As was only to be expected, middle age brought with it increasing numbers of separations. A third came right at the end of 1981, when Trijang Rinpoché also “manifested the act of passing away.” Although, following the break with Shugden, the Dalai Lama was not as close to his junior tutor as he had been, the bond between them was by no means broken. When the Dalai Lama heard of his guru’s illness, his first act on returning home from giving teachings in Sikkim was to pay the sick man a visit and to ask him “to remain in this world for the welfare of living beings.” The Precious Protector was again among the first to pay his respects when, having spent two days in meditation on the “clear light of death,” the master abandoned earthly life.
If the passing of his mother, Lobsang Jinpa, and Trijang Rinpoché signaled the beginning of the end of an era, the continued liberalization taking place in Communist China just as clearly signaled the start of a new one. When, during the spring of 1982, a quartet of high-ranking Tibetan government in exile officials traveled to Beijing for what promised to be substantive discussions, all realized that they would soon know how far the party’s commitment to reform would go with respect to the Land of Snows.
In accordance with the Dalai Lama’s wishes, the officials boldly proposed that from now on, Tibet, as an administrative entity, should include not just the so-called Tibet Autonomous Region but also Kham and Amdo. Second, they proposed that Tibet be granted equivalent status to that proposed for Hong Kong, which would return to Beijing’s control when its lease to Great Britain expired in 1997. Tibet would thereby enjoy genuine autonomy through the principle of “one country, two systems.”*
The Chinese flatly rejected both proposals. The first, they said, was unrealistic, given that Kham and Amdo had long been subsumed variously within Sichuan, Qinghai, Gansu, and Yunnan provinces. The second suggestion implied a much higher status for Tibet than was plausible, given the fact that it was an economic backwater. Hong Kong was a major trading entity in its own right. Instead the delegation should refer to the five-point plan issued earlier by Hu Yaobang as the basis for any discussion.
Clearly, the Chinese had no interest in any claims made by or on behalf of the government in exile. Only the Dalai Lama’s status and future role were up for discussion. It is true that, in former times, a key aspect of the question of Tibet’s status with respect to China was the question of the Dalai Lama’s status with respect to the emperor. Would the emperor leave his throne and greet the Dalai Lama outside the palace? Must the Dalai Lama kowtow to the emperor? Did the emperor treat the Dalai Lama as a vassal or recognize his authority? Yet having already abandoned any thought of restoring the old system and by fully embracing democracy, the Precious Protector conceived of his role quite differently. Above all, his concern was to serve the Tibetan people as a whole, not just those living in what China called the Tibet Autonomous Region—effectively just the central and western provinces.
It was this re-envisioning of the role of the Dalai Lama that lay behind his insistence that, henceforth, the three provinces be treated as a single entity. Historically, Lhasa’s ability to assert control over and raise taxes from the provinces was distinctly limited. By embracing the non-Gelug schools, however, he had created the conceptual space for a type of leadership that transcended the divisions of the past. The recent exaltation of the Lotus-Born and repudiation of Shugden by the Dalai Lama should thus not be seen as an eccentric throwback to an arcane and irrelevant aspect of Tibetan culture. Instead it was a bold move to break with a narrow, inward-looking metaphysics of government and repurpose it to serve all Tibetans, irrespective of region or religious affiliation. The Dalai Lama had instigated a revolution of his own.
It was during the impasse that followed the meeting of the Dalai Lama’s embassy to Beijing that Ling Rinpoché suffered a serious stroke. The previous year, the Precious Tutor had undertaken an arduous tour of America and Europe. Exhorting his Tibetan audiences to remain united in friendship, regardless of regional or doctrinal differences, Ling Rinpoché had used his own—immense—prestige to consolidate this reorientation of the Dalai Lama’s role away from narrow concern for the Gelug tradition and its government of Tibet toward a much wider role.
