The Dalai Lama

by Alexander Norman

  As for looking after his own needs, he sometimes jokes that he would not know how to make a cup of tea. Nor does he cook and, aside from helping make khabse (New Year’s cookies) in the kitchens of the Potala Palace when very young, he has rarely seen the inside of a kitchen. At least when younger, however, he would happily build a fire. But he has always been restricted in what he has done for himself, having been surrounded with staff and attendants since very early childhood. Of these he retains a small community. Within his household, there are around ten, including cooks and orderlies. He has four or five personal attendants, all of them monks, as well as a number of retainers who, because of their age, have only the lightest duties and who remain with him simply as friends. It is to this little community that he turns for conversation and respite at the end of the day. In terms of office staff, they are divided into Tibetan and English sections, most, though not all, of whom are laymen. He employs four (up from only two until comparatively recently) principal private secretaries, who are in turn supported by a small number of subordinates. Although the Dalai Lama appoints these men himself (and, out of consideration for his monastic state, they are all men), their names are submitted to him by the Central Tibetan Administration. Together they constitute his eyes and ears beyond the confines of the Ganden Phodrang, as his home headquarters is known (much as the administration in Washington is known as “the White House”). To be sure, he also listens carefully to what visitors tell him, and he has family and friends from whom he gains intelligence.

  If he is less well informed than he should be on a given topic, it will be because the people surrounding him have failed, for whatever reason, to brief him as fully as they ought. Perhaps inevitably, given the small pool of people on whom he has to rely, this does sometimes happen.

  Besides his permanent staff, there are larger numbers of bodyguards. At home, the Dalai Lama is watched over by a contingent from the Indian army in addition to his Tibetan security. As to his relations with these, he maintains a certain formality except with the most senior of them, but he is considerate of their needs too. He always has a friendly word for those who keep watch at night when he goes for his early morning walk. (He is in the habit of strolling outside, or along hotel corridors, as soon as he has completed his first prayers.) And when traveling, he invariably takes time out to talk to those who serve him.

  Much is made of the Dalai Lama’s sense of humor. I have often thought that Tibetan humor generally is quite similar to the English: ready, often earthy, and with a love of irony and absurdity. The best success I have had with a joke was a very innocent one about a mouse. I would not tell him a vulgar story, however. He would likely think it odd that anyone other than his closest family or colleagues would do such a thing. But he is no spoilsport. He once asked me about the wedding of a young Tibetan official that I had attended—whether anyone had gotten tipsy? When I said yes, he was not at all disapproving. When I learned that, besides nature programs, he would sometimes watch an episode of the perennial English comedy series Dad’s Army, I once sent him a box set, but I do not know whether he ever saw it. I also included a Mr. Bean film, as I thought this would appeal to him.

  Although he does not stand on ceremony—he actively dislikes formality and any sort of pretense—the Dalai Lama is conscious of the dignity of his office. On one occasion when I failed to produce a kathag, the silk offering scarf it is customary to present on meeting, he did not hesitate to reprimand me. On another occasion, I committed one of those faux pas that seemed innocuous to me as a foreigner but which must have caused serious offense. Again, he made me aware of my mistake, but kindly. I do not believe he would have done so if he had not known me as well as he does, however. He is sensitive to others’ feelings. That said, he does sometimes make an artless remark that takes people aback. I recall hearing that he laughingly scolded a fellow writer for having fingernails “that looked like claws.”

  The Dalai Lama is also both affectionate by nature and often tactile. He will pretend to give friends a playful slap on the back of the head. He may clasp your hand and hold it, or nuzzle his cheek against yours, or stroke your beard. Being tactile is a characteristic he shares with his predecessor the Great Thirteenth Dalai Lama, who, having evaded a pursuing Chinese army by fleeing over the mountains into neighboring Sikkim, was rapturously received by the people each according to his or her custom. Some bowed, some offered salaams, some prostrated themselves, but there were three little Scottish girls on ponies—their father was a local missionary—who insinuated themselves into the procession right behind behind him. When he slowed to acknowledge the crowd, they jumped down and ran ahead to await the Dalai Lama at the government guesthouse where he would be staying. As he walked up to it, the Great Thirteenth paused unspeaking to run his fingers through Isa Graham’s flaxen locks, “feeling it between finger and thumb, as one feels silken threads to test their quality and texture.” Disappearing into the building, he came out only a few moments later to feel her hair again while the crowd gasped.

