Stephan Talty

by Escape From the Land of Snows_The Young Dalai Lama's Flight to Freedom

  The Chinese ensured that the Tibetans were implicated in their own suffering. Soepa was forced to beat his fellow Tibetans in thamzins, and he watched formerly brave resistance fighters do the same. “[They] were so full of fear and suspicion that they lost their principles,” he said. He even came across an official who, decades before, had journeyed through snowstorms and up stony paths to the far-flung province of Amdo as part of the search party for the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. When Soepa saw a prisoner in ragged clothing and with filthy knotted hair, he whispered to the official, “Look, here is a model of socialism.” The man looked at him in terror. “Shut up!” he hissed. Soepa, looking at this Tibetan luminary now “scared beyond his wits,” became despondent. The joy of the Fourteenth’s discovery all those years before now seemed almost ludicrous, with the Dalai Lama driven into exile, unable to offer them even a word of comfort.

  Soepa never told his interrogators the part he had played in the escape. But, secretly, he was proud of what he had done. “Before it, nobody knew of Tibet’s existence,” he says. “Now this unique, peaceful culture is felt in the world.”

  The total number of deaths in Tibet under Chinese rule is impossible to ascertain. The figure of 1.2 million, which has been commonly accepted by aid organizations and by the Tibetan government-in-exile, is almost certainly too high. The Tibet scholar Patrick French writes that 500,000 is probably the best available estimate. With a preinvasion population of 2.5 million in Tibet and its border areas, that translates into one death for every five Tibetans.

  • • •

  As more and more refugees poured into India in the spring of 1959, the world waited to meet the man who would lead them forward. As did Nehru. The last time they had met, the Indian prime minister had overawed the young Tibetan. But when the two leaders met after the escape, it was clear there’d been a change in the Dalai Lama. He was respectful, but firm in his demand that Tibet be free. As he made his case for Tibetan independence, Nehru grew furious, banging the table and yelling, “How can this be?” The Dalai Lama didn’t relent. “I went on in spite of the growing evidence that he could be a bit of a bully.” His Holiness set out two aims: the violence in Tibet had to stop, and Tibet had to be free. At that, Nehru exploded. “ ‘That is not possible!’ he said in a voice charged with emotion.… His lip quivered with anger as he spoke.”

  His Holiness stood fast. Nehru still regarded him—indeed, all the Tibetans—as naïve, and kept him and his ministers confined to their camp at Mussoorie, unable to even contact foreign governments. But when an American journalist remarked he “hadn’t expected much” from the Dalai Lama, Nehru told him he was wrong. The young man, he said, “was extraordinary.” He possessed “a kind of radiance.”

  Many observers initially dismissed the Dalai Lama. The man from Reader’s Digest “snorted and said belligerently” that His Holiness was “a child.” Life magazine thought he looked like a “nice boy.” No one could predict the remarkable figure he was to cut in the world, the unique spiritual influence on modern life he was to become.

  The most revealing look at the monk came when a young Indian poet got an assignment from Harper’s magazine. Arriving at the Dalai Lama’s hotel in Hyderabad months after the escape, he found “grim, black-robed elder lamas” guarding the entrance to His Holiness’s rooms. The Dalai Lama’s minders laid out the rules for the audience, in a conversation that could have taken place in 1750 or 1850: “ ‘Now, there are certain other things. Do not touch His Holiness. That is sacrilege. When the audience is terminated, do not turn your back on His Holiness. Leave the room backwards. Also, kindly do not ask His Holiness rude questions.’

  “ ‘How do you mean, rude questions?’

  “ ‘Do not ask His Holiness if he believes he is a god.’ ”

  It was the protocol of the ancient Lhasa court. The poet was ushered into His Holiness’s rooms and found a young man with nice skin and color in his cheeks. The Dalai Lama, immediately upon meeting him, began to disregard all the rules that his minders had laid out. He shook hands before the two sat on a long couch for the interview. He ignored his interpreter’s warning when certain subjects were declared off-limits. In fact, he was so effusive and warm that the horrified poet, convinced he was committing a host of sins, retreated across the couch. The Dalai Lama cheerfully followed, making his points with a gentle tap on the poet’s knee.

