Sun After Dark

by Pico Iyer

By the time I returned to Tibet in 1990, all the lights were out. Martial law had been declared after Tibetan monks (spurred, perhaps, by the foreigners who gave them now a voice, a contact with the world) began crying out for independence and human rights; soldiers patrolled the rooftops of the low buildings around the Jokhang Temple, the holiest site in Tibet, and tanks were parked nearby. Tibetans were not even allowed to visit the Potala that is the center of their culture, and every morning they stood plaintively at its gates, watching the few tourists who were in evidence led around the magnificent symbol backwards. Even those of us who were admitted were led through a largely shuttered place, scarcely lit, its doors closed, where often the electricity went out altogether and we were left in an absolute darkness.

  Now, coming back to Tibet, I found the passage across the ropebridge shakier than ever: the place was neither festival nor blackout. On the one hand, the temples were filled with Tibetans, eager to throw themselves in front of the sacred statues and crawl under dusty scriptures in the hopes that wisdom, or at least grace, would be passed down to them; on the other, the pictures of the Dalai Lama that once flooded the altars were replaced by those of the small boy Beijing has chosen as the Eleventh Panchen Lama (the Tibetan choice still under house arrest, as he has been for seven of his thirteen years). The Tibetans I met seemed much less put out than were foreigners by the gleaming new buildings full of boom boxes and signs for Giordano and Jeans West, but one day, as I sat in the middle of an ultramodern street, taking its wonders in, two friendly Tibetan matrons came over and looked at the real source of wonder in the area: the pen with which I was transcribing the scene. The little guest house where once I shared a single coldwater tap in a courtyard and a foul-smelling hole in the ground with thirty or forty others now offers a sleek rooftop restaurant where you can eat Japanese and Mexican food and where Jim Morrison sang (the night I visited), “This is the end, my only friend, the end . . .”

  A foreigner, flying into Lhasa on one of the six China South-west planes that go back and forth every day from Chengdu in the summer (“California Dreaming” streaming through the cabin, and video monitors screening an antic Hong Kong gangster movie for the mostly Chinese passengers), may try not to notice the PETRO CHINA sign that greets him on arrival; the air-control tower that says, pointedly, THE LHASA AIRPORT OF CHINA; the teams of tour groups from Beijing piling out in zippy “Discover Tibet” baseball caps. And yet as I walked around the Potala, a young Tibetan came up to me and said quietly, “For view, beautiful”—I was looking out of one of the small windows to the city below—“but what for human rights?” As I wandered around the central market—rows of monks everywhere, rocking back and forth on the ground over their chants—the monks extended their hands, and when I declined to give them anything, sneered in a highly unmonastic way. Sitting by the reflecting pond that the Chinese had built outside the Potala, I found two little girls, no older than six or seven, clambering over my lap, running hands over my face, cooing, “Give me money. Give money.”

  In many of the chapels in Tibet now, it costs $20 just to use a camera, and in some of them $250 to turn on a video camera; the scatter of old buildings that had made up most of Lhasa when first I visited was now called “Old Town,” as if it were an artificially reconstructed area in a yuppie suburb. I thought sometimes, in the evenings, of the place that had so moved me when I had first come, put me on the rooftop of my being, as it felt, and opened a kind of window so a high clear light came through; I’d never been to a town that took me so far from everything I knew. Then I thought of the Dalai Lama, asked not long ago by a colleague of mine how he regarded the discos at the foot of the Potala. “No problem,” he said, “no problem,” implying that such surface changes were not important, provided that something more fundamental, in his people’s souls and stomachs, was respected.

  Because of its location, behind the highest mountains on earth and two miles above sea level, and because, too, of the isolation in which it has been left, seeming to pursue not material development, as you could say, but immaterial, Tibet has always attracted visitors of a certain kind, and they, like every kind of visitor, have usually found, or claimed to find, exactly what they were seeking. Monks who run two hundred miles at a stretch, in a trance; others who can raise their body temperatures just through the intensity of their meditation. Monks who can levitate—seem to fly—and others who have perfected the psychic skills that have left Madame Blavatsky, Gurdjieff, Paul Brunton, and a host of notorious others transfixed. It all sounds highly implausible until you think of how a Tibetan villager might respond to the news that Americans have walked on the moon, that people can speak to one another across the globe on little wireless instruments they carry in their pockets, or that the Chinese god “Wang Dao” (or Michael Jordan, as we call him) can be seen flying over a basket ten feet above the ground.

