The Dalai Lama

by Alexander Norman

  The Dalai Lama’s welcome by the senior-most religious figure in Mongolia was less than generous, however. The Great Thirteenth’s official biography notes a dispute over the relative height of the two men’s thrones when they met, but it is also recorded that the Dalai Lama was appalled to discover that the Mongolian, against the rules of monastic tradition, had taken a wife and was both given to drink and addicted to tobacco. He even had the temerity to smoke in the Dalai Lama’s presence.* This was a major insult. Nonetheless, the Dalai Lama was compelled to remain at the Mongolian hierarch’s headquarters in Urgya (modern-day Ulaanbaatar) for the time being.

  When, in September of that year, Younghusband withdrew from Lhasa, the Tibetans were as amazed as they were relieved. It seems they fully expected a wholesale British takeover on the model of previous invasions of Tibet by Mongolians and Manchus in turn.† But relief turned to dismay when it became clear the British were adamant that the Dalai Lama must remain in exile.

  The Great Thirteenth therefore stayed in Urgya another year. One of the few Europeans who had an audience with him at this time was a Russian explorer, who gives us a description of the Dalai Lama’s demeanor during their conversation. It was, he declares, “one of great calmness.” The Dalai Lama “often looked me straight in the eye, and each time our glances met, he smiled slightly and with great dignity.” When, however, “the matter of the English and their military expedition was touched upon, his expression changed. His face clouded with sorrow, his gaze fell and his voice broke with emotion.”

  Meanwhile in China, Cixi, the Dowager Empress, was similarly devastated by the British seizure of Lhasa. “Tibet,” she wrote, “has belonged to our dynasty for two hundred years. This is a vast area, rich in resources, which has always been coveted by foreigners. Recently, British troops entered it and coerced the Tibetans to sign a treaty. This is a most sinister development . . . [W]e must prevent further damage and salvage the present situation.” When, a year later, rebellion, led by the monks of Batang Monastery, broke out against the Chinese presence in Kham, the second of Tibet’s two eastern provinces, she took this as her cue and dispatched an army under one of her generals, Zhao Erfeng. This was to prove the last major undertaking of the now exhausted Qing dynasty, in power since the mid-seventeenth century.

  The Khampa rebellion took place in 1905, two years before the Precious Protector’s visit to Shartsong. There was at the time a small Chinese outpost in the township of Batang, which stands amid fertile plains irrigated by the upper Yangtze River. This had been established following the invasion of central Tibet, by Mongol descendants of Genghis Khan, when the Manchu emperor of China was called on for help by the Tibetans. The unintended but inevitable consequence of this was that Tibet fell under the sway of the Qing empire.

  From the perspective of the Tibetans, however, the relationship between themselves and the Qing dynasty was to be regarded in terms of the relationship between the Dalai Lama and the reigning emperor. In Tibetan eyes, the arrangement was not a political one. It was, rather, a spiritual relationship whereby the Tibetan hierarch and the Chinese emperor were respectively priest and patron. This was seen in the association between Rolpai Dorje, a high lama close to the Seventh Dalai Lama, and the then emperor, to whom he gave spiritual teachings. (The emperor and the Dalai Lama never met; the relationship was thus enacted by proxy.)

  Understanding how this priest-patron relationship works from the Tibetan point of view is crucial to understanding how Tibetans conceive of what at first glance looks like a straightforward surrender of sovereignty to the Chinese, first under the Yuan dynasty and then again under the Qing. To do so, it is important to realize that from its earliest days, Buddhism has been a religion of renunciation. To begin with, its teachings were preserved and propagated by celibate men, and latterly women, living in forest-based communities away from “civilization.” The Buddha specified that his followers were to be mendicants, to beg their bread rather than to bake it. This meant they were dependent on others for their survival, a dependency that, as the religion spread and the tradition of communal living in monasteries developed, led to the need for patronage on a large scale. This came to be provided by those princely families that had awakened to the truth of the Buddhist teachings. But while the sangha, or monastic community, was materially dependent on this patronage, it was understood that those providing it were similarly dependent on the sangha for their spiritual well-being. And since, according to the Buddhist analysis, spiritual well-being takes precedence over material well-being, the sangha took at least theoretical precedence over the royal house—even if, of course, the religious community could not survive without its patronage.

