The Dalai Lama
Page 53
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* Not all the Dalai Lamas have been great scholars. The Fourth, a Mongolian descendant of Genghis Khan, never learned Tibetan to an adequate degree and was likened, somewhat uncharitably, to an “empty box” (by Desi Sangye Gyatso in his biography of the Great Fifth); the Sixth refused to take holy orders, preferring instead to write love poetry and go on adventures with the more louche among the aristocratic youth of his day; the Eighth, a sickly young man, showed little aptitude for philosophy and spent most of his time sunning himself on the veranda.
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* Nagarjuna (ca. 150–250 CE), arguably the greatest Buddhist philosopher, is most widely known for his Mulamadhyamakarika, or Verses on the Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way.
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† Saint Isidore of Seville, the late-antique encyclopedist, also places a great mountain at the center of the world.
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* Apart from Harrer and his fellow Austrian Peter Aufschnaiter, the others were Hugh Richardson, the British political officer; Reginald Fox and Robert Ford, both of them British radio operators; and a White Russian refugee by the name of Nedbailof who helped electrify the capital.
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* In fact, they had four other companions to start with, of whom two made it into Tibet, but they split into separate parties. The others turned back before reaching Lhasa.
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* He said this to me, in a (filmed) interview at his home in St. Andrews, Scotland, in 1994. Richardson, having been the British political officer resident in Lhasa, subsequently worked—in an identical role—for the Nehru government until 1950.
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* For the next five months, Ford was held in solitary confinement in a rat-infested cell, forced on many occasions to sit motionless for sixteen hours at a time. “I was never struck a single blow,” he later recalled, “but mentally it was no holds barred.” Over the subsequent three years, he was subject to relentless interrogation and “re-education” before finally signing a false confession in May 1954. He was sentenced to ten years in prison. No sooner had this sentence been pronounced than he was told that he was to be deported. Whether this was true or another attempt to break him he did not know for another six months until, eventually, he was taken across China to one of the railway bridges that led into Hong Kong and told to walk across, not knowing “whether I would get a bullet in my back.” Phodo, as he was affectionately known by Tibetans, subsequently became a vocal supporter of the Tibetan cause and was invariably called on by the Dalai Lama whenever the Precious Protector visited Britain. In 2011 he was honored by the Tibetan community in exile, who symbolically handed over a one-hundred-sang note by way of back pay, together with an apology for the delay “due to extenuating circumstances.” He died in 2013 at the age of ninety. I had the privilege of meeting him twice. He was as courteous and self-effacing an individual as ever to have been the partial cause of an invasion of one country by another.
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* The Dalai Lama thought of himself as sixteen, however. According to the Tibetan way of reckoning, sentience begins at conception and a child is a year old at birth.
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The word yoga means discipline. A yogi or yogin is one who engages in a given discipline or practice.
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* When Ngabo objected that he had not brought the official government seal with him, the Chinese provided him with one of their own devising.
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† I recall being astounded when, during one of our first meetings, the Dalai Lama told me that, as a rule, he devoted more than 80 percent of his time to spiritual matters, and less than a fifth to worldly matters. He confirmed this during an interview on April 2, 2019.
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* According to Harrer, he suffered a heart attack.
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* Remarkably, although the texts do not specify precisely who these symbolic barbarians are, it is clear from the fact that their religion is founded in a place called Mecca, their men circumcised, and their women veiled that it is Islam that the tantra has in mind. The first textual evidence of the Kalachakra tantra dates from the tenth century—a time when Buddhist northern India was being invaded by Muslims.
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* In contrast, nuns maintain a whopping 364.
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* This was Phagpa Lodro Gyaltsen (1235–1280), who became Imperial Preceptor for Tibet in the court of the Yuan emperor Kublai Khan, a fact that supplies one of the arguments the Chinese government makes in connection with Tibet’s claimed status as a vassal state since the thirteenth century.
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* These were Josef Kolmas and Jan Vanis. The story is from Vanis, via his nephew, also Jan, who kindly shared with me the transcript of his uncle’s recollection.
