by Escape From the Land of Snows_The Young Dalai Lama's Flight to Freedom
At 10:00 a.m., every day, His Holiness and his brother would be separated, and the Fourteenth would be escorted to a meeting with the members of his government, who ascended the steep stairs from their offices on the second and third floors. He was not allowed to speak. His regent, a flamboyantly corrupt monk named Reting Rimpoche, directed the nation’s business.
When the Dalai Lama was a child, political affairs and religious studies were sheer drudgery. His tutors found the boy to be bright, with an impressive memory, and deeply concerned with underdogs, the friendless and abused. But he didn’t work at his lessons. “My only interest was in playing,” the Dalai Lama admitted. He was a strong-willed boy more interested in concocting elaborate war games than anything else. He was almost worryingly obsessed with gadgets, war machines (challenging his keepers to make tanks and airplanes out of balls of tsampa dough), military drills, and dangerous stunts, such as running off a ramp and jumping, to see who could leap the highest. Because the Dalai Lama was forbidden to have friends his own age, his adult attendants were shanghaied into mock battles. The young boy would toss missiles made of dough at their heads, and they would fire back.
He hadn’t yet overcome his legendary temper, either. After losing a game to his sweepers (who swept the gleaming floors of the palace clean), His Holiness would sometimes stand and glower at them, literally shaking with rage. The ancient myths held that the Tibetan people had descended from a ravenous she-beast, and Tibetans believed Chenrizi had come to watch over them because of their wild nature. But at times it was the Dalai Lama who seemed ungovernable, a spirit of fury unleashed in the echoing rooms of the Potala.
It was only with the sweepers that His Holiness had what could be called a normal relationship; the others used formal language when speaking to him, addressing the institution, the superior being, instead of the young boy. Protocol gave his ministers strict rules for what they could and couldn’t do in the Dalai Lama’s presence: sitting, for example, was sacrilege. In fact, the Dalai Lama often saw only the tops of his subjects’ heads, as they bowed low at the first sight of him and he, by tradition, looked up in the air. Nor could he be punished: when the Fourteenth did something bad, it was his timid brother Lobsang who was lashed with a whip hanging on their tutor’s wall. The Dalai Lama had the curious fate of being neglected and spoiled at the same time.
When His Holiness was just eight, Lobsang, the last daily link to his old life, left for private school. Now the two brothers would see each other only on the occasional school holidays. “When he left after each visit,” the Dalai Lama said, “I remember, standing at the window watching, my heart full of sorrow, as he disappeared into the distance.” His estrangement from a normal childhood was complete. “Those children wrested from their families,” wrote the Tibet scholar Giuseppe Tucci, about the young Dalai Lamas,
subjected to the strict supervision of elderly wardens … led through the endless maze of lamaistic liturgy and dogmatics and plunged forcibly into the ponderous works of their former embodiments, certainly do not know the blissful astonishment of childhood. Such strict discipline, such statue-like immobility as the dignity of that office imposes, the daily intercourse with gloomy, elderly people, look to me like a violent, ruthless suppression of childhood.
As he entered his teens, the Fourteenth was barely treading water with his studies. At thirteen, he was introduced to Buddhist metaphysics, and his mind shut down completely. “They unnerved me so that I had the feeling of being dazed, as though I were hit on the head by a stone.” The only things that moved him were the stories of the Buddhist martyrs and the passages about suffering and forbearance that the scriptures abound with. At times, he would shed tears when reading them. But for the rest, he only let the verses play on his lips, not even trying to memorize them. He would edit the stories in his head to make them more exciting, or conjure up cliff-hanging adventure stories to avoid boredom.
• • •
Summer brought the move to the Norbulingka, and the young Dalai Lama quickly grew to love the rambling green place. He would take his younger brother, Choegyal, out on the pond in a tiny boat that could fit only the two of them. They would stare down over the gunwales of the boat and drop food to the fish that they could see flitting in the green water. His attendants would walk along the shore, tracking the progress of the vessel. The Fourteenth proved to be a daredevil, falling into the pond one time while trying to retrieve a stick and being rescued by a janitor who happened to hear his calls.
