Nine Lives

by William Dalrymple

  “Then one day the Chinese troops came to the monastery. There was a colonel, and about fifty or sixty soldiers with guns. Without asking anyone, they put up posters of their president on the walls and erected loudspeakers in the courtyard so that we would have to listen to what they said. Their colonel wore spectacles. He was polite at first. He said they had come to help Tibet be self-reliant and they would return back home when they had taught us to be modern. He said they had come to bring justice, and to help the poor, and to make Tibet a good country, like China. He said that China was like our big brother, and that it would be good for us if we accepted their authority until the people of Tibet were ready to govern themselves in a modern, Communist way. The colonel even told us he had come to liberate us. To this the abbot replied that he could not liberate us, as the Lord Buddha had showed us that it was up to each man to liberate himself. The colonel just made a face—I don’t think he really understood what the abbot meant.

  “After that, the Chinese came to the monastery every month or so and gave us a lecture—they called them indoctrination meetings. Sometimes the posters they put up were blasphemous—insulting the Lord Buddha and saying that the monks were trying to keep the people of Tibet poor and ignorant. Slowly the lectures became ruder and more pointed: they said that everything the monasteries did was wrong, and that there was no other option but to accept the changes the Chinese were making. Even when the Chinese were nice and polite—giving free seeds and yaks to the poor people and so on—we always felt we could not trust them. Even from the seclusion of the monastery we could see that they were bringing in more and more of their people to build roads, and more and more troops. I realised something was wrong, even though they tried to make it look as if they were our friends. I sensed that something bad would come—that something evil was creeping behind their smiles.

  “As the programme of lectures progressed, I began to have sleepless nights, thinking about what was happening to Tibet, and how these Chinese people—and Chinese lay people at that—kept telling us what we should do in our own monastery. I didn’t want to be under their rule, but I couldn’t see any other option. Some of the monks began to talk about fighting, saying that the Chinese were out to destroy Buddhism, and that we should not simply surrender to what they wanted. Some nights as I lay awake, I wondered if maybe these monks were right.

  “Then, in the summer of 1954, rumours began to spread that the Chinese had killed many monks and bombed a monastery at the other end of our Kham province. We also heard that there had been a rebellion among some of the Golok and Khampa nomads. It was said that when the rebels took shelter in the monastery of Lithang the Chinese had bombed it, killing everyone there. Then we heard that the same had happened closer to us, at Changtreng Gompa, and that the monastery had been first bombed and then desecrated.

  “There were other stories too: that the Chinese made some of the monks in Kham get married, and others they forced to join the PLA, to build roads for them or even to work in slave labour camps. Some said that parents who refused to send their children to Chinese schools were tied to posts and had nails driven through their eyes.

  “Shortly after we began hearing such things, the Chinese army came to our monastery and asked us to give them all our guns and swords from the monastery armoury. The abbot said that these things had been given to us by our forebears and parents, and that the Chinese had no right to take them. But they ignored him, and searched the monastery and took away all the arms they could find.

  “After this, we had a meeting—not just the monks, but many lay people from the villages nearby. The monks were unanimous that we must fight, as the Chinese were now clearly intent on destroying the Buddhist dharma and so were tendra, Enemies of the Faith. We had heard that many fighters—some said 15,000—had gathered in Lhokha to the south and founded a resistance movement called the Chu-zhi Gang-drung, or Four Rivers, Six Ranges. Many said we should all leave and join them there.

  “So we went to the abbot and before him we renounced our vows. We simply said that we could not continue as monks. Now we had to fight to protect the dharma. There was no ceremony; the abbot just said, ‘All right. You have my permission to give up your vows. Now go.’ We weren’t sure whether this really did release us from all our promises; it seemed so perfunctory, especially as we were all still wearing our robes. But there was no time to worry about these things at that moment, though it was something which greatly exercised us later when we had to take up arms.

