In Exile From the Land of Snows

by John Avedon

  In 1207, apprised of the approach of Genghis Khan’s armies, Tibet’s chief rulers joined together to offer the Mongols tribute and thereby avoid invasion. Thirty-two years later, though, having failed to make annual payments, Tibet was invaded by Godan Khan, grandson of Genghis. Once he had burned Reting Monastery north of Lhasa and slaughtered five hundred monks and laymen in reprisal, the Mongol prince ironically sought religious instruction from Sakya Pandit, head of the Sakyas, the second of Tibet’s four principal sects. Sakya Pandit assented and in return was given temporal authority over all of Central Tibet, a role which his nephew Phakpa inherited from Godan’s successor, Kublai Khan. With this, the so-called Priest-Patron tie came into effect wherein the Mongols looked to Tibet’s preeminent lama for spiritual authority, while considering the country itself to be within their own sphere of influence. Through it Tibet was loosely associated with China following Kublai Khan’s capture of that nation’s throne. With the waning, though, of both Sakya and Mongol authority one hundred years later, the bond broke. Three centuries of Tibetan independence followed, at the conclusion of which, in 1642, a new religious sect, the Gelugpas, led by their chief teachers the Dalai Lamas, established their rule over rival groups, once more using the fulcrum of Mongol support. Shortly afterwards China’s second foreign dynasty, the Manchus, assumed the Mongols’ role of lay patron. Symbolically aligned to them, the Dalai Lamas governed Tibet into the twentieth century, Lhasa considering its duties to Peking purely ceremonial; an effective means for deflecting a large, aggressive neighbor and little more. In the meantime, Tibet’s unique civilization fully matured.

  With the collapse of the early empire, the single-minded zeal Tibetans had shown for the pursuits of war turned to those of peace, transmuting the national character to that of the long-forgotten father of the race. The change resulted primarily from the Buddhist ideas themselves. Buddhism held worldly life in any form to be imbued with suffering. Only through realizing the ultimately illusory nature of existence could freedom—the state of Buddhahood—be obtained. Mahayana Buddhism, the school which came to Tibet, laid particular stress on attaining enlightenment for the sake of liberating all sentient beings from sorrow. Accordingly, the cultivation of compassion, matched by that of renunciation and wisdom, charged the Tibetan soul. Hunting, fishing and the killing of so much as an insect became anathema. Prayer wheels filled the rivers with mantras, prayer flags the sky; house-high piles of mani stones, inscribed with invocations, and the spire-topped reliquaries of Buddhist saints called chortens converted the landscape into a living web of sacred sites, linked by a constant flow of pilgrims. Where every valley had been dominated by the forbidding walls of a mountaintop dzong or fort, great city-like gonpas, or monasteries, now sprang up, centers of learning and culture, inhabited, in time, by a quarter of the male population.

  It was in her cloisters that Tibet’s culture flowered. Writing, literature, medicine, arts, architecture and the higher studies of the monastic colleges all derived from the great corpus of the Buddhist teaching or Dharma, which, alone among the nations of Asia, Tibet received in its entirety. While a rotating cadre of monks conducted its administration, the bulk of the monastic community, given to the sangha or clergy as young boys, rigorously pursued enlightenment through ritual, study and daily meditation. In Gelugpa monasteries scholars memorized and debated for up to twenty years before standing for their final exams in the Doctor of Divinity or Geshé degree. Their effort was matched only by the retreats of lifelong gomchen or hermits who, sealed in caves and isolated mountain huts, tended by a few disciples, practiced the most extreme mental and physical austerities. The preeminent religious practitioners, however, were the 4,000 or so tulkus, incarnate lamas believed able to choose the time and place of their rebirth. Recognized in infancy by their followers, they were returned to their monasteries to once more take up the great Buddhist work of leading all beings to liberation. Chief of these were the emanations of high Bodhisattvas or Buddhas, among whom, as the living incarnation of Tibet’s patron saint, Chenrezi, the Dalai Lama stood out as the holiest presence in the land.

