Nine Lives

by William Dalrymple

  But more surprising was what Passang said of his eventual decision to give up his monastic vows and take up arms to resist—something which seemed to go against all the usual preconceptions about the non-violence of Tibetan monks.

  “It was not that I wanted to murder individual Chinese soldiers,” he said. “And it was certainly not blood lust, or because I took any pleasure in killing.” He paused, unsure of how to explain, twirling his prayer beads pensively between thumb and forefinger. “I knew that the Chinese soldiers were committing the most sinful of all crimes—trying to destroy Buddhism. And I knew that it is written in our scriptures that in certain circumstances it can be right to kill a person, if your intention is to stop that person from committing a serious sin. You can choose to take upon yourself the bad karma of a violent act in order to save that person from a much worse sin.”

  “So inspired by these teachings,” I asked, “you took up a gun and fought the Chinese?”

  “I tried,” replied the monk. “But we were just fools. Though we acquired some old guns, we were outnumbered and knew nothing of fighting. All we knew was how to pray, not how to kill. As soon as we came across the Chinese troops they put us to flight. It was a total fiasco.”

  Eventually, he said, after fleeing Tibet and spending many years with a special Tibetan unit in the Indian army, he had retired to a small wooden hut in Dharamsala, intent on spending his last years atoning for the violence he had committed. Here he began trying to earn merit, by making wooden blocks and printing prayer flags. Finally, encouraged by a sermon of the Dalai Lama, and along with several other former monks, he had once again taken up his old monastic vows and robes, a full thirty years after he first renounced them.

  “Every day now, I recite the mantras of repentance,” he said. “We are told that when you really regret your actions, and repent, and bow towards the Buddha, it is possible for the bad karma to be removed. After all, the Buddha himself forgave a mass murderer.

  “There was a man named Angulimala who had killed 999 people, and hung a finger from each around his neck on a garland. He hoped the Buddha would be his thousandth victim; but instead, on meeting the Lord, he converted and became a monk. Many were critical of this decision, but the Lord Buddha insisted his repentance was genuine, and that he should be allowed to atone for his misdeeds. If he can be forgiven, then maybe so can I …”

  Passang smiled, his broad face lighting up momentarily. “Since I retired I have gone and repented before many lamas. I have visited many temples, pledging not to do such things ever again. I have prayed for the souls of the men I have killed, and asked that they have good rebirth. But still I worry.”

  The prayer beads were whirling nervously around his fingers again. “The lamas told me that if my motivation was pure, and I had done violent acts to help others at the expense of my own karma, then I can still be saved. But every sentient being has life and even the thought of killing makes me unhappy. In truth I don’t know how much forgiveness I have gathered. I don’t know yet whether on my deathbed I will feel calm and satisfied. Maybe I will never know …”

  Passang sipped at his butter tea, warming his hands around the sides as he did so: “In the scriptures it says that one who lives in the dharma sleeps at ease in this world, and also in the next; but I still have a feeling that I did a terrible thing. When you take up arms, you have to follow orders—you have no right to act as you wish. Sometimes you are told to kill. Still sometimes the dreams come. At night, I hear the noise of war …”

  The monk broke off, and fell silent, looking into his empty cup. “Come and see me tomorrow,” he said, rising suddenly, “and I will tell you how all this came about.”

  McLeod Ganj, the Tibetan settlement above the north Indian town of Dharamsala, is a miniature Tibet-outside-Tibet. It is the place to which countless displaced lamas and landowners, refugee peasants and farmers, exiled townsmen and traders have made their way, clustering like barnacles on a rock around the temple-residence of the Dalai Lama.

  The complex crowns a saddle on one of the higher ridges of the town. Above, in the grey wintery light, loom the black rock walls and fault lines of the Himalayas, rising to a series of gleaming white snow peaks glowing strangely with refracted light at the level of the clouds.

