The Dalai Lama

by Alexander Norman

  After several days of ceremonies, what had begun as a caravan and was now a cavalcade many thousands strong moved off. The next stop was Reting Monastery, from which the regent hailed. Dating from the tenth century, the foundation boasted a cedar forest said to have sprung from the hairs on the head of Atisha, the great Indian scholar saint to whose memory the monastery was dedicated. Here, the regent and the Dalai Lama’s father discovered their common love of horses. Already there was magnificent stabling for dozens of splendid animals. It would not be long before these horses were joined by many more from the trading caravans brought from Amdo to Lhasa by the yabshi kung, as the Dalai Lama’s father was now known. As was his right, the regent was invariably offered the pick of the crop among the horses the yabshi kung subsequently imported from the eastern breeding grounds, while the kung was often invited to elaborate picnic parties and horse gymkhanas arranged for the mutual gratification of the two enthusiasts.

  It was also at Reting Monastery that the regent briefed the Dalai Lama’s parents as to what they could expect in Lhasa. They would find many flatterers, and some people would certainly try to harm them. In particular, he warned the gyalyum chenmo never to accept food that had not been cooked in her own kitchen, “as it might be poisoned.”

  Leaving Reting Monastery for Lhasa, a week’s journey distant, the caravan made its way to the environs of the small monastery of Rigya just outside the city. Here, on the plain below, a huge tented encampment had been erected. At its center stood the Macha Chenmo—the Great Peacock—a splendid blue-and-white construction that was only ever used to welcome the new Dalai Lama back to his temporal home. A poetic description of the return of the Sixth Dalai Lama gives some idea of the splendor of the occasion. At night it was said to have seemed that all “the stars of heaven [had] come down to earth.” Then when the newly recognized Dalai Lama resumed his journey for the short distance to Lhasa, it caused “such a thunder of hooves as had never before been heard.”

  No film of the event—which took place on October 8, 1939—survives, though there are still photographs, and we know enough about Tibetan ceremony to have a good sense of what it must have been like: the sumptuous silk brocade of the lay officials, the ladies’ magnificent jewelry of silver and turquoise and coral, the impossible headdress of even humble womenfolk—strange lattices of wood, adorned with precious stones, beneath which the hair was braided and strung like so much wash hung out to dry. And alongside them, the grave countenances of the solemn but inwardly exultant clergy, the eager bustling of the crowd seeking a place to stand, the longing expressed in the torrent of mantras recited, the smoke of incense burning, the reverent hush and humble obeisance of the common people as the procession drew close. But one has to think past these outer manifestations of gladness to recognize the true—the inner—and spiritual significance of the occasion. The profundity of the emotional connection Tibetans have with the Dalai Lama is beyond anything others can easily imagine. It was with a mixture of awe, reverence, and yearning, coupled with the tenderest feelings of possession, blessedness, and good fortune, that the whole population turned out to greet their beloved. That he was a somewhat unruly child who pulled away from the regent to get back to his mother and, to his terror, had to be manhandled back to his place by a bodyguard “with big bulging eyes” was nothing to them. The one in whom the bodhi—the awakened mind of the Buddha—resides is not merely a monarch. He is someone who connects, in himself, the seen world with that unseen.

  PART II

  ✹

  The Lion Throne

  6

  ✵

  Homecoming: Lhasa, 1940

  To those for whom the city represented what its etymology suggests—lha, “gods,” sa, “earth,” and hence “the gods’ dwelling place on earth”—we can suppose that what occurred on that day when the Fourteenth Dalai Lama came home to Lhasa must have seemed a glimpse into the very mysteries of existence. To Tibetans generally, a visit to the holy city was the fulfillment of a lifelong ambition. It had then, as it still does, the same draw as Jerusalem, Rome, and Mecca have for followers of the Abrahamic religions. Merely to visit its shrines and holy places is to acquire spiritual merit. To such people, the mystical aura of this, the place to which the earthly manifestation of Chenresig, Bodhisattva of Compassion, was now returning, would render invisible the squalor and deprivation that might be the first thing to have struck a time traveler from the modern age.