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* It is common practice for family and friends to abbreviate names to the first syllable (though in fact any combination of syllables can be used) of the two given names. Aside from aristocratic or otherwise well-known families and some lamas, it is unusual for Tibetans to have or to use surnames, or family names.
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* The suffix –la (correctly lags) denotes an honorific. It is used as a mark of respect: the Dalai Lama does not place himself above such considerations.
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* Rustomji was the epitome of an official from the latter days of the British Raj: a Cambridge-educated classicist, violin player, and prizewinning gymnast.
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* Among many other forms of divination practiced by Tibetans, that of mo is widely used. Preceded by a period of meditation and accompanied by appropriate prayers and invocations, this is performed by placing in a vessel two or more balls, traditionally of barley dough, distinguished from one another sometimes with dye, but more usually by pieces of paper with possible answers written on them and concealed inside. The balls are then rotated ever more swiftly until one flies out, propelled by centrifugal force. Though simple enough in operation, conducting a mo is a grave and serious business. The correct spiritual outlook and motivation are essential if it is to be accurate. And the more spiritually advanced the questioner, the more reliable will be the answer.
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* An act of worship, a ceremony.
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* Geshe Ngawang Wangyal (1901–1983) was a protégé of Agvan Dorjieff, the Tibeto-Buryat confidant of the Great Thirteenth.
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* A symbolic offering of the world and all that is in it.
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* Back in 1706.
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* Right up until this time, the government of Tibet published an astrological almanac which identified days that were or were not auspicious for certain types of government business. A late example can be seen in the museum of the Tibetan Medical and Astrological Institute in Dharamsala.
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* It was during this bombardment that the college of traditional Tibetan medicine at the top of Chakpori, previously a striking feature of the Lhasa skyline, was destroyed. In its place today stands an array of communications towers.
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† These were Stuart and Roma Gelder of the British daily News Chronicle.
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* To the envy of every Tibetan, Bhutan became a member of the UN in 1971.
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* Many of the refugees, children included, were subsequently drafted to build roads in some of India’s most remote areas. This was their chief—often dangerous—employment for many years.
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* Nauzer Nowrojee was subsequently to find fame as the prototype of the uncle in Rohinton Mistry’s novel A Fine Balance.
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* I cannot entirely exclude at least my younger self from this accusation.
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* Astonishingly he lived another thirty-six years until his death in 2014, aged ninety-two, having fully recovered and authored several books, one of them a remarkable exercise in Hegelian dialectics intended to demonstrate that, of necessity, Liquid Water Does Exist on theMoon (the book’s title).
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* The last of his three meetings with the Dalai Lama took place on November 8, 1968. Merton died on December 10.
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* To be fair to Paul VI, he had inherited most of these reforms from his predecessor, John XXIII. Paul was the one who implemented them.
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* In Tibetan, phyi rol pa, literally, outsiders—in contrast to Nang pa, meaning insiders (where nang means “home”).
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* Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter; in office 1966–1977 and again from 1980 until her assassination in 1984.
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* This may well be a reason why the Dalai Lama is not wholly vegetarian. The yogas he practices can be very demanding physically.
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* There is an interesting argument to be had here about whether the yogin’s experience is merely a psychological state induced by self-hypnosis. Yet for the one who attains such experience, it is evident that there is an attendant indubitability that defies such an easy reduction.
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* Remarkably enough, the British army retains, at least at the time of this writing, at least one Tibetan Buddhist monk on strength as chaplain to its Gurkha regiments. More than half of all Gurkhas are Buddhist.
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* Uban published a memoir of the same name.
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* It can be safely assumed that the Dalai Lama was encouraged in this project by Nechung.
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* A tsok offeringis a highly charged ritual practice that involves the offering of both material and spiritual substances to the tantric deities as a means to gaining wisdom and merit.
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* The term refers to the union of wisdom and emptiness.
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† Correctly gcod, which means “cutting through” or “severing” and refers to the hindrances or obstacles that stand in the yogin’s way on the path to Enlightenment.
