by Escape From the Land of Snows_The Young Dalai Lama's Flight to Freedom
Ketsing Rimpoche, now dressed in his abbot’s robes, presented the boy’s father and mother with presents and requested to see Lhamo Thondup alone. The pair showed the abbot and his attendants to their bedroom, and the search party placed a long wooden table across the bed. On it, Ketsing Rimpoche laid the items he’d brought from Lhasa for just such an occasion: two black rosaries, two yellow rosaries, two damaru hand drums, and two walking sticks. One item of each pair had belonged to the Thirteenth. The other hadn’t.
The bright-eyed Lhamo Thondup entered the room, crowded with strange men, and calmly walked over to Ketsing Rimpoche. The abbot greeted him and held up the two black rosaries. He asked the boy which one he wanted. Lhamo Thondup immediately pointed to the Thirteenth’s and placed it around his neck. The same thing happened with the yellow rosaries. The tension in the room, a mix of anticipation and nerves frayed over months of searching, mounted. Ketsing Rimpoche pointed to the walking sticks. Lhamo Thondup considered, then reached for the wrong stick—it belonged to Ketsing Rimpoche himself. The members of the search party froze. One mistake would disqualify the boy. But then Lhamo Thondup gently let go of the stick and grabbed the Thirteenth’s cane, holding it up in front of him. The officials in the room let go of a collective breath. Later they would realize that the first walking stick had actually belonged to the Dalai Lama briefly before he gave it away to a monk. It was as if the boy had felt the spiritual traces of the Thirteenth, like fading fingerprints.
They came to the drums. The lamas had purposefully matched the Thirteenth’s plain old drum with a luxurious model done up in gold, ivory, and turquoise, its ball attached with a beautifully brocaded tassel. The boy instantly grabbed the right one and turned it quickly in his hand, tapping out a rapid little beat. “Now that we had witnessed these miraculous performances,” wrote a member of the search party, “our minds were filled with deep devotion, joy, and gaiety.”
The final step was a physical examination. There are eight marks associated with the discovery of a Dalai Lama, including curling eyebrows, wide eyes, large ears, tiger stripes on the legs, and a curling imprint resembling a conch shell on the palm. The members of the search party found three on the person of the young boy, enough to confirm their find. Some of the men in the room bowed their heads, their eyes filling with tears. In that moment, they recognized not only their old master, their beloved Thirteenth, but the spirit of Chenrizi, the bodhisattva of Infinite Compassion, which was with them again here in this crowded, airless room in an obscure corner of Tibet. The boy staring at them with his bold brown eyes also reassured the men that one day they too would be reincarnated into another life, that the faith they’d followed their entire lives was alive and true.
Two
TO LHASA
n the heat of mid-July, a week after his fourth birthday, the newly christened Dalai Lama set out on his journey to Lhasa. He was attended by fifty travelers, including his older brother Lobsang (at six years old, closest to him in age), his parents, and an uncle, as well as bodyguards, the entire search party who had discovered him, and a group of Muslim merchants who had been called on to make a loan toward the $300,000 ransom demanded by the region’s governor and warlord, General Ma Pu-feng, for letting the child incarnate leave. There were also mule drivers and scouts necessary to command the 350 horses, mules, yaks, and camels that would carry the pilgrims’ belongings for the three and a half months it would take to reach Lhasa. It was raining lightly as the expedition set off.
Lhamo Thondup had been elevated beyond his family’s wildest imaginings, but he was still a mischievous, generous boy who’d inherited his father’s temper. On the road, Lhamo fought ferociously with his brother Lobsang, forcing the driver to call his mother, who always found the older brother in tears and the Dalai Lama sitting in the golden litter, smiling, with a look of triumph on his face.
As feisty as he was, the boy often became overwhelmed by the attention. When the caravan arrived at a village along the route, hundreds or thousands of Tibetans often waited, thronging the road and asking for his blessing, causing the four-year-old to break into tears. What the Dalai Lama especially remembered from the trip was the wildlife, the drong (wild yaks), kyang (wild asses), and nawa (Himalayan blue sheep), “so light and fast they might have been ghosts.” He was also struck, as a young child uprooted from his familiar landscape, by the forbidding remoteness of the territory they were passing through, “gargantuan mountains flanking immense flat plains which we struggled over like insects.”