  According to Alexandra David-Néel, the fearless and indefatigable French explorer who reached the capital during the 1920s, Lhasa was “a town full of animation, inhabited by jolly people whose greatest pleasure is to loiter and chat out-of-doors.” A less flattering picture is presented by the Japanese pilgrim Ekai Kawaguchi, who visited some years earlier. Describing the city as a “metropolis of filth,” he recoiled in horror at the puddles of water into which people would openly defecate. In contrast to the broad squares where the great dramas of the liturgical year were enacted, there lay alleyways “narrow and devious,” crowded, and “obscured by tumbledown buildings whose mud and stone walls were forever disintegrating and collapsing,” the paths between them potholed with “pools of sludge.” William Stanley Morgan, the Welsh-born doctor attached to the 1936–37 British mission to Lhasa, was appalled by the beggars he encountered “squatting or lying in the dust by the roadside.” They were, he wrote, “mainly old and infirm—some blind and others lame or deformed. Many had huge goiters [from] long standing thyroid deficiency. Clad in sheepskin chubas [the traditional Tibetan gown] or bundled up in a mass of rags, they hung with dirt.” He blanched, too, at the sight of the city’s communal garbage dump, consisting of “great piles of offal eight and ten feet high” and surrounded “with a black and slimy ooze.” His traveling companion, Freddy Spencer Chapman, a future jungle war hero, was particularly distraught over the dogs swarming around the refuse. “They were at once a revolting and pathetic sight—bodies bared with skin disease, huge suppurating sores covered with flies, lamed, often dragging a . . . useless leg, eyes gouged out, ears torn off . . . Nothing I had ever seen could compare with them.”

  To a Tibetan out-of-town visitor such as T. Y. Pemba, however, Lhasa was a place of wonder and delight. “The ordinary residents,” he wrote, “were gay, witty, sharp and flamboyant . . . [and] Lhasa prided itself on having the gayest, prettiest and perhaps the ‘loosest’ women in Tibet.” The city was divided into several different communities: there was a Muslim quarter, a small Nepalese quarter, and a quarter where the ragyabas lived—the butcher caste who also took the dead to the places of sky-burial, where the corpse was dismembered and fed to the ever-hovering vultures. The houses of these ragyabas were made almost entirely of animal horn. There were particular places where criminals would gather, too, some yoked together in pairs and shackled at the feet, others handless, having been mutilated for their misdeeds, the stumps “immersed . . . in boiling oil to arrest the bleeding.” Although the Great Thirteenth had not approved of the practice, there is reason to suppose that it was carried out at least until the end of the regency period, and it remains a familiar trope of propaganda put out by the Chinese that it was they who outlawed such barbarism.

  Owing to the absence of roads, let alone modern methods of communication (save for the telegraph line up from India that the British had installed for their own benefit), the city was one where rumor and counter-rumor were a continuous feature of life. Once, at around this time, the people were struck with terror when a story began to circulate that an army of Kazakhs was approaching, led by “an Amazon with breasts that hung to her waist.” Her army was reputed to be so huge that it took a whole day to review it, while it was said to be “armed with strange secret weapons of immense power.” It turned out the “army” was a ragged band of starving men, women, and children who had fled Sinkiang province and were on their way to seek asylum in India.

  Lhasa was at this time a city with a settled population of probably no more than ten thousand. T
his might double or even triple during the most important annual festivals or, as in this case, at the Dalai Lama’s homecoming. Within a few hours’ walk stood the three largest monasteries in Tibet: Sera, with seven thousand monks, at around five miles distant; Drepung, with perhaps as many as ten thousand, around seven miles away; and Ganden, the third-largest monastery with a population of around three thousand monks, which was just under twenty miles from the capital. Almost every able-bodied monk would decamp and make his way to the city on great occasions such as this, crowding the streets “from sunrise to sunset,” while at night, visitors slept crammed in stables and camped in courtyards.

