The Dalai Lama

by Alexander Norman

Evidently aware of the Precious Protector’s dissatisfaction at the lack of progress, a group of officials called for a “written oath” of allegiance to him. But he was unimpressed. “The ‘written oath’ was taken repeatedly in Tibet. And it was again taken as soon as we arrived in Mussoorie . . . A ‘stronger written oath’ was taken at Bodhgaya. What benefit have these ‘written oaths’ given? Yet again, today you are taking another ‘written oath.’ I cannot give credit to these attractive documents, empty words and talks. I believe in facts . . . Attractive paperwork and pretentious speeches are useless.” Similarly, repeated offerings of “long-life” religious ceremonies for his benefit only exasperated him. For the Dalai Lama, it was abundantly clear how and why Tibet had been lost. What had happened was due primarily to “our many years of negligence in the past.”

  Although many were still hopeful that the Dalai Lama, by virtue of his relationship with Chenresig and the protectors, could perform miracles, he did not share this view. As Tibetans, they would have to pay the karmic debt themselves. Moreover, he was all too keenly aware that the charity extended by organizations such as the Save the Children Fund, and covertly by the United States, could not be counted on indefinitely. “Our foreign aid and assistance will eventually be terminated,” he noted in a speech in March 1961. “We must be very careful.” He was equally clear-sighted about putting excessive faith in diplomatic initiatives. “We should not,” he warned, “place too much importance on my brother Gyalo Thondup’s attendance at the United Nations Organisation’s meeting,” which was scheduled for the fall. This was a reference to ongoing attempts to have the issue of Tibet’s right to independence raised at the highest level within the international community.

  The Dalai Lama also understood the vital importance of recruiting new staff from the younger generation. “They are, by nature, physically stronger,” he argued, “more [alert], more creative, and more aware of international events.” From now on, therefore, all government appointments would be on merit, not on seniority or birth or status. As for monastic appointments in government, whereby in former times many positions were held jointly by both a monk and a layman, these would cease forthwith. He was quick, too, to take advantage of political trends. Reminding his audience that “Buddha, the compassionate one, has given equal right for both Bikshu [monks] and Bikshuni [nuns],” he argued that it was appropriate to give “equal opportunity to both men and to women to practice religion.” The Dalai Lama also called on Tibetan women to participate in all areas of life in exile, including government.

  Not all the young leader’s innovations met with approval. His plan to raise revenue through taxation was resisted by some influential Khampas, known as the Group of Thirteen, who claimed that the government in exile was ignoring Khampa needs. This provoked immense resentment on behalf of those loyal to the Dalai Lama, and when one of the thirteen was murdered, a close relative of the Dalai Lama’s was accused of being responsible. By no means did the Precious Protector have the unwavering support of all his people even in these days of direst need.

  Yet notwithstanding the immense difficulties he faced, for the Dalai Lama, the catastrophe of exile was also an opportunity. He had understood from his discussions with Harrer as a teenager eager to learn about the world that Tibet could not afford to remain in psychological isolation. It was, he later said, “our worst mistake, our greatest mistake.” For him, the material benefits of the modern world should not be refused simply on the grounds that they were foreign, and certainly not on the grounds that they were somehow “unnecessary,” as some of the more conservative members of the establishment thought. In the Dalai Lama’s view, it was a question of navigating a middle way between the outright forsaking of tradition and a complete rejection of novelty.

  Again and again in his speeches to members of the Tibetan government in exile, we find the Dalai Lama exhorting, cajoling, encouraging, and imploring his fellow exiles to abandon any thoughts of Tibetan superiority and to embrace modern methods. At times it seems as if he alone saw the reality of the situation the refugees now faced. “We still have faults of delaying and being careless in our actions,” he exclaimed, evidently exasperated. “Others set specific times and finish their work ahead of schedule. In our case, forget about completing the work ahead of time; we cannot even complete our work in the specified time.”

