In Lungshar’s case, his crime seemed to his enemies to warrant the severest penalty. Not only had he tried to undermine the position of the Kashag by introducing reforms that must harm religion itself, but also he had resorted to the dark arts. It was thus decided that he should have his eyes put out.
It is arguably a favorable sign that this punishment had not been handed down for so long that no one could be found who had experience of carrying it out. Members of the butcher caste tasked with the operation were forced to rely on the folk memory of their clan. Involving the application of yak knuckles to each temple and a tourniquet tightened until the eyeballs popped out, the technique proved successful on one side only. Eventually, the recalcitrant globe was simply gouged out with a knife and the sockets cauterized with boiling oil.
The humiliation of Lungshar (who, though he survived the experience, unsurprisingly lived only a year longer, incarcerated in a dungeon of the Potala Palace) meant that the government of Tibet during the regency period remained, on the one hand, rigidly conservative and, on the other, indecisive with respect to any serious issue with which it was confronted. But what the incident tells us about the politics of Tibet at the time is of considerably less significance than what it tells us about the Tibetan tradition itself. Lungshar’s proposed reforms were both moderate and reasonable. Full democracy and the accountability of government to the Tibetan people were not in question, though his plans were a step in that direction. The mere fact that Lungshar could be accused of black magic suggests that the tradition itself rendered Tibet completely unready to take its place in the modern world.
3
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A Child Is Born
While Lungshar was in the process of discovering just how premature was his vision of a new Tibet, the search for the new incarnation of the Dalai Lama began in earnest. Following his enthronement as regent in 1934, Reting Rinpoché’s primary task was to sift and assess the various signs and portents brought to his attention. An early event concerned the embalmed body of the lately departed Precious Protector. It had been seated, wrapped in gauze, facing south in its burial chamber. But when after some time the embalmers came to put in fresh salt, they found the head inclined toward the east. This they took to be significant, and when it happened again, there could be no doubting its importance.
The utterances of the various oracles associated with the Dalai Lama were also of the greatest interest at this time, and not just what they said but their actions, too. When three of them all turned to the east and threw offering scarves—again not once but twice—this was of clear significance.
Further help came from signs in nature. Among those noted by the monastic officials charged with collating evidence were some curious cloud formations that appeared on the northeastern horizon. There were also some unusual botanical indications. It came to the attention of the authorities that snapdragons had bloomed unexpectedly underneath the stairs that stood at the eastern end of the public discourse area adjacent to the Jokhang, the most important temple in Lhasa. And then there was the matter of the strange star-shaped fungi that appeared at the base of a wooden pillar standing to the northeast of the shrine where the late Dalai Lama had been entombed.
It was concluded that, taken together, all these signs indicated that the search for the new incarnation should be conducted in the east. What was needed now was greater precision. More than a thousand miles separated Lhasa from what was then considered to be the border with China. It was in hopes of getting a more fine-grained answer that, during the summer of 1935, the regent traveled to the monastery founded and consecrated by the Second Dalai Lama during the first decade of the sixteenth century. This was Chokor Gyal in southern Tibet. Situated at a remarkable fifteen thousand feet, the monastery is overlooked by three mountains, each regarded as the abode of a different tutelary, or guardian, deity.
Of still greater significance, however, is the lake that lay half a day’s journey away, Lhamo Lhatso. This is held by tradition to be the dwelling place of Palden Lhamo—the Glorious Goddess—the protector deity most closely associated with the Dalai Lamas. These protector deities (of whom somewhere between fifteen and twenty are fully attested) are central to the Tibetan tradition. They are quite distinct from the tutelary deities; their chief characteristic being to channel the “wrathful,” or negative, aspects of particular fully enlightened beings. This wrath is deployed to guard both the doctrine itself and the community of practitioners. It can also be made available to communities and individuals as an aid to overcoming obstacles. In the case of some protectors, for example Yamantaka (Lord of Death), they may also be taken as meditational deities, whereby the form and attributes of the deity are (imaginatively) assumed by individual practitioners as a means to overcome their own negative thoughts and emotions in the quest for Enlightenment. But these are specialist practices; on the whole, the protectors are treated with great caution. It is well understood that, misdirected, their fearsome energy can cause untold harm.
The power of the protectors can be appreciated in their iconography: the Glorious Goddess, Palden Lhamo, is described as having a dark blue body—
in her right hand she brandishes a club over the brains of those who have broken their promises to her; in her left hand, on a level with her heart, she holds a skull-cup filled with blood and other substances used in exorcism. Her mouth is open and between her sharp teeth she gnaws on a human corpse. As she does so, her joyous yelps resemble roaring thunder. She has three red, round eyes, which gleam like lightning. Her yellowing hair stands on end and her eyelashes and beard blaze like the fire which flames up at the end of cosmic eons. In her right ear she wears a lion, in her left, a snake. On her head she wears a diadem of five skulls, while round her neck is draped a garland of fifteen freshly severed heads, dripping blood.