  In marked contrast to the squalor of large parts of the city stood the Dalai Lama’s two palaces, the Potala and the Norbulingka, and the mansions of the aristocracy. It was the Norbulingka to which, with his next-elder brother, Lobsang Samten, the Dalai Lama was taken on this joyous occasion. Built as a summer retreat for the Seventh Dalai Lama at around a mile and a half to the southwest of Lhasa, the palace was topped with a golden roof and fronted with pillars, its windows glazed and protected from the sun by awnings decorated with auspicious symbols rendered in appliqué. Altogether more homelike than the Potala, it was surrounded by leafy parkland and several well-tended gardens that provided sanctuary to a menagerie of animals, including variously “a herd of tame musk deer; at least six enormous Tibetan mastiffs which acted as guard dogs . . . a few mountain goats; a monkey; a handful of camels; two leopards and a very old and rather sad tiger,” and a large number of birds, including “several parrots; half a dozen peacocks; some cranes; a pair of golden geese and about thirty very unhappy Canada geese whose wings had been clipped.”

  It was at the Norbulingka that the Precious Protector had his first presentiment that he might indeed have some special connection with the Great Thirteenth. Up until that moment he had merely accepted what he had been told. But on this occasion, or so his mother informed him later, he announced that he would like to go to the Chensalingka. This was a building erected in the grounds of the Norbulingka by the Great Thirteenth. “She told me that we entered one room and I pointed to [a] box and said to open it. My teeth would be there.” Sure enough, it was found to contain teeth that had belonged to his predecessor.

  The Dalai Lama’s parents had, in the meantime, taken up residence in a mansion situated beneath the northern wall of the Potala. This was to be their home until a new, more modern dwelling could be built for them. Although family photographs of this time show happy faces, the installation of the newcomers from Taktser was not entirely to the satisfaction of Lhasa’s leading families. Some clearly still felt that the relative of the Great Thirteenth was a more suitable candidate, given his better connections.* Not only were the new Dalai Lama’s family uneducated commoners (his mother was illiterate), but also they spoke a dialect that marked them as being from a part of Tibet hardly known in Lhasa.

  Himself of lowly birth, the regent was attuned to the difficulties the family faced and arranged for the government to grant several landed estates to them, to ensure their independence. Even so, it takes little imagination to see what an ordeal those first few months must have been for the new arrivals, plunged into the round of formal entertaining that is the lot of the families of high officials everywhere. The fact that they needed an interpreter to begin with (the Amdo dialect they spoke was sufficiently different from the high-flown locutions of Lhasa as to need translating) was no doubt difficulty enough.* The records of the British officials who knew them well show the Lhasa aristocracy to have been little different from aristocracies anywhere else—fond of flummery and elaborate etiquette. The leading ladies were no doubt quick to share their opinions of the manners and comportment of the gyalyum chenmo, while the men (a lot of them idly rich and not a few of them habitual opium smokers) would have been eager to take the measure of the yabshi kung. Many aristocrats had by now been exposed to polite British society in places like Kalimpong and Darjeeling, and the disparity between their level of sophistication and that of the new Dalai Lama’s family would have been immediately apparent. But while the yabshi kung received mixed reviews, the gyalyum chenmo captivated the hearts of prince and pauper alike with her simple, unaffected charm. Legendarily generous, she was humble, kindly, and warmly affectionate.

  The new Dalai Lama’s first public engagement after his homecoming was the tonsuring ceremony at which both he and the now eight-year-old Lobsang Samten were inducted as novice monks. As was his right, and only fitting, the regent himself performed the ritual haircutting that marked the Dalai Lama’s entry into the monastic novitiate and gave the young hierarch his new name: Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso.