  The politics of the interview are almost beside the point. His Holiness laid out the Tibetan position in strong, clear language and appealed for international help in regaining his country. But it is in his gestures that we are introduced to the figure the world would come to know. At the end of the interview:

  The Dalai Lama dropped his arm round my shoulders in a friendly gesture. I remembered what I had been told about not turning my back. I accordingly began to sidle out backward, crab-fashion. The Dalai Lama watched me for a moment. Then he suddenly took a few steps forward, dropped his hands to my shoulders, and turned me around so that I faced the door. He gave me a friendly push to speed me on my way.

  I heard his laugh behind me, for the last time.

  These simple human gestures might seem small things, but for a Dalai Lama they were almost unthinkable, especially because they involved a foreigner, someone who in previous years could have been killed for simply entering Tibet. His Holiness would follow up this change in his personal style with more-profound alterations: a Tibetan constitution in 1961, a suggestion that future Dalai Lamas be religious figures only and their political power be given over to an elected representative, even the idea that the next incarnation could be a woman. He suggested that the Tibetan people could vote the Dalai Lama out of office. It was all, from the standpoint of Tibetan tradition, unimaginable. In exile, the Fourteenth modernized Tibetan culture in ways the Thirteenth could only have dreamt of.

  The Dalai Lama today would be unrecognizable to a Tibetan of 1930, or 1850. For generations of Tibetans, Chenrizi was an occult figure, hidden behind bull-shouldered monks, an object of extreme reverence. When he arrived in the West, the Fourteenth shed traditions as one steps out of a suit of clothes. He made himself as ordinary and approachable as possible. He dispelled his own mysteries. Even today, a typical way for him to open a conference is to say, as he did in 2000: “Given the significance of this event, I would like to encourage everyone, for the space of these few days, to dispense with ostentatious posing and the empty formalities of ceremony. Let us try to get to the heart of the matter.”

  That all came later. Hemmed in by Nehru, who didn’t want the Tibetan issue publicized, the Dalai Lama wouldn’t even be allowed to leave India until 1967. There were years of political intrigue and disappointment ahead. After Mao died in 1976, the new Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping offered to negotiate with the Dalai Lama on all issues except independence, but deep mistrust and political maneuvering spoiled any chance for progress. Politics continued to baffle and elude His Holiness.

  But he was on his way to becoming a larger figure in the world. And the persona that the world would come to know was all present in that gesture of taking a flummoxed poet by the shoulders and turning him around.

  Today the Dalai Lama lives in a compound atop the hills of Dharamsala, India, a mountain town dotted with the last survivors of the escape. Down the road, Yonten, who as a sixteen-year-old joined the protests in front of the summer palace, sits at a desk in the security department of the Tibetan government-in-exile. He’s now a neatly dressed man of sixty-six, handsome, compact, and quick to smile. Fifty years after the revolt, and forty years after he left a Chinese jail where he’d been held for a decade, 1959 is still as alive to him as the afternoon heat. When he talks of his father, who died in an obscure Chinese labor camp, his head drops suddenly into his hands, and he weeps unreservedly.

  One Sera monk who became a gunrunner during the uprising spends his days in a low-roofed hut at the bottom of a hill in Dharamsala, reading scriptures. An old woman shambles into the room and begins to make tea. �
�Nowadays, when I recall that time, I realize that the Chinese unified Tibet,” the old monk says. “They brought us awake.”

  The Dalai Lama passes by the survivors every so often on his way out into the world, his golden palanquin now replaced by a brown Toyota. Crowds of believers, as well as monks, dreadlocked blond backpackers, and the Kashmiri traders, all wait by the side of the dusty road that will bring him to the airport, there to jet to Copenhagen, or Santa Barbara, or Sydney. The world is quite literally his home now, and he travels it in a never-ending service to the Dharma. As he passes in the Toyota, he smiles, that sudden, beautifully spontaneous smile, and waves. He is, by all appearances, a very happy man indeed. The backpackers, seeking an appropriate gesture of reverence at the last moment, bow their heads awkwardly.