  I picked up a copy of Magic and Mystery in Tibet while I was staying in Lhasa—the young Chinese student sitting across from me in the sunlit courtyard of the Yak Hotel (black T-shirt and long ponytail) was deep in a copy of Lost Horizon himself—and tried to orient myself to Alexandra David-Neel, who greets the man who sets out her itinerary for her, in the book’s opening paragraphs, as “a genie come down from the neighboring mountains.” Like many a Himalayan adventurer, perhaps, she seemed to have few qualms about offering her wisdom to the Thirteenth Dalai Lama (“the Omniscient,” as she calls him), or about exclaiming, at one point, “Oh, to talk with this magician who shot avenging cakes through space!” It wasn’t entirely surprising (or reassuring) to find that the author was depicted in a frontispiece wearing a rosary of “108 circlets cut out of 108 different human skulls” and wearing at her waist a “magic dagger” and a “kongling trumpet made of a human femur.”

  The introduction to the Frenchwoman’s accounts of her early-twentieth-century sojourns in the Himalaya, by a member of the Académie Française, called the excited wanderer a “complete Asiatic” while noting that she “remains a Westerner, a disciple of Descartes,” committed, in her way, to what others have called the empirical study of another world. Yet reading her stories of men who must “practise the uttering of hik!” to free the spirits of the dead, or the delogs who have “returned from the beyond” in Tibet—seeing that her eagerness to be transformed ran ahead, perhaps, of her intelligence (“It was difficult to begin a conversation with the ascetic, as his mouth appeared to be full of rice”)—I couldn’t help but recall T. Lobsang Rampa, the enigmatic author of The Third Eye and other books of Tibetan magic, who turned out to be an unemployed English plumber who’d seen the virtue of branding himself as a Tibetan. “I don’t like this place,” the token scientist says in the movie Lost Horizon, as his companions start settling down amidst the five-star comforts of Shangri-La. “It’s too mysterious.”

  I remembered, too, as I read of the Frenchwoman’s fascination with occult or magical practices, the Dalai Lama, asked if he could remember previous lives, shrugging and all but saying, “Perhaps, but what’s the point?” It would be a kind of stunt, he suggested, that would have nothing to do with leading a better or more attentive life. David-Neel’s dressing up as a Tibetan seemed most apt insofar as she referred to “the habitual Tibetan mixture of superstition, cunning, comedy and disconcerting events.”

  And yet, driving in from the airport a few days earlier, past great statues of the Buddha carved into rocks (and obscured now by tour buses, flying cameras, and children hanging on to visitors’ shirts, crying out, “Give me money! Give me pen!”), I’d seen the friend I brought to Tibet suddenly lose all color in her face. “I dreamed all this,” she said quietly, as if not wanting to be heard, “a month ago.” Later—though never given to such presentiments elsewhere—she was convinced she saw the face of her long-lost brother in a statue in the hidden monastery, and in Shigatse, an image of Avalokitesvara seemed to smile at her. When she flew away from Tibet, having suffered through days of diarrhoea and headaches from the altitude, and having be
en unable to move often, from mysterious ailments, she said that she felt cleansed somehow, able at last to embark upon a new chapter in her life.

  Sitting in California, in the comfort of the sun, I’d put the conundrum of Tibet into a neat diagram on my desk. On the one hand, there was a culture (China) that had consecrated itself entirely to progress and to profit, and had decided, following the god of consumerism, that whatever was new was good and whatever was clean was right. On the other, there was a culture that asked how much going forwards was actually a matter of sitting still and to what extent progress meant, in fact, a passage backwards, into the ancient and the deep. It was the same dialogue that one hears in many a household (or many a heart), the old folks saying, “Things will never be as good as they were when we were young,” while the grandchildren say, “Things will never be better than they are tomorrow.” One group pulling you to one side of the swaying bridge, one group to the other.

