially dangerous from the point of view of the monasteries was the implicit threat to them implied by his intended greater role for the National Assembly. That of the Kashag, the council of ministers, would thereby be downgraded. This would have, as a further consequence, a diminution of the prospective new Dalai Lama’s political power when eventually he reached his majority. While at first the monasteries were reassured by Lungshar’s professed anti-military stance, gradually the ramifications of his scheme began to dawn on them.

  A month after his selection, Reting Rinpoché was formally installed as regent. Meanwhile, Lungshar worked hard to secure support. By mid-March 1934 he felt confident enough to hold his first open meeting. With roughly a quarter of the National Assembly declaring for him, his position was by no means secure, but it was adequate for his purposes at this stage. For now, Lungshar’s aim was simply to put a petition to the Kashag. This was designed to undermine the position of its most powerful member, Trimon Shapé.

  Lungshar intended to present this petition on May 10, the timing of his submission known to only a few. One of these, an early ally, had by this time decided that his own career prospects were in fact best served by throwing his support behind Trimon. He therefore sent a warning to Trimon that Lungshar was poised to make a move against him. While Lungshar’s intentions were almost certainly peaceful, the warning clearly implied that Trimon’s life was in danger. Early on the morning of the tenth, therefore, Trimon left his house with several servants and sought an immediate meeting with the regent and the chief minister. Together they decided that Trimon should flee to Drepung Monastery while orders were issued for Lungshar’s arrest.

  The petition was duly presented to the remaining three members of the Kashag later that morning. In the afternoon, Lungshar was summoned to a meeting of the government department of which he was a member. At first undecided whether to attend or not, he seems to have determined to go on the grounds that he had done nothing illegal and there was some chance that the officials he was to meet with could be brought into the fold. This was a major miscalculation. He was met at the Potala Palace with an arrest order accusing him of serious crimes, including, disastrously, failure to appreciate the kindness of the late Dalai Lama. While waiting for the official who should at this point have ceremonially removed his topknot and robe of office, Lungshar made a bid to escape. He had left the servant to whom he had entrusted his pistol just outside in the corridor. As ill luck would have it, the servant was at that moment on his way back from the latrines downstairs. Recognizing Lungshar’s plight, he held out the weapon toward him as his master ran down the stairs. But just as the two men met, the servant was seized by several janitors while Lungshar was overpowered by a palace guard. He was forcibly escorted back to the regent’s office.

  Having undone Lungshar’s topknot and taken his gover
nment robe from his back, the official and his assistants began to remove his footwear. As they did so, Lungshar managed to break free and swallow a piece of paper that had fallen out of the first boot. But he was unable to do so a second time as another piece of paper fell out of his other boot when it was removed. On inspection, this had written on it, next to an occult symbol, the fateful words Do harm to Minister Trimon.

  This was black magic.

  Or so the story goes. The alternative version is that the black magic component was a later invention to justify Lungshar’s punishment. Trampling on a person’s name would, with the aid of a wrathful deity, bring about the violent demise of the victim. A similar tactic had been employed in an attempt on the life of the Great Thirteenth some four decades previously—not so long ago that the event should have been forgotten. On that occasion, the young Dalai Lama, having suffered several bouts of illness, summoned the oracle in an attempt to discover the cause. It transpired that a pair of boots belonging to one of his teachers was implicated. On questioning, the reverend teacher agreed that there did seem to be something strange about the boots: every time he wore them, he suffered a nosebleed. When they were examined, it was found that the sole of one of them contained a piece of paper on which the Dalai Lama’s name was written adjacent to the symbol for shinje she, Lord of Death*. Again this was black magic, and in this case it was being employed in the most heinous of crimes—there being none greater than the attempted killing of the Precious Protector. As a result, the ex-regent, who was behind the plot, and three accomplices—including the then chief minister—were arrested, charged with treason, and sentenced to death. The Dalai Lama intervened and the death penalty was rescinded, but the ex-regent nonetheless died in mysterious circumstances, apparently drowned in a vat of water. Meanwhile his co-conspirators all had bamboo driven under their nails and received a hundred lashes before being sent into exile. Even the chief minister’s wife was forced to wear for a week the cangue (a portable pillory consisting of a wooden collar, worn around the neck, to which the victim’s hands were shackled).