  “Many went off on horseback—a number of the monks were from the village at the foot of the monastery and their families gave them horses to go and join the resistance. As for me, I took the gun I had used as a shepherd from the place where I had hidden it, and left the monastery as well; but I had no horse. I went on foot, on my own, with my gun. All I really wanted to do was to go to my home and see my family again. But the PLA had built a small camp next to our land, and I knew it would not be safe. So taking my gun with me, I headed back in the direction of the camp in the mountains where we used to pasture the yak and dri in summer.

  “What I didn’t know was that the monastery was full of informers. As soon as the Chinese heard that I had taken my gun and gone to the hills, they came to our house and began beating my mother, asking her for details of where I was. They were very cruel. They beat her feet, and dragged her by her hair so that she was almost bald, and stayed that way for months. They tied her to a stake outside our house, stripped her and threw cold water over her. They left her there overnight so that the water froze to her and she nearly died of exposure.

  “They came back every day, each time beating her and devising new tortures so that she would say where I had gone, or so that I would come and give myself up. But I was up in the mountains, and it was over a month before I came to hear of what had happened to her.”

  By the time Passang had reached this part of his story, it was very late, and he needed to retire for the night: he had to rise at 3 a.m. to begin his round of prayers and meditation.

  The following morning, Passang said he had to go and visit the Home Ministry about his allowance, so I offered to help him down the hill. We wandered down together, and while he was there I took the opportunity to visit the library and archive which stood next door. This contained some of the most precious texts and artefacts that had been smuggled out of Tibet. Like the Parliament building which it abutted, it was modest in scale, but built in the style of a Tibetan gompa with sloping walls and wooden pillars vaguely modelled on those of the Potala Palace. Inside, the walls were closely lined with books, while one room contained shelves of ancient Sanskrit and Pali texts, wrapped up in yellow cotton dust covers.

  Browsing around the books, I asked the scholar who kept the manuscripts to explain to me the rules governing a monk who wished to renounce his vows. In answer he produced from the shelves a series of old leather-bound volumes of Max Müller’s translations of the earliest Buddhist texts on monastic rules and conduct, the Vinnaya Sutra (in Sanskrit, literally, “The Text on Taming”), said to have been collected together in 499 bc at the great council which convened after the death of the Buddha; before then the rules had been passed down orally from the Buddha to his disciples. He also brought down the celebrated commentary on the Vinnaya Sutra made by the monk Tsonawa in Debung monastery in the fourteenth century, and a translation of the Pratimoksha Sutra (literally, “The Path Which Leads to Moksha”), the fundamental Buddhist text on vows.

  From these it was clear that there was a long tradition of monks being able to give up their vows in case of emergency. Unlike ordination, for which very detailed ceremonial instructions were given, the renunciation of vows was a very straightforward matter. As long as strict criteria were met—notably the need for the monk to fight for the dharma—then the monk merely approached a rinpoche or senior lama, or if none was available, a statue of the Buddha, and explained what he wanted to do, and that his intention was to defend rather than damage the dharma.


  There were also many examples in Tibetan Buddhist cosmology and history which justified violence in the defence of the dharma: most notably the very popular Bodhisattva of Wisdom, Manjushri, who changed into his terrifying and wrathful form to become the most violent and destructive of all Tibetan deities, Yamantaka, the Conqueror of Death. In 1984, as an eighteen-year-old backpacker fresh from Scotland, I had first come across this fearsome god on a visit to the monastery of Alchi in Ladakh. Now part of India, Ladakh had been for most of the Middle Ages an important region of western Tibet. At this time the great Tibetan emperors like Songtsan Gampo had ruled from Bengal and the borders of Kashmir through the whole of China as far north as Mongolia.

  In Alchi, a huge mural of Yamantaka was placed above the doorway in the Sumtsek of the monastery. The god was shown sitting naked but for a tiger skin, surrounded by a flaming halo in a graveyard strewn with filleted and decapitated human corpses. He was depicted fanged, blue-skinned, six-headed and six-armed, clutching in his claws his sword, bow and mace, as well as his strangler’s noose and disemboweller’s hook, his hair decorated with the skulls of his victims and his neck garlanded with snakes. Seven hundred years after it was painted, it still had the power to make you shudder.