  Below, rutted roads and cobbled footpaths lead down to the Tibetan Parliament, which despite its grandiose name is in reality little larger than a village scout hall. On one side is the equally modest yellow ochre Tibetan Home Ministry; to the other a library and archive. Farther below still, through steep slopes of cedar and deodar, and below the slowly circling eagles, is a stutter of foothills. These lead down to the foggy floor of the Kangra Valley, where the hilltops emerge from the flat blanket of winter morning mist like the humps of a school of whales rising from the deep.

  The old people’s home for Tibetan veterans where Passang had finally found shelter lay a short walk below the library, on a projecting ledge of rock in the lee of a small temple. It was late afternoon when I arrived. The old veterans who had been sitting silently on benches in the sun, playing cards or watching the light rake down the peaks, now found themselves in shade, with the temperature dropping rapidly. So they gathered their shawls around them, and adjusted their knotted mufflers and bonnets. Then they began to shuffle inside to drink their evening butter tea before heading up to the temple for their evening prayers. I later learned that of the 150 inmates in the home, no fewer than thirty had, like Passang, been monks who had given back their vows to fight in the ill-fated Tibetan resistance.

  Passang led me to his room, a warm and snug space at the back of the home, in the shadow of the cliffs. This he shared with one other monastic army veteran. On a shelf at the end of the room lay a line of doll-like images of Tibetan saints and rinpoches. A butter lamp burned in a brass brazier, and a red electric light mimicked the flickering of a candle below a framed image of the Dalai Lama. Above the door, Passang had hung some fatty yak meat to dry on an improvised framework of skewers.

  For a few minutes the old man fiddled around with a primus, making chai, which he poured from a saucepan into small cups. He passed me one, then proceeded to sip noisily from his own. Only when he had finished did he begin to talk.

  “I was born in 1936 in the Dakpa country of Kham province,” said Tashi Passang. “Like many in eastern Tibet, my family lived a semi-nomadic life. Although we were small landowners with a stone three-storey house, we also had many yak and dri. The herd numbered almost 100, and in summer it was the job of the boys of the family to help my grandparents and my uncles to take the animals up to the high summer pastures.

  “As a young child, I would watch my elder brothers go off with the herd, and feel sad to be left behind. But the valley where we lived was very beautiful in summer. The trees were all in blossom and there were so many wild flowers—cornflowers, poppies, deep purple gentians—that I couldn’t name even half of them. There was a big river leading to a lake near our house, and in summer red crane and white duck would come in their thousands, and build their nests. They laid their eggs by the side of the lake and my parents would warn me not to go near the nesting area, in case I touched the eggs. Then the mother would smell a human and abandon them, and the young would die—something my mother said was a sin and which would bring bad karma on all of us.

  “In autumn the birds would fly south, and we would begin to prepare the butter lamps to light us during the cold and darkness of winter. I remember helping my father roll the cotton for the wicks, hold it in the centre of the bowl and pour in the melted butter, then put it aside to settle. As we did so, my father would quietly chant mantras, as if it was some sort of religious ceremony.

  “Soon after, winter would come, and both river and lakes would freeze over. It was very, very cold and the blizzards would bring a covering of thick snow. The ice on the river was so hard that you could walk or even skate on it. We each had a pair of flat wooden skates that my mother kept in a special box, and would produ
ce only when she was sure the ice was hard enough to take our weight. During this season the yaks were all sheltered in a covered enclosure, and it was only at the beginning of the thaw that we would take out the young beasts and pierce their noses so we could put a rope through and harness them for ploughing.

  “When I was twelve, I asked my parents if I could accompany the herds to the mountains for the summer. Finally, after much pleading, they agreed. For me this was a totally new way of life. That part of the year we all slept in a single round ba made of skins. Inside there were no partitions, and a fire in the centre; the smoke would escape through a small hole in the roof. My mother would pack tsampa—roasted barley—and butter, cooking vessels and lots of bedding, and load them with the tents on the back of the yaks.