  As soon as I began walking around Tibet, of course, such simplicities dissolved: the two worlds are woven around one another so tightly that you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. At some level, the two worlds live parallel identities in the same space: Tibetans, for example, walk around all the holy places clockwise, while the Chinese, out of defiance or just ignorance, walk around them sometimes in the opposite direction, as if to reverse the spell. Tourists (who are mostly from China these days) ascend the Potala from the back, and then walk down through its rooms backwards, from top to bottom; Tibetans ascend along the front of its sheer white face, following the zigzagging patterns of what they call “the pilgrim’s path,” and going from room 1 to room 2 to room 3. Besides, Tibetans visit the building in the afternoon, while tourists go in the morning. The “People’s Park” that the Chinese celebrate around the Dalai Lama’s Summer Palace is still for Tibetans the Norbulingka, or “Jewel Park.”

  And yet things are rarely kept so conveniently apart. Many of the sweetest people I met, in Shigatse and Lhasa and elsewhere, were, in fact, the Chinese settlers—shopkeepers and taxi drivers from Sichuan province who had come here to make the new lives they could not find at home. (When I’d visited before, I’d felt saddened and outraged at what the monks and other protectors of Tibet had to endure for their belief in freedom of religion and speech; but it had been hard, too, not to feel sorry for the Chinese soldiers, often, teenage boys, clearly lost and far from home, put out by the altitude, thousands of miles away from the government that was inflicting on them this duty, and surrounded by people famous for their powers of resistance.) In some sense, too, part of the Chinese policy is to blur the distinctions between the cultures through intermarriage, and to flood the area with so many Han that you can no longer talk of a separate Tibet. Besides, the power of the land has never been unequivocal: the writer of the major guidebook to the area, I heard, on coming back from Lhasa, had been found by local nomads in a cave, gibbering like a madman, and had to be shipped home.

  For foreigners, inevitably, much of the magic of Tibet lies in the fact the place is so undeveloped. Around the Barkhor, the traditional pilgrim’s circuit that also comprises Lhasa’s central, age-old marketplace, you see figures from the farthest reaches of human experience. Pilgrims whose faces and clothes are encrusted with black, and who have walked two thousand miles or more to visit the holy city, sometimes prostrating themselves every step of the way. Wild men from Kham, tassels of red strung around their hair, and others who stride around with ceremonial daggers. People sticking their tongue out at one another for hello in the ancient Tibetan way, and, inside the Jokhang Temple, in the dark, lit up by butter-lamps that throw a strange light into their faces, countrywomen singing folk songs as they prostrate themselves before an auspicious statue. All day and into the night much of Lhasa is a constant murmur of sacred chants and shuffle of prostrations, as locals fall to the ground again and again, stretching themselves out in honor of a culture that is fast dying and a leader who is long gone.

  I mentioned once to the Dalai Lama how moved I had been by the fervor and the absolute devotion I had seen in Tibet, more intense than any I had seen in any culture of the world. He looked surprised. “That’s just blind faith,” he said, as if wary of giving too much credit to what does not stand up to science or to reason. I told him another time how moved I had been by the Tibetan spirit, and he said, “What good is spirit if there’s no Tibet?”

  We live, the psychologists (and our intuitions) tell us, in two domains at once, and if we move too much to the side of either one, we run the risk of falling over the ropebridge and getting picked up and carried away by the rapids down below. Those who travel out of modern secular societies, as the great explorer of religions Huston Smith points out, are often going in search of ancient cultures that are, as often, looking back at them. The result is that both parties find something other than what they think they’re looking for, the nomad in his yak-hair tent against the mountains stumbling upon an Itagelato restaurant on Beijing Dong Lu (as it’s now called) in Lhasa, the visitor so opened up that the smallest thing can set him off.

  The one time, before Mao, that a sizable group of Westerners came into Tibet all at once was at the end of 1903, when Colonel Francis Younghusband led one thousand British soldiers (and more than ten thousand coolies) to Lhasa, to see if they could form an alliance of sorts with the Tibetans. In “Great Game” terms, Tibet, an area as large as Western Europe, had always been strategically charged, with its openings onto Russia and China and India. No one was very taken aback when Britain’s viceroy in India, Lord Curzon, decided to send an expeditionary force to Tibet, partly on the flimsy grounds that Tibetans had been attacking Nepali yaks across the border.