  Yamantaka is not alone in Tibetan cosmology. There is also, for example, the four-headed, six-armed Chakrasamvara, who is shown in murals dancing on his prostrate demonic enemies. Engulfed in flames, roaring with rage, yet strangely poised and balletic, he is crowned and garlanded with skulls, brandishing thunderbolts and skull-headed sceptres; over his head he holds the stretched skin of a dead elephant. Such angry and violent protectors are common in Tibetan Buddhist art, and correspondingly popular in Tibetan devotion; they use their powers for the good of humanity, warding off demons and the creatures of darkness, subverting the ancient warrior imagery of Tibet and utilising it for peaceful ends. Even the most benign figures, such as Guru Rinpoche, are believed to have the power to transform themselves into terrifying killers who can perform acts of great violence in order to protect Buddhism and defeat its enemies, both human and demonic.

  Nor is this tradition of violence to protect the dharma solely the preserve of religious tracts and iconography. The great secular epic poem of King Gesar tells how the ruler of the legendary Tibetan Kingdom of Ling killed hundreds of thousands of enemies of the dharma. If these figures could take up arms to protect their faith, then so could the monks. The Dalai Lama’s message has always been one of strict ahimsa (from the Sanskrit for “to do no harm”), and was reinforced after his arrival in India by his reading of Mahatma Gandhi; but it is clear that in the 1950s some monks looked as much to their ancient Tibetan warrior traditions as they did to their Buddhist heritage of non-violence.

  As I walked Passang back up to his home later that afternoon, I asked him how he had felt about taking up arms after so long practising non-violence. “There is a teaching story about this in our Jataka Tales. Let me tell it to you.

  “There was once a rinpoche of the highest mental state, who was very near Enlightenment. One day he was travelling across the Ganges along with 500 of his brethren in a boat. The captain of the boat was an evil man who hated the Buddhist dharma, and in particular hated the monks who lived and protected it. Secretly he planned to take this boatload of monks to the middle of the river, overturn the boat and drown them all. But because of his spiritual gifts, the rinpoche was able to read the man’s mind, and realised what he was planning. So after hesitating and praying for guidance, he decided to throw the man into the river before he was able to carry out his plan. He did this, and the man was pulled under the waves and drowned almost immediately.

  “The other monks were horrified and asked: ‘Rinpoche, you are a most senior monk, the reincarnation of a great soul, and an example to us all. How could you do this? How could you perform an act of such violence and kill a man?’ The rinpoche explained what the man was planning and said that he was willing to take responsibility for his actions, and the bad karma that would accrue through the killing, in order to save the lives of 500 monks. He was supremely unselfish, sacrificing himself and his place on the wheel of rebirth for the sake of the dharma so that the other monks could continue on the path of Enlightenment. I often think of that rinpoche’s sacrifice, and wonder whether he was right to make it. I think he was.”

  When I asked how he had actually ended up fighting, Passang told me he had been in the mountains for a month, successfully avoiding the search parties the Chinese sent to look for him, when news first reached him of what had happened to his mother. His uncle the monk came up to the mountains to bring him the news that she had been tortured. He asked that Passang surrender his gun in order to save his mother, and of course he immediately did so. The uncle then took it to the Chinese, who eventually released Passang’s mother. Passang meanwhile made contact with several of his brethren who were also hiding in the hills, and decided to walk with them to Lhasa to warn the monks there of what was happening, and to try to galvanise some resistance.