News of Ling Rinpoché’s illness reached the Precious Protector while he was on a trip to Switzerland. As he wrote later, the Dalai Lama was at first “tormented with fear” that he would not be able to cope should “the Precious Tutor [show] the act of entering nirvana.” On his return to Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama’s first act was to visit Ling Rinpoché. He went back many times over the next three months. Sometimes the Precious Tutor showed signs of improvement, and sometimes he appeared to get worse. By the time the Dalai Lama left for Bodh Gaya in December, he was “almost . . . used to this awful situation.” Thus, when he heard that Ling Rinpoché had entered tukdam on December 25, “the earlier fear of not being able to bear the separation was not so strong.” In retrospect, the Dalai Lama was convinced that this “taking on” of illness was a deliberate act of generosity on the part of the Precious Tutor, to enable his pupil to become used to the idea of being without the “rock” on which he had leaned his whole adult life.
Clinically speaking, Ling Rinpoché was dead. Yet from the perspective of the Tibetan tradition, the mind stream of the most advanced practitioners does not leave the body at once. Sensing the approach of death, the master begins the prescribed meditation practices and enters a state of mental equipoise such that when the body ceases to function, the mind is absorbed in the clear light held to be the most subtle level of consciousness. This is tukdam, wherein the practitioner passes from the earthly realm in what the Western tradition describes as “the odor of sanctity.” At the moment of death, the room may be filled with a pleasant smell, sometimes lingering for days, while the body remains for a time incorrupt.* In Ling Rinpoché’s case, at precisely the moment when he entered tukdam, his attendant and several others also clearly heard the sound of bells and a damaru drum.
It was not until half past six in the morning of the eighth day that definitive signs of the Precious Tutor’s final passing announced themselves. According to the Dalai Lama’s own account, there was a snowstorm with snowflakes in the shape of flowers, and much thunder. During this time the Precious Tutor left his meditation.
As a sign of this a little urine seeped from his vajra, and his complexion changed. However, there was still some warmth on his vest around the chest area, and so the ceremonial washing of the body was postponed for that day. On the seventh at around eleven o’clock, more urine was emitted, and a few tears came from his eyes. At four o’clock the washing ceremony was performed.
The Dalai Lama does not mention post-mortem practices other than the washing and then the salting rituals. Partaking of the body of those masters considered to be enlightened beings who have taken earthly form seven times is held to be effective means of attaining higher realization. To this end, bodily matter may be cut from the corpse for later consumption in the form of so-called “precious pills.”* Some of the liquid in which the corpse is washed may also be drunk as a sacrament.
That Ling Rinpoché was a master in the highest degree is in no doubt from the perspective of those closest to him. A fellow adept spoke of how on occasion the Precious Tutor appeared to him in a vision “with a head, nose and so forth that was extraordinarily bright,” adding that “behind his ears [were] two small horns radiating blue light . . . with decorations [of] small tongue-like wall hangings.” And it was noted by the Dalai Lama himself that “even Palden Lhamo, mistress of the desire realm, could not compete with this great master and had to comply with his wishes.” Ling Rinpoché was, or so it seemed to those who knew him best, the veritable manifestation of a fully enlightened being.
Whether or not we accept the truth of this claim, it is undeniable that the senior tutor was the handmaid of the Dalai Lama’s role as global teacher of the Buddhadharma. It was out of gratitude to his guru that the Dalai Lama would use his position to
make available what he himself had been taught to all who sought it.
If, in fulfilling this role bequeathed to him by Ling Rinpoché, the Dalai Lama was able also to act as a “free spokesman,” as he put it, for the people of Tibet, that was to be welcomed. But his reading of the global situation persuaded him that confronting China directly would not succeed. Still less was violence a plausible solution. In view of this, he became increasingly convinced that Tibetans should abandon their claim to complete independence. What mattered was the welfare and happiness of all Tibetans. If his people’s happiness could be secured with Tibet as an administrative entity within the People’s Republic of China—if, that is, they could enjoy freedom of religion, association, and speech, and if their material needs were met—he would, as he put it, have “no point to argue.” It made sense, therefore, to ignore China’s recent rebuff and take Deng Xiaoping at his word. If “anything” could be discussed except independence, he would drop the call for rangzen (independence) and adopt instead umaylam—a middle-way approach between reaction and surrender.
