Himalaya

by Ed Douglas

  Many have heard of the Boston Tea Party and the American War of Independence; few understand the links between these famous events and the financial woes of the East India Company. Its plight was exposed in 1772 when a London banker fled to France, having lost £300,000 shorting East India Company stock. This prompted a credit crunch, which meant the Company couldn’t refinance its debt, ironically devastating its share price. To survive, the Company needed to sell its vast holdings of tea in London as quickly as possible. The Company wasn’t allowed to sell tea direct to the American colonies and had to pay duty on it in London before selling it on to intermediaries. Such a large mark-up put the Company at a disadvantage; American consumers were more than happy to drink cheaper contraband tea smuggled in from Dutch wholesalers, who dealt with the Chinese through their colony at Batavia (today’s Indonesian capital, Jakarta). To protect the nation’s stake in the East India Company and keep it afloat, in May 1773 the British parliament passed the Tea Act, giving it the right to ship tea direct to America without paying duty in London first. This outraged legitimate tea merchants in Boston and other American cities and led to direct action – the so-called Tea Party – to prevent tea being unloaded.

  Like a modern global bank, the East India Company had become too big to fail but was forced to pay a price for the government’s continuing support: the Regulating Act, passed a month later. This was aimed squarely at the East India Company itself, an attempt to cut corruption, limit dividends and reorganise its dismal administration. In return, the Company’s debts were refinanced. Warren Hastings was appointed governor general of not just Calcutta but all three presidencies in India, laying the foundation for British rule over the whole subcontinent. In the blink of an eye, India’s fortunes had been made collateral to the East India Company’s experiment in globalisation. Despite these reforms, the Company still had deep structural problems. Although it had a monopoly on British trade with China, the Company was restricted to one port, Canton, the modern city of Guangzhou, and found itself effectively shut out of Chinese markets and China’s interior. All China wanted in return for its tea and silk was silver, creating a huge trade imbalance for the British. Any route to freer trade with China was worth considering, even one as remote as Tibet.

  Bogle arrived in Calcutta as a writer, or clerk, in 1770 in the midst of the cataclysmic Bengal famine. He wrote to his brother of the nightmarish impact:

  There were men employed to pick up the Dead Bodies in the Streets, and throw them into the River, and from the 1st to the 9th of last Month no less than twelve Hundred Carcasses were found – in the streets of Calcutta – that had not died of Pestilence, or Sickness, but absolutely of Hunger.

  The situation was even worse in Murshidabad, the once proud Mughal capital of Bengal, where as many as five hundred people a day were dying. The resident there reported cannibalism, something Bogle also mentioned in his letters, and an outbreak of smallpox that deepened the tragedy. Whole villages simply disappeared. The East India Company’s response was to increase taxation to meet a drop in revenues, wealth that flowed abroad to pay shareholders in priority over preventing future disasters. There were allegations of famine profiteering by British employees of the Company acting in their own interest.

  Until very recently, the kada, the ceremonial white scarf being offered to the Panchen Lama in Kettle’s painting was captioned by the Royal Collection as a bolt of cloth, a sales sample meant to lever open the floodgates of trade between Bengal and Tibet, and ultimately China. The mistake was understandable. Bogle did travel to Tibet with samples – European cutlery, Bengali cloth, mirrors, clocks, glassware, a string of pearls (which was of particular interest to a great Tibetan lama), thermometers, telescopes and a toy that gave off a small electric shock – all part of the effort to open new markets and boost profits, a door-to-door salesman on the roof of the world. Hastings had also given him a shopping list, particularly for those goods that were easy to transport through the mountains: gold, precious stones, musk and less obvious items, like plants used to dye fabrics. This was supplemented by a second private request from Hastings to bring back shawl goats and a pair of yaks, ‘cattle which bear what are called cowtails’, meaning yak tails, fresh ripe walnuts and any other seeds that looked useful, ‘ginseng especially’. In fact, Bogle should bring back anything that might persuade ‘Persons of Taste in England’ to open their purses, and anything else he judged of interest to the endlessly curious Hastings.