  “Five families would collect their herds, and head together into the mountains. We would walk all the way, driving the animals in front of us. Yaks are very good-tempered, and I always felt safe with them. They seemed to enjoy the journey and my grandmother was especially good at handling them. She knew them all by name and would talk to each one as she milked them in the evening. Every evening, all the families in the migration would gather together to have dinner, and recite prayers to the goddess Tara.

  “Once we reached the summer pastures the different families would separate and we would each head to our own camp. My job would be to take the yak up to the high green pastures each morning, and to stop the mountain wolves from attacking them. At first I was scared of the wolves, but it soon became clear that they were more scared of us than we were of them—at least during the day. Only when they were hungry in winter were they really dangerous. All you had to do was to shout, and maybe fire a warning shot, and the entire pack would run away. Occasionally I would have to fire at them, but I was too young to handle a rifle in those days, and I never managed to hit one. There were stories of yetis up in the mountains, but I never saw one. A much bigger threat were the dremong—fierce brown bears—which sometimes attacked the yaks, usually as you led them down for the night.

  “On my third summer in the mountains, my great-uncle came with us. He was a monk, though he no longer lived within a monastery, and it was he who persuaded me to become a monk too. My mother had taught me to read and write a little Tibetan, and he thought that I was a promising boy who might benefit from a monastic education. Every day he would sit with me and teach me to write on a slate, or on the bark of a dwarf oak, as of course there was no paper in the mountains. He also loved history, and was very good at telling stories. As we tended the animals, he would tell me long stories about Songtsan Gampo and the kings and heroes of Tibet.

  “But his main love was the dharma, and he told me that if I continued to lead the life of a layman I might acquire many yaks, but would have nothing to take with me when I died. He also said that married life was a very complicated business, full of responsibilities, difficulties and distractions, and that the life of a monk was much easier. He said that it gave you more time and opportunities to practise your religion. I was always a religious child, and I thought about what he said.

  “By the end of the summer I had decided that I would like to try monastic life. I thought that if I really dedicated myself to religion I would have a better chance of a good rebirth in my next life, and have the opportunity to gain Nirvana. My uncle and I guessed that my parents would forbid me from becoming a monk, so we decided that I should join the monastery first, and only later inform the family. At the end of the summer, when we came down from the passes, my uncle and I went ahead to Dakpa monastery, and there he handed me over to the abbot.

  “I was worried I would miss the freedom of the mountains. But as it turned out, in the monastery I was happier than I had ever been. In my life as a herdsman, I had to worry about the wolves, and my yaks, and to look after my grandparents—life was full of anxieties. But as a monk you have only to practise your prayers and meditation, and to hope and work for Enlightenment.

  “Also, the life in the mountains, for all its beauty, was quite lonely. In Dakpa there were nearly 500 monks, and many boys of my own age. Very soon I made many friends. I knew I had made the right decision. Before long even my parents became reconciled to what I had done.

  “How you start your life as a monk can determine the rest of your life. One of our scriptures says, ‘Men who have not gained spiritual treasures in their youth perish like old herons in a lake without fish.’ I worked very hard at memorising the scriptures and proved to be good at remembering them.

  “The main struggle, especially when you are young, is to avoid four things: desire, greed, pride and attachment. Of course you can’t do this completely—no human being can—but there are techniques for diverting the mind. They stop you from thinking of yaks, or money, or beautiful women, and teach you to concentrate instead on the gods and goddesses. The lamas who taught us trained us to focus on these things. We were taught how to concentrate—to stare at a statue of the Lord Buddha or Guru Rinpoche, and to absorb the details of the object, the colour, the posture and so on, reflecting back all we knew of their teachings. Slowly you go deeper, to visualise the hand, the leg and the vajra in his hand, closing your eyes and trying to travel inwards. The more you concentrate on a deity, the more you are diverted from worldly thoughts. As it says in our scriptures:

  The quivering, wavering mind,

  Hard to guard, hard to check,

  The wise one makes straight,

  Like the bowman his shaft.