Small wonder that, faced with depictions of these extraordinary beings for the first time, the Victorian explorers of Tibet were convinced that the Buddhism they found practiced there was a debased form of the religion, which, cut off from its original sources, had degenerated into mere devil worship. (One wonders what the first Buddhists to travel in the West made of Christians praying to a deity disfigured and nailed to a cross.) In any case, what those explorers failed to realize was that, from the Tibetan perspective, the protector deities, for all their gruesome attributes, are ultimately agents of compassion.
Following his retreat at the Second Dalai Lama’s monastery, and after conducting the appropriate sadhanas (rituals) to propitiate the Glorious Goddess, the young regent did indeed experience a detailed vision in the waters of the lake. First, he saw three letters of the alphabet (actually syllables), Ah, Ka, and Ma. There followed a vision of a three-storied monastery with three distinguishing features: its second story was painted the color of turquoise, its top story was adorned with a golden roof, and there was a “thread-like” path leading east from the monastery to a hill, on top of which stood a single-story building with a blue roof.
Having noted down the contents of his vision, the Rinpoché took these details as the object of further meditative investigation. On returning to Lhasa, he also consulted with Nechung and other oracles over the course of a full year. At the end of this time, he ordained three search parties. Each headed by a tulku (a reincarnate lama) and assisted by three senior monks, these search parties were to conduct investigations in three far eastern districts. One search party was dispatched to the southeast, another went roughly due east, while the third went to the northeast.
Not that Reting Rinpoché’s instructions went entirely unopposed. There were those who were skeptical that the Dalai Lama would take rebirth so far from Lhasa: Would there not be a danger that if he was from some remote part of the borderlands, he might fall into Chinese hands? Surely the gods would not take that risk? Furthermore, there was a promising local candidate, a boy born into the family of the Great Thirteenth Dalai Lama. Soon after his birth, a horse from the Dalai Lama’s stables had broken loose
and run straight to the infant’s house, a credible indication that there was a connection between the Precious Protector and the baby boy. But Reting was adamant that the first symbol he had seen in the waters of the lake referred to Amdo, the eastern province. In clear confirmation, the oracle of Samye Monastery took off his breastplate and gave it to Kewtsang Rinpoché, the tulku appointed to lead the party that would go to Amdo.
The three teams left Lhasa during the autumn of 1936. As it turned out, the two that went east and southeast found not a single plausible candidate, while even the one that was sent to Amdo did not at first find any that seemed promising. Nevertheless, one significant early event was a meeting between Kewtsang Rinpoché and the Panchen Lama—after the Dalai Lama, the second-most-important and powerful tulku in the land—who was then residing at Riwoche.
The Ninth Panchen Lama was at this time living in self-imposed exile. He had fled his monastery at Tashilhunpo in protest at the Great Thirteenth’s imposition of new taxes to fund the army. When the Dalai Lama found out, he had been outraged, sending an armed party to apprehend him. It arrived too late, however, and the Panchen made good his departure, first to Mongolia and then to China. “It is not known why you have left your monastery,” wrote the Precious Protector subsequently, “in which you should now be sitting in meditation. You seem to have forgotten the sacred history of your predecessors and wandered away to a desert . . . like a moth attracted by lamplight.”
Traditionally, the Panchen and Dalai Lamas serve each other as religious teachers in successive incarnations, the older one acting as mentor to the younger. This was most famously the case when the Fourth Panchen Lama tutored both the Fourth and the Great Fifth Dalai Lamas (there have so far been two Dalai Lamas acclaimed as Great, the Fifth and the Thirteenth, though it is whispered already of the present incarnation). It is also true that there are some who point to the fact that—at least according to one way of reckoning—the Panchen Lama lineage is the senior lineage. And it is indisputable that, considered as a spiritual master, the First Panchen was more highly accomplished than the First Dalai Lama. There had thus always been rivalry, not so much between the individuals themselves as between their respective labrangs, or estates. In this instance, it is generally believed that the Panchen Lama, a man of “singular sweetness and charm,” according to Sir Charles Bell, had been put up to his eastern escapade by the men surrounding him.
That the Panchen Lama’s animosity was not personal is attested to by the fact that, when he met with the search party leader, the Panchen Lama gave Kewtsang Rinpoché a list of candidates whose names had been brought to his attention and whom he had investigated by the usual methods of meditative inquiry. It included the name of Lhamo Thondup, the boy who would eventually be proclaimed Dalai Lama.
Thus equipped, the search party made its way to Kumbum Monastery, arriving in the spring of 1937, where it was greeted by a large number of local dignitaries, both monastic and lay.
Not until winter did Kewtsang Rinpoché and his men finally reach the village of Taktser, however. Perhaps one reason for their slowness to investigate the boy there was the fact that the family into which the candidate had been born had already yielded an important incarnation—that of the Taktser Rinpoché, his older brother, and reincarnation of the man with whom the Great Thirteenth had enjoyed a picnic lunch three decades previously. By now, the new Taktser Rinpoché, thirteen years older than Lhamo Thondup, was a novice at Shartsong Monastery. It must have seemed highly unlikely that the same family could harbor one still greater. Besides, it was not as if the parents were particularly distinguished. They didn’t even speak proper Tibetan but a kind of hybrid language known as siling ke, which necessitated that the team take an interpreter with them.