  In considering these personal characteristics, it is vital we do not lose sight of the fact that the Dalai Lama is a monk before he is anything else—and a monk with enormous ritual responsibilities. A weakness of a biography like this is that it cannot avoid giving the impression that the subject’s life is all about his public deeds. In the case of the Dalai Lama, however, it is actually his interior life that is the more important. It is therefore essential that the reader bear in mind the Dalai Lama’s total commitment to his monastic calling. Every day on rising, without fail, he begins with at least three hours of prayer and meditation. Every evening, without fail, he concludes with an hour or more of the same. And during the day, he will pray and study to the extent his schedule allows, very often including when eating. When on retreat, which he undertakes for extended periods of up to three weeks at least once a year, but also for shorter periods of a few days multiple times during the course of the year, he increases his commitment (by rising at 3 A.M. instead of 4:30) and limits his involvement with worldly affairs to an hour or two per day whenever possible.

  I have already mentioned my deficiency in spoken Tibetan. Though functionally literate in the language, I am also reliant on a dictionary or the good offices of some kind person save for the shortest and most basic texts. In some ways, though, this has been a blessing. It has meant that I have come closer to a number of Tibetan friends than might have been the case if I were more self-sufficient. It has also been a constant reminder that I write as an outsider, as an observer, looking in.

  It is arguably less of a failing that I am not a Buddhist. It has enabled me to ask questions and think thoughts that would otherwise have been more difficult, if not impossible. But for this same reason, I have no doubt that some of what I say here will seem to some impertinent and possibly even disrespectful, even though I mean neither impertinence nor disrespect. It is also possible that some of the material may be painful to some of my readers. With respect to this, I take encouragement from the Dalai Lama himself, who, on many occasions, has spoken of the need for fair and balanced assessment of the facts. I trust that I have succeeded; certainly this has been my aim at all times.

  PART I

  ✹

  A Prophecy Fulfilled

  1

  ✵

  The Travails of the Great Thirteenth

  It is tempting to begin our story with the first Saturday in July 1935, when, by the Gregorian calendar, the present Dalai Lama was born. And yet to do so would be to ignore the context of that birth. In a way, it would be more accurate to begin with the evening of the seventeenth of December 1933, and the circumstances surrounding it, when the Great Thirteenth Dalai Lama “withdrew his spirit to the Tushita paradise”—where dwell all those on the point of Enlightenment—as pious tradition expresses the matter. The death of the previous Dalai Lama is what precipitates the birth of the next—even if, as in this case, it happens that more than nine months elapse between the two events.r />
  Yet there is also a case for beginning with the birth of the First Dalai Lama, since, after all, each incarnation is considered to share the same mental continuum. But besides necessitating a long digression into history, this would be problematic. It turns out that the First Dalai Lama was in fact the Third. What happened was that a lama by the name of Sonam Gyatso was summoned by Altan Khan (a descendant of Genghis) to Mongolia, where they met in 1578. Altan, the new strongman of Central Asia, was looking for a way to legitimize his rule, and Sonam Gyatso, as one of the most renowned lamas of the day, looked to be just the person to lend him respectability. Accordingly, Altan, in the idiom of that time, conferred on the Tibetan a number of high-flown titles, one of which pronounced him Dalai Lama. The word dalai is simply a Tibetanization of the Mongolian word for “ocean,” which in turn translates the second half of Sonam Gyatso’s name. Yet because Sonam Gyatso was in fact the third incarnation of a lineage connected with Drepung, Tibet’s largest monastery, it followed that he must, in fact, be the Third Dalai Lama.

