The Dalai Lama

by Alexander Norman

  After preliminary invocations, the assembled religious began a ceremony to welcome the torma, which were now brought forward, accompanied by a phalanx of monks. Consisting of “wooden frames bound with leather on which stood various images and decorations, all made of butter” brightly dyed, the sculptures were a most impressive sight, standing up to thirty feet tall. The images having earlier been ritually infused with the evil of the past year, the Namgyal choir now began chanting the liturgy of exorcism. When this was complete, the sculptures were taken out of the courtyard and carried in procession to an open space on the southern side of the city while the monastic orchestra continued to play. This, though, was but the prelude to the grand finale of the day’s proceedings, the arrival of the Nechung oracle, possessed already by the spirit of Dorje Drakden.

  Some silent film shot by an aristocratic cineaste at the 1959 Monlam Chenmo gives us a glimpse of the oracle in action. Bursting forth from within the temple itself, the medium—his trance fully developed—rushes out clasping a sword in one hand and a bow and arrow in the other. The crowd visibly gasps. Golden and shot through with flaming color, the oracle’s tunic is adorned with a breastplate of polished silver that radiates light at his every move. On his head he wears a vast crown—said to have weighed more than eighty pounds—decked with peacock feathers, studded with precious stones, and trailing plumes of white horsehair. As the musicians urge him on with a giddy rhythm that mounts faster and faster, the oracle, holding his weapons aloft, begins to dance. Lifting his legs high, he whirls around and around in a crescendo of color, the sunlight flashing off his breastplate as if it were on fire. After several breathtaking gyrations, Nechung* leaves the courtyard and, now supported by two attendants and accompanied by the monastic orchestra, heads off down the road in the direction taken by the party bearing the torma.

  When at last the oracle reaches the place where the torma now lie on a mass of brushwood, he fires an arrow toward them and, to the intense satisfaction of all present, the pyre erupts in butter-fueled flames to the screams and yells of the crowd, heard above the still chanting monks. This signifies the destruction of the old year’s evil, wiping the slate clean at the dawn of the new. Finally, three ancient cannon—known respectively as the Idiot, the Old She-Demon, and the Young She-Demon—are fired. Their reports could be heard by the Dalai Lama, who, to his continued frustration, remained in his apartment in the Jokhang. There he had to await the final procession, which would wend its way slowly back from the site of immolation, so all those participating could abase themselves beneath his window.

  The next day was the last of the Great Prayer Festival. A procession of monks, including the Ganden Throne Holder—technically the most senior religious authority in the land—followed an image of Maitreya, the Buddha to come, around a circuit which brought them to a halt in front of the chamber where the Dalai Lama remained hidden behind his gauze curtain. Again, the Nechung oracle appeared in a trance, and, following his ritual dance and presentation of an offering scarf to the image, all would prostrate themselves beneath the youngster’s window.

  But what of the little boy himself? While we might prefer to imagine the holy child rewarding these supplications with inward grace and outward benediction, by his own account he behaved no better—and possibly even a little worse—than the majority of small boys might in his position. “The sight of all those people down there was too much for me,” he wrote. “I boldly poked my head through the curtain. But, as if this were not bad enough, I remember blowing bubbles of spit which fell on people’s heads as they threw themselves down to the ground far below!”

  During the time of the Great Thirteenth, Maitreya’s procession was followed by an appearance of the Dalai Lama’s elephant. After forcing its way through the crush of maroon-clad monastics, it would kneel at the foot of the building and trumpet its salute before leading the procession out of the courtyard. This was the moment for the cannon to be fired once more, at which the religious ceremony would conclude and the secular entertainments begin. Its report signaled the start of a horse race. Surprisingly for a people who made so much use of the animal, these horses were riderless. Urged on by the crowds of spectators that lined the route from Drepung Monastery to the center of town, they were joined at the halfway mark by human athletes, who, at the sound of a second gunshot, would take off, competitors of both species occupying the same space on the road. As the Dalai Lama put the matter, “This tended to result in enjoyable confusion as both arrived simultaneously.”

