Stephan Talty
Page 9
Late in the day, the Dalai Lama received a letter from Tan Guansan. “Since you have been put into very great difficulties due to the intrigues and provocations of the reactionaries,” he wrote, “it may be advisable that you do not come for the time being.” It was clearly an attempt to save face: the decision not to attend the show had been made by the Dalai Lama hours earlier, but with the letter Tan Guansan could claim credit for it.
The Dalai Lama’s reply indicates the enormous pressure he was under. He apologized for not attending, saying he was prevented by “reactionary elements.” “This has put me to indescribable shame,” he wrote. “I am greatly upset and worried and at a loss as to what to do.” There was a long tradition of Tibetan leaders writing insincere letters to their Chinese counterparts in order to get their own way; it was seen as a necessary diplomatic device. The Dalai Lama would later dismiss the letter (and two others to follow) as a delaying tactic, but his tone is striking. The protests had clearly caught him off-balance.
Yonten arrived home. His father, whom he deeply loved, was a teacher who ran his own school for the sons of all classes, from farmers to nobles. He was also a longtime Tibetan nationalist who’d fought against the Chinese occupation. He had been chosen as one of the People’s Representatives and was at that moment at one of the tumultuous meetings being held at the Norbulingka. Yonten, bursting with the news of what he’d done and said that day, told his sister, the one who’d run out with wet hair that morning, that he’d signed up as part of the volunteer guard for the Norbulingka. He ordered her to pack a bag with barley and flour so he’d have something to eat. His sister just laughed at Yonten; he was an excitable boy who wasn’t going anywhere near the summer palace. She told him to wait for their father to get home before he started collecting provisions.
When his father arrived, Yonten begged him for permission to guard the Dalai Lama. His father just smiled. “You’re too young,” he said. “If war breaks out, what are you going to do?”
Yonten felt that the words he’d chanted all day long—“We shall fight to the last man, even if only women are left to defend the country!”—applied directly to him. He pleaded to be allowed to stand between the PLA and the Dalai Lama.
Finally, moved by his son’s persistence or just exhausted, his father relented. He would let the boy come with him to the meetings of the People’s Representatives. “At last he understood me,” Yonten remembers. “And he said I could follow him. It was Buddha’s way.”
As night fell, a group of young monks left their vigil outside the Norbulingka and returned to Drepung Monastery. The choe-ra, the common area shaded by willows where the lamas would teach the novices, was empty. The entire monastery seemed deserted. Still disturbed by what they had seen in the city, the young monks climbed to the monastery roof and sat there under the moonlight, looking at Lhasa in the distance. As they watched, the sound of a drummer beating a dirge-like rhythm over and over pulsed out from the monastery’s Temple of Wrathful Deities. There, in an airless, black-painted room, smelling strongly of rancid butter, with gaping-mouthed demons and monsters painted on the walls, surrounded by costumes made of bones, monks were chanting out prayers for the safety of Tibet. It was a place of horrors designed to protect against horrors, and its drum beat through the night.
None of the young men could sleep.
Over the next few days, the tension rose almost by the hour.
Swarms of women banging pots and kettles and shouting slogans emerged from the narrow alleys of Lhasa and surged toward the Potala Palace. There were young girls, grandmothers, aristocrats, servants, women who found themselves side by side for the first time in their lives. Many of them taunted the Chinese soldiers, newly installed on the rooftops along Barkhor Square, crying, “Go ahead and shoot us!”
Monks at the three great monasteries ringing the city awoke to find their sleepy bastions militarized. Each of the Great Three had a “master of discipline” who meted out punishments for infractions. Now as the monks gathered in the choe-ra, these men called out for volunteers to guard the Norbulingka and protect the Dalai Lama. At Sera, three miles north of the Jokhang Temple in central Lhasa, a young monk awoke to the sound of Chinese voices. “The loudspeakers were saying they would kill the three red bugs if we didn’t obey them,” he recalled. The “three red bugs” was a local colloquialism for the three chief monasteries of Tibet—the Chinese had begun using native slang in their warnings.