  “For seven or eight months we walked,” he said as we headed up the hill back to the veterans’ home, Passang ahead and me puffing a little behind, struggling to keep up with this man forty years older. “At first we travelled only at night, but after a while, when we began to near Lhasa, we felt more secure walking during the day. There were many checkpoints, but there were lots of other pilgrims and monks on the roads. We told anyone we met that we were pilgrims heading to Lhasa for the Monlam ceremony, when the Dalai Lama addresses all the people with sermons for two weeks.

  “When we finally reached Lhasa, the streets were crowded with pilgrims and the atmosphere was very tense. But our government had no real soldiers, and there was little they could do to stop the Chinese doing exactly what they wanted. I and my fellow monks planned to take shelter in Sera monastery, our mother house, because although we had tried to renounce our vows, we were still wearing the robes of monks and still really thought of ourselves as monks. Sera lies to the north of the city, where the Lhasa plain meets a great arc of mountains. There we found to our pleasure that several of our brother monks had already arrived before us.

  “I was sure that the Chinese would come to Sera too, as I could see the army camps already established around the outskirts of Lhasa, and I was determined not to bow down to the Chinese. I told the other monks about the Chinese, how they were very strong and very cruel, and how we had to stand up to them. We said the monks should take their guns while they still had them, and join the rebels. But the older monks wouldn’t listen. They thought our government could still protect us, and that the magical powers of the Dalai Lama would keep the Chinese away. We replied that if this was the case, why were the Chinese here, even on the outskirts of Lhasa, and not the other side of the border?

  “Then word reached Lhasa that my mother had died. She was not old—no more than fifty. But she never recovered from the beatings the Chinese gave her, and she died as a result of the internal injuries she received for what I had done.”

  Passang looked down, and for a moment his face crumpled; but he stopped himself. “Of course, I wept when the news came. For long days after that I was too paralysed with sadness to think of anything else. But I was worried too, because I now felt a real hatred for the Chinese. Violence may be justified by our scriptures in certain circumstances, but anger and hatred are always forbidden. I knew I was now in mortal danger of real sin, but this only made me hate the Chinese more.”

  For the next fortnight, while he turned these issues over in his mind, Passang performed the elaborate round of prayers prescribed in Tibetan Buddhism for the souls of the dead. By the time they had been completed, it was early March 1959, and Lhasa was in crisis.

  The following morning, Dharamsala dawned dark and threatening, with black thunderheads massing above the town and blotting out the snow peaks.

  I had arranged to meet Passang again at the tea house below the temple after he had finished his morning parikrama. The weather
had turned, and as it was now bitterly cold we sat inside and ordered tea, momos and a bowl of thukpa to warm us.

  As we ate, Passang described how the tension in Lhasa had reached crisis point during the first week of March, when the Chinese invited the twenty-five-year-old Dalai Lama to attend a theatrical performance in the army camp outside Lhasa. The invitation came when the Tibetan leader was debating in the great Jokhang Temple. Two Chinese officers barged through the crowd and demanded to see His Holiness immediately, breaking all rules of Tibetan protocol. They said that, contrary to custom, the Dalai Lama should bring no bodyguards when he came to their camp to see the performance.

  Word of this suspicious invitation soon got out, and the population of Lhasa, along with the crowds of pilgrims who had come to Lhasa for Monlam, converged around the gardens of the Dalai Lama’s summer palace of Norbulingka, in an attempt to prevent his attending and—it was widely suspected—being abducted to China.

  “On the evening of 15 March, I and twenty-five other monks of Sera were told to get ready as we were going to meet His Holiness,” said Passang. “Ahead of us, leading the party, went two senior monks on the back of donkeys. The rest of us walked. We assumed we were going to join the crowds gathering at Norbulingka, and I was excited as I hoped we would get to hear His Holiness give one of his public teachings. But we didn’t stop at Norbulingka; instead we headed off into the darkness. We crossed the wide Tsangpo River in a small boat, and for the next two days we walked and walked, through empty plains, with only hard balls of tsampa to eat. The monks who were leading us refused to tell us where we were going or what we were doing, and as we were all very junior monks we had no option but to obey.