The Dalai Lama

by Alexander Norman

  The skeptical reader will doubtless see this whole account as a classic example of myth-making. There is even some support for this view from within the tradition itself. The Great Fifth Dalai Lama—whose birth is said to have been accompanied by a rain of flower-shaped snowflakes—wrote disparagingly in his autobiography about the selection procedure he himself underwent. In his case it was less formal, with only his teacher present. When he was shown the “images and rosaries,” he could, by his own account, “utter no words” of recognition. Nonetheless, when his teacher went out of the room, the Dalai Lama heard him say, “‘I am absolutely convinced he recognised the objects.’” To be fair, the present Dalai Lama disputes a straightforward reading of this passage, cautioning that the Great Fifth had a “very sarcastic” style of writing which ought not to be taken at face value.

  We should remember, however, that the word “myth” has come to denote something that “didn’t really happen” and has thus become a generally pejorative term. Yet this development rests on the assumption that the only events that can be securely known to be true are those that can be verified empirically. The point to be borne in mind is that from the Buddhist perspective, the way things really are is quite different from the way science tells us they are. Science leaves out karma (the fruit, or consequences to us and to our future selves, of our actions), and it leaves out the supernatural. What looks, from a modern perspective, to be “mythological” and therefore not actually or even possibly true is considered by the tradition to be both possibly and in many cases actually true.*

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  The View from the Place of the Roaring Tiger: Tibet’s Nameless Religion

  It is often said that the present Dalai Lama comes from a humble peasant background, but this is not strictly accurate. According to family legend, his ancestors served as soldiers in the army of Tibet’s greatest monarch, the seventh-century King Songtsen Gampo. Subsequently, they lived for many generations as nomads, herding their flocks from place to place before eventually settling in the region of Taktser. By the time of the Manchu conquest of China and the Tibetan borderlands in the mid-seventeenth century, the family had become relatively prosperous, and for the next two hundred years that remained the case. But then, toward the end of the nineteenth century, disaster struck. The village was destroyed during a rebellion against Manchu rule, and the family, made destitute, was reduced to living in “grinding poverty” in the caves of the surrounding hills.

  It was not until one of its members was recognized as the reincarnation of a famous lama that the family’s fortunes revived. This was Taktser Rinpoché, the man with whom the Great Thirteenth shared the picnic. (He was also the great-uncle of the present Dalai Lama.) Because of the continued danger, the young prodigy was taken as a child to Mongolia to be educated. There he gained a reputation as a great teacher and, returning home in middle age, is said to have brought with him a vast fortune, including ten thousand camels. This is surely an exaggeration, but as a result of their now famous scion’s generosity, the lama’s relatives were able to buy back the land they had lost and to build a house that, in the words of one of the Dalai Lama’s older brothers, was “one of the best in the village . . . a new Chinese style home that was large and spacious.” The family into which the present Dalai Lama was born was thus one of petty landowners. They were not aristocrats to be sure, but neither were they members of the very large class of people that was directly dependent on the monastic or aristocratic estates. Employing three servants (one of them Chinese, another a Hui Muslim), they owned “over fifty sheep, a number of yaks, and several dzomo” (a female cross between a yak and a cow).

  Entered from the lee side, the new Dalai Lama’s family home was a miniature fortress built around all four sides of its internal courtyards, at the center of which stood a pole hung with prayer flags bleached by the sun and torn by the constant breeze blowing in off the nearby mountain range. There were no windows in the outer walls, however, and the few internal openings were covered with rice paper, not glass. The southern wing of the house included a dog kennel and a sheep pen, while the northern wing contained the family chapel next to the best room—the room in which visitors were received—and the main bedroom. The east wing was taken up by the kitchen, which was divided into two equal halves, and included the main living space. There was a large stove and a tub for water; one side of the space had a wooden floor while the other was of compacted earth. The west wing served as a cow barn and stable, with a storeroom and a guest room adjacent. Yet it was not in the guest room but in the stable, alongside the cattle, that the children were brought into the world. The first to survive was Tsering Dolma, a daughter born in 1917. She was followed by three sons—Taktser Rinpoché (1922), Gyalo Thondup (1928), and Lobsang Samten (1933)—before the Precious Protector, who was born, according to the Tibetan (lunar) calendar, on the fifth day of the fifth month in the (female) Wood Pig year of the sixteenth Rabjung calendrical cycle—or July 6, 1935, according to the Western calendar.

