The Dalai Lama

by Alexander Norman

  Much has been made of Harrer’s dubious past (which forced a re-edit of the film based on his travelogue of the same name, Seven Years in Tibet). That he was not a dedicated Nazi (he claimed to have worn his uniform only once, on the day he married his first wife) is attested to by the fact that, having escaped from a British internment camp at Dehra Dun in northern India together with fellow Austrian Peter Aufschnaiter, he decided to try for Lhasa rather than proceed to Japan (Germany’s ally at the time). He was an adventurer, not an ideologue. A stronger case can be made for a link between the Nazis and Reting Rinpoché, at least when he was regent. During the 1930s, the Ahnenerbe, the institute founded by Heinrich Himmler to give academic respectability to the party’s racial ideology, sent a total of three expeditions to Tibet, the last of them attending the 1939 New Year celebrations in Lhasa. The purpose of their visit was to determine the truth of a claim that the Tibetans were in fact descendants of a lost Aryan tribe. Reting Rinpoché was on good terms with the expedition leader, Ernst Schaefer, who was well liked by Himmler. All five members of his team were Nazi ideologues, and one was subsequently convicted of being an accessory to the murder of eighty-six Jews at Auschwitz. A famous photograph shows Schaefer and his men posing with senior Tibetan officials in front of a swastika flag and two SS pennants they had put on display at a dinner party in Lhasa. Some see in this evidence of an unambiguous link between esoteric Vajrayana Buddhism and Nazism.

  After several unsuccessful attempts, Harrer, together with Aufschnaiter, had reached Lhasa during the middle of January 1946 following two years of grueling travel.* Given that the prohibition against foreigners entering Tibet without government permission was rigorously enforced, this was a very considerable feat.

  En route, the two of them had passed themselves off variously as itinerant dentists, as traders, and as the advance party of an important foreign dignitary. Having survived more than one serious attempt on their lives, they were given a cordial welcome in Lhasa by the aristocratic family whose house they chanced to enter on their arrival in the capital. Eight days later, by which time they had been visited by many of the highest-ranking laity—including an army general eager to learn all he could about the German tank commander Erwin Rommel—they received word that the Dalai Lama’s family wished to meet them. But it was to be more than three years before Harrer’s first meeting with the Dalai Lama himself. In the meantime, he and Aufschnaiter had to apply for asylum. At first their application was refused, and it was only thanks to Aufschnaiter’s engineering skills that they were eventually allowed to stay. Subsequently Aufschnaiter worked on a hydroelectric power project and helped plan the city’s first sewage works, while Harrer, who had good English and was an accomplished lensman, soon found himself in demand as a translator and occasional court photographer.

  Eventually, Harrer was approached by Lobsang Samten—by this time serving as Lord Chamberlain—with a request to build a movie theater for the Dalai Lama in the grounds of the Norbulingka Palace. As the Dalai Lama recounts in his autobiography, one of the things he had found among the belongings of the Great Thirteenth was an old film projector, which, astonishingly, by taking it apart and carefully reassembling it, he had returned to working order. He was now eager to put it to use.

  When Harrer and the Dalai Lama did finally make each other’s acquaintance in the second half of 1949, it was clearly only after a carefully orchestrated campaign. Harrer reports of their first meeting that the hurried blessing the Dalai Lama bestowed on him “seemed less like the ceremonial laying-on of hands than an impetuous expression of feeling on the part of a boy who had at last got his way.” This enthusiasm was in marked contrast to the coldness with which the monastic officials surrounding the Precious Protector acknowledged Harrer’s greeting.

  In his travelogue Seven Years in Tibet, Harrer includes a chapter portentously titled “Tutor to the Dalai Lama.” This is an overstatement of their relationship. Although Harrer and the teenaged Dalai Lama met more or less weekly over a period of a little more than six months, their time together was entirely informal. It was a friendly, sometimes joshing relationship—the Dalai Lama nicknamed Harrer gopse, or “straw head”—albeit one they both took seriously. They remained friends until the end of Harrer’s long life.