  It is difficult, of course, but it is also essential. In the Fire Sermon, the Lord Buddha said: ‘The world is on fire and every solution short of Nirvana is like trying to whitewash a burning house.’ Everything we have now is like a dream, impermanent. You can see it: this floor feels like stone, this cupboard feels like wood, but really it is an illusion. When you die you can’t take any of this, you have to leave it all behind. We have to leave even this human body.

  “The training to be a monk was very rigorous. For three years we were given text after text of the scriptures to memorise. It was a very slow process. First we had to master the Tibetan alphabets. Then we had to learn a few mantras, and then slowly we were taught the shorter versions of the scriptures. Finally we graduated to the long versions, and learned the techniques of debating. When I couldn’t remember the words, the teachers would be very disappointed. Sometimes I would try to fool them by taking a peek at the texts. Once I was so frustrated by my inability to remember more that I tore up one of the texts, and the teachers were very angry with me.

  “Finally, after three years, we were each sent off to a cave for four months to practise praying in solitude. We were supposed to master the art of being a hermit, of being alone. There were seven other boys nearby, in the same cliff face, but we were not allowed to speak to each other.

  “Initially I was apprehensive. The cave was cold and dark, and I thought there might be evil spirits lurking there. But once I got into a routine of praying and meditating I became more confident. I made a small altar, and I placed the image of Guru Rinpoche that I had brought from the monastery upon it. I made flower offerings and lit a butter lamp. I used to rise at one o’clock in the morning and until 6 a.m. I was praying and prostrating, until my knees were so sore I could prostrate no more. At 6 a.m. I would make butter tea and take a break for half an hour. Then it was back to meditating on the roots of compassion, until a small lunch of tsampa at midday. At 7 p.m. I would have some rice, rest for an hour, and was asleep by 8 p.m.

  “Initially I felt like a failed monk. I was lonely, and scared, and had a terrible pain in my knees from the number of prostrations—we were expected to do 4,000 a day. But by the end of the first fortnight, I began to see my way. It was only then that I began reflecting deeply on things, and really began to see the vanity of pleasures and ambitions. Until then I had not really sat and reflected. I had done what I had been taught and followed the set rhythms of the monastery.

  “In the cave I felt I had found myself, and fo
r the first time was practising the true dharma. I discovered a capacity for solitude I hadn’t known I had, even in my days in the mountains. My mind became clear, and I felt my sins were being washed away with the austerity of the hermit’s life; that I was being purified. All my worries began to disappear and there were no distractions. I was happy. It is not easy to reach the stage when you really remove the world from your heart. That took place in the cave, and ever since then I have always had a desire to go back and to spend more time as a hermit.

  “But it was never to be. Soon after I returned from those four months of solitude, the Chinese appeared.”

  The Chinese invaded Tibet in the summer and autumn of 1950. They rolled across the Drichu River, and split their forces into three, quickly overwhelming and encircling the antiquated and primitive Tibetan army with their speed, efficiency and numbers.

  A year later, in May 1951, with more than 40,000 People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers lined up outside Lhasa, the Chinese pressured the Tibetans to sign the Seventeen Point Agreement. This was supposed to safeguard some Tibetan freedoms in return for giving the Chinese the right to guide and reform the Tibetan government. In reality, it allowed the Chinese to station troops all over the country, build supply routes and entrench Chinese Communist rule in Tibet.

  “The Chinese invasion of our country had taken place even before I joined the monastery,” Passang told me. “I was twelve or thirteen when I first saw them—long lines of soldiers streaming through our valley with their guns and their horses. In those days there were no roads for trucks or cars. I had no idea why they were there, or what they wanted, but initially there were very few of them, and they never really impinged on our life.