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* His own marital arrangements were much more traditional, except that his marriage to a Russian divorcee four years his senior prevented him from sustaining his claim to the Greek throne.
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* Lobsang Samten was, by all accounts that I have heard, the most gentle of souls and his mother’s admitted favorite. His decision to return to India may have been influenced by his recent discovery and exposure in the local press.
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* It was not aerial bomb damage, however, but destruction by artillery fire.
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† I saw evidence of this with my own eyes when visiting the Jokhang in April 1988. Giving my tour party’s guide the slip, I wandered through its chambers. All were completely empty, their floors swept clean, and on the wall of an upstairs chapel I saw a large hammer and sickle, quite well executed in red paint, superimposed on an ancient fresco.
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* The late Sogyal Rinpoché, putative author of the multimillion-selling Tibetan Art of Living and Dying, is a more recent example of a popular lama falling afoul of that prejudice which favors outward behavior measuring up to claimed inner disposition.
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* His real name was Lobsang Jinpa. Ponpo, his nickname, means “the Boss.”
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* This is the constitutional principle formulated by Deng Xiaoping whereby the former independent Chinese polities (Hong Kong, Macao, and, it was assumed, in due course Taiwan) would retain a large measure of independence following reunification with the Motherland.
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* Saints Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582) and, more recently, Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897) are well-attested examples.
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* This practice is sKye bdun sgrub pa, literally “accumulating for the seventh rebirth.” While at first sight shocking, it is important to recognize that theophagy—the sacramental eating of a god—lies at the heart of Christian practice: Catholic Christians believe that, in Holy Communion, they too are actually eating the very flesh and drinking the very blood of Jesus, albeit that their outward form of body and blood has changed to those of bread and wine.
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* I have often thought that a biopic—possibly even an autobiopic—using computer-generated imagery to re-create some of these experiences would be an outstanding way to gain insight of the Dalai Lama’s spiritual life.
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* This was Michael van Walt van Praag, a Belgian-born, US-based international jurist.
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* Queen Elizabeth II is said to have the same ability.
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* The event was held at Madison Square Garden.
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* The Gaddi are an Indian hill tribe of pastoralists who have farmed the foothills of the Himalayas since time immemorial.
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* This was at the Trode Khangsar, which still stands in Lhasa today.
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† There is, however, another tradition, which holds that the real origins of Shugden lie with the maleficent activity of a seventeenth-century Kargyu lama. It is alleged that, owing to friction between the Gelug and Kargyu schools at that time, this lama succeeded in “hacking” Drakpa Gyaltsen’s spirit, then sending him off to another realm and substituting an evil spirit in its place to masquerade as a dharma protector but in fact to do maximum harm to the Gelugpas.
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* When Father Johannes Grueber, the first European known to have visited Lhasa, reached the capital in 1661, he was scandalized to discover that the most highly prized remedy in the Tibetan pharmacopoeia was the Dalai Lama’s and other high lamas’ excrement, desiccated and incorporated into “Precious Pills.” While Precious Pills continue to be manufactured, it is remarkable to see that medical opinion has lately turned in favor of a similar practice (fecal microbiota transplant) for treatment of certain intestinal conditions.
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* It is true that the government in exile (the Central Tibetan Administration) has some quite obvious shortcomings in both respects, but this is a very young institution as well as a very new idea in terms of the tradition.
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* Moore founded the charity Children in Crossfire, of which the Dalai Lama is now patron. He is a gifted musician and as a young man played lead guitar in the musical Jesus Christ Superstar
when it opened in Dublin. He often jokes that in holding him up as any kind of hero, the Dalai Lama shows that he is a terrible judge of character.
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* The sign of successful transference is said to be the appearance of a small hole at the crown of the head, into which it is traditional to push a blade of kusha grass.
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* Though these have been identified as a form of agate, there has been no definitive classification of the natural bead that I am aware of. Genuine stones now change hands for thousands of dollars apiece.