  Shortly after the conclusion of the New Year festivities, the young leader’s formal enthronement ceremony was held in the Potala.* According to witnesses, the child could not have conducted himself more perfectly. A “solid, solemn but very wide-awake boy, red-cheeked and closely shorn,” he “sat quietly and with great dignity, completely at ease in these strange surroundings, giving the proper blessing to each person.”

  But if the people were thus reassured, the ceremony was of little consequence to the boy himself. He was more eager to get his hands on the gifts the British delegation had brought for him. These included a Meccano construction set, a pedal car, a tricycle, a “nightingale clock,” and, most exciting of all, a pair of parakeets. Of the two brothers, however, only Lobsang Samten was permitted to attend the children’s party given at the Dekyi Lingka—literally, the Garden of Happiness—which housed the British mission. The Dalai Lama’s monk caretakers deemed it unsuitable for him to go. This was cruelty enough, but when the head of the British mission, Sir Basil Gould, explained to Lobsang Samten that it would be better if the birds could remain at the Dekyi Lingka until they had acclimatized properly following their journey over the mountains, the Dalai Lama was distraught. Unable to bear the wait, the young hierarch sent a messenger to the British two days later requesting that the birds be sent at once. They were duly dispatched, together with detailed instructions for their care. Another two days followed before, to their surprise, the British received the birds back. It transpired that the Precious Protector was persuaded that perhaps the sahibs should after all be responsible for the creatures until they had adjusted to the Lhasa climate.

  The parakeets were doubtless the source of many moments of welcome distraction during that first year. When, however, the New Year festival inaugurating the subsequent (Iron Snake) year—1941—came to an end, what had amounted to a honeymoon period for the young Dalai Lama also came to a close. During the past year, his duties had been minimal, but from now on he would have to participate in the daily tea ceremony in the Great Hall—a magnificent, somewhat low-ceilinged chamber, its walls covered with frescoes topped with gilded stucco. This was a formal gathering of senior government figures over which the boy Dalai Lama presided while affairs of state were discussed, but in which he played no part. More onerously, it was at this moment that he, together with Lobsang Samten, now began their formal education as novice monks. This entailed shifting his quarters from the Norbulingka Palace to his new residence in the penthouse on the top floor of the Potala, again with Lobsang Samten for company, where he occupied the same suite of rooms that both the Great Fifth and the Great Thirteenth had occupied. Besides a bedroom, this comprised a small private chapel and several large anterooms, though, unlike accommodations in one or two of the aristocratic mansions, it did not have a bathroom.*

  Rising miraculously from the Marpo Ri, the Red Hill, the Potala is unquestionably one of the architectural wonders of the world, wholly dominating the Lhasa townscape even today. (In 1994 it was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list.) And as anyone who has set eyes on it will testify, it is an extraordinary feat of human ingenuity. “The contrasts and rhythms of different materials, of solids and voids, of heavy and light, of monochrome and intense colour, are startling, subtle and pleasing at the same time,” according to one guide to Tibetan architecture, while the “seemingly floating golden roofs are ethereal forms in contrast to their solid substructure.” In all, the building covers around 1.3 million square f
eet (more than half again as large as Buckingham Palace) and stands nearly four hundred feet high. It has, moreover, fully a thousand rooms, the largest of which, the West Main Hall, has a floor area covering some 7,250 square feet.

  Dating back to the mid-seventeenth century, though the site was originally built on much earlier—certainly no later than the seventh century and very likely long before that—the building consists of two separate but connected palaces, the White and the Red. Inaugurated by the Great Fifth Dalai Lama’s teacher of the magical arts, who drew a sacred mandala at its heart, the Potala took half a century to complete—though even this seems too short a time when one considers not just the size of the structure but also its incredible complexity. Stonemasons, carpenters, woodcarvers, and artists came from all over Tibet as well as from among Nepal’s Buddhist community.