  Up at cockcrow in the dark hour before dawn, mother to light the fire, father to take the horses to water, the family lived, until they moved to Lhasa when Lhamo Thondup was officially acclaimed, the rugged but satisfying life of pastoralists everywhere. At the time of the boy’s birth, the village comprised some thirty homesteads and so, we can assume, had a population approaching two hundred. Because children in such communities were seen as a boon, not a burden, families tended to be large—while there was no question of grandparents moving out. Yet childhood was something of a contest with nature, and life tended not to be long. With no doctors within many days’ walk, still less a hospital, it is little wonder that of the sixteen children the Dalai Lama’s mother bore, only seven survived into adulthood. Nonetheless, the eldest recalled in his autobiography that he and his siblings lived a “happy and contented life in our remote village,” adding that they “found it strange when the occasional travellers passing through found it necessary to express sympathy with us on account of what they perceived to be our hard lot.”

  For food, the main staple was tsampa, roasted barley flour made edible by adding either tea, milk, or chang (barley beer) and kneaded into small balls in a bowl. Another staple was potato, which featured at most meals, but legumes were scarce except in their brief season. There was fresh meat, though in the autumn months only, this being the time when the animals were ready for slaughter. For the rest of the year, dried meat had to suffice. The only exception to this rule was if a beast died unexpectedly. When an animal was brought to the table, it was honored by being consumed in its entirety. Everything that could be eaten was eaten; anything not edible was put to use. The intestines, carefully drawn, were used as casings for sausage and stuffed with congealed blood and gobbets of fat, and tsampa flour. Brains and brawn, tripe, liver, and lights (or lungs) were all washed, seasoned, and roasted. The lights were considered a special delicacy, while some of the tripe was set aside and used for storing butter. The kidneys, nestled in sheaths of fat, were cooked in the glowing embers of the hearth. The trotters too made good eating, while the horn was used for making glue.

  In the summer, raspberries and strawberries and bilberries could be picked wild in the woods nearby, while from the family vegetable plot came radishes and other salad foods and wheat for milling. Peas were grown for fodder, and there was dairy produce aplenty. But above all, in this household there were baked goods in abundance: deep-fried khabse cookies and plump loaves of bread, rolls fat with butter and sugar and raisins, and sticky dumplings soft as pillows, all made in the Amdo style. Even today, family members recall with wistful pride the delicious confections of the gyalyum chenmo (literally, the Great Royal Mother).

  Because the household economy depended for its health on the produce grown and the livestock reared, with the occasional sale or purchase of a horse, every storm rolling in from Kyeri, the mountain in the shadow of which the village stood, was watched with apprehension. A single hailstorm
could destroy the labor of many weeks, and the house had to be battened down every time. Yet in spite of the frequent violence of the climate, sheep and goats, pigs, yaks, dri (the female counterpart of a yak), and dzo lived alongside the horses and the human folk in symbiotic kinship. Apart from the weather (the winters were bitter, and snow came often), the only natural enemies universally acknowledged were the wolf and the hu-hu—bands of marauding men of the local Hui population.

  Though wolves rarely attacked people, a wolf pack could easily carry off a flock of sheep or, on occasion, bring down cattle and sometimes even horses. No surprise, then, that the man who came home with a wolf carcass was considered a hero, and wolf hunting was an important activity, though other predators—mainly foxes and lynx—were hunted as well.