When, at fourteen, he first met the Austrian soldier Heinrich Harrer (who would go on to write the memoir Seven Years in Tibet), the two worked a film projector together. At one point, the Dalai Lama convinced Harrer to speak through a microphone and announce the next film to his tutors sitting in the theater, which Harrer did in the casual way of a Westerner. “He laughed enthusiastically at the surprised and shocked faces of the monks when they heard my cheerful, disrespectful tones,” Harrer remembered. Harrer found the Dalai Lama to be an ebullient, confident teenager who felt the suffocating traditions of his office keenly. “From the first day of the year until the last, it was nothing but a long round of ceremonies,” the Dalai Lama wrote. “This formalism regulated every detail of our everyday life. You had to observe it even while talking, even while walking.” He preferred gossiping to politics—and the intrigues that swirled around Lhasa were as complex as any Tudor plot. When his father died in 1947, allegations circulated that he’d been poisoned as part of a complex conspiracy. (There was even one rumor that said the Fourteenth was not the real Dalai Lama but an imposter.)
Harrer described the young man he met: “His complexion was much lighter than that of the average Tibetan. His eyes, hardly narrower than those of most Europeans, were full of expression, charm and vivacity. His cheeks glowed with excitement, and as he sat he kept sliding from side to side.…” The Dalai Lama wore his hair long (probably, Harrer thought, as protection against the freezing cold of the Potala Palace), suffered from bad posture as a result of many hours spent bent over books in his badly lit study, and had beautiful hands, which he kept folded. “He beamed all over his face and poured out a flood of questions,” Harrer remembered. “He seemed to me like a person who had for years brooded in solitude over different problems, and now that he had at last someone to talk to, wanted to know all the answers at once.”
His Holiness was interested in the world outside Tibet but had few ways of learning about it. He had a seven-volume account of World War II, which he’d had translated into Tibetan, but there were large patches of world history that were a mystery to him. World War II had reshaped societies outside the Himalayas’ ranges and set in motion the forces that would threaten to overwhelm his country, but the Dalai Lama learned about the battles by paging through back issues of Life magazine, which arrived in Lhasa months after their issue date, already musty with age.
All he had for an insight into power was the Tibetan myths and the murals that looped and spiraled across the walls of his palace. They told him how the great imperial era of Tibetan history, a time of conquest and national consolidation, drew to an end in the ninth century. The line of religious kings was terminated, and Tibet spun off into regional fiefdoms ruled by warlords and local chieftains. By the thirteenth century, when Genghis Khan marched on Tibet, he found waiting for him not a formidable opponent arrayed in battle formation but a few chieftains waiting with gifts. The skirmishes between China and Tibet would continue for centuries, but China was now the dominant power. And for the Han, nomads such as the Tibetans were more than outsiders or enemies. They were alien, a people “not yet human, because they pursued a lifestyle similar to wandering beasts.” Tibetans were destined to be seen by the Han as primitive hunter-gatherers who’d never joined the human fold. Barbarians.
The murals the Dalai Lama gazed at were also a family tree. In the mid-seventeenth century, the line of politically dominant Dalai Lamas began with the political genius of the Great Fifth. Before him, the Da
lai Lamas were simple monks and abbots who were recognized as reincarnations of Chenrizi, the bodhisattva of Infinite Compassion. But the Great Fifth, as the leader of a relatively new sect of Tibetan Buddhism still seeking its place among competing schools, cannily reached out to Gusri Khan, founder of China’s great Qing dynasty. Gusri Khan sent his soldiers to Tibet and, in a series of withering battles, defeated the Fifth’s rivals and installed the Dalai Lama as ruler of a newly unified Tibet. Tibet’s Buddhist rulers had struck a grand bargain with Peking, allying themselves with a more powerful neighbor. Having traded the sword for the prayer wheel, they would now depend on foreign protectors for their security. It was a compromise that would come to haunt the Fourteenth.