  Besides quartering the Dalai Lamas—year round before the Norbulingka was built—the Potala was home both to a large community of monks and to a small number of laymen. Namgyal Monastery, the foundation to which the Dalai Lama himself belonged, and which existed primarily to serve him through its prayer and liturgy, was situated within its precincts and numbered up to two hundred monastics. The Potala was, furthermore, the seat of Tibet’s religio-political government.† This was the institution, inaugurated by the Great Fifth, that united the spiritual and temporal realms under the leadership of the Dalai Lama. For this reason, besides the monks of Namgyal, thirty or so highborn monastic officials who composed the upper echelons of the civil service were also in residence, plus another large contingent of monk clerks, not to mention serving staff, kitchen staff, and the guardians of the various storerooms, as well as resident tailors, prison guards, and inmates of the palace dungeons. In addition there was a garrison of soldiers, together with a contingent of grooms for the Dalai Lama’s and government officials’ horses stabled within the Potala’s many-storied splendor.

  Yet for all its magnificence, few would deny that the Potala is also somber in the extreme. Outside it looks more like a military fortress than the palace of the Bodhisattva of Compassion, while inside it feels more like a giant sepulcher than anyone’s home.

  The military character of the building is by no means as inappropriate as it might at first seem, however. It was built with an eye both to withstanding a lengthy siege such as the Mongols might have undertaken and to the often overlooked martial aspect of the Dalai Lama institution. It is hardly surprising, then, that, like his predecessor, the present Dalai Lama came to prefer the Norbulingka as a place to live.

  With respect to these military overtones, it is vital to recognize that quite as important as the Dalai Lama’s authority over the temporal realm is his authority over the unseen forces of the Tibetan Buddhist pantheon—not just the minor deities of home and hearth but also the protector deities of the Buddhadharma. Many of these protectors are conceived of as warriors, masters of their own fortresses with retinues of armored minions. Besides being an impregnable redoubt to protect the Dalai Lama and his government against their earthly enemies, the Potala is thus also a visible symbol of his role as one whose power extends to the realm of the gods. Not merely an earthly protector of his people, he is their supernatural protector as well. He guards his country and his subjects against the unseen hosts in thrall to the cravings of untamed desire and the karmic consequences of unexpiated sin.

  The funerary aspect of the Potala’s interior has much to do with the fact that it also functions partly as a giant mausoleum. The reliquary stupas, or tombs, of the Fifth, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, and Thirteenth Dalai Lamas are all contained within its walls. Those of the Great Fifth and the Great Thirteenth are particularly splendid, as befits the achievements of those two incarnations. Indeed, the tomb of the Great Thirteenth stands three stories high and necessitated considerable structural alteration to the palace to accommodate it. Smothered in gold and set with thousands of precious stones, it faces an altar on which stands an offering mandala composed, it is said, of 200,000 pearls. But for all the magnificence of the carvings, the statuary, the mural paintings, the thangkas,* and other products of the Tibetan artistic genius, as the Dalai Lama himself would be the first to admit, the place was hardly suited to the five-year-old boy whose home it now was.

  Placed under the care of three principal attendants, the Master of the Ritual (choepon khenpo), the Master of the Kitchen (soelpon khenpo), and the Master of the Wardrobe (simpon khenpo), the Dalai Lama was looked after with, according to one British official, a “devotion and love, almost surpassing the love of women.” But this can hardly have been adequate recompense for the lack of a mother’s love from the point of view of one so young. Moreover, the rooms he occupied were as dismal as they were disastrously ill-kept. “Everything . . . was ancient and decrepit,” he later recalled, “and behind the drapes that hung across each of the four walls lay deposits of centuries-old dust.” The rooms were also pitifully cold and dimly lit, and so badly infested with mice that the curtains surrounding the little boy’s bed ran with urine.