  It was helpful that Harrer was as down-to-earth as his protégé. The Dalai Lama, impatient with the protocol that surrounded him, and already conscious that the religious education he was getting was inadequate to the political role he must soon undertake, was eager to learn as much as he could from his new friend. “He seemed to me like a person who for years brooded in solitude over different problems,” Harrer recalled, “and now that he at last had someone to talk to, wanted to know all the answers at once.”

  Harrer quickly found that, besides being boundlessly curious, the youngster was also intensely serious. The Dalai Lama soon sorted the eighty films in his collection into those that were educational in some way and those that were mere entertainment. The former he watched more than once—a documentary about Mahatma Gandhi being a favorite—while the others he set aside. And when he asked a question, he expected a full and reasoned answer, such that Harrer had to take “the utmost trouble to treat every [one of them] seriously and scientifically.” Yet it was always clear where the Dalai Lama’s true priorities lay. He would invariably break off their conversations in plenty of time for his official studies, as he did not like to keep his real tutors waiting—any more than he liked to be kept waiting himself. On one occasion Harrer was ten minutes late for an appointment and was scolded for his temerity.

  The picture of the young Dalai Lama that emerges from Harrer’s account is one of a highly intelligent, inquisitive, studious, serious-minded yet good-humored young man with a keen sense of his responsibilities and a nature as affectionate as his mind was open and eager. “Sometimes,” recounts Harrer, “he came running across the garden to meet me, beaming with happiness and holding out his hand.” Regarding Harrer himself, despite the strange irony that the incarnation of the Bodhisattva of Compassion was tutored by a former SS man, we have no reason to suppose that Hugh Richardson spoke in bad faith when giving his assessment of Harrer, even if it does seem somewhat extravagant. He once said* that, if there was only one other person left on earth, he would have wanted that person to be Harrer. As for the thought that Harrer must have known about the Holocaust, we have similarly no reason to suppose he had any inkling of it until after the war. He left Germany in 1939, while the Wannsee Conference that inaugurated the Final Solution did not take place until January 1942. This does not touch the question of whether the Dalai Lama’s friend was an anti-Semite, surely a precondition of membership in the SS. It seems that, at the very least, he must have been when he joined, even if fellow mountaineer Reinhold Messner is right in believing that Harrer’s experiences in Tibet caused him to change his mind. It is also undeniable that Tibet’s esoteric Buddhism speaks loudly to the romantic strain in fascist ideology. And if what chiefly motivated Harrer was curiosity and love of adventure, it is difficult to imagine that his dream of reaching Lhasa was not partly inspired by fantasies about what he would find there.

  When, at the Dalai Lama’s request, Harrer began to teach him English, the Austrian was surprised to discover that the youngster had already taught himself the Roman alphabet and would transcribe the pronunciation of words “in elegant Tibetan characters.” Harrer was duly impressed. “What versatility!” exclaimed the Austrian. “Strenuous religious studies, tinkering with complicated mechanical appliances, and now modern languages!” Together they would “listen to the English news on a portable radio and [take] advantage of the passages that were spoken at dictation speed.”

  As well as wanting to learn English from him, the Dalai Lama tasked Harrer with teaching him the rudiments of arithmetic and geography (his favorite subject, though even more than classroom study, he enjoyed working on mechanical devices). Math he did not take to, but he was astonished, Harrer tells us—j
ust as many Westerners today are astonished—to hear that Tibet was as large as it is. And he was delighted to discover that the highest mountain in all the world rose on its southern extremity. Besides instruction in these subjects, the young man was also eager to learn about current affairs and modern developments like the jet engine and the atom bomb. It turned out that the Dalai Lama was familiar with all the different types of aircraft and armored vehicles used by the various powers in the recently concluded war. He was also familiar with the names of the great men of the day—Churchill, Eisenhower, Molotov. Yet it was apparent that he often “did not know how persons and events were connected with each other.” As to any concerns the Austrian may have had about his young friend’s capacity to absorb all this new information, “he continually astonished me,” Harrer recalled, “by his powers of comprehension, his pertinacity and his industry.”