  There is an added complication, however. Besides being the third exemplar of the Drepung line, Sonam Gyatso is also considered to have been forty-second in an unbroken lineage going back to the time of the historical Buddha, who lived during the fifth century BCE. It is this lineage that associates the Dalai Lamas with Chenresig, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, whom they are understood to manifest on earth. And yet this lineage is itself antedated by yet another that connects Chenresig with a young prince who lived 990 eons ago. How long is an eon? A disciple is said once to have asked the Buddha the same question. He replied with an analogy: Suppose there were a great mountain of rock, seven miles across and seven miles high, a solid mass without any cracks. At the end of every hundred years, a man might brush it with a fine Benares cloth. That great mountain would be worn away and come to an end sooner than ever an eon. It becomes apparent that, as soon as we start delving into the history of the Dalai Lama, we are faced with the most profound of questions. Indeed, it turns out that, so far as the present Dalai Lama is concerned, we have before us not merely the biography of one man but the story of a being who, from the perspective of his tradition, has been perfected and purified of all defilements through the performance of unnumbered good deeds over countless lifetimes and who manifests here on earth not for his own good but for that of all others. This is, moreover, a story in which the remote past is just the other day and matters supernatural are as real as the natural and as close as right next door.

  To understand the Dalai Lama, therefore, we need to try to catch a glimpse of the world as Tibetan tradition sees it: not as one that began with a single moment of Creation, nor as one where everything might ultimately be expressed as a string of mathematical formulae—a world of atoms and electrons, protons and neutrons. We should not even think of it as a world explicable in terms of quanta and probability. The world as it is understood through the lens of Tibetan tradition did not begin with a big bang which sent the Earth spinning among galaxies and solar systems and ever-expanding space. The world according to Tibetan tradition has no beginning at all. Indeed, the world we see around us exists not on account of atomic or subatomic particles but on account of the accumulated karma of numberless sentient beings over eons of time.

  So let us begin our story not with the birth of the present Dalai Lama, or Lhamo Thondup (the h in Lhamo and in Thondup can both be safely ignored, while the T in Thondup is hard, almost a D), as the infant Fourteenth was known at birth, nor with the death of his predecessor. Let us ignore convention and begin instead with a homely snapshot of the visit of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama to a village in far eastern Tibet one fine day during the spring of 1907.

  Returning from the small monastery of Shartsong, the Precious Protector—this being one of the epithets by which all Dalai Lamas are commonly known by Tibetans—repaired to the grassy summit of a nearby hill together with his companion for the day, Taktser Rinpoché. (Taktser is pronounced roughly Taksé. It means, literally, the Place where the Tiger Roared. Rinpoché, an honorific applied to the highest class of monk, but also to certain places and objects, means something like Precious One.) The Rinpoché, who took his name from the village that stood beneath them, was the most important lama of the local area, which lay at the farthest extreme of the northeastern province of their country, known to Tibetans as Amdo.

  We have grown used to the idea of nation-states with clearly defined borders, but for most of history the demarcation between peoples—even those of different ethnicity—was never so sharply drawn. From the Chinese perspective, at that time Taktser and its environs lay firmly within Qinghai province. But from the Tibetan perspective, for the best part of a millennium (roughly from the seventh to the seventeenth century), the village had been unambiguously part of Tibet. And although at the time of the Great Thirteenth’s visit the Chinese had reasserted their control over the area, the majority of the local population remained Tibetan.

  After commenting favorably on the natural beauty of the landscape, the Dalai Lama expressed his desire to visit Taktser village. So it was that, following a picnic lunch, the Great Thirteenth personally visited each homestead. There, we are told, he delighted the householders by engaging them in conversation and asking innumerable questions about their lives. So moved was one villager that she subsequently took a scoop of ashes from the fire on which the Dalai Lama’s lunch was cooked and buried them in the courtyard in front of the family home.