  One of the first tasks he set for the civil service was to develop a constitution that could be tested in exile and taken back to Tibet on their presumed return. A newly created Commission of Tibetan People’s Deputies was assisted in this by a member of the Indian Supreme Court, Purushottam Trikamdas, also a member of the International Commission of Jurists. Former president of India Rajendra Prasad was enlisted as well, though he died before he was able to produce his comments. A controversial element of the proposed constitution was a clause providing that the Dalai Lama himself could be impeached if a two-thirds majority insisted on it. Most Tibetans were appalled that such an idea could be conceived, let alone committed to print. To their way of thinking, the logic of democracy demanded that still more power be granted to the Dalai Lama, not less. Yet the Dalai Lama himself insisted on the impeachment clause.

  If the Dalai Lama’s role was pivotal in the reform process, it was no less so in the practical sphere of resettling the eighty thousand refugees who managed to escape Tibet before the Chinese fully sealed the border. The Nehru government made clear that it would not permit large numbers of potentially restive Tibetans anywhere nearby, and instead granted the refugees land far to the south, in the region of the then minor provincial city of Bangalore—its future status as tech powerhouse not even a wild dream. It was here, on virgin ground, that some fifty-eight villages were established. Arriving at the camps, “many of the Tibetans broke down [and wept] on seeing the thick forest filled with wild animals and the work that lay before them.” Yet, in a remarkably short time, the majority became flourishing communities. It was among these that, in due course, the Three Seats of Ganden, Drepung, and Sera were eventually refounded. But first, as the Dalai Lama later explained, “we considered setting up schools to be more important.” Accordingly, using English as their primary language, several schools, generously staffed and subsidized by the Indian government, were quickly built, while most of the monastic community remained in the north, quartered in an old prison camp that had at different times held both Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru himself.

  Besides overseeing establishment of the refugee villages, the Dalai Lama was also instrumental in bringing into being several institutions intended to help safeguard Tibet’s cultural heritage. The first of these was an opera company, the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts. Another was the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, which, besides housing a considerable collection of pecha—printed religious works in loose-leaf format—also began publishing works relating to Tibetan history and culture, the majority of them in English.

  It goes without saying that all this enterprise came at a cost, and, especially in the early years, funding was a major difficulty. At his second meeting with Nehru after coming into exile, the Dalai Lama raised the question of taking out a loan from the Indian government. Could the Tibetan government in exile possibly borrow 200 million rupees (just under $4 million) from the Indian exchequer? Presumably this was to be secured against the eventuality of the Dalai Lama’s resuming his position in Tibet. In reply, Nehru expostulated that the Indian government itself did not have such a large sum, let alone such a surplus available to loan. When the Tibetan leader, greatly embarrassed, explained that this was what he had been advised to ask for, Nehru warned him “to be cautious about listening to such advice from his ministers.” It was a point well taken.

  Soon after, the Tibetan leader decided that the treasure still under the care of the maharajah of Sikkim should be sold. First by mule, then by car, and finally by a specially chartered aircraft, it was transported to Calcutta, where it was melted down, graded, and hallmarked before sale, eventually raising
approximately $2 million on the bullion market, or around 26 million rupees. It was clear that there should have been quite a bit more, however. To this day, the disbursement of the Dalai Lama’s treasure remains a source of controversy among Tibetans. Several people besides Gyalo Thondup, not all of them Tibetan, were involved in the operation, and each, at one time or another, has been accused of malfeasance. The funds that did become available were used to make a number of investments, apparently at the suggestion of Nehru himself. Besides various pieces of real estate, these included holdings in a paper mill in Bhopal and, by way of an unsecured loan, one in the Calcutta-based Gayday Iron and Steel Company. Only four years later, when the investments were transferred into the Dalai Lama Charitable Trust, the total value had fallen to a mere 8.2 million rupees, less than a third of the original sum.

  Another early undertaking, and one that in the future provided significant revenue, was publication of the first of the Dalai Lama’s two autobiographies. At the suggestion of Hugh Richardson, David Howarth, an English ex–Royal Navy officer turned popular historian, was commissioned to produce a book that drew on a text dictated by the Dalai Lama and subsequently translated into English. Published in London by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 1962 under the title My Land and My People, it was well reviewed though it enjoyed only modest sales. Nonetheless, the book became essential reading for the increasing numbers of foreigners who began to make their way to Dharamsala. The Dalai Lama also authored at this time the only book ever published under his name to have been entirely written by himself, Opening the Eye of New Awareness, a basic introduction to Buddhism in the Tibetan tradition.