  The environment in which the young Dalai Lama began his academic career was decidedly austere. Yet, in the Tibetan tradition, the emphasis placed on learning is such that, for the Gelugpas at least, scholarship and sanctity are almost synonymous. The boy’s education was thus of crucial importance for, unless he could command the respect of the monastic community, he could not hope to govern effectively. To understand why this is so, we need to have some idea of the way in which the monasteries functioned—and to a large extent continue to function—within Tibetan society. The main purpose of the monasteries is twofold. They exist, first, to furnish their members with an environment conducive to private spiritual practice and to provide a superlative education such that the more able of them can become teachers of the dharma. The Three Seats of Ganden, Drepung, and Sera (the Harvard, Yale, and Princeton of Tibet) are in this respect very much like the medieval universities of Europe, which grew out of the teaching faculties of the various Christian religious orders. While the different halls or colleges of the Christian universities, like the Tibetan monasteries, fulfilled the liturgical practices—the masses and devotions—of their particular order, there are important differences between the ancient European universities and their Tibetan counterparts. This was reflected in the other principal function of the monasteries, which was to mediate between the seen world and the unseen.

  It is in this second function that the major differences lie. For Christians, God is transcendent. That is to say, God exists independently of the world, even if He pervades it. In Buddhism, there is no such transcendent realm; the world is unbounded, so although there are levels of being that start with the gross and ascend through different strata to the most refined state, the realms of the Buddhas, these realms are not considered to exist “outside” or “beyond” the totality of all that there is. The monasteries are thus deeply concerned with “this-worldly” matters, even though this concern is principally focused on the gods and godlings of the supernatural realm. They are not only seats of learning, then, but also fortresses from which spiritual armies are mustered through ceremonies—lasting sometimes whole days and nights, during which millions of mantras may be recited, tens or even hundreds of thousands of liturgical texts chanted, and thousands of pages of scripture read—which are then sent forth to do battle with the enemies of the Buddhadharma.

  Of course, as is the case with every institution, even in their heyday there were few really excellent monks and many who were “lazy, stupid and mere parasites.” For those whose intellectual gifts did not mark them out as future scholars (the majority), the daily ceremonies were largely what monastic life consisted of. As to their other duties, some were designated as traders and bankers, undertaking business on behalf of the monasteries, chiefly through selling and bartering the produce of the landed estates that supported them. But monastic officials would also make loans and collect taxes on lands the monastery owned. Others would work in the monastery administration
, while still others, because of their artistic skill, would be employed in the workshops as painters and sculptors. Those suited to more menial tasks might work in the kitchens or perhaps as tailors. Up until 1959, there also existed a distinct subclass of monks known as the dob dob. These were fraternities of monks whose principal concerns were sport, fighting, and to some extent sexual adventure. These, according to one observer, were “tough looking characters, with dirty greasy clothes[,] their faces painted with black streaks.” With regard to their sporting activities, these were generally conducted off-site and might include running or weightlifting, while their fighting often involved wielding the heavy keys that were typically worn on a chain around the waist. Latterly they had taken to practicing with firearms as well. As for their sexual exploits, they would sometimes lie in wait around Lhasa in the evening in the hope of capturing young aristocratic boys, on whom they would take their pleasure. Yet if the dob dob were feared by both layman and monastic alike, they were also very often the ones who would nurse the sick and dying. The dob dob should not, however, be confused with the monastic proctors and disciplinarians, who would keep order with whip and staves during the great liturgical ceremonies, prodding those who fell asleep and lashing those who were unruly. These were monks of good reputation who, together with the abbot and chant master (the umze), comprised the leadership of the monasteries. The more physically imposing of their number made up the monastery police force. Padding their shoulders to look still more fearsome, they would patrol the monastic precincts carrying an elaborately decorated mace as a sign of office.

  Although there was a sharp division between the different activities of the monks, the larger monasteries were made up of two or more colleges, or dra tsang. These were further subdivided into khang tsen, or “houses” (rather like Griffindor and other houses in the Harry Potter novels). These khang tsen had strong local affiliations, so that monks from Kham were likely to join one, monks from Amdo another, those from Mongolia still another, and monks from central or western Tibet another again. Similarly, each college was generally home to one or more incarnation lineages. But although some colleges were inevitably wealthier than others, and although the monasteries themselves had their own landed estates, almost without exception, anyone joining had to have at least some independent source of income. This would usually come from the individual monk’s own family or from a wealthy patron, but in any case, lack of funds could be a major source of difficulty for even the most able scholars. It was only when such individuals graduated and were able to teach in their own right that they could hope to become self-sufficient.