  When today the Chinese government points to the historic ties between China and Tibet and claims that these show that Tibet is, and has long been, an “inalienable part” of China, it sees only the political arrangement whereby, among other things, the emperor stationed his troops there. It ignores totally the spiritual dimension, which for Tibetans is of far greater importance.

  This said, when the monks of Batang Monastery rose up against the Chinese troops in 1905, they could well have been accused of forsaking their own side of the bargain by taking the lead in a ferocious bloodletting. Indeed, so grotesque are the accounts of the atrocities they committed that it seems hard to believe they are not exaggerated. The sources, though varied, are in such agreement, however, that it is clear they are not.

  The uprising targeted not only the Chinese but also a small mission operated by two French priests of the Roman Catholic Church. The priests and their converts were all murdered. Subsequently the unrest spread across the neighboring countryside. This included a small Sino-Tibetan trading station where another missionary community had taken root and which was at the time served by two more French priests. Staying with “the hospitable and venerable” chief of the mission at the time was the renowned Scottish botanist and plant hunter George Forrest. On hearing that the Chinese garrison stationed nearby had been “wiped out almost to a man,” the three foreigners, together with their small community of converts, fled by moonlight. The next day, one of the priests was shot, “riddled with poisoned arrows . . . the Tibetans immediately rushing up and finishing him off with their huge double-handed swords.” The remainder of the “little band, numbering about 80, were picked off one by one, or captured, only 14 escaping.” One who almost succeeded in evading their attackers, a band of some thirty monks, was Père Dubernard, the other priest, but he was

  eventually run to ground in a cave . . . His captors broke both arms above and below the elbow, tied his hands behind his back, and in this condition forced him to walk back to the blackened site of [the mission]. There they fastened him to a post and subjected him to the most brutal humiliation; amongst the least of his injuries being the extraction of his tongue and eyes and the cutting off of his ears and nose. In this horrible condition he remained for the space of three days, in the course of which his torturers cut a joint off his fingers and toes each day. When on the point of death, he was treated in the same manner as [his fellow priest], the portions of the bodies being distributed amongst the various lamaseries [monasteries] in the region, whilst the two heads were stuck on spears over the lamaserie of the town.

  Those in charge of the Catholic mission believed that the atrocities followed specific instructions by the Dalai Lama himself, but this seems unlikely in the extreme, given what we know of the Great Thirteenth’s attitude toward both capital punishment and the practice of mutilation. He accepted that capital punishment was in certain circumstances a regrettable necessity, but in one of his earliest decrees he had reserved it for crimes of treason alone. He also decreed the abolition of mutilation, and while he permitted flogging, he much preferred restorative justice where possible. On one occasion he ordered a disgraced official to plant a thousand willow trees, on another that the guilty party should repair a stretch of road.

  What the destruction of the Catholic mission and the
attempt to kill Forrest tells us, therefore, is that the monasteries were often a law unto themselves. It also tells us that if our image of pre-Communist Tibet is one of monks serenely meditating in the mystic fastness of their mountain retreats, we must revise it. But the monks’ uprising also highlights graphically the intense feeling that Tibetans had toward outside interference, whether it came from missionaries wanting to preach the gospel or from Chinese wanting to “pacify” them. All and any intruders were unwelcome. Their overriding motive was to protect the Buddhadharma, which they feared—rightly as it turned out—would be harmed if outsiders (that is, non-Buddhists) gained admittance to their country. Indeed, when the first Christian missionaries came to Lhasa back in the eighteenth century, they had been warmly welcomed. Their personal morality and keen interest in Buddhism recommended them as worthy spiritual seekers. It was only gradually that the sangha came to realize that despite their friendliness, their high culture, and their manifest sympathy for the poor, these foreigners were not merely interested in learning about Buddhism but were in fact intent on destroying it through conversion.