  If Harrer’s picture of the young Dalai Lama shows him not to have been so very different from any other highly intelligent teenager of his time—or indeed of any time—there was one thing that might at first strike us as unusual: the Precious Protector had not a trace of skepticism with respect to the religion he was being brought up in. Not for him the wrestling with faith of Saint Augustine. According to Harrer, the Dalai Lama was, for example, “convinced that by virtue of his faith and by performing the prescribed rites he would be able to make things happen in faraway places.” Moreover, “when he had made sufficient progress, he would send me there and direct me from Lhasa” by means of telepathy. As we shall see, the Dalai Lama’s conviction that the supernatural realm is not imaginary is one that he maintains to this day.

  10

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  “Shit on their picnic!”: China Invades, 1949–50

  While the young Dalai Lama was learning all he could about the modern world from Harrer, following the end of the world war, events within it were reaching a climax. In China, the Communists were moving ever closer to victory. When Ma Bufang, the Muslim warlord who had demanded ransom for the Dalai Lama’s release, lost his headquarters to the Reds during the summer of 1949, it was clear to Tibetans that China’s capital must soon fall. It remained only for Chiang Kai-shek to withdraw to Taiwan before, on October 1, Chairman Mao declared the founding of the People’s Republic of China. This brought to an end more than twenty years of strife, during the course of which countless millions had died. But while the Communists’ victory caused deep uneasiness on the part of the Tibetan government, the regent, Taktra Rinpoché, offered no response beyond ordering the Three Seats to begin the ritual chanting of the scriptures.

  For his part, the young Dalai Lama still played no active role in government affairs. During the winter of that year, he did, however, instruct his junior tutor, Trijang Rinpoché, to renew the protector support substances in the Potala. This entailed reconsecrating various ritual objects so as to ensure the constant presence and protection of the wrathful protector deities. According to Trijang, the substances used included such items as “double-edged steel swords with scorpion hilts tempered in blood and poison . . . [a] bow made from the horn of an uncastrated ox . . . [b]lack banners with mantras and figures drawn on them with weapon-spilled blood . . . the skull of an illegitimate child filled with charmed substances . . . a corpse shroud around which the long mantras of calling, expelling and slaying . . . had been written,” and an image of Palden Lhamo on which “were smeared the juices of sexual union.”

  Meanwhile, Tibetan government officials did eventually dispatch a letter to their Chinese counterparts acknowledging the Communists’ victory. Addressed to “the honourable Mr. Mao Tse Tung,” it began by explaining that “Tibet is a peculiar country where the Buddhist religion is widely flourishing and which is predestined to be ruled by the Living Buddha of Mercy or Chenrezig. As such, Tibet has from the earliest times up to now, been an Independent Country whose Political administration had never been taken over by any Foreign Country.” The letter ended, one short paragraph later, with the demand that “those Tibetan territories annexed as part of Chinese territories some years back should now be returned to their rightful jurisdiction.”

  To the Chinese, who had a lively sense of history, the claim that Tibet had “always been independent” can only have seemed nonsensical. What was the office of Imperial Preceptor, created in the thirteenth century by the Yuan emperor Kublai Khan, if it was not an office for the governance of Tibet? And had not the Qiangxi emperor sent troops to aid Tibet in expelling the Nepalese incursion in the seventeenth century? Indeed, had not the Dalai Lamas’ very recognition been subject to ratification by the Qing throne? What was this if not subjection? And as to foreign interference, China was no foreign country—though Britain was, and so was India.

