Light at the Edge of the World

by Wade Davis

  Following the return of the Dalai Lama to Lhasa, an uneasy calm enveloped the ancient capital. Then, in 1959 , the possibility of coexistence between Tibet and China was shattered in a morning as word of an uprising in the eastern provinces of Kham and Amdo sparked open rebellion in the streets of Lhasa. Disguised as a peasant, the Dalai Lama rode away from the city on the first leg of an epic journey that would, in time, carry him across the Himalayan snows into exile in India. In his wake, he left a trail of sorrow soon to be followed by tens of thousands of his countrymen.

  With the Tibetan leadership broken and the provisions of the 17 Point Agreement nullified by events, all talk of respecting traditions and honouring local political autonomy ceased. The Chinese were free to pursue their ultimate goal, which was nothing less than the total revolution of Tibetan society. The Anti-Rebellion campaign that ensued both quelled the revolt and spread fear and instability throughout the land. In scores of villages that had yet to encounter the invaders, heavily armed Chinese cadres arrived to institute thumzing, struggle sessions in which the old ways were denigrated and the communists promoted as liberators. The intent was the ideological conversion of the people and the subversion of all traditional institutions, encapsulated in “the three evils”: the aristocratic land owners, the Dalai Lama’s government and the monasteries, then home to one Tibetan out of ten.

  Public meetings degenerated into theatrical whirlwinds of false accusations and the settling of old scores. Monks and diviners, oracles and high lamas, were paraded in dunce hats, the object of cruel and ruthless ridicule. Under the watchful eyes of the Chinese army, Tibetan farmers and nomads learned to recite Maoist slogans as effortlessly as they had once chanted Buddhist prayers. Even in lands where no one had risen in revolt, monks and landowners were condemned for high treason. The entire Tibetan army was marched off to labour camps. A people who for centuries had believed in the holy character of their monasteries were told that chörtens and temples were but prisons of mud and dirt, the esoteric and sacred knowledge of the priests but tangled words of entrapment. Ideologically committed to the eradication of religion, the Chinese vigorously attacked the monastic order, forcibly disbanding the large estates and undercutting at every opportunity the status and authority of the more than a hundred thousand monks and nuns. The destruction of the economic basis of the monasteries would prove to be the most significant social and political event in Tibetan history since the introduction of Buddhism.

  Ideological fanaticism, materialist thought control and communist class struggle reached a watershed during the Cultural Revolution, a cataclysmic upheaval that unleashed a wave of barbarism that in the end even Mao himself could not control. The campaign began in 1966 as a purge of the Communist Party leadership, a deliberate infusion of instability designed to perpetuate revolutionary zeal and secure Mao’s place as the helmsman and sole mediator of the nation. Its ostensible goal was the creation of a pure socialist cadre, men and women whose minds had been purged and memories erased to yield a template upon which the thoughts of Mao could be engraved. The true and just society would emerge in the wake of the destruction of the Four Olds: old ideas, old culture, old customs, old habits. Create the new by smashing the old. This was the official slogan of what was heralded to be the last battle before the coming of the socialist paradise.

  All notions of religion and spirit, the poetics of culture and family, intuitions about the relationship of man and woman and nature, the scent of the soil, and the meaning of rain falling upon stones had no place in Mao’s calculus of transformation and domination. Nationality was considered a mere product of economic disparity; once material inequalities had been addressed, ethnic distinctions would wither. Tibet, of course, exemplified the old; China, the new. Thus, the Cultural Revolution both implied and demanded a total assault on every facet of Tibet’s ancient civilization.

  In villages throughout the land, people were mobilized to destroy chörtens and temples, prayer flags, incense burners, religious statuary, prayer wheels and mani stones. Sacred objects centuries old were shattered, thousands of monasteries vandalized. At Lithang, six thousand Tibetans locked themselves inside the monastery gates and endured a siege of sixty-four days, until finally a massive Chinese air strike left four thousand dead and the structure in ruins. At Ganden, a place of spiritual intensity and architectural grandeur second only to the Potola in Lhasa, Chinese cadres used dynamite and artillery fire to reduce to rubble the entire complex, a city of learning at the time home to four thousand clergy. In multiple acts of blasphemy, thousands of scriptures were set ablaze, and those not burned were dispensed to shops to be used as wrapping paper or as the liners and padding for shoes. In Lhasa, sacred texts littered the ground around public latrines, where the Chinese left them in bundles to be used as toilet paper.

  By decree, the recitation of prayers ceased. The practice of prostration and the circumambulation of holy sites was outlawed, as was the refined language of the aristocracy. Those who sought treatment from traditional healers, or knowledge of the future through consultation with oracles and diviners, faced severe sanctions. Gift giving, the ceremonial exchange of silk khata, symbol of hope and goodwill, was prohibited. Even the picnics and parties for which Tibetans were famous were forbidden as symbols of the feudal past. Ideological fervour challenged even the traditional Tibetan way of using a shovel, whereby one person worked the tool and a second helped lift the load by means of a rope attached to the spade. It had been legitimate, the cadre suggested, to save energy whilst working for the landlords, but in the new China, everyone had to work with full vigour for the motherland and the socialist state. Thus, the ropes had to go.