The 500 monks at Sera rushed to a meeting, and each house within the monastery was asked to produce 10 volunteers. The young monk stood up. “I was a tough guy,” he says. “Only twenty-five years old.” He was handed an old British rifle, a World War I relic, serviceable but hardly a match for the Chinese machine guns. The monks were told there was one gun for every two men, and only a hundred bullets for the entire house. At another monastery, Ganden, one of the faithful listened to his abbot speak. “He pleaded with those who were deeply engrossed in their studies not to go, as it was also essential to protect the Dharma.” But those who felt their vocation less intensely could abandon their vows. The abbot made it clear that once a monk volunteered for the resistance, the punishment for backing out was death.
Some of the volunteers formally renounced their vows in an odd ceremony, exchanging their maroon-and-gold robes for a gun, or a sword, or just a pledge to protect His Holiness. The monks now entered a kind of spiritual netherworld. Violence against even an insect was forbidden in Tibetan Buddhism; to kill a man was to cast oneself into the realm of demons. “My spiritual comrades and I felt very uncomfortable about choosing the path of violence,” remembers one Ganden monk. He was a novice, and he offered back his vows to his mentor, “thinking this would make my sin lesser.” But he couldn’t deny that he was driven by what Buddhism regarded as repugnant desires. “I was a human being and I felt these negative emotions intensely—I kept thinking about revenging myself over and over again on the Chinese for their brutal killings.”
The Lord Chamberlain was leaving nothing to chance. He issued a command banning the use of electric flashlights, all the rage in Lhasa, which lacked streetlights. The Lord Chamberlain was worried that if His Holiness was forced to escape, a soldier or citizen might flash a torch into the face of a soldier and find it to be the Dalai Lama in disguise. He also sent a messenger galloping to the southeast, to inform Athar and Lhotse—the only connections to the CIA and the Americans—about recent developments and asking them to set off immediately toward Lhasa. “Immediately” in the rugged country of southern Tibet was relative, however—it would take six days for the message to reach the two CIA operatives.
On March 16, Athar was at Lhuntse Dzong, a huge stone fort in the south of Tibet, sixty miles north of the Indian border, that was commanded by the rebels. Having failed to meet with the Dalai Lama, Athar and Lhotse were focused on building up the rebels. On February 22, they’d watched a second load of CIA-bought arms parachuting onto their landing zone, guided by another dung bonfire, and they’d helped hide the munitions in a secret cache for future operations. The pair were in constant contact with the CIA, but they had essentially given up on the Dalai Lama and his government, having had no contact with Lhasa for a year.
Every day, Athar would laboriously encrypt that day’s information, using his one-time pad and employing the five digits common to the Chinese commercial telegraph system. At the time designated in his signal book, Athar would then crank up the generator of the RS-1 crystal radio and send the report in Morse code. The transmission would be picked up by the CIA’s station at Okinawa, then relayed from station to station all the way to Washington. If it was intercepted, it would appear to be a harmless order for batches of silk or truck parts.
Athar was in far more danger than he realized. A year earlier, just after his first meeting with the Lord Chamberlain, Tan Guansan had met with the Tibetan cabinet and vented his rage on them. He revealed that the Chinese knew of radio messages being broadcast from a small mountaintop near Lhas
a. By decoding the messages—something the CIA didn’t believe they were capable of—the Chinese had discovered that the Tibetans had gone to the Americans for help. It was a revelation that played into Peking’s deep paranoia about foreign interlopers in Tibet. With this discovery of American aid, Tibet had become far more than a troublesome borderland issue for the Peking leadership. It was now a matter of national security. The PLA had even caught one of the CIA-trained Khampa guerrillas and—it was assumed, though nobody knew for sure—forced him to reveal the details of the entire operation.
Back at the Norbulingka, on March 16 the Dalai Lama again went for a walk as the sun set. He marveled at how normal and serene the Jewel Park was. There were his bodyguards, out of uniform, bent over his flower beds, carefully watering the budding plants from a long-nosed can. His beloved peacocks strutted across the manicured lawns. Brahmini ducks floated on the pond, their kicks under the surface sending a slight ripple across the smooth green-black water.