  But it’s in person that one discovers why this monk has become such a significant figure in modern life. Grasping your hand, he seems completely entranced by you for the moment, interested beyond all reason in questions he’s probably heard a hundred times. The Dalai Lama has a charm that leads deeper. But he isn’t without flaws. The old childhood anger still flares occasionally. One Tibetan remembers His Holiness becoming absolutely furious when he met a group of former monks who’d abandoned their vows in exile. “He said that the Chinese were forcing monks to remove the robe in Tibet,” the man says, “but here in India nobody was forcing us to take them off.” The Dalai Lama chastised the men “very strongly.”

  His Holiness is nothing if not honest about how the escape was fortunate for him personally. “There is a Tibetan saying,” he offers. “Wherever you find happiness, that is your home. Whoever shows kindness to you, they are your parents. So, as for me, I’m a homeless person who found a happy home.” He knows he’d be a different man if he’d stayed in Tibet and suffered through the terrors of the Cultural Revolution, as the Panchen Lama was forced to. After accepting the nominal leadership of Tibet after His Holiness’s escape, the Panchen Lama toured the country’s border areas and sent a blistering letter to Mao in 1962 detailing the abuses committed by the Chinese in Tibet: the willful destruction of monasteries, the starving of rural people (“whole families dying out”), and even the “elimination of Buddhism” itself. The Tibetans have sometimes been prone to exaggerating Chinese atrocities; for a people raised on myths and legends, hard numbers and objective reporting sometimes give way to allegory. But these were things the Panchen Lama had seen and heard for himself. The letter was a suicidally brave gesture, and it earned the Panchen nothing but anguish. His missive was deemed “The Seventy-Thousand-Character Document of Reactionaries,” and the Tibetan leader was thamzined—beaten and humiliated in front of throngs of cheering Red Guards—and placed under detention for fifteen years. It was a fulfillment, in a way, of the rumor that had swept through the streets of Lhasa in March 1959. The Tibetans had seen what awaited His Holiness if he’d stayed in Tibet. The Panchen Lama’s life proved their premonition right.

  The Dalai Lama still has nightmares about his escape. They are mixed in with more pleasant dreams. “A few days ago I had a dream about my return to Lhasa, wandering about …,” he said in 2003. When asked what the happiest moment in his life has been, he recalls the second day out of Lhasa, when flying down the far slope of Che-La and knowing he was free from the Chinese. And the saddest? Saying good-bye to his Khampa guards at the Indian border as they turned back into Tibet.

  The escape changed him. “The refugee status brings a lot of positive opportunities,” the Dalai Lama says. “Meeting with various different people from different levels of life. I really feel if I remained in the Potala, on the throne, the Dalai Lama would be a more holy person. But he would have less chance for talk, less experience. I really feel personally being outside has been a good opportunity.”

  Becoming famous—and famous as himself, not as an anti-Communist icon or Westernized guru—has been his only real weapon against the Chinese occupation. He is a movable Tibet. He is proof against Chinese fictions.

  In leaving Tibet, the Dalai Lama gained an unprecedented personal liberty. From that moment on, freedom—not a traditional Buddhist subject of contemplation—became a subject he returned to again and again. And his words were given weight by the people he’d left behind. “Brute force … can never subdue the basic human desire for freedom,” he would write years later. “It is not enough, as communist systems assumed, to provide people with food, shelter and clothing. If we have those things but lack the precious air of liberty to sustain our deeper nature, we remain only half human.”

  The escape also forced the Dalai Lama to think beyond Buddhism. “His exile was huge in his life,” says Paul Jeffrey Hopkins, a Tibet scholar and former interpreter for His Holiness. “Without it, it would be very difficult for him to develop a message that is applicable to the entire world. Instead of becoming someone who’s trying to drive Buddhism forward, he’s attempting to call to everybody in society and thus address their need for kindness and compassion. There would be no way for that to develop had he remained in Tibet.”