For hundreds of years after the Fifth’s death in 1682, the curious relationship between Tibet and China waxed and waned according to the strength of the dynasty in Peking, ranging from periods of direct political control (as during the reign of Lha-bzan Khan from 1706 to 1717) to spans when the head Chinese representative in Lhasa was no more than “a mere puppet whose strings were pulled by the Dalai Lama.” Successive Dalai Lamas sought alliances with the emperors of the Qing dynasty and were allowed to carry out domestic policy under their protection, watched over by a succession of ambans, or representatives of the emperor, who were given varying degrees of control over Tibetan affairs. Peking’s representatives still had the ability to have disobedient Tibetan officials flogged (sometimes to death), but their supposed inferiors often found ways to outwit or outlast them. One amban complained that the Tibetans “very often … left orders unattended to for months on the pretext of waiting for the Dalai Lama’s return or for decisions yet to be made, simply ignoring urgent requests for answers.” Most often, true power lay in the hands of the Dalai Lama and his cabinet.
The Qing dynasty began to dramatically weaken in the mid-nineteenth century when rising imperialist powers such as England and Russia started to impinge on its territories. By 1911, China had descended into a patchwork of warring chieftains and provinces, and after 1913, Tibet began to consider itself a fully independent nation. But it failed to grasp its best chance at autonomy, even declining to petition the United Nations for recognition as a sovereign state. Tibet, the keeper of the Dharma, remained locked behind its wind-whipped summits.
Until a resurgent China, under Mao Zedong, returned.
Despite the company of old men and what could have been a soul-crushing separation from his family, the Dalai Lama was somehow able to retain the sympathies and qualities of a child. While locked up in the Potala, he would watch the prisoners held in the yard below. “Many of them were sort of my friends,” he recalled. “I watched their lives every day. Many were common criminals, but still I could see their pain as a boy.… So when I first came to power, I released all [of them].” His previous self, the Thirteenth, would have frowned at the gesture. But it was very much in keeping with the new incarnation.
This is really the Dalai Lama’s first great triumph. He didn’t become a wild and rebellious hedonist, like the Sixth. He didn’t retreat into religious isolation, like the Eighth. He didn’t attempt to mold himself into a political mastermind, like the Fifth, or a sharp-elbowed strongman, like the Thirteenth. The teenaged Dalai Lama somehow found the strength to remain himself, a charismatic and simple-hearted young man in a dangerous time.
Three
ACROSS THE GHOST RIVER
n 1950, when the Dalai Lama was fifteen, the twentieth century arrived in Tibet in the form of the People’s Liberation Army. Some 80,000 battle-trained Chinese soldiers crossed the “Ghost River” that separates China from the Tibetan province of Chamdo. The Tibetan army that faced them was badly trained, badly equipped, and, at 8,500 soldiers and officers, almost ludicrously undermanned, a legacy of the monasteries’ distrust of the military. In Tibet, soldiers were thought of as social outcasts because they killed living things, against the Buddha’s strict prohibition. “[They] were held to be like butchers,” remembered the Dalai Lama, and, like butchers, they were called “impure bones” by other Tibetans and forbidden to marry outside their group. Centuries after conquering large swaths of Asia, Tibetan soldiers had to import their techniques and their marching songs and even their vocabulary from the British army, as there were no words in Tibetan for things such as “fix arms.” The memory of military aggression had faded so thoroughly, even the words had disappeared.
Warriors from eastern Tibet, the Khampas, put up a spirited resistance to the invasion, but the Tibetan army collapsed and resistance was quickly extinguished. During the onslaught, a frantic Tibetan official telegraphed the Kashag, the Tibetan cabinet, for instructions and was told the members could not respond because they were on a picnic. “Shit on the picnic!” (“Skyag pa’I gling kha!”), he famously wired back.