  The lay society which supported such a temporally nonremunerative pursuit was feudal yet, owing to Tibet’s severe terrain and the temporizing doctrines of the faith, imbued with an essentially democratic spirit. Tibetans themselves were naturally warm and pragmatic, accepting of their lot, socially conservative but individually tolerant. Their innate love of order had kept the various classes immutably defined for centuries.

  Holding to the high, open country, Tibet’s original inhabitants, her nomads, grazed vast herds of yak and sheep between summer and winter pasturage. Dwelling in low-slung black felt tents, speaking their own dialects, wearing heavy charm boxes, long swords and fleece-lined robes—though often stripped to the waist in even the harshest weather—they enlivened their existence by ambushing traders’ caravans and, when the snows became too deep to move about, reciting for days on end Tibet’s great epic poem Gesar of Ling. Wary of the sedentary lives of their neighbors, the nomadic tribes descended from the highlands only to trade meat and cheese in exchange for grain, guns and household goods. Here, along the protected valley floors and river basins, lived most of Tibet’s population: farmers skillfully raising the staple crop, barley, out of a thin skin of easily depleted arable earth, beset by a dry climate, early frosts and devastating hailstorms. But within the limits of the land, Tibetans were prosperous. Famine was unknown; properly stored meat remained fresh for a year, grain for a century. Due to the germ-inhibiting altitude, disease was rare. Large families were the norm, polygamy, polyandry and monogamy all being practiced. The status of women was equal to that of men in both business and the household and, without doubt, the highest in Asia. The main repressive feature of Tibetan society was the system of taxation: since taxes were paid in kind or labor to whatever large monastic, noble or government estate dominated the area, peasants were tied to their property and social mobility was impeded.

  The chance for economic betterment lay almost exclusively in trade. In autumn, following the harvest, one or two men from each family departed home on a trading expedition. Entering the ancient caravan ways, they joined the mule, yak and camel trains of the great merchant concerns, traveling south to India, east to China and north to Mongolia. Tea blocks, tools, tobacco, silver ingots, horses, Russian silks, Japanese matches and American perfume were all imported; musk, wool, salt, gold dust, furs, medicinal herbs and yak tails, used abroad for fly whisks and Santa Claus beards, were sent out. Camped behind stockades fashioned from bales of their goods, flintlocks and ferocious mastiffs at the ready, the traders broke their journey at midday, when afternoon dust storms scoured the land, and were afoot long before dawn. The greatest beneficiaries of their business were the small noble class, numbering no more than three hundred families, who, beside the monks, stood at the pinnacle of Tibetan society.

  The oldest of Tibet’s aristocrats traced their origin directly to the Yarlung kings. Like those ennobled more recently, they held ancestral estates by grant from the government, in exchange for which they rendered service to the bureaucracy. Their noble status was clear to all from their splendid silk robes (the sleeves worn a foot below the hands to denote leisure), pendant earrings and coteries of retainers who, as they rode forth from their homes, cleared the way. They ate off silver plates and jade bowls, had a passion for elaborate flower gardens, archery (using box-headed arrows that whistled in flight) and four-day picnics at which the guests were serenaded by exquisitely dressed chang or “beer” girls, who encouraged everyone to drink. The nobility, though, were not, by nature, opulent. All employed a staff of monks to say daily prayers before household shrines, and their most compelling concern, beyond a strict adherence to their faith, lay in the business of governance. Though many had country estates in or around Shigatse and Gyantse, Tibet’s second- and fourth-largest cities, the obligations of government work kept them in the capital for most of the year.

  It
was to Lhasa that all Tibet gravitated. At the hub of the city—and of Tibet itself—lay the Central Cathedral containing the country’s most sacred image, Jowo Rinpoché, the Precious Lord. A statue of the Buddha believed to have been blessed by him, it was the magnet to which pilgrims would prostrate across the entire nation, an endeavor often years in the undertaking. Arriving at the Cathedral or Tsuglakhang, they turned the prayer wheels of the first of Lhasa’s three circular roads, the Nangkhor, and entering the hallowed sanctum, beheld its golden face lit by the serene glow of colossal butter lamps. The Tsuglakhang epitomized Tibet’s inextricable mix of the sacred and mundane. Within the more than 50 chapels on its ground floor lay an inestimable treasure of spiritual wealth, yet on the two floors above stood the offices of the Cabinet, the Foreign Bureau, the departments of Finance, Customs and Agriculture, the Mayor of Lhasa, the Regent and a score of others. Their documents, which included centuries-old treaties and tax records, were filed in bunches tied to red-lacquered pillars while much of their respective budgets were kept in the form of grain, material and fuel in adjoining storerooms. Between them all ranged more chapels and shrines, so that the seven grades of the civil bureaucracy were continually passing incense-shrouded images and devout worshippers as they conducted the various affairs of state.