  The Panchen Lama, whose name was Lobsang Palden Yeshe, was both a great religious leader and a shrewd politician: he understood very well the purpose of George Bogle’s mission and the acquisitive nature of his employers. Bogle mentions this in his despatches, how the lama had been warned against allowing Bogle’s visit, that the East India Company ‘was like a great King and fond of War and Conquest, and as my Business and that of my People is to pray to God, I was afraid to admit any Fringies [from the Farsi farangi, meaning Franks, or Europeans] into the Country’. The lama’s presentation of himself as a simple holy man with little experience of the world, a naïf who had never before seen a European, was cheerfully disingenuous. At the time of Bogle’s visit, with the eighth Dalai Lama in Lhasa still a teenager, the Panchen Lama was the most powerful individual in Tibet.

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  Tilly Kettle’s painting showed the Panchen Lama in yellow silk robes, a colour and fabric emblematic of the Chinese imperial court but also of the order of monks the lama belonged to, the Geluk, ‘the virtuous school’, for their strict monasticism, often referred to by Europeans as the ‘yellow hats’; Bogle describes the Panchen Lama wearing ‘a mitre-shaped cap of yellow broadcloth, with long bars lined with red satin’. The idea of a yellow hat had been borrowed from another Tibetan Buddhist school, long defunct, to give the Geluk-pa, the ‘people of Geluk’, their own identity as they established themselves in a crowded spiritual field. The depth of history behind these symbols and the political complexity they hinted at were almost wholly new to the British: how the Panchen Lama came to be the power that he was; the nature of his relationship with the centre at Lhasa; the rival factions that threatened him; the strangeness of reincarnation. It needed a sprightly mind to start unpicking this knot; luckily for the Company, it had Bogle.

  By the time Europe – its missionaries, traders and explorers – first encountered Tibet in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Geluk-pa dominated its political scene. When foreign actors dealt with Tibet, they did so through the Geluk-pa. The order’s colossal monastic institutions not only exerted political control but dominated the economy as well. Monasteries were significant businesses in their own right with aristocratic patrons adding lustre to their art and treasures. This was what Bogle witnessed. Yet the origins of the Geluk-pa were a far cry from the pomp and wealth on display at the Panchen Lama’s monastic seat, Tashilhunpo, in the town of Shigatse.

  During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, under the religious patronage of the Yuan dynasty, the Sakya school of Buddhism had dominated Tibet, eclipsing the other major lineages, the Nyingma and Kagyu. The Sakya was favoured by Kublai Khan, prompting the Sakya leader Phagpa to recruit Newari craftsmen from Kathmandu, including the famous Arniko. Then, as Mongol power fractured in the mid fourteenth century, central Tibet, meaning the provinces of U (including the city of Lhasa) and Tsang, became contested space. As the Yuan faded, and with it Sakya power, Changchub Gyaltsen, a young and charismatic Kagyu leader from the famous monastery of Phagmodru, ‘sow’s ferry crossing’, rose to govern large parts of Tibet from his capital at Nedong, some hundred kilometres south-east of Lhasa, extending his influence to Kham in eastern Tibet and north-east to Amdo.

  With the weight of their foreign overlord removed, many Tibetans looked back with pride to the era of the divine tsenpos, the empire and Tibet’s adoption of Buddhism. Aiming to revive the spirit of Songtsen Gampo, Changchub and his immediate successors built new fortresses or dzong and encouraged a renaissance in Buddhist philosoph
y and translation, and tolerance also between different Buddhist schools. Among those who emerged from this period of spiritual freedom and renaissance was perhaps the single most influential Tibetan student of Buddhism in history: Tsongkhapa, ‘the man from onion valley’. It was under his influence that the Geluk school was founded and rose to prominence, changing the course of Tibetan history.

  Tsongkhapa’s father Lubum Ge was Mongolian. His birth, in the Amdo town of Tsongkha in 1357, glittered with miraculous portents. Where a drop of blood from his umbilical cord fell to earth, a sandalwood tree emerged. His mother Shingza Acho later built a stupa here and in time the site became Kumbum monastery, among the most important in the Geluk tradition. Aged eight he became a novitiate monk and was given the name Lobsang Drakpa from his tutor Dondrub Rinchen, a master in important Buddhist tantras that would form the basis of the Geluk school and a student in the Kadam school of philosophy founded by Atisa, the translator Changchub O had brought to Tibet during the second diffusion. Aged sixteen, Tsongkhapa left for central Tibet, but he couldn’t settle at one monastery; his restless intellect drove him from place to place in a wide-ranging exploration of Tibetan Buddhism’s different strands. He met a Sakya monk, Rendawa, with the same questioning outlook, who tutored him through his exams and gave him the confidence to continue on his path. To thank him, Tsongkhapa wrote a short verse in his praise. Later Rendawa returned it, having crossed out his own name and replaced it with that of his former student. The verse became known as the ‘Migtsema’:

  Avalokitesvara, great treasure of non-objectifying compassion,

  Manjushri, master of stainless wisdom,

  Vajrapani, destroyer of the entire host of demons,

  Tsongkhapa, crown jewel of the sages of the land of snow . . .