Yet the search party was startled to realize that the architectural features of the birthplace of the child matched precisely the details provided by Reting Rinpoché on the basis of his vision. And they were immediately impressed with the now two-year-old boy they met. A member of the party later recalled how he went straight up to Kewtsang Rinpoché and “pulled the rosary [he] wore round his neck and said, ‘give me this!’
“‘Tell me who I am and then I will give it to you,’ replied Kewtsang Rinpoché.
“‘You are an Aka* from Sera. Mani, mani,’† the boy replied spontaneously.
“‘Who is the man [next door]?’ asked Kewtsang Rinpoché, and the boy replied, ‘Tsedrung Lobsang!’”
Then he pointed to the interpreter and gave his name too. According to the official account, he gave all this information spontaneously and “without any hesitation or doubt.” The members of the search party also noted that his mannerisms were “extraordinarily profound for his age.”
Such were the first miracles. For his own part, the Dalai Lama himself remembers almost nothing of this first interview, save for the piercing eyes of the man who subsequently became his senior personal assistant. As the search party went to leave Taktser the following day, they did so with heavy hearts; they longed to stay and bask in his presence. When the boy “firmly insisted” they take him with them, it was only by his parents’ playing a trick on little Lhamo Thondup that they were able to prevent the boy from following after.
So as not to arouse the suspicions—or, presumably, the hopes—of the family, Kewtsang Rinpoché had disguised himself as a servant during this first visit to the boy’s house. The search party had portrayed itself as a group of pilgrims en route to nearby Shartsong. After a brief return to Kumbum Monastery, however, in order to confer with his colleagues (and, we may assume, with the deities), and to send a message to the government back in Lhasa, Kewtsang Rinpoché together with his team returned to Taktser a few weeks later.
On this occasion he did so in his official capacity as head of one of the search parties looking for the new Dalai Lama and warranted to thoroughly examine the child. Along the way, the search party met with a number of auspicious signs, faithfully recorded. First, they encountered several people carrying barrels of curd, milk, and water. Second, they met with a young Chinese close to the house who suggested a route that took them to the front door of the boy’s house rather than the more usual direct route which led to the back door. Third, just as they reached the door, they heard the sound of a conch shell being blown from the top of Kumbum Monastery, calling the monks to assembly. Finally, on entering the house, they heard a cuckoo—the first, they noted, of spring.
It was teatime when they arrived, and while refreshments were being served, the boy appeared. Wearing a kind of “jump-suit,” he had a “look of joy on his face.”
With the usual courtesies discharged, now came the moment of truth. Could the child recognize what had belonged to him in his former life from among other objects that did not? Kewtsang Rinpoché began by holding up two dark-colored rosaries and asking which one the little boy wanted. The right one, as it turned out. The same happened with a pair of yellow rosaries: the boy correctly chose the one that had belonged to the Great Thirteenth. There followed a near disaster. On being shown two canes and pausing for a while, the little boy picked out the wrong one. But after a moment, he picked them both up again and examined “the handle and the tip of each with concentration.” They were both of the same design, the only difference being in the tip, one of which was made of bronze, the other of plain iron. This time, he held on to the correct one, “holding it straight with its tip to the floor.” In itself, this near mistake was a most auspicious sign: it was later recalled that the Great Thirteenth had in fact given away the first cane to a colleague. That must be why the child had picked it up and then put it down.
There followed a test involving three lengths of fabric which the boy had to identify from among others before he was presented with the final two objects. These were a small hand drum made of ivory, and another, larger damaru, a drum with two faces. The first the Great Thirteenth had used for summoning his attendants; the second was a more elaborate instrument furnished with a “golden belt and
[a] brocade handle.” Most children would no doubt have selected the larger, gaudier of the two instruments, but without hesitation, the small boy chose correctly and, “holding it in his right hand, he played it with a big smile on his face; moving around so that his eyes could look at each of us from close up. Thus, the boy displayed his occult powers.” The four members of the search party were left spellbound.
That night, staying with the family, Kewtsang Rinpoché made further inquiries. The test had been highly persuasive but was by no means the end of the matter. It must therefore have been somewhat disconcerting when he asked the child’s parents whether any auspicious signs had accompanied the birth of their son. “No,” they replied, “nothing of that kind.” From some of the local people, however, they learned that there had been, among other indications, a rainbow directly over the house at around the time of the birth. Also, the boy’s father had been seriously ill and in fact had nearly died. But when the child was born, the father had enjoyed a miraculous recovery. And it was remembered that in the past, whenever a great lama had been reborn in the locality, it had been presaged by a series of natural calamities. In this case, there had been four years of successive crop failures, and the boy’s family had themselves lost some of their most valuable livestock. Five of their best horses bolted one day and leaped over a cliff to their deaths below. Then seven of their mules sickened and died, one by one. Thus encouraged, when they finally turned in that night, the members of the search party were so excited that none of them could sleep, “even for a moment.”
The Dalai Lama Page 5