  Apart from Harrer, Richardson, and Howarth, among the Precious Protector’s first overseas visitors were four members of America’s avant-garde literary scene, poets Allen Ginsberg and his lover Peter Orlovsky, together with Gary Snyder and his wife, Joanne Kyger, who arrived together at Swarg Ashram (the name of the Dalai Lama’s residence) in early 1962. A record of the meeting, which arguably says more about the Beats than it does about the Dalai Lama, is given in Kyger’s journal:

  We met the Dalai Lama last week right after he had been talking with the King of Sikkim, the one who is going to marry an American college girl. The Dali [sic] is 27 and lounged on a velvet couch like a gawky adolescent in red robes. I was trying very hard to say witty things to him, but Allen Ginsberg kept hogging the conversation by describing his experiments on drugs and asking the Dalai Lama if he would like to take some magic mushroom pills and were his drug experiences of a religious nature, until Gary said really Allen the inside of your mind is just as boring and just the same as everyone elses is it necessary to go on; and that little trauma was eased over by Gary and the Dalai talking guru to guru like about which positions to take when doing meditation and how to breathe and what to do with your hands, yes yes that’s right says the Dalai Lama. And then Allen Ginsberg says to him how many hours do you meditate a day, and he says me? Why I never meditate, I don’t have to. Then Ginsberg is very happy because he wants to get instantly enlightened and can’t stand sitting down or discipline of the body.

  The suggestion that the Dalai Lama did not meditate because he “did not have to” is certainly a mistake on the author’s part. Nonetheless, Kyger’s journal entry is valuable as an example of the blithe arrogance of some of the Dalai Lama’s Western visitors in the early days of exile.* But if it is evident that the audience was no great success on either side, the Tibetan leader’s meeting with the poets was the first of many encounters with exponents of the West’s counterculture.

  In an unsettling juxtaposition, Ginsberg’s visit took place at almost exactly the same time that the Panchen Lama submitted to the Chinese Politburo what became known as his seventy-thousand-character petition, a document that paved the way for his downfall and subsequent imprisonment. When the Dalai Lama fled Lhasa in 1959, the Panchen Lama was quick to assure the Chinese of his own continuing loyalty. For this he was rewarded with leadership of the Preparatory Committee for the Tibet Autonomous Region, of which position the Dalai Lama was summarily stripped.

  For the next two years the Panchen Lama was successfully used by the Communists as their chief collaborator. In 1962 he was presented to a visiting English journalist, to whom he dutifully explained how, as “a cadre of the People’s Republic of China, [he was] performing [his] duties in accordance with the policies of the Chinese Communist Party.” Yet in fact he had by this time undergone a remarkable transformation. Having witnessed the aftermath of the suppression of revolt in Lhasa at first hand in 1959, and then, in 1960, having toured Amdo province and again seen for himself the abuses inflicted on Tibetans in the name of education and reform, he began to voice criticisms of the party. A year later he took the opportunity to visit his home village while returning to Lhasa from Beijing. Seeing with his own eyes the abject poverty to which his kinsmen had been reduced—all their metal cooking utensils had been confiscated in the local commune’s drive to make steel—he declared that now, “in the socialist paradise, unlike in feudal times, beggars did not even have a begging bowl.”

  The experience persuaded him that he should prepare a formal report to the leadership declaring the many “errors” he had witnessed in the party’s imposition of reform in Tibet. Over a period of several months during the early part of 1962, he began work on a petition. Written in Tibetan, it was subsequently rendered into Chinese and submitted during the summer of the same year. One of those he asked to work on the translation refused on the grounds that the criticisms voiced were too dangerous. Some of the statements were indeed toned down on the advice of Ngabo, the man who had lost Chamdo and who was now a senior collaborator with the Chinese, who also suggested that the document include a preamble praising the party for the good it had also wrought in Tibet. In spite of these changes, it remained an extraordinarily courageous undertaking. The Panchen Lama’s teacher is said to have prostrated himself and, with tears running down his face, begged the Precious One not to go ahead. He had consulted the oracles and they had indicated clearly that inauspicious consequences would follow. But with astonishing determination, the twenty-four-year-old Panchen Lama ignored all advice.