  Outside the Tsuglakhang ran Lhasa’s second circular road, the Barkhor or marketplace. With the ship-like girth of the Potala looming in the distance, bakers, booksellers, rug and saddle merchants vied for the business of the huge crowds, among whom could be seen all of Tibetan society. Women of U and Tsang, Central Tibet’s two provinces, wore their hair in great wood-framed headdresses, studded with coral, pearl and turquoise, bulky amber necklaces and multicolored aprons adorning their ankle-length chubas or robes. Towering Khampa men swaggered through the streets clad in thick wool garments and fox-fur hats, long, carved daggers in their belts. From Amdo came the nomadic Goloks, feared for banditry, the men wearing ivory bracelets and heavy red and black leather boots, their heads shaved save for a short lock left on the crown, the women’s waist-long hair braided into 108 plaits bound with large silver discs and coins to show their wealth. Among the shoppers, monks stopped to buy snuff (their sole indulgence save for up to sixty cups of butter tea a day), children played at keeping a ribboned fly aloft with the kicks of one foot, while strolling drama troupes and traveling bards or lama manis regaled the people with tales from the lives of Tibet’s great saints. Following New Year’s the Cathedral and Barkhor became the nucleus of the three-week-long Monlam Chenmo or Great Prayer Festival. Thousands of monks swelled Lhasa’s population; public sermons, doctrinal debates, parades, horse races and athletic events filled the city, spilling into its third and outermost circular road, the Lingkhor or Holy Walk.

  Four miles long, the Lingkhor enclosed not just Lhasa but the vale’s two major hills, on which stood the Potala and the government’s chief medical college, Chokpori. Jammed by men and women performing prostrations, it passed through the numerous lingkas or parks to which Lhasans flocked in summer and early autumn for picnics and opera and, due to the preponderance of the faithful, was a principal haunt of beggars. Near it lived the Ragyapa, who, dwelling in curious shelters made of yak and goat horns, performed, along with Moslem butchers, the lesser tasks of life, such as conveying corpses to the great black rock east of the city where they were cut up to be fed, as a final act of altruism, to the vultures. Beyond the Lingkhor stood the Norbulingka as well as the world’s largest monasteries, the “Three Pillars of the State,” Drepung, Sera and Ganden, holding among them upwards of 22,000 monks. Further out, the valley was studded by dozens of ancient cloisters, all of which, in Tibet’s theocracy, ensured the Place of the Gods, as Lhasa was known, to be the undisputed center of both secular and spiritual authority.

  Since the advent of the Ganden Phodrang, the government of the Dalai Lamas, Tibet’s administration had been equally split between the clergy and the nobility. Every key post was held jointly by a monk and a nobleman, both to share and to check power. Tibet’s unique government worked so well that internal strife rarely emerged, save in the unavoidably weak regencies between the majorities of the Dalai Lamas. With the restraining hand of central authority removed, factionalism, which had plagued Tibet since the fall of the Yarlung Dynasty, inevitably cropped up. This and its corollary, the vague, potentially compromising tie to an outside power, most recently China, stood out as the nation’s sole political liabilities. So long as Tibet remained hermetically sealed from the world, isolated behind impregnable mountains, the faults never threatened to destabilize it. Toward the close of the nineteenth century, however, more than two millennia of Central Asian solitude suddenly gave way to the encroachments of the modern world.