  In Batang, the Chinese amban, or governor, met a fate similar to the missionaries’. The monks of a nearby monastery succeeded in capturing him and, having flayed his skin, they stuffed it with grass and paraded it around town, subsequently using this disgusting image first in a ritual for banishing evil and then for target practice within the monastery, before finally trampling it underfoot.

  When the Dowager Empress’s general arrived in the local area, the reprisals began at once. Desiring to make himself feared by the Tibetans, he immediately ordered three prisoners to be placed in a cauldron of “cold water, tied hand and foot, but with their heads propped up.” A fire was then “built under the cauldron and slowly the water was brought to a boil.” Some prisoners “had oil poured upon them and [were] burned alive. Others had their hands cut off and sent back as a warning to those from whom they came. Others [were] taken and, with a yak hitched to each arm and each leg . . . torn in pieces.”

  Informing the populace that henceforth they should consider themselves subjects of the Qing emperor, General Zhao ordered not only that they were to wear Chinese dress, but also that the men should adopt the hated Manchu queue (pigtail) and desist from sporting the traditional Khampa topknot. This, often dashingly threaded with strands of red-dyed wool, made them “resemble living demons” according to him. The presence of Butcher Zhao, as he was quickly named, “only made confusion worse confounded,” in Forrest’s account, and it took almost a year and many more atrocities before Zhao succeeded in forcing a peace. It took him all that time to starve into submission the three thousand monks of Chatreng Sampeling Monastery, who had taken to arms with especial ferocity. But when they finally surrendered, he had no compunction in executing every last one of them.

  Unexpectedly, Zhao was not without his allies among the local Tibetan population. According to one witness, “in order to curry favour with the Chinese,” members of the local Tibetan population brought numbers of their own countrymen in to be beheaded. “Heads fell every day, and so many bodies lay in the streets of Batang that at times the dogs feasted. No one dared touch or bury them, for fear they would be considered friends of the dead and in turn suffer the death penalty.”

  By the time Zhao had completed his “pacification” of Kham, the Dalai Lama, much disturbed by the news reaching him from the south, especially the suggestion that the general had soled his soldiers’ boots with pages of scripture torn from the monasteries’ holy books, had left his unwelcoming host in Urgya and relocated to Kumbum Monastery some five hundred miles to the north of Batang and its environs. Kumbum was especially important to the Precious Protector because of its association with Je Tsongkhapa. It was he who had been the progenitor of the reformed Gelug school of Buddhism to which the Dalai Lamas have all belonged. Kumbum was also, as it remains, Amdo’s most important religious center, housing in its heyday several thousand monks.

  By remarkable coincidence, John Weston Brooke, an English explorer, and the Reverend Ridley, yet another missionary, were present at Kumbum on the day in late October 1906 when the Dalai Lama arrived there. Describing the occasion, they inform us that the Dalai Lama’s entourage was preceded by a Chinese band which made a “shrieking” and “diabolical” noise on the approach to Kumbum, “five or six men . . . shuffling along in a gait that was neither a walk nor a run. They were dressed as they liked, played as they liked, and shuffled as they liked.” Behind these musicians came the imperial standard bearers, in the same disorder, followed by Tibetan outriders “dressed in wonderful long yellow coats and curious hats made of gilded wood, riding rough, high-spirited ponies . . . Suddenly,” they report, “a distinguished-looking Tibetan galloped out of the crowd and shouted to the onlookers to ‘koutou.’” The Englishmen dismounted from their ponies but “refused to do more, so [the Tibetan official] left us to harangue the Chinese, who were quite indifferent and only laughed and said rude things.”

  Ridley and Brooke were subsequently granted an audience with the Precious Protector, though it could hardly be counted a success. They found themselves quite unable to persuade him that the British were, as Ridley claimed, “a kind people,” still less that if he “would come to India and meet with them and learn to know them, he would not mind their coming to his country.” Instead, Brooke claimed that he had “never seen such a hard, expressionless face as that of the Dalai Lama.”