  As Younghusband’s troops moved towards the capital, they succeeded in slaughtering 628 Tibetans in less than four minutes near a village called Guru, many of the bewildered locals shot from behind as they walked in consternation away from the battlefield, protected only by charms decorated with the Dalai Lama’s seal. Later, at another site near “Red Idol Gorge” (as the British rendered it), almost 200 more Tibetans were killed, while British casualties amounted to three wounded. At every point the invading troops, as they seemed, fired on the locals with machine guns, and the Tibetans retaliated with slingshots or flung rocks. Though the British gamely carried wounded Tibetans to a military field hospital, the overall impression, in John Buchan’s words, was of a “big boy at school” pushing back an “impertinent youngster.”

  When the British arrived at last in Lhasa (the Thirteenth Dalai Lama having fled), they marched through its streets with their Gurkha band, and crowds of Tibetans clapped. Younghusband congratulated himself on his reception, not knowing that clapping is how Tibetans try to expel evil spirits. And after concluding a typically inconclusive treaty with Tibet’s regent— the Barkhor by now had been dubbed “Piccadilly Circus,” the Potala, “Windsor Castle”—Younghusband, on his final night in Lhasa, took a ride into the mountains. Suddenly, he was overcome by an overwhelming mystical vision of peace. “Never again could I think evil or be at enmity with any man,” announced the bluff British soldier. “All nature and all humanity were bathed in a rosy glowing radiancy.” Before long, back in London, he was setting up a World Congress of Faiths, speaking up for Indian independence, and writing mystical books like The Gleam, in which the visionary Indian who catches a glimpse of eternal life is, in fact, a depiction of himself.

  All this fits into the standard mythology of Tibet. And yet the real story is even more mysterious. As it happens, Younghusband had been drawn towards the place across the mountains long before he entered Tibet; as he sat on its plains preparing for battle he steeped himself in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and books on “Cosmic Consciousness.” Going out from the camp in cold so severe that ink would freeze immediately, he began writing out in pencil what he hoped would be a volume on “The Religion of a Traveller.” And in all his journeys, he felt that the exploration of remote places was really “an exploration of the v
ery heart and soul of things, the discovery of the real Power, the inner Being, of which the outward facets of Mother Earth’s face, the plants and animals and we men, are but the expression.” According to his biographer, the house in which Younghusband’s parents lived, in, of all places, Dharamsala, is now perhaps the one occupied by the Dalai Lama’s younger sister.

  In Lhasa, as the days went on, I took to going out very early in the mornings to see Tibet reclaim itself. There were no Chinese visible—almost no tourists—at four or five in the morning, and so I would go out of my room in the Yak Hotel, down into the courtyard, the sound of early buses and late taxis in the blue-black streets outside, and try, almost literally, to steal out of my confinement. The Yak Hotel was guarded by a huge gate that was bolted in the night. Next to it sat a Chinese soldier at a guard post. Often, though, when I went out, the man was so fast asleep that I was able to take the keys from his side, unlock the bolt in the gate, pull back the great bars, return the keys to his side, and go out into the chill and bracing street without his noticing.

  The alleyways were pitch-black at this hour; my feet, as I fumbled across the mud, sometimes lurched down into a puddle, or slipped on something less than solid. Few figures were visible then, and those that were were merely silhouettes: a little old woman, walking around the Jokhang very fast, spinning her prayer wheel furiously as she went; a strutting man from Kham, so exuberant at his early-morning circumambulation that he was shouting out prayers to the sky.

  Girls swept the small area in front of their stalls or shops. A lone monk sat on the ground, a robe covering his head like a hood, and recited his prayers in a steady, muttered chant. As I walked around the central temple, at one point, in the distance, the Potala came into view, high up, on its crag, though unlit these days, even at night. The building that once presided over the city, visible from every corner, is now only caught in snatches here and there.