  Most important was Tsongkhapa’s time at a small hermitage called Drowa Gon, near Lhodrak, one of the few Kadam temples that had not been absorbed by the Sakya; here he learned more of Atisa’s teachings with its abbot, Drubchen Namkha Gyeltsen. Later, with his tutor Rendawa, he taught for three months at Reting, the original Kadam monastery founded by the followers of Atisa soon after his death. As his learning deepened, important themes emerged that would help define Geluk philosophy: an adherence to logic and the patient accumulation of knowledge being the groundwork for powerful, intuitive insight. Some of his views remain controversial even now, particularly his interpretation of madhyamaka, the ‘middle way’, which is central to Tibetan Buddhist philosophy. His most famous work, written in his mid forties while at Reting, was The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment.

  Plagued from youth with a bad back, he found it increasingly difficult to travel and spent more and more time in Lhasa. By then his tutors had become his students and hundreds flocked to hear him speak about the dharma. In 1409, he instituted the Monlam Chenmo, or Great Prayer Festival, still celebrated around the time of the Tibetan New Year, or Losar. That same year, persuaded by his many followers to commission a permanent home, he founded Ganden monastery near Lhasa, Ganden meaning ‘joyful’. Ganden was followed in 1416 by Drepung monastery and in 1419, the year of his death, Sera : these are the three great Geluk monastic establishments centred on Songtsen Gampo’s ancient capital. Before then, Tibet’s monastic strength had lain elsewhere; now Lhasa was the centre.

  At first, Tsongkhapa’s followers were known as Ganden-pa, people from Ganden, but the name Geluk-pa became popular after his death, meaning ‘virtuous ones’. The behaviour of the sangha, meaning ‘assembly’, the monastic community, had been of intense importance to Tsongkhapa. He is sometimes compared to Martin Luther for his reforming zeal; he certainly adhered to vows of celibacy and abstention from drinking alcohol or eating meat, but he was more ecumenical than Luther. Most importantly, unlike earlier famous schools of Tibetan Buddhism, the Geluk emerged from within the Tibetan world and wasn’t directly inspired or fed by scholars in the holy land of India, a Buddhist world that had by Tsongkhapa’s time ceased to exist.

  In his lifetime the monasteries founded in Tsongkhapa’s name held a few hundred monks, but within a century Drepung alone had ten thousand and Sera something similar. Given the small Tibetan population, the size of these vast establishments was, according to some historians, a brake on Tibet’s economic development. They were certainly a brake on population growth, but given the physical limits on Tibetan agriculture that was not necessarily a bad thing. The Geluk monasteries also came to dominate Tibetan politics, which entered a period of civil strife a few years after Tsongkhapa’s death as the Phagmodru dynasty began to unravel. Clan rivalry between the provinces of U and Tsang spilled over into religious sectarianism. Gedun Drub, one of Tsongkhapa’s younger students, took the new Geluk school to Tsang and founded a Geluk monastery at Shigatse: Tashilhunpo. In this way he extended the influence of his order into a place with strong historical links to Sakya and older Kagyu schools: an outpost of the new Buddhist world founded at Lhasa. Here Gedun Drub remained, choosing to be reincarnated after death in the body of a young monk.

  The role of reincarnation in Tibetan Buddhism’s spiritual lineages can seem opaque and esoteric, although George Bogle took it in his stride. Reincarnation itself is of course part of Buddhism: the cycle of life, death and rebirth is part of the journey for all living things, returned to earth involuntarily as a consequence of negative emotions and actions, or karma. From around the twelfth century some great Buddhist teachers began choosing to return rather than going on to nirvana and the bliss of self-extinction. They did so, they said, for the benefit of all sentient beings. Such reincarnate lamas, or tulku, would predict the location of their rebirth and even their parents. In the thirteenth century, Rangjung Dorje, leader of the Karma Kagyu school, the largest within the Kagyu tradition, formalised this process, combining his choice of reincarnation with the lineage he led. This innovation would have a profound impact on Tibetan society, lifting Buddhist lineages, in theory if not in practice, beyond the reach of secular power. Religious authorities took charge of selecting and educating their next leader. In this way, they transmitted their particular philosophical strand to the leader of the next generation, who became a temporary host or platform for an enduring ideal.