  But the hu-hu were more to be feared than any wolf pack. Descendants of Central Asian traders who had settled in China during the Middle Ages, the Hui constituted the principal ethnic group, other than the Tibetans, settled in the region. Every so often they would conduct raids among the Tibetan community, scouring the countryside for plunder. Then as now, the Tibetans lived mostly in the more remote areas, while the Hui—still for the most part traders—were found in and around the larger settlements, notably Siling, where there was a large mosque. And while on the whole the Tibetans lived quietly off the land, the Hui, who were more directly exposed to the greater Chinese economy, were more restive. Especially during the declining years of the Qing dynasty and then, more recently, during the Chinese civil war which broke out during the late 1920s, conditions were harsh, and from time to time unrest led to looting. The situation was complicated by the fact that, following the fall of the Qing, the Hui elite had joined forces with the Chinese Nationalist Guomindang party. The Hui leader Ma Bufang was one of their number, and it was his soldiers who, not long before the birth of the Dalai Lama, had fought a battle with the Tibetans and slaughtered not only the combatants but their children too. Joseph Rock, the Austro-American explorer, writing in National Geographic, described how their little heads were “strung about the walls of the Moslem [Hui] garrison like a garland of flowers.”

  Yet if wolves and marauding gangs were a perennial threat to the family’s security, a threat in many ways still more serious was that posed by entities of quite a different order. This threat was described by the Dalai Lama’s mother in her autobiography, where she speaks of the visits of a kyirong, a type of ghost that can change its form at will. The first haunting the Great Mother recalls occurred when she lay gravely ill. On this occasion, the kyirong manifested as a young girl who appeared in a dream, but who remained visible after the Great Mother awoke. The dream girl held out a bowl of what at first sight seemed to be Chinese tea, but which turned out to be blood. As the patient tried to sit up in bed, the ghost “slipped to the door, laughing all the while, and disappeared.”

  On another occasion, the Dalai Lama’s mother was sitting beside her ailing newborn. All of a sudden, she heard first the heavy footsteps of the kyirong on the roof of the house, then the sound of it descending to the door and unlatching it. The kyirong, she wrote, came in “and stood beside me.” Thinking that the ghost—the appearance of which is not described—could not harm her child, the gyalyum chenmo took the baby up in her arms. But then the lamps, which she had just lit, flickered and went out. The next thing she knew, the child was crying on the floor ten feet away, though the “lamps were once more lit, and I was still sitting upright. I was not aware how my child had got to the floor.” For the next fourteen days, the baby was severely ill, “his eyes swollen out of all proportion. He cried constantly, and nothing I could do would comfort him. In the mornings I would notice bloody scratch marks in and around his eyes, and there were bloodstains on his cheeks. Three weeks later his crying ceased, but he seemed lifeless. When he could finally open his eyes, to my horror [they] had turned from brown to blue. He had become blind.”

  The kyirong was not finished with the family yet, however, and appeared some time later in the form of an old man. After this visit, her baby’s eyes became swollen again while an older daughter’s eyes also became infected. This time, the son’s illness was fatal; he died just past his first birthday.

  These stories are worth relating, as they give a clear picture of the world into which the Dalai Lama was born. It was a world enchanted. Not enchanted in the optimistic Disney sense of frolicking fairy princes and princesses, but in the darker sense of the visible world possessed by a realm of beings only rarely seen. In this conception of nature, humans are largely unwelcome intruders on earth, who must contend with a hidden host, the jealous guardians of territory considered by these entities as theirs by right. It was a world that would have been familiar to countless millions of people elsewhere at this time. Among the country dwellers of Ireland, for example, the aes sidhe, the “Fair Folk,” were still well attested, and even today we hear of Laplanders sure that their farms are guarded by trolls.