It was, as Buddha taught him, illusion, all illusion. “I must admit,” said the Dalai Lama, “I was very near despair.”
Six
FOREIGN BROTHERS
houghts of the outside world flitted through the Dalai Lama’s mind as the crisis escalated. He understood that Tibet had no reliable friends in the world. He and the cabinet had sought foreign allies as a counterweight to China’s massive power, but they’d been bitterly disappointed by the response. His Holiness knew that messages had been sent in secret to Tibetan mutual-aid societies in India and elsewhere, telling them of the uprising and asking them to rally support outside Tibet. And protesters in Lhasa would soon arrive in front of the missions of India and Nepal, the only two in Lhasa, pleading for those nations to back their cause.
Many Tibetans held out hope that America, a beacon of freedom even in this hermit kingdom, would somehow come to their rescue. But the Dalai Lama knew that Washington was thousands of miles away and already fighting its own war in Indochina. Having dealt with a cautious State Department in the past, he didn’t believe America would send its sons to die in the Himalayas. But his knowledge of the world was fragmentary at best. “I had an atlas, and I pored over maps of distant countries,” he said later, “and wondered what life was like in them, but I did not know anyone who had ever seen them.”
As Tibetans dreamt of an improbable victory, the world on March 10 knew nothing of what was happening in Lhasa. Tibet in 1959 was a rumor of a nation, a shadow on the world’s collective memory. Off-limits to foreigners for decades, it was the object of a romantic longing that had only intensified during the gray, dreary confrontations of the Cold War. Tibet was removed not only in space, hidden behind the almost inaccessible peaks of the Himalayas, but in time. Prior to the Chinese arrival, there were only three cars in the country, two Austins and a Dodge, all owned by the Dalai Lama (one had been taken apart and carried over the Himalayas on mules before arriving in Lhasa fully assembled). There were no modern hospitals, no railroads, no cinema, no newspapers. After China invaded in 1950, it brought hydroelectric plants, new roads, and a local newspaper that was published every ten days. But the Chinese occupation had also made information on Tibet even harder to come by. Foreign journalists were banned: no footage of the occupation was allowed out, no photos of the uprising spun on the drums of the Associated Press, no radio networks broadcast the latest news to the capitals of the world. The country was practically invisible to all but a handful of chi-ling, or foreigners of European descent.
What was known, or imagined about Tibet was alluring. It was “a place of dizzy extremes and excesses,” according to the Italian explorer Fosco Maraini. Herodotus had believed monstrous ants burrowed up mounds of gold in its hills, perhaps referring to the Tibetan villagers who collected the earth dug up by the native marmot and extracted gold dust from it. Here mastiffs “as huge as donkeys” could bite off your head in a single gulp, according to Marco Polo, and any Tibetan official who let a foreigner enter was arrested, jailed, tortured, and then tossed into the Tsangpo River. (That last part, in fact, was true.)
The first Western explorer to reach Tibet was probably a Jesuit priest, the Portuguese António de Andrade, who reported on his travels in The New Discoveries of the Great Cathay or of the Tibetan Kingdom in 1626. Andrade was convinced Tibet had once been connected to the ancient Christian civilizations, a common belief in Europe at the time. One expert called this the “foreign brother” syndrome, a belief among Tibet-lovers that the nation possessed a culture sympathetic to Europe’s own, exiled among brutes and apostates. This distant and mysterious country was believed to retain values and customs cherished by Westerners. A hundred years later, another Jesuit missionary visited Lhasa and found beautiful architecture and an often bizarre justice system. One method of determining whether a suspect was innocent involved “making an iron red hot and commanding him to lick it thrice.” If he burned his tongue, the man was guilty; if not, he was set free.