  In fact, Tibetans do not deny any of these claims. But they interpret them very differently. Furthermore, Tibetans cannot forget that, for almost three hundred years from the middle of the seventh century, Tibet was the center of a great trading empire, controlling what came to be known as the Silk Road linking Rome in the west with China in the east. Tibet was at the time also the major military power of Central and Southeast Asia. Frequent were the defeats dealt China by Tibetan armies in the Tarim Basin and elsewhere. There was even a thrilling moment—in 763 CE—when Tibetan forces deposed the T’ang emperor and, if only for three weeks, set up their own in his place. This was an extraordinary feat of arms: Chang’an, seat of the T’ang empire, was at the time a city of a million people, one of the greatest the world had ever seen—rivaled only by ancient Rome in terms of size and sophistication. By the end of the eighth century, the Tibetan emperor controlled territory stretching as far as Persia in the west, to the Bay of Bengal in the south, to within striking distance of Chang’an in the east, and up to the Pamirs (in modern-day Tajikistan) in the north.

  In 821 the two emperors entered into a treaty, the terms of which were inscribed on three stone stele, or pillars, in both Chinese and Tibetan script, and erected one on the border itself and one each in the respective capitals, “in order that it may never be changed [and] so that it may be celebrated in every age and every generation.” The one in Lhasa still exists for all to see. It stands near the base of the Potala, albeit partially shielded from view by its “protective” covering, still proclaiming that “both Tibet and China shall keep the country and frontiers of which they are now in possession,” and that

  the whole region to the east of that being the country of Great China, and all to the west is, without question Great Tibet . . . from either side of that frontier there shall be no warfare, no hostile invasions, and no seizure of territory. There shall be no sudden alarms and the word “enemy” shall not be spoken . . . Between the two countries no smoke or dust shall appear . . . Tibetans shall be happy in Tibet and Chinese shall be happy in China.

  From the Tibetan perspective, the treaty between the emperor and his Chinese counterpart has never been abrogated.

  What happened when the thirteenth-century Yuan emperor Kublai Khan summoned Phagpa, head of the Sakya sect, which was then the most prominent in Tibet, to the imperial court was not, for Tibetans, the political subjugation of one country by another but rather the establishment of a spiritual relationship between two individuals. In exchange for religious instruction granted by Phagpa at Kublai’s request, the Khan entered into a priest-patron (cho yon) relationship, whereby the Khan gained spiritual merit through taking religious teachings and the lama gained the emperor’s material support. And whatever the political ramifications of such a relationship, they did not change the terms of the earlier treaty. The same applies with respect to the relationship between the Dalai Lamas and the Qing emperors of the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Again, theirs was a personal, spiritual relationship that conferred obligations on both parties. Crudely put, the priest prayed for the emperor and the emperor paid for the priest—and paid not just in terms of treasure but in blood, too. It became a royal duty for the emperor to protect his guru.

  From the
Chinese perspective, the spiritual teachings of the priest were an offering of tribute to the emperor. Once tribute had been paid, the emperor would graciously provide his protection on the grounds that the tribute payer had rendered himself a vassal. So whereas the ancient treaty spoke of an alliance between the two thrones, the new dispensation understood the relationship as one in which the one summoned was subordinate to the will of the one summoning.

  In January 1950, Mao announced the return of Tibet to the Chinese Motherland as one of the Communist Party’s top priorities for the year. Soon after, he called on the Tibetan government to send representatives to Beijing to discuss how they wished to facilitate this “liberation.” For many weeks, his communiqué went unanswered.

  Eventually the Tibetan government stirred itself to appeal to the British and American governments and, in spite of its tardy recognition of Indian independence, to the nonaligned Indian government as well. But although the Indians (albeit with American and British connivance) did agree to supply arms (including mortar bombs but not antiaircraft shells as requested), it was far too little to make a difference and at least ten years too late, given the training that would be required. Although, on the back of this gesture, the bodyguard regiment, which had disbanded itself on the demise of the Great Thirteenth, was hastily revived, there was never a realistic chance that it could be made battle-ready in time. One thing the Tibetan government did do was to send Robert Ford, a British radio operator it had employed to instruct a small cadre of officials in the use of telecommunications, together with two radio sets, out to Chamdo in the east. Understanding that, if the Communists were to take Lhasa, they must first take Chamdo, the Tibetans reckoned that posting Ford there with his radios would at least give the government some warning in the event of disaster.