  The long-established aristocratic clans and the country’s immense religious establishments had now become the two most powerful forces within Tibet, but finding a political structure that met the interests of both proved intractable. Eventually foreign powers were dragged back into the equation. In 1578, Gedun Drub’s third reincarnation, a lama called Sonam Gyatso, accepted an invitation from the Mongol leader Altan Khan to renew the priest–patron relationship his forebear Kublai Khan had enjoyed with the Sakya. Altan Khan gave Sonam Gyatso the Mongolian name Dalai Lama, ‘Dalai’ being a translation of his ordination name ‘Gyatso’: meaning ‘great ocean’. Sonam Gyatso respectfully backdated this new title to include his two previous incarnations and so as a consequence Gedun Drub was counted as the first Dalai Lama. The fourth Dalai Lama, Yonten Gyatso, conveniently reappeared in the body of a descendant of Altan Khan, but by then Mongol power had faltered and the Geluk-pa were under pressure. This foreign-born Dalai Lama, needing approval, persuaded the abbot of Tashilhunpo, Choekyi Gyaltsen to come to Drepung monastery in Lhasa, where the Dalai Lamas then had their seat. Choekyi Gyaltsen soon became deeply involved in the increasingly turbulent political situation across the region. Lhasa, part of U province, was now under the control of a king from Tsang called Karma Phuntsog Namgyal. His spiritual allegiance was to the rival Kagyu lineage the Karmapa; the Dalai Lama didn’t have remotely the power he would come to acquire later.

  In 1617 the fourth Dalai Lama died and for a while Choekyi Gyaltsen applied a brake to the search for his reincarnation. Two years later, the last vestiges of the Phagmodru regime in U collapsed as the Tsang laid siege to its capital at Nedong. Lacking the support and protection of the Phagmodru, Geluk monks and their Mongolian patrons became restless. To prevent violence, Choekyi allowed
the search for the fifth Dalai Lama to proceed. A candidate had already been identified in secret, a boy who had attracted interest from several rival Buddhist schools because of his exceptional promise. And as he himself would later joke, the boy failed hopelessly in one of the crucial tasks that marked out a reincarnated lama: identifying the possessions of his predecessor. Yet this boy, the fifth Dalai Lama, ordained as Ngawang Lobsang Gyatso, would be the making of the lineage. It was the ‘Great Fifth’ who built the world famous Potala on the old site of Songtsen Gampo’s palace, which still dominates the modern city of Lhasa. He also recognised Choekyi Gyaltsen as the Panchen Lama, ‘Panchen’ being a portmanteau word from pandit and chenpo, meaning ‘great scholar’. This new lineage was retrospectively extended back to another of Tsongkhapa’s students, Khedrup Je. This calculation made Choekyi the fourth Panchen Lama.

  As a boy, the Dalai Lama’s power rested with his regent Sonam Choephel, a senior monk from Ganden; more than anyone, Sonam Choephel was the architect of the Geluk’s rise to power. Securing that power was Gushi Khan, a Khoshut Mongol leader from the tribe that had superseded Altan Khan’s descendants and defeated rival Mongol supporters of the Karma Kagyu school. In 1642, civil strife ended, or at least paused, as Gushi Khan invested the fifth Dalai Lama with both temporal and spiritual control of Tibet at Tashilhunpo. The Karmapa, leader of the Karma Kagyu, had already fled into exile in Bhutan. The new government, known as the Ganden Phodrang, would govern Tibet until China’s occupation in the 1950s. The impression many in the West have of the Tibetan state is that of the Phodrang, created under the fifth Dalai Lama’s rule: it was during his lifetime that the first Jesuit missionaries arrived in Tibet. So central was the Great Fifth to Tibetan stability that when he died in 1682, his chief minister, or desi, Sangye Gyatso, kept the news secret for another fifteen years, while the succession was managed.