  At the conclusion of his visit, the Precious Protector announced that he had fallen in love with this pretty little valley and promised one day to return. Alas, he never did. Or at least he did not do so in his guise as Thirteenth Dalai Lama. But it was here that twenty-eight years later the present Dalai Lama was born—into the family in front of whose house those ashes lay buried.

  The circumstances of that fateful picnic back in 1907 were hardly propitious. This was a moment of history when the Chinese empire of the Qing dynasty was tottering toward extinction while the British Empire, although at its peak in terms of power and prosperity, was soon to fade after the maelstrom of the First World War, creating a vacuum that would be filled by the twin terrors of fascistic nationalism and communism. At this moment, the Tibetan leader was in exile from Lhasa, his capital. Three years previously, British troops under the command of Colonel Francis Younghusband had Gatling-gunned their way into central Tibet, causing the Dalai Lama to flee north to Mongolia. This invasion, arguably one of the least glorious feats of arms in the long history of the British Empire, had come about ostensibly as a result of the Dalai Lama’s government refusing to recognize Britain’s protectorate over Sikkim, a small Buddhist kingdom sandwiched between Tibet and India. In fact, it had more to do with British paranoia about the rising power of Russia. That, and the dream one of the Great Thirteenth’s closest advisers had of a pan-Buddhist federation in Central Asia uniting Mongolia, Tibet, and other Buddhist lands under the spiritual leadership of the Dalai Lama and the military protection of the Russian Empire.

  This adviser was Agvan Dorjieff, whose unfamiliar name must have sounded thrillingly sinister to contemporary British ears. When, around the turn of the century, it became clear to Queen Victoria’s ministers that Dorjieff had personal links with the tsar himself, there grew a conviction that Something Must Be Done. Questions were asked in Parliament.* People wrote to newspapers demanding action, while Lord Curzon, viceroy of India, began to plot. For him it was essential that Tibet remain a neutral buffer between the Russian Empire and the northern borders of the British Empire.

  The military campaign that ensued was as swift as it was brutal. The first action occurred on March 31, 1904, and resulted in the expenditure by the British of fifty shrapnel shells, fourteen hundred machine-gun rounds, and 14,351 rounds of rifle shot for no loss of life on the British side but 628 Tibetans slain. Among the dead were two generals and two monk-officials. Even Younghusband admitted it was a massacre. He did, however, admire the Tibetans’ calmn
ess and tenacity under fire. For their part, the Tibetans were astonished not just by the firepower of the inji invaders but also by their code of conduct in war. Never before had they seen their wounded treated in enemy field hospitals and those taken prisoner merely disarmed and given cigarettes and a small sum of money before being set free.

  Less than a fortnight later, Younghusband was camped outside the vast fortress of Gyantse, which lay just a few days’ march from Lhasa. From there he issued an ultimatum to the Dalai Lama, giving the Tibetan leader until June 12 to send competent negotiators or he would resume his march. While they had no interest in conquest, what the British wanted, aside from favorable trading rights, was to compel the Tibetans to accept a British presence in Tibet so that they could monitor and, if necessary, check developments that might prove harmful to India, the jewel in the crown of their empire.

  As for the Dalai Lama, he and his council of ministers, the Kashag, were determined to refuse any contact until the invading army withdrew. Younghusband’s letter, sealed and beribboned in best imperial fashion and carried to Lhasa by a newly released prisoner, came back unopened several days later. The Tibetans calculated that, however mighty the British, they would never be able to take Gyantse fort. The wrathful protectors of the Buddhadharma (the doctrine or Way of the Buddha) would see to that. But Gyantse fell in no time, and Younghusband resumed his march. Hastily appointing a senior monastic official as regent, the Dalai Lama fled north in the direction of Mongolia. He could at least be sure that his co-religionist there, the Jetsundamba Lama, would offer him sanctuary and protection until the British could be got rid of.