PART IV
Bodhisattva of Compassion
19
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Cutting Off the Serpent’s Head: Reaction and Repression in Tibet
Over the decades since the Dalai Lama’s first trip to America in 1979, he has made well over four hundred separate visits to foreign countries to teach, to lecture, and to preach. Despite this, only occasionally has he visited a country more than once during the course of a year. What is more, almost invariably these trips have been undertaken at the invitation of a third party, usually a Buddhist group. The only exceptions to this rule have been the occasional private visits for medical purposes or to collect an award. Similarly, he has rarely stayed as a guest in a private house, though he describes one exception in his book Ethics for the New Millennium. On this occasion, as he discloses in a disarming confession, he learned an important lesson when, as he was visiting the bathroom, his curiosity got the better of him. Peeking inside a cupboard, he looked through the medicines he found there. To his surprise, he saw that these included antidepressants—and yet this was the house of an exceptionally wealthy family. Evidently wealth and well-being did not always go hand in hand.
When the Dalai Lama makes an overseas trip, it is usual for his hosts to be instructed to book modest accommodations, and, certainly during the earlier visits, this was the rule. During the 1980s, he would travel with a considerably smaller entourage than later, perhaps half a dozen strong, compared with a dozen more recently. Typically this would include two personal attendants, a secretary, two or three security men, and one or two government in exile officials. In recent years, more security has been involved and, on longer trips, more personal attendants. Often, of late, he has also been accompanied by a diarist, the Englishman Jeremy Russell; it is he who compiles the daily reports for the Dalai Lama’s (English-language) website.
Of all these overseas trips, only one could be described as a vacation in the accepted sense of the word. This was a ten-day trip to Austria and Switzerland in 1983. After meeting with a small group of scientists in the Tyrolean mountain resort of Alpbach, the Dalai Lama was persuaded to spend a few days sightseeing in Switzerland. It is worth mentioning in this context Trijang Rinpoché’s delight on a trip of his own to Switzerland when he witnessed a fireworks display over Lake Geneva. He wrote subsequently that “seeing flowers of every colour appear and fall like sparkling rain from space really helped improve the way I visualized the emission and dissolution of light and the purifying rain of nectar during my daily practices.” There is no record of the Dalai Lama’s seeing fireworks at Lake Geneva, but it is certain that he himself undertakes just such visualization practices on a daily basis, even when traveling.*
The visit to Alpbach itself brought the Dalai Lama together for the first time with the Chilean biologist and philosopher Francisco Varela. A student of the wayward lama Choegyam Trungpa, Varela was subsequently credited with being the founding father of neuro-phenomenology, a branch of science he described as taking a pragmatic approach to the “hard question” of consciousness. They became friends at once, both agreeing that science and Buddhism were, in essence, entirely compatible methodologies designed to solve the same problem of improving the quality of life for all beings. Before the gathering was over, the forty-eight-year-old Tibetan, as eager as ever to learn, invited Varela to Dharamsala to initiate him into the mysteries of neuroscience, then Varela’s principal area of research. The two subsequently met on many occasions through the Mind and Life Institute, which they co-founded in 1991. Varela died in 2001, but the Dalai Lama keeps a photograph of him on his desk to this day, while the institute itself has become a flourishing multinational forum. Bringing scientists and meditators (“contemplatives”) together to study, it researches, among other things, whether Buddhist meditation techniques could benefit society as a whole and, if so, how they might be taught in a secular environment. A major component of the Dalai Lama’s efforts to reach out to the scientific community, the Mind and Life Institute has attracted some of the great names in science, including two Nobel laureates: Daniel Kahneman, the Israeli economist and psychologist, and Yuan Tseh Lee, the Taiwanese chemist. Also associated with the institute are world-renowned psychologists Jon Kabat Zin and Daniel Goleman, both of them leaders in the field, who have contributed significantly to the exponential growth of interest in secularized Buddhist meditation techniques associated with the mindfulness movement. The work of neuroscientist Richie Davidson should also be mentioned in this context. Indeed, there have been rich collaborations for many, even if one skeptical early participant quipped that “Buddhist psychology takes people who think they’re somebody and helps them understand they’re nobody; Western psychology takes people who think they are nobody and helps them understand they’re somebody.”