Tibet reacted to the threat from China with a kind of spiritual rearmament. Buddhist monks were ordered to read the Tibetan Bible at public ceremonies attended by throngs of praying villagers and farmers. Smoke appeared on the summits of holy mountains as monks took turns stoking fires that burned fragrant incense. New prayer wheels sprang up in remote corners of the country, holy relics were brought out from dusty vaults, and believers implored the spirits to protect the Dharma and the Tibetan people. But nothing stopped Mao’s battalions.
Mao turned his eyes to Tibet after winning his brutal war with Chiang Kai-shek’s army, the Kuomintang. “China has stood up” were the Communist leader’s famous words when he declared the People’s Republic in Tiananmen Square. The Communists had come to power as fierce nationalists, and restoring Tibet to the fold was high on their list of priorities. One of Mao’s first objectives after the takeover was the reunification of the motherland, the recovery of lands that, in the Chinese mind, had been lost to “splittists” or imperialists in the decades and centuries before. On January 7, 1950, a Communist general announced that the People’s Liberation Army had wiped out the last of the Kuomintang resistance in southwest China; he added that the army’s next mission would be to “liberate our compatriots in Tibet.”
Occupying the country offered Mao a foreign policy victory as well as a domestic one: It would move China’s border from the Yangtze River to the Himalayas, giving Peking an almost impregnable buffer against land armies sweeping across from India eastward or from Pakistan and eastern Turkistan northeastward. And it would eliminate the possibility of a free Tibet becoming a staging ground for imperialists in London, Washington, or Tokyo. “What is meant by independence here,” wrote one Chinese official from Lhasa, “is in fact to turn Tibet into a colony or protectorate of a foreign country.” Steeped in the powerful tradition of Chinese victimhood, Mao and his followers sincerely believed that Tibet belonged within the new China. Every move toward independence was regarded by the Chinese as the first crack in a dam that would result in national disintegration. Traditionally known as “the treasure house of the west,” Tibet also held vast quantities of copper, lead, gold, and zinc, along with million of acres of forests and—unknown to Mao at the time—reserves of oil, uranium, and borax. It had resources that China could use to grow.
For Mao, it was essential that the Tibetans be reunited with the homeland, along with the Mongolians, the Uighurs, and the rest of China’s far-flung minorities. “The relationship between Tibet and China would be like brothers,” he said. “The oppression of one nationality by another would be eliminated. All nationalities would work for the benefit of the Motherland.” The Communists acknowledged the deep cultural differences between the two nations—they were hard to ignore—but they insisted that the two societies had grown together over centuries. The Tibetans, on the other hand, believed that the relationship had been one of equals, and that Tibet had kept control of its own internal affairs, its cultural institutions, and its political independence.
Each side hid uncomfortable truths behind their interpretations of history: The Chinese failed to acknowledge that they’d forced a civilized Tibet to accept their protection at
the point of a spear and that their control over their neighbor often slipped into a ceremonial façade as the dynasties in Peking faltered. And when the Tibetans painted the relationship as a primarily spiritual bond, they ignored China’s military and political influence. But the Tibetans carried the deeper point: over centuries of intense contact, their nation had never willingly assimilated into Han society.
In 1950, none of that mattered. China had taken Tibet. After the invasion, Life magazine asked the question that was on the minds of Tibet-watchers everywhere: would the Dalai Lama now become “one more in the succession of Moscow-pulled puppets?”
The Dalai Lama, and the world at large, knew little about Mao in 1950. The Chinese leader was unquestionably a political genius, a supremely magnetic personality who was unmatched in his ability to get his followers to do the unthinkable for him. Mao promised the Chinese people deliverance from the chaos that had racked the nation since the breakup of the Qing dynasty in the mid-nineteenth century. Mao reversed a century of Chinese history and unified the country. And he promised to end the intrusions by foreign powers that were regarded by the average citizen as a deep and lingering humiliation.