  In 1904, concerned over Russian expansion—via Tibet—to the northern borders of its Indian realm, Great Britain dispatched an expeditionary force to Lhasa. After securing trade ties from the Tibetan government, the troops withdrew, not, however, before alerting China to the insubstantial nature of its claim on Tibet, described prior to the assault by Lord Curzon, the British viceroy of India, as a “constitutional fiction.” To reassert their dominance, the Manchus sent an army of their own. After almost six years in exile, following the British attack, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama had been back in Lhasa only a few weeks when, in the winter of 1910, he was forced to flee once more, this time, ironically, to India and the protecting arms of the British. For the first time in history, Peking now ruled Tibet directly until, in the wake of the 1911 revolution, its forces were expelled and the Dalai Lama returned to formally reproclaim Tibetan independence. Ignoring the declaration, China’s new republic, led by Yuan Shih-kai, announced a policy, based on Sun Yat-sen’s doctrine of the five races of China, laying claim to most of the major regions with which the Chinese state, in its various forms, had had substantial contact over the centuries. Thus, not only Tibet but Manchuria, Mongolia and Xinjiang were held to be provinces of China proper, a belief subsequently adopted by both the Kuomintang or Nationalists and Communists as well. China, though, could not occupy these territories. By 1918 Tibet’s small army had pushed the Chinese back through Kham to Dartsedo, the original border of the two nations. Nevertheless, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama recognized that a political solution must eventually be found. Enlisting Great Britain as mediator, he attempted, at the Simla Convention of 1914, to negotiate a compromise based on a British concept of Chinese suzerainty over a fully autonomous Tibet. When the Chinese refused to comply—holding out for complete control of Tibet—he began to modernize the country’s antiquated army. As China’s first republic collapsed, and the period of competing warlords followed by the Nationalists’ long struggle with the Communists ensued, the issue faded. Tibet once more found itself fully independent, unassailed by outside pressures. For two decades peace descended on the country, aptly described by the Dalai Lama in his kachem or final testament, when he stated that under the latter part of his reign Tibet had become “happy and tranquil, like a land made new.” Beside his sanguine portrait of the present, though, had been the ominous warning, drafted in such vivid detail, of a future Tibet eclipsed in oppression, the days and nights “dragging slowly on in suffering.” Remote as such a fate seemed to be in the winter of 1933, its antecedents were to strike with shattering speed.

  Three days after the Dalai Lama’s death, Tsipon Lungshar, an ambitious Finance Minister, mounted a coup d’état. Hoping to capitalize on the delicate period of transition to a regency, he sought to displace the interim power of the Cabinet with that of the National Assembly, under his control. Inciting the thousand-man Drong Drak Magar Regiment to rebel, he succeeded in having his chief rival—a monk official named Kunphela, who had been supported by the regiment—banished by the Assembly to southern Tibet, charged with negligence in caring for the Dalai Lama during his final illness. It was not until the discovery of an assassination attempt, orchestrated by Lungshar against an intransigent minister, that both the Assembly and the Cabi
net realized how close they had come to being superseded. (Documents in the possession of Lungshar’s followers subsequently revealed a detailed plot to overthrow the government.) Convicted of high treason, Lungshar received Tibet’s severest form of punishment—blinding. No sooner had the crisis been averted, however, than a second, less dramatic, if ultimately more dangerous threat developed. In the confusion following the Thirteenth Dalai Lama’s death, a Chinese Nationalist general and two aides-de-camp were granted entry visas to Lhasa. In 1912, following the expulsion of the Manchu occupation force, the Tibetans had demonstrated their independence by refusing to accept Chinese representation in their country maintained, historically, by two Ambans, or Manchu officials, stationed in Lhasa—a convention that Peking had cited since the eighteenth century as proof of its own dominion. But now, unsure of itself, the government let just such a delegation in, under the guise of a condolence mission. Instead of departing after it had tendered official sympathies, the mission remained, opened up a liaison office and established a crucial foothold for the Nationalists in Tibet.

  Thus, almost immediately following the Dalai Lama’s demise, the two dangers foretold in his testament began to materialize—Tibet being threatened “both from without and from within.” Under these inauspicious conditions Reting Rinpoché, a twenty-three-year-old lama of little political acumen, though greatly respected for his spiritual attainments, assumed the regency, having been selected by the National Assembly. Once more, Tibet turned away from worldly affairs, content to take up, in the evening of its seclusion, the pursuits of peace and meditation. Within this tranquil interregnum, the new Dalai Lama was to spend his childhood.