  He has not escaped the bitter truths of his faith. Every refugee arriving in Dharamsala is granted an interview with His Holiness; it’s a policy unchanged since 1959. This means His Holiness has consoled thousands of men and women, bewildered, wounded people with stories of persecution and loss. One story from thousands: The father of Norbu Dhondup, who had castrated himself after being humiliated in a thamzin, spent twenty years in a Chinese prison before being released and allowed to travel to Lhasa. Norbu, at sixty-five, with little money and no connections, made the trip from India to see him. When he walked into the old folks’ home in Lhasa where his father was staying, the two didn’t recognize each other. “It had been so many years,” Norbu says. “He hugged me and I cried.” Norbu’s father got down to practical matters, asking him, “How do you live in India? What type of house do you have? Do you have cows?” The older man’s mind had clearly been affected by the decades in a Chinese prison, so that he seemed to have erased, or was unable to recall, the years spent there. And Norbu couldn’t find the words to ask him.

  Father and son left by bus for Nepal, where the crossing out of Tibet was easiest, to a place called Dam, near the border. The roads ahead were bad and there were no vehicles that would risk them, so Norbu was forced to carry his elderly father on his back. From Nepal they took a bus to India. Norbu’s father had one wish he wanted fulfilled before he died: to see His Holiness. Faith in the Dalai Lama had sustained him in the long years in prison. Finally, after weeks of trying, a meeting was arranged. Norbu stayed outside while his father went to speak to the Dalai Lama. “When he came out,” he remembers, “he was crying so much that he was speechless.”

  The meetings are private, but they give weight to everything His Holiness does. His encounters with suffering and death animate the Dalai Lama’s message to the world: compassion is, finally, strength. “When, at some point in our lives, we meet a real tragedy,” he said, “which can happen to any one of us, we can react in two ways. Obviously, we can lose hope, let ourselves slip into discouragement, into alcohol, drugs, unending sadness. Or else we can wake ourselves up, discover in ourselves an energy that was hidden there, and act with more clarity, more force.”

  Buddhists believe the Dalai Lama perfected his gift for compassion in the course of many incarnations. Unbelievers may question that. But he has, at least in this lifetime, exemplified the virtue.

  Epilogue

  BONFIRES

  he first thing I noticed were the shotguns. Slim, blunt-nosed shotguns, being carried by patrols of PLA troops as they swaggered through the streets of Lhasa. The guns looked like deadly black eels nestled on the shoulders of the young soldiers. The weapons seemed out of place among the picturesque alleys full of traders and Buddhist pilgrims.

  It was February 2009. I was in Tibet fifty years after the Dalai Lama had escaped over the Kyichu, a clear cold stream filled with snowmelt that comes up to one’s knees. The city itself had changed a g
reat deal. The landmarks of the events of 1959 were still there: the Norbulingka, now open to tourists for a small admission fee; the Jokhang; the cobblestoned streets of the old city where Tibetan rebels had fallen. But over them had been laid a twenty-first-century metropolis, a Chinese city that now dominates the centuries-old Tibetan one. And, as the anniversary of the uprising approached, the city was under something approaching martial law.

  But why shotguns?

  In the big public squares, where the distances are greater and the firing angles more open, the PLA troops carried automatic rifles, which were almost comforting to see. In the post-9/11 world, they are everywhere: carried by American soldiers in Penn Station and British marines at Heathrow. These days, an automatic rifle in a public place isn’t so much an actual gun as it is a prop in a ritual. The world’s ugliest and most-capable-looking guns are paraded through city squares, so that people might feel safe. Lhasa was no different.

  But what message were the Chinese sending with the shotguns, which are far less menacing, less recognizable tools to intimidate terrorists than UZIs or M16s? It took me a couple of days to realize that I was being too abstract. This was not theater. Shotguns were the best weapon for shooting Tibetans in the narrow alleys of the old city should another uprising be touched off fifty years after the last one. That was the message.

  I’d spent weeks arranging the trip, while the Chinese issued a blizzard of restrictions as the anniversary drew closer. No journalists were allowed in. Two reporters were kicked out weeks before I’d arrived. (I’d listed myself as “Salesman” on my Chinese visa to avoid the same fate.) No individual travel—all visitors had to be part of a tour. No travel to the western provinces of Tibet.