  The description seems unfair. It was too much to have expected the Precious Protector to be wholly gracious, given that, as Englishmen, the two visitors stood for the enemy who had deprived the Tibetan hierarch of his throne. Besides, we have it on the authority of several other European visitors that the Great Thirteenth was by no means wholly unbending. Years later he formed an unlikely friendship with the British political officer for Sikkim, Sir Charles Bell, who confirms the Dalai Lama’s habitually stern expression but notes also the “welcoming smile that softened his features” whenever they met for talks.

  The Dalai Lama remained at Kumbum for more than a year. As if the horrific news of Zhao’s scripture-trampling marauders in the south were not enough, the Great Thirteenth also had to contend with the lack of discipline he found among the monastic community at Kumbum itself. “Many monks,” we are told, “had taken to drinking, smoking and gambling.” He therefore made it his business to renew respect for the vinaya, the monastic code that regulates both the spiritual and the administrative life of the sangha. The Dalai Lama also reinvigorated the academic side of Kumbum’s monastic life, paying particular attention to the monks’ proficiency in debate. This might have caused resentment as, typically, the monasteries firmly resisted any interference, no matter from whom. But such was the Tibetan leader’s prestige, and such his personal magnetism, that he succeeded without alienating his hosts. Indeed, so deeply venerated was he that, day after day throughout his stay at Kumbum, he received countless pilgrims from far and wide, all seeking audiences with him. He would frequently bestow his blessing on crowds of thousands, while to visiting monks he gave spiritual teachings and initiations, ordaining many hundreds. Though it is true that some of Kumbum’s officials grumbled at the expense of maintaining him, for as long as he remained with them, the Great Thirteenth enjoyed the highest esteem of the local people.

  To be sure, the Dalai Lama’s time at this, the greatest of Amdo’s religious foundations, was not all gloom. In any case, it is pleasant to think of him enjoying at least some respite from his many difficulties when he went on pilgrimage that fine spring day to Shartsong Monastery and stopped on his way back to give his blessing to the little village of Taktser.

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  A Mystic and a Seer: The Regency Established

  The Great Thirteenth’s promise to return one day to Taktser was duly recorded by his officials and then, no doubt, completely forgotten. Something of his relationship with the village was preserved when, in middle age, the Precious
Protector was asked to confirm the identity of the new incarnation of his friend Taktser Rinpoché, who had recently died. This he did, and the boy entered the monastery at Shartsong. But the time that elapsed between the Great Thirteenth’s visit to Taktser in 1907 and his rebirth there in 1935 was so full of incident it is hardly surprising that it was not until long afterwards that anyone noticed the significance of his promise to return.

  It was similarly not until many years later that anyone saw the significance of another seemingly trivial deed of the Great Thirteenth. Sometime during 1920, when repair work to the eastern wing of the Potala Palace—the magnificent thousand-chambered seat of government and principal residence of the Dalai Lamas—was being undertaken, the Great Thirteenth gave instructions for a blue bird to be painted on the wall of a staircase that led to the north side of the West Chamber on the floor above. He also called for a white dragon to be painted on its eastern wall. This, it is said, perplexed everyone because there was neither scriptural nor iconographic warrant for such images in these locations. A strict canon governed all forms of representation and their placement, although of course the authority of the Dalai Lama would certainly trump such considerations. It was not until long after that anyone realized the significance of the images. The blue bird represented the year (that of the Water Bird) during which the Great Thirteenth would depart this life (1933). The white dragon indicated the year of the Iron Dragon (1940), in which his successor would be enthroned.

  It is notable that high lamas sometimes furnish explicit details of both their death and their next incarnation, including when and where they will be reborn. Occasionally the most highly evolved masters go so far as to give not only the name of the infant into which their stream of consciousness will pass but also those of its parents. But that level of detail is usually available only after intensive investigation, while here, the choice of imagery at the Potala sounds more spontaneous.