Still days away from the capital, the boy shed his peasant clothes for the last time and was dressed in the maroon-and-gold robes of a Buddhist monk. Then the Mendel Tensum was performed, in which the boy was presented with a reliquary, a scripture, and a statuette of the Buddha of Long Life, gifts appropriate to a high lama. His head was shaved, and he was given a new name as well, Tenzin Gyatso. By these modest steps, the boy from Amdo prepared himself to become the Precious Protector of Tibet.
It is one of the more charming traditions of Tibetan life that no one is allowed to leave on or return from a trip unattended. A young boy who is being sent off from Lhasa to a remote monastery will find dozens of friends and family taking the first part of the trip with him, sending their loved one off with tears and assurances that they will be waiting for his return. And on his arrival back, he will again find a party of friends and neighbors waiting for him on the road, ready to escort him back. To set off alone on a journey would be seen as deeply uncivilized. For the next Dalai Lama, the tradition was filled by battalions of Tibetan soldiers, officials, and the heads of the capital’s three great monasteries, who journeyed out from Lhasa to meet the caravan. When the Amdo party approached Lhasa, the dignitaries met them on the plain two miles outside the capital. They brought with them “the Great Peacock,” a special wooden throne used only for greeting the new incarnation on his arrival in Lhasa. Among the officials was a humble monk named Ponpo (“the boss”), who would be in charge of the Dalai Lama’s kitchen. This self-effacing man would become the Dalai Lama’s surrogate mother in the lonely and alienating days to come.
A daylong ceremony followed, which to the young boy’s eyes consisted of enormous swarms of people, more than he thought even existed in the world, coming to greet him and receive his blessing. What seemed like the entire population of Lhasa waited for him in the capital, a sea of shining faces flooding around his litter. The boy felt “as if I were in a great park covered with beautiful flowers while a soft breeze blew across it and peacocks elegantly danced before me.”
To understand the Fourteenth and his role in Tibetan life, one must understand the nature of Tibetan Buddhism and its place within the nation. Tibet pursued the building of monasteries and the pledging of huge numbers of monks as state ends. One out of every four young men was placed in a monastery, often when he was six or seven years old. The monasteries sought these extraordinary numbers of monks for both theological and political reasons: not only to advance the Dharma, the way of the Buddha, but also to draw as many Tibetan families as possible into the monastic economy and to build up their political base. As anywhere, numbers translated into power. The monasteries also doubled as universities, offering the only real education that peasant children could hope for, while at the same time owning huge tracts of land and collecting revenues that dwarfed the government budget. Buddhism was much more than a state religion; it was the sole reason for Tibet’s existence. The faith became the institution around which all other things in the society were molded: the economy, the military (or lack thereof), foreign policy, domestic policy. One explorer described Tibet as one “huge monastery inhabited by a nation of monks.” Stealing from a monastery’s funds was considered a graver offense than killing one’s own parents.
This single-minded pursuit also meant that these institutions were far from the tranquil places of meditation that one thinks of when one hears the words “Tibetan Buddhist monastery.” The enormous complexes were roiling, highly poli
tical outposts in which not every initiate was dedicated to the pursuit of the Dharma. The Dalai Lama, in later years, spoke of a monastery where only one in five of the thousands of monks was actually a serious student of Buddhism, while the others spent their time distracting themselves or fighting off boredom (“organized gold-bricking,” Life magazine would call it). And one young monk painted a rather harrowing portrait of elderly monks’ pursuit of him and other young boys whom they wanted as drombos, or homosexual partners. Neither Tibet nor its premier institutions, the monasteries, was free from the vices of the world.
The heroes of this formerly martial society were no longer warriors and chieftains but monks who walled themselves up in mountain caves to meditate, with a small hole cut in the wall through which food was passed to them once a day. Or the lung-pa (“wind men”), who were said to have achieved such a high degree of concentration that they could overcome the laws of physics and fly through the air for hours at a time. The promise of Mahayana Buddhism, the school that had taken root in Tibet, is that a human being, through sustained and devout effort, can rise through his life cycles to become a bodhisattva, an “enlightenment-being” who has achieved complete wisdom and compassion for others. And it is selfless empathy for others that leads to Buddha-dom. The lotus, the symbol of Tibetan Buddhism and the subject of its central mantra Om Mani Padme Hum! (“Oh! The Jewel in the Lotus!”), is born in the dank mud of a swamp, but it rises above the clammy muck to unfurl its beautiful clean flower. One could in the same way free oneself of the base hatreds of human existence and come to embody enlightenment and the “jewel” in the mantra, pure compassion.