From the start, the Dalai Lama found it easier to meet with scientists sympathetic to his ideas than to meet with sympathetic politicians. Although he personally made no special effort to do so, his various representatives abroad did their utmost to develop support for the Tibetan claim to independence—despite the fact that the Dalai Lama himself was moving away from this as a goal. One regular attendee at the press conferences his representatives invariably organized when he arrived in a foreign country recalled how, even in New York City, these were “almost deserted” during the 1980s. And on those occasions when meetings with journalists and others were well attended, there were some embarrassing misconceptions about what the Dalai Lama actually stood for. On an early visit to the United States, a business CEO asked him whether he felt “closer to John Lennon the dreamer, or to Gandhi the politician.” The Dalai Lama had never heard of Lennon, and as for dreaming, for him this was not something one did to little or no purpose. More than once, too, he was brought to tears by someone in the audience asking him what was the “quickest, easiest, cheapest” way to attain Enlightenment.
Nonetheless, in spite of these occasional misunderstandings, and in spite of the lack of overt interest in Tibet among politicians, small coalitions of influential supporters did begin to emerge in America and in Europe. At this stage, few people outside Buddhist circles knew much about Tibet. Political support in America at first came as much from Republicans, such as the notoriously right-wing Jesse Helms, and social conservatives, such as New York Times editor turned columnist Abe Rosenthal (whose epitaph proclaims that “he kept the paper straight”), as from Democrats. For the right, Tibet was a stick with which to beat the Communist Chinese, a popular stance under the Reagan administration. The Dalai Lama’s hoped-for 1985 visit to Tibet not having taken place, that summer ninety-one members of the U.S. Congress wrote an open letter to the Chinese president urging the Communist Party to enter into meaningful negotiations with the Tibetan government in exile. When the Chinese denounced the letter, it was this disparate group of supporters who encouraged the Dalai Lama to follow up their initiative with what became known as his “Five
Point Peace Plan for the Future of Tibet.”
Invited to address the Congressional Human Rights Caucus in Washington during the fall of 1987, coincidentally at the very moment when Gyalo Thondup arrived in Beijing on business, the Dalai Lama called first for the transformation of the whole of Tibet into what he described as a “zone of peace,” whereby his homeland would be completely demilitarized. The Dalai Lama’s second proposal was that the Chinese government halt its population transfer policy, whereby large numbers of non-Tibetans were “threatening the very existence of the Tibetans as a distinct people.” Instead, his third point, their fundamental human rights should be respected and democratic freedom for Tibetans implemented. Fourth, the natural environment of Tibet—devastated since the Chinese occupation—should be restored, and in particular, the Chinese should desist both from developing nuclear weapons and from dumping nuclear waste in Tibet. Finally, he said, now was the time for “earnest negotiations” on the future status of Tibet and of “relations between the Tibetan and Chinese peoples.”
Significantly, there was no mention of independence. Nonetheless, as the Dalai Lama must have feared, the party leadership in Beijing immediately rejected the plan. The Chinese were also pained that Gyalo Thondup had informed them that the Dalai Lama’s visit to Washington would be of no importance. Either he had lied, or, if he had been telling the truth and had no foreknowledge of the speech to Congress, he must not be as close to the Dalai Lama and the exile government as he claimed.
But what shocked both sides was the violent protest that erupted in Lhasa the following week. On September 27, a party of monks from one of the Three Seats appeared in Lhasa carrying a Tibetan flag and proceeded to circumambulate the Jokhang Temple, shouting slogans and calling for self-rule (rangzen in Tibetan). The monks were quickly arrested and beaten. Four days later—significantly, on China’s national day—another group of monks from Sera staged a second demonstration. This was joined by a number of laypeople. Again the demonstrators were rounded up and beaten by police. But as the morning wore on, a large crowd gathered outside the police station where the demonstrators had been detained, demanding their release. A confrontation developed, the outcome of which was that the crowd stormed the station, setting it on fire and freeing the detainees. One of the monk protesters, badly burned in the flames, was carried aloft in front of the crowd, which, further enraged, began pelting the police with stones. In response, law enforcement officers now in position on the roofs of adjacent buildings began to shoot. Up to ten demonstrators were killed.
The Dalai Lama Page 31