  If there is a major difference between the folk beliefs of Tibetans and those of other peoples, it is only the strength of the hold they had—and to some extent continue to have—over the popular imagination. Many scholars speak of these folk beliefs in terms of Tibet’s “nameless religion.” It is not just that houses are haunted by shape-shifting ghosts. Every feature of the landscape and every creature dwelling within it falls under the aegis of some sprite or spirit or deity. Even the bolts of lightning in a storm were said to issue from the mouths of celestial dragons. Every mountain, every lake, every river, every stream and waterfall, the forests, the wildernesses, even each individual tree and shrub belongs in some sense to one or more god or godling. So too does every valley, field, and pathway, not to mention every town, village, and even monastery. If that were not enough, the very stars and planets above have their attendant deity. Father Desideri, an eighteenth-century Jesuit missionary to Tibet, wrote of the “dreadful and tedious solitude” of the territory he crossed on his way to Lhasa. He was quite wrong. For Tibetans, their country, so barren and empty to the European eye, positively brims with life unseen. There are minor deities (known as lha) in every strange rock formation, every cave, and every cavern. Even the tools of agriculture, the implements of the kitchen, the saddles and tack of horses, the harness of yak, dri, and mule have their presiding spirits. And woe betide anyone who neglects to appease the hearth gods. For the nomadic population of Tibet (much smaller in size today than it used to be, but perhaps great enough to account for half the country’s total population* during the period in question), these hearth gods are of particular importance. They are “strange jealous creatures [that] swarm at the rising of the smoke in a new tent, and take proprietary though at times perverse interest in the new hearth. Because of their displeasure, children die or are born dead. Their frightful blows bring blindness, strange swellings and the swift rotting of anthrax . . . What tent can hope for peace if the hearthstone spirits are angry?”

  There is, then, no place or object that does not fall within the purview of some unseen being which, like the kyirong, may take on outward form from time to time and as occasion demands—with which human beings must contend: entities like the shi dre, the gson dre, and the rollang. The shi dre is the form most often assumed by victims of calamity such as violent death—whether by rockfall or by murder. In the latter case, the deceased may pursue the perpetrator of the crime relentlessly until he too comes to a hideous end. The gson dre are, by contrast, a kind of spirit whose interest is restricted to women, mainly at night, whose bodies they inhabit and whose actions they control. This demon’s hapless victims become its plaything, bringing misfortune and lingering disease—no doubt often venereal—to those women it possesses. The rollang are similar to the zombies and undead familiar to the Western imagination. These take possession of a corpse at the very moment when the spirit animating it departs and, having done so, wreak havoc among the living.

  Some of these unseen beings are more powerful than others. The mountain gods, for example
, are of great importance in that they command the loyalty of many, while the influence of the hearth gods extends only to those who come into contact with the hearth’s fire. The influence of the lu, or naga, is restricted to bodies of water. Nonetheless, in every case, because of their nature, anyone wishing to live in peace must perforce enter into relationship with these beings. Similarly, anyone wishing to embark on some enterprise, whether it be a journey by land or a river crossing or the building of a house or the pitching of a tent, must take care to identify on whose territory they will be encroaching and take appropriate measures to appease and propitiate them.

  In most cases, offerings are made—whether of food, money, or prayer. For propitiation of the mountain gods, it is usual to build cairns—sometimes made of animal horns and generally adorned with prayer flags—and, one day in the year, to offer weapons. To the hearth deities are made daily offerings of tsampa flour. In the past, some of the more powerful deities would demand blood sacrifice, though since the advent of the Buddhadharma, superior methods using only symbolic sacrifice are now employed—and to better effect. A highly trained adept may call on the gods to produce rain or to avert hailstorms. But some of the more troublesome minor beings, such as the kyirong, can be extremely difficult to deal with. Certain kinds of wood smoke can be helpful, especially that of the juniper tree or of particular types of rhododendron. In some circumstances, the performance of meritorious deeds, such as redeeming animals destined for slaughter, may prove effective. In others, a scapegoat may be required. Tibet’s first Western-trained physician, Dr. T. Y. Pemba, describes in his autobiography how, when he fell sick with a mysterious illness at the age of around thirteen, his family called on the services of some monks from their local monastery. For several days they recited prayers and chanted, but when the boy’s condition continued to deteriorate, his parents resorted to more drastic measures. They bought a sheep that was destined for slaughter—the choice of animal being determined by the fact that the boy had been born in a Sheep year, reckoned according to the Tibetan lunar calendar. It was then painted and kept “almost as a pet.” When this, too, failed to bring about any improvement, a ritual using a human scapegoat was performed. This entailed finding another youth to participate, since, Dr. Pemba explains, “it was believed that in this ritual, my disease would be transferred to the other boy.” For this reason, “only a very poor family was likely to allow one of its children to take part.”