The fact that the most revered bodhisattva in the land, Chenrizi, was resident in the person of the Dalai Lama made him not only a spiritual leader and the political head of state but the example of what every Tibetan Buddhist strove for, a perfect model of what a human being should and could become. Chenrizi was “the Lord who looks down,” a being who, constantly on the verge of attaining Nirvana, postpones his final transformation in order to help others end their suffering. He was therefore, in a sense, the final aim of the nation, the end product of its special mission in the world.
The Tibetans do not even have a word for “religion.” It isn’t something apart. It abides in life always.
After his entry into Lhasa, the Amdo boy was installed in the summer palace, the Norbulingka, as he awaited his enthronement, “the last temporal liberty I was ever to know.” On the cold morning of February 22, 1940, he was taken to the Potala, the winter residence that loomed over Lhasa, its height accentuated by an architect’s trick: the walls angled inward from their base, as did the windows, making the building seem to soar even higher than it did. The boy was led to the Lion Throne, which had been vacant for six years but kept supplied with fresh food, holy water, and new flowers, as this was the seat of a spirit on its way back from distant parts. The British delegate to the ceremony, Sir Basil Gould, walked into the Hall of All Good Deeds of the Spiritual and Temporal Worlds and saw the new incarnation for the first time: “The Dalai Lama,” he wrote, “a solid, solemn but very wide-awake boy, red-cheeked and closely shorn, wrapped warm in the maroon-red robes of a monk and in outer coverings, was seated high on his simple throne, cross-legged in the attitude of Buddha.” The boy was surrounded by five abbots, and Gould was struck by the “devotion and love” they showed the Fourteenth as well as the “extraordinary steadiness of his gaze.” The ceremony that followed seemed to go on forever: two mime performances were followed by dance, song, readings of national history, blessings and counter-blessings. It was the boy’s introduction to the marathon Tibetan rituals he would come to know so well (and loathe so thoroughly). The Dalai Lama remained composed throughout, and many people remarked that he seemed to recognize the officials who had served his predecessor.
The new Dalai Lama took his place at the Potala Palace and began his apprenticeship to the political and spiritual leadership of Tibet. Sitting atop Marbori, “the Red Hill,” the Potala was a seventeenth-century masterpiece, but it wasn’t an easy place to live in. To go anywhere in it you were forever stepping over thick wooden transoms, climbing up stairs or ladders, the sight lines constantly broken by wooden pillars, by doors to hidden chapels, by corridors that spun off to another of the thousand rooms. It was freezing cold during the winter. And the Dalai Lama soon learned that his living quarters were placed so high above his people that he could see them only through a telescope. He would often study the criminals, who were closest to view (the Potala even contained a prison), men who when they saw the sun flashing off His Holiness’s telescope lens would bow their heads and look away out of reverence. The palace’s attic was rumored to be haunted by giant child-snatching owls and ghosts, ghosts that terrified the young Dalai Lama when he first stayed there, and its many chapels were filled with the remains of his predecessors in gargantuan stupas, or golden burial vessels. When he wasn’t studying or playing, the boy would wander among the stupas, the emeralds and rose-gold facets on the tombs occasionally catching a ray of light from the butter lamps and sparkling in the cold gloom. The Potala was too big to truly know, a Buddhist metropolis with offices, meeting rooms for the National Assembly, two treasuries and a large armory, a dungeon hard by the national library, and uncountable chapels. Its interior barely lit by the sun but only by candles and the glimpse of open courtyards, it was as dark and fragrant as a cave inhabited for centuries.