  In a frenzy of fear, Tibetans struggled to prove their revolutionary zeal. Streets and parks in Lhasa sprouted new names, as did children. The elegant clothing of old Tibet was replaced with the drab attire of Mao, uniforms of grey and green cloth upon which people deliberately sewed unnecessary patches to affirm their proletarian credentials. Om mani padme hum, the “ jewel in the lotus,” the mantra of Buddhist compassion carved into stone and recited in temples and caves for a thousand years, was supplanted by the slogan of a personality cult: Mao Zedong wan sui, “May Mao live for ten thousand years.” For those who resisted, there was sadistic punishment: people burned alive, people forced to eat human waste, tortures too numerous and dreadful to enumerate.

  By 1970, the process of transformation appeared complete. The monasteries and temples, as many as six thousand sacred monuments and centres of wisdom and veneration, lay in ruins. The monks who had once dominated the nation were gone. Overt religious practices of any sort had ceased. The divisions between rich and poor, educated and ignorant, powerful and weak, had been dissolved by decree. Endless rounds of political meetings intimidated the elders. Children were separated from their families to attend state schools, where revolutionary zeal was the measure of pedagogy. Superficially, at least, Tibetans ceased to have any distinctive characteristics. All diversity of spirit and heart, of thoughts and imaginings, dissolved into shadows as a cloak of conformity fell upon the land.

  The cruel excesses of the Cultural Revolution afflicted not only Tibet, of course, but all of China. So widespread were the injustices and so numerous the tormentors that, in order to survive, modern China has simply expunged the era from its memory, a bitter legacy swept beneath the carpet of history. In Tibet, such sleight of hand is not possible. Over a million Tibetans were killed. There are simply too many memories among the families of the dead, too many signs of physical destruction upon the land: the broken stones and walls of Shegar Dzong, the Shining Crystal monastery that once held the finest collection of woodcut books in Tibet, or the landslide of rubble on the immense flank of the Drokpa Ri ridge, all that remains of the original Ganden monastery, a warren of hundreds of structures built over the course of half a millennium and destroyed in a month.

  The suggestion that such devastation was the price of modernity and that Tibet at least escaped the
tyranny of feudalism and benefited by the economic development brought by the Chinese deserves consideration. It is certainly true that many Tibetans loathed the inequities and exploitation of the monastic era. I once spent a month on the eastern approaches to Everest with a Tibetan who had fled as a youth to India for economic reasons. With anger and contempt, he recalled watching his relatives carrying petrol and dismantled sections of vehicles on their backs as they embarked on a journey of hundreds of miles so that the Dalai Lama and his entourage could play with their cars in the streets of Lhasa. He remembered the prisoners let out at night from the local jail to beg for their evening meal, men in wooden yokes, many with severed kneecaps and stumps for hands. Electricity and running water were unknown. When he and his family reached Darjeeling, he had played for hours with a water faucet and stared in delight at a light bulb. In Tibet, he recalled, the ruling elite had offered them nothing but prayer wheels. What they had wanted were real wheels.

  Roads the Chinese did bring to Tibet, 1200 miles (1900 km) by 1954 alone. These arteries allowed for the garrisoning of troops, the movement into Tibet of Chinese settlers and the shipment of timber and other resources from the mountains to the densely populated provinces of western China. But they also facilitated the flow of goods and people within Tibet itself. The Chinese improved primary health care, introduced electricity to remote villages and provided land to previously disenfranchised peasants, all initiatives that were well received by the majority of Tibetans.

  But a closer examination of the consequences of the Chinese occupation reveals that their efforts concentrated on ideological education and social transformation rather than industrial and economic development. Political chaos destroyed the traditional economic system, leaving little in its place. The forced collectivization of land proved in the end to be a disaster. An edict to replace barley with wheat led only to hunger, leaving the predominantly agricultural nation in abject poverty. Even the fundamental need to retain some grain reserves in anticipation of unexpectedly harsh winters and the need to sow another crop in the spring was lost in the fervour of revolution. Far from eradicating poverty, the communists left the nation in ruins through their economic mismanagement. Not until 19 81, five years after the death of Mao, did economic reforms finally return the Tibetan people to the standard of living they had enjoyed more than thirty years before the arrival of the Chinese.

  The notion that Tibetan society would have remained static during those years and that the material lot of the people would not have improved without the Chinese is highly questionable. The monastic orders were deeply conservative, but not all elements of the Tibetan elite were resistant to innovation. The Dalai Lama’s own family had begun to disband its estates and redistribute land long before the Chinese invasion. His Holiness himself was famously intrigued by Western science and technology, and with the winds of change blowing harshly upon his borders throughout the middle years of this century, it is most unlikely that the Tibetans would have either wanted or been able to resist the intrusion of modernity.

  The Chinese investment over the years has indeed been monumental. By 1994 , more than $4 billion had been spent, $600 million in 1996 alone. Just what has been achieved and what has been lost remains in dispute. Between 1982 and 1991, literacy rates actually declined under Chinese rule. Much of the financial aid has either been squandered on ill-conceived projects or been used to facilitate the transformation of a civilization. As a result, Lhasa has become a Chinese enclave, with the economy dominated by Han immigrants.