  Although at first the petition was received with little comment, Mao denounced it soon enough as a “poisoned arrow aimed at the Party by reactionary feudal overlords.” For his remarkable bravery, the Panchen Lama was arrested and “struggled against” for fifty consecutive days. He was then thrown into prison. From time to time he would be dragged from his cell and subjected to further thamzing in front of large crowds. One infamous event that occurred during the Cultural Revolution is said to have “wounded him more than any other.” At a public meeting, his sister-in-law was persuaded to accuse him from the podium of having raped her, following which his younger brother beat him on stage for the alleged crime. Afterwards he was put in solitary confinement, and for the next decade, it was unknown whether he was alive or dead.

  The Dalai Lama’s meeting with Ginsberg thus stands in stark contrast to the reality of life in Tibet, even if it gave an indication of how things presently stood in the West. Indeed, from the Dalai Lama’s own perspective, a much more important encounter than his meeting with the Beats was his meeting with the lineage holder of Shantideva’s tong len practice. Kunu Lama, a Tibetan layman living anonymously in Varanasi, was the recipient of the actual teaching that Shantideva himself had conferred on one of his students and which had subsequently been passed down, teacher to student, in an unbroken stream from generation to generation. To receive a teaching in this way is to hear the very words of the Master as if from his own lips.

  Shantideva himself, author of the Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life, is one of the Dalai Lama’s favorite authors and a great spiritual hero of the Tibetan tradition, while the practice of tong len, today popular with many advanced mindfulness enthusiasts and even taught as part of social and emotional learning programs in increasing numbers of schools in the West, entails the medita
tive exchange of “self for other.” The meditator calls to mind someone toward whom he or she feels negatively and imagines exchanging his or her own good qualities for the other’s negative qualities. Of course, most who adopt the practice do not have the privilege of direct transmission.

  In order to track down the lama, the young aspirant ordered his chauffeur to drive around Varanasi in monsoon rains until, by good luck, he saw the reclusive yogin in the street. To the consternation of those with him, he ordered the car to stop, jumped out, and humbly offered a kathag to the teacher, beseeching him for initiation into the practice. At first the lama tried to refuse, saying he was not worthy to teach it to the Dalai Lama. When, however, the Precious Protector followed him into his own home, despite his protestations, he finally consented.

  Meanwhile, the fact that Nehru had made it clear to the Dalai Lama that the Indian government would not support any request for him to travel abroad was at the time a source of frustration to the Dalai Lama. The Indian leader did not wish to antagonize the Chinese further than he already had in granting the Dalai Lama asylum. Yet in later years, the Dalai Lama credited his enforced grounding with giving him the opportunity to further his spiritual practice in a way that might not otherwise have been possible—even if it is true that his temporal duties have to this day prevented him from undertaking the three-year, three-month, three-day retreat that every serious practitioner aspires to make at least once in his or her lifetime. When he was finally granted leave to travel, eight years after arriving in exile, his first overseas visit was to Japan, followed three months later by a trip to Thailand, in both cases to participate in Buddhist conferences.

  The restrictions Nehru’s government continued to place on the Dalai Lama did not prevent Mao from administering a sudden and completely unanticipated reminder of China’s territorial ambitions when, following a number of skirmishes with Indian troops, the PLA mounted an incursion across the so-called McMahon line, the border with Tibet bequeathed by the British which the Dalai Lama had crossed two years earlier. Striking precisely at the moment when the world’s attention was diverted by the Cuban Missile Crisis (in the fall of 1962), the Chinese outgunned, outmaneuvered, and quickly outfought the Indians, who were ill-prepared and ill-led. Remarkably, the PLA withdrew after barely a month. But the episode left Nehru humiliated and utterly demoralized, his dream of uniting India and China in fraternal cooperation against the old world colonial powers turned to nightmare.