The Fourteenth was often intensely lonely at first. His nervous and rather meek brother Lobsang went to live with him, but his parents were installed in their own home in Lhasa and were allowed only periodic visits. In their absence, the boy latched on to his beloved Ponpo, his caretaker, forming an attachment that would last for decades. “So strong was [our relationship],” the Dalai Lama said, “that he had to be in my sight at all times, even if it was only the bottom of his robe visible through a doorway or under the curtains which served as doors inside Tibetan houses.” Like the Dalai Lama’s mother, Ponpo was a forbearing, kindhearted person who fed and soothed the boy. But the memory of his mother lingered. The Dalai Lama’s younger brother, Choegyal, was installed at Drepung Monastery, a few miles from Lhasa, having been recognized as the reincarnation of a high lama. There Choegyal grew desperate for any hint of his old life, especially the warm presence of Diki Tsering. “I missed my mother terribly,” he remembers. “She used to send me homemade cookies, lollipops, chewing gum … all wrapped up in a scarf. I would sniff the scarf, desperately trying to recapture the smell of her.” The Dalai Lama suffered similar pangs.
As a boy in the freezing Potala on long afternoons, the young Fourteenth Dalai Lama would sit for hours on the shiny arga floors, made of chipped stone and waxed with butter, and gaze up at intricate murals hundreds of years old. These became his history lessons. Extending from floor to ceiling, they told the story of Tibet in flowing allegories and luridly colored portraits.
The Dalai Lama learned about Songtsen Gampo, the Tibetan king who, beginning around AD 629, transformed Tibet into a relentless military power. His armies pushed into Nepal and Burma, into Tang-dynasty China, the border areas of India, and the neighboring kingdom of Zhang Zhung. But he also established Lhasa as a cosmopolitan mecca, sending scholars to northern India to create a written Tibetan language and bringing astrological systems from China, laws and civil administration from the Uighurs, and art from Nepal. The king, in his most lasting legacy, then imported Buddhism to Lhasa and declared it the official state faith. Before Songtsen Gampo, the Tibetans had practiced Bön, “the nameless religion,” a shamanistic belief system populated by demons, vengeful ghosts, snake-gods, and devils who called for human sacrifice and who could only be controlled by a priest known as a “bön,” or invoker of spirits.
Gampo’s successor, Trisong Detsen, summoned the legendary guru Padmasambhava from India and encouraged him to journey to every corner of Tibet, teaching the Four Noble Truths: to live is to suffer; suffering is caused by des
ire; desire can be overcome; and the path to that overcoming is embodied in the Noble Eightfold Path—right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration. Sin is not the great villain in Buddhist philosophy; ignorance is. We sin because, in our ignorance, we fail to see how lying and stealing and committing violence harms our own karma and leads only to more suffering. Tibetan Buddhism has often been called a science of the mind, and with some justification. It’s a struggle to understand life and overcome its illusions so that one may gradually attain a sublime equanimity. Padmasambhava was the first to expound its principles in the Land of Snows.
The guru didn’t attack Bön so much as cannibalize it, incorporating the faith’s demons and legends into the Buddhist pantheon and thereby giving even the simplest peasant a clear way of comprehending the new religion. It was said he faced down the Bön deities by causing massive avalanches, stopping the wind, and bringing the waters of frigid lakes to a boil, all through a mind honed by constant meditation. By the twelfth century, Buddhism had conquered the country, this time not by imperial decree but by capturing the hearts of ordinary citizens.
The young Dalai Lama slept in the Great Fifth’s bedroom, on the seventh—and uppermost—story of the Potala. “It was pitifully cold and ill-lit,” he remembered. “Everything in it was ancient and decrepit and behind the drapes that hung across each of the four walls lay deposits of centuries-old dust.” He made friends with the mice who came to steal the food left as offerings for the Buddha. In the morning, after his 7:00 a.m. breakfast, the Dalai Lama and his brother Lobsang were given their lessons together, beginning with reading and memorization of Buddhist texts. The Dalai Lama was trained through the traditional Tibetan methods. First, he was taught to read and then to write (including a very exacting course in penmanship, divided into training in one script for writing manuscripts and in another for official communications and private letters). Then he began to memorize the classic scriptures, both to sharpen his memory and to give him a basic understanding of Buddhist principles. This was followed by nyam tee, “teaching from experience.” Here a lama would be invited to the Potala to give a lecture on a specific virtue, illustrating the point with real-life stories and quotations from Lord Buddha and the classic Indian authorities. Next came perhaps the most important step of all, the practice of meditation, where the student was left alone in complete silence to contemplate the lessons of the day and to begin the internal explorations that are the grist of the monk’s life. Finally, that development was tested in debates with tutors and teachers, accompanied by a series of stylized gestures—the questioner, for example, would try to distract his adversary by slowly raising his right hand above his head and then slapping it into his left palm.