  In a brazen effort to tear from the fabric of the ancient capital its resonance and identity, Chinese authorities endorsed a campaign of modernization that by 1996 had resulted in the destruction of over half of the historic buildings in the city. In their place rose stark Chinese structures of concrete and chrome, all blue mirrors and cheap tiles, with corridors where the cement dust never settles. In the Barkhor, the market bazaar that surrounds the Jokhang, most sacred of all Tibetan temples, Asian pop music today drowns out the prayers of pilgrims. In doorways, Chinese merchants crouch in the dirt, drinking long draughts of cold tea, spitting and coughing as they snap their cigarette ashes into the paths of monks.

  In the history of modern Tibet, the brutality and suffering are overwhelming, but in a certain sense what is equally disturbing is the realization that the Maoists actually believed in what they were doing. Rhetoric that today appears laughable was embraced as gospel. Their cause was from the start a totalitarian fantasy. The goal was the triumph of materialism, a deterministic model of the world that left no place for the finer sensibilities of the human spirit.

  What is truly remarkable in this long and tragic saga is the resilience of the Tibetan people, the redemptive power of their faith and the strength of their determination to survive as a nation. The reforms initiated by the Chinese in the early 1980s revealed that all the years of torment and propaganda had done little to fundamentally transform the culture. Once free of the overt repression of the Maoist era, the Tibetans within weeks discarded the veneer of proletarian life imposed by the communists. In every village, religious relics reappeared, family treasures surfaced from the soil, and men and women began the stone-by-stone task of rebuilding the chörtens and temples. The Chinese spoke of duty to the motherland, but the Tibetans clearly felt no filial piety. What they honour is the Buddha. Their strength grows out of a conviction that suffering can only be overcome by acceptance of the impermanence and illusionary nature of reality. In the Diamond Sutra, the Buddha cautions that the world is fleeting, like a candle in the wind, a phantom, a dream, the light of stars fading with the dawn. It is upon this insight that Tibetans measure their past and chart their future.

  7

  A Thousand Ways of Being

  LIKE THE CHINESE IN TIBET, THE EUROPEANS who colonized Australia were unprepared for the sophistication of the place and its inhabitants, incapable of embracing its wonder. They had no understanding of the challenges of the desert and little sensitivity to the achievements of aboriginal peoples who for over fifty thousand years had thrived as nomads, wanderers on a pristine continent. In all that time, the desire to improve upon the natural world, to tame the rhythm of the wild, had never touched them. The Aborigines accepted life as it was, a cosmological whole, the unchanging creation of the first dawn, when earth and sky separated, and the original Ancestor brought into being all the primordial Ancestors who, through their thoughts, dreams and journeys, sang the world into existence.

  The Ancestors walked as they sang, and when it was time to stop, they slept. In their dreams, they conceived the events of the following day, points of creation that fused one into another until every creature, every stream and stone, all time and space, became part of the whole, the divine manifestation of the one great seminal impulse. When they grew exhausted from their labours, they retired into the earth, sky, clouds, rivers, lakes, plants and animals of an island continent that resonates with their memory. The paths taken by the Ancestors have never been forgotten. They are the Songlines, precise itineraries followed even today as the people travel across the template of the physical world.

  As the Aborigines track the Songlines and chant the stories of the first dawning, they become part of the Ancestors and enter the Dreamtime, which is neither a dream nor a measure of the passage of time. It is the very realm of the Ancestors, a parallel universe where the ordinary laws of time, space and motion do not apply, where past, future and present merge into one. It is a place that Europeans can only approximate in sleep, and thus it became known to the early English settlers as the Dreaming, or Dreamtime. But the term is misleading. A dream by Western definition is a state of consciousness divorced from the real world. The Dreamtime, by contrast, is the real world, or at least one of two realities experienced in the daily lives of the Aborigines.

  To walk the Songlines is to become part of the ongoing creation of the world, a place that both exists and is still being formed. Thus, the Aborigines are not merely attac
hed to the Earth, they are essential to its existence. Without the land, they would die. But without the people, the ongoing process of creation would cease and the Earth would wither. Through movement and sacred rituals, the people maintain access to the Dreamtime and play a dynamic and ongoing role in the world of the Ancestors.

  A moment begins with nothing. A man or a woman walks, and from emptiness emerge the songs, the musical embodiment of reality, the cosmic melodies that give the world its character. The songs create vibrations that take shape. Dancing brings definition to the forms, and objects of the phenomenological realm appear: trees, rocks, streams, all of them physical evidence of the Dreaming. Should the rituals stop, the voices fall silent, all would be lost. For everything on Earth is held together by the Songlines, everything is subordinate to the Dreaming, which is constant but ever changing. Every landmark is wedded to a memory of its origins and yet always being born. Every animal and object resonates with the pulse of an ancient event, while still being dreamed into being. The world as it exists is perfect, though constantly in the process of being formed. The land is encoded with everything that ever has been, everything that ever will be, in every dimension of reality. To walk the land is to engage in a constant act of affirmation, an endless dance of creation.