Not all the world thought of Tibet as a sanctuary. Princess Kula of the Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim described a nation consumed by “greed, magic spells, passion, revenge, crimes, love, envy and torture.” But the overall tone was one of admiration. The massive 1763 Alphabetum Tibetanum declared that “according to the theories of many historians, the human race expanded from Tibet and its neighboring lands.” There was nothing Tibet was not capable of, including becoming the birthplace of Homo sapiens.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, a Tibet craze struck Europe. Sherlock Holmes, after being killed by Professor Moriarty, returned in 1903’s “The Adventure of the Empty House” and told Watson he’d escaped to Florence and then Tibet, where he’d wandered through Lhasa and enjoyed “spending some days with the head lama.” But the greatest popularizer of Tibet was the English writer James Hilton, whose bestselling 1933 novel Lost Horizon tells the story of three Brits and an American who crash-land in the Valley of the Blue Moon, also known as Shangri-La, where the people live long, blissful lives without a hint of cruelty. It was turned into a popular Frank Capra movie in 1937 and became perhaps the most influential vision of Tibet as a haven of peace and sublimity. FDR, who wrote ditties about Tibet and its politics (“I never saw a Kashag, I never want to see one …”), even named his presidential retreat Shangri-La before it became the more sober “Camp David.”
One of the best-known authorities on Tibet in the mid-1950s was T (for “Tuesday”) Lobsang Rampa, a Tibetan lama living in London who’d written a book called The Third Eye, a memoir of life on the Roof of the World that included descriptions of crystal gazing, mummifications of Lobsang’s previous selves, and yetis, or Abominable Snowmen, flying across the Himalayas on the backs of large box kites. The title referred to an operation the lama had had performed to open up the mystical aperture that would allow him to see the “psychical emanations” of people he met. T Lobsang Rampa described the operation:
The instrument penetrated the bone. A very hard, clean sliver of wood had been treated by fire and herbs and was slid down so that it just entered the hole in my head. I felt a stinging, tickling sensation apparently in the bridge of my nose. It subsided and I became aware of subtle scents which I could not identify. Suddenly there was a blinding flash. For a moment the pain was intense. It diminished, died and was replaced by spirals of colour. As the projecting sliver was being bound into place so that it could not move, the Lama Mingyar Dondup turned to me and said: “You are now one of us, Lobsang. For the rest of your life you will see people as they are and not as they pretend to be.”
The book became a worldwide bestseller, selling 300,000 copies in its first few years, but Tibetophiles—including the author Heinrich Harrer—smelled a rat. Harrer hired a Liverpool detective to look into the lama’s background, and the private eye discovered that T Lobsang was actually Cyril Henry Hoskin, a large-nosed former plumber’s assistant from Devonshire who had shaved his head, bought a monk’s robe, and changed his name. Hoskin, cornered in Ireland, defiantly said tha
t he’d formerly been a man named Cyril Henry Hoskin but that he’d been possessed by the spirit of Lobsang when he’d fallen down and hit his head while photographing a rare owl in Surrey.
Hoskin was a fraud, but he was a very evocative one. Far from being a gimmick, The Third Eye presented a compelling, fully imagined world—the Times Literary Supplement said the book “came close to being a work of art”—that captivated readers so consistently that it remained in print and highly popular even after the author was exposed. Unfortunately, this was a fully imagined world, a place that Lobsang/Hoskin and many thousands of others had dreamt into existence out of disgust and boredom with modern life.
In short, the world in 1959 knew almost nothing about Tibet.
Despite the trash about Tibet that was readily accepted in the West, there were a few interested parties, pinpricks of light dappled around the globe who represented a desire to know the country as it truly was. As the Dalai Lama considered leaving Lhasa, these isolated individuals and groups would prove vital.
In Kalimpong, a spy-infested town on the border between India and Tibet, the journalist George Patterson was stirring up a hornet’s nest. The lanky Patterson was a Scot by birth, a doctor by training, and an evangelical Christian by the grace of almighty God. The fervently religious expat had been seeking a personal relationship with his Savior for most of his life. “I wanted to be like Moses and Joshua,” he said. In 1943, at the age of twenty-three, he’d been reading a book on mountaineering when he heard a voice say, “Go to Tibet.” This was the first time his Savior had spoken to him, in a tone so clear it was “like a knock on the door.” He’d gone to Tibet, treated the sick, and become a convert to the cause of Tibetan nationalism. “I wanted a cause for which I might die,” he wrote. “It was in this cause that I went to Tibet.”