  When at last the proceedings were over, the child returned to the small building within the grounds of the Norbulingka which was to be his home for the first year in Lhasa. To begin with, the Dalai Lama’s mother had right of access to him, and they saw each other regularly, if not every day. And though life promised to be lonely for one so young, the following days were enlivened by the New Year festival which began shortly afterwards, commencing with the ceremony of the Priest’s New Year and ending on the twenty-seventh day with the “Sky Archery” ceremony. Strolling minstrels and wandering friars frequented every street, while the more pious, clad in leather knee and elbow pads, circumambulated the Jokhang Temple, measuring their body length on the ground. “One saw many of these people, their faces dusty and bruised, their eyes tight with pain and [their] mouths set hard,” noted an observer. Above all, though, this was a time of rejoicing, a time for families to come together, for old friendships to be rekindled and new ones formed. There was street theater and music and dance. Two perennial favorites were the lion and peacock dances, the former featuring an imp who tries to tame the beast, succeeding at last, to the delight of the crowd.

  Unfortunately for the young Dalai Lama, he was forbidden to participate in the celebrations. From his point of view, the most important element of the proceedings was the Monlam Chenmo, the Great Prayer Festival, which began on the sixth day of the New Year. A central feature of Monlam, the Brilliant Invocation of the Glorious Goddess, necessitated that he move to a suite of rooms at the top of the Jokhang Temple, where he would reside until the final day of the festival. Preceded by ranks of soldiers with bayonets fixed, the boy was carried in a palanquin whose bearers marched with a peculiar gait so as to minimize its swaying. Once the Precious One was safely within the temple, the carousing could resume once more, whereupon “the crowd really let themselves go . . . [T]here was great merrymaking that night.”

  Dating back to the eighth century, the Jokhang is considered the most important temple in all Tibet and is a place of pilgrimage sacred to each of the different traditions within Tibetan Buddhism. There are four principal schools, or sects, within the Tibetan tradition: the Nyingma (literally the “Old Ones,” who are associated with the seventh-century sage Padmasambhava, the Lotus-Born One), the Sakya (dating from the eleventh century and associated with the Kon clan of central Tibet), the Kargyu (dating from the twelfth century and associated chiefly with Karma Pakshi and Milarepa), and the Gelug (founded by Tsongkhapa in the fifteenth century and the only one to require celibacy of its monks). Here, despite his tender years, the boy was to preside over a ceremony at which incense was offered to Palden Lhamo, the Glorious Goddess and protector deity (the one invoked by the regent at the lake called Lhamo Lhatso), in whose spiritual care the Dalai Lamas subsist.

  Several days later followed the most spectacular of all the New Year public ceremonies. This was the Casting-Out of the Votive Offering, and it was only on the eve of this event that the young Precious Protector was permitted to come down and walk among the crowds. It was, as he recalled in his autobiography, “one of the best moments in the Dalai Lama’s year.” This was the one day, he wrote, when “I was allowed outside to walk round the streets so that I could see the torma, the huge, gaily coloured butter sculptures traditionally offered to the Buddhas
on this day. There were also puppet shows and music played by military bands and an atmosphere of tremendous happiness amongst the people.”

  With its strong military character, the ceremony that followed was notable for its displays of martial prowess. Soldiers sang war songs in honor of the Glorious Goddess as they brandished their bows and arrows and fenced with swords. Part of the proceedings enacted a standoff where men armed with guns would aim at an opposing rank and shout abuse at them, taunting them in an episode known as “the Incitement.” This culminated in a series of flashes and bangs as firecrackers exploded. The foot soldiers departing, a detachment of cavalry then appeared, riding slowly beneath the Dalai Lama’s window while he remained sequestered inside. On reaching the entrance to the temple forecourt, the riders would dismount and prostrate themselves before him, though to his intense frustration, the Dalai Lama could only peep through a yellow curtain. It was then the turn of the monks of Namgyal Monastery, who appeared in their finest vestments, carrying on their heads the tall, curved yellow felt hat characteristic of the Gelug order, some censing the air with sweet-smelling herbs, others carrying musical instruments. There was also a contingent carrying the shinyen cymbals, the purpose of which was to drive out evil.