The Dalai Lama

by Alexander Norman

  The party leadership could hardly have dared hope for such an outcome, and when the Dalai Lama applied to join the Communist Party, it must have seemed that the ultimate prize was within its grasp. (In the end, though, nothing came of his request.)

  A week later, the Chinese were given further encouragement in their thinking that the Dalai Lama might become an ally. At a speech to the first National People’s Congress, on September 16, 1954, the Precious Protector announced that “one of the main fabrications of the enemy for sowing discord is that the Communist Party and the People’s Government destroy religion . . . But these pernicious rumours . . . have been utterly exploded. The Tibetan people have learned from their own experience that they have freedom of religious belief.” This is a startling statement. It is true that freedom of religious belief was enshrined in the new constitution. It is also certain that Phunwang would have had a hand in writing this speech. But did it represent the Dalai Lama’s honest opinion?

  It was now four years since his elder brother had resigned the abbacy of Kumbum Monastery, yet the Tibetan leader could hardly have forgotten Jigme Norbu’s account of Chinese heavy-handedness. He had by this time also heard reports of similar behavior elsewhere in Kham and Amdo. In a speech made during the 1990s, the Dalai Lama admitted that “when dealing with the Chinese, you have no choice but to be conciliatory . . . On those occasions when I met Mao Zedong, I flattered him a little.” It seems possible, therefore, that the Dalai Lama was calculating that his best hope of keeping religion safe was to amplify Mao’s words, and so hold him to them. It seems that both men had similar opinions of each other as key players in their respective domains. Mao saw the Dalai Lama as crucial to winning over the Tibetans. The Dalai Lama, having seen how Mao was regarded by his deputies, understood that his strategy should be to develop a strong personal relationship with the Chinese leader.

  In the days following, the Tibetan leader, though not accepted as a full member of the party, was appointed a deputy chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress. This was a wordy title for a position that carried neither weight nor responsibility, but it did show that the Dalai Lama had won approval from the party leadership. A week later, Chairman Mao made an unexpected announcement. In place of the planned Military-Administrative Committee that was intended to manage the transition between the “liberation” of Tibet and the full implementation of socialism, the party would create a new Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) with the Dalai Lama as its chairman and the Panchen Lama as his deputy. This was a pleasant surprise to the Tibetans. The word “autonomous” was extremely heartening, even though it soon became clear that the proposed TAR would not include Kham or Amdo. Nevertheless, with strong support from the Dalai Lama, the proposal was officially accepted by the Tibetan delegation.

  In between the formal engagements at which affairs of state were discussed, the Dalai Lama and his entourage were frequently invited to evening entertainments. On one occasion he attended a performance of the Chinese state opera. There were also dance parties in the evening, which occasionally he and the Panchen Lama attended. At these it was common for girls from the state dance troupe to go up to guests and invite them to dance. Though Mao himself was an avid consumer of lissome females, and though Zhou is known also to have taken mistresses from among the dancers, the Chinese premier gave strict instructions “not to let the lamas dance even if they wanted to.”

  These parties were not wholly wasted on the Precious Protector. He was, wrote Phunwang, “extremely alert, and he liked to observe people and size them up. He noticed right away that Zhou was a very good dancer and told me that the way Zhou danced made him appear youthful . . . By contrast when Mao and Zhu De danced, they showed their age.”

  Phunwang was similarly observant. “Meeting often with the Dalai Lama made me realise that he was not in good physical condition. In fact,” he wrote, “it worried me enough that I suggested he start doing exercises to radio music every morning.” Phunwang was also surprised to learn from the Dalai Lama of the spartan nature of his life and concluded that the food he ate was considerably inferior to that enjoyed by most aristocrats in Lhasa.

  Another of Phunwang’s observations was that the Precious Protector was not an enthusiastic small talker. Such conversation he declared to be “silly. Wasteful.” Yet on the subject of socialism for Tibet, he was “extremely interested, and asked many questions.” Tibet was, “he openly agreed, backward and had to be reformed. Without reforms, he said, there was no hope for Tibetans to progress.”

  Early the following year, the new arrangements regarding the administration of Tibet were signed into law and the political component of the visit was concluded. The remainder of the Dalai Lama’s sojourn in China was to be spent on the road, as both he and the Panchen Lama were taken on (largely separate) tours of the country. Some remarkable film footage survives. There are vignettes of the Precious Protector, well wrapped up in a smart overcoat, visiting a steelworks. We see him waving to crowds from a jeep. There is a moment when, saying good-bye at a train station, the Panchen Lama suddenly remembers his manners and, removing his hat to touch foreheads, gives his senior a cheeky grin. The two had been kept largely apart by their respective (Tibetan) courts, and while officially relations between them were cordial at best, a glimpse of warmth is evident.

  The tour itself was a partial success. The Dalai Lama showed himself “eager to learn about all aspects of Communism,” wrote Phunwang. But his friends and family were less so. The tour was highly regimented. “From morning till evening there was some programme,” his mother recalled. “On some days we had to get up at four in the morning, and we would not return until seven in the evening.” At the beginning of every meal a bell would sound, and when it was over, the bell would ring again. In the industrial centers, they found the cities “clogged with pollution and smoke,” while, apart from in Shanghai, where “traces of the old gaiety” could still be seen, “the uniformity” of the blue shirts and trousers and blue serge hats of the people they met depressed the Tibetans. They themselves still wore the dazzling silks that were now made only for the export market. But more than anything else, they were struck by the poverty of the peasantry in the countryside, where, for lack of livestock, ploughs were yoked to human beings.

  According to one young Tibetan official, it was clear that the Dalai Lama and his party were “never taken to any place that would give us adverse opinions.” Furthermore, the Communists habitually claimed more than was their due for the improvements they showed to their guests. “Our guides [said] that all the machinery in the plants had been manufactured by the Chinese themselves,” and since most of the Tibetans present could not read English, they didn’t doubt it. “However,” as the British-educated official wrote later, “I could plainly read the words, ‘made in U.K.’ or ‘made in U.S.A.’ on most of the machinery . . . We had a good laugh about Chinese attempts to fool us.”

  None of this is to say that the Tibetans were wholly unimpressed by what they saw in China. Many of the lay contingent could recognize the advantages of modern transport. Nor were they unappreciative of the efforts to ensure their material comfort. Most were delighted with the food—though not Ling Rinpoché, who preferred to rely on the bag of tsampa he carried with him everywhere. Nonetheless, all were mightily relieved when it was announced that they would be returning to Tibet following a modest celebration of Losar, the Tibetan New Year, in Beijing.

  At a banquet the Dalai Lama hosted to mark the event, the Chinese leader again impressed the Precious Protector with his charm. Picking up morsels with his own chopsticks, Mao even shared food from his plate—to the horror of the Dalai Lama, who was all too aware of the Great Helmsman’s stinking breath and rotten teeth. A slightly sour note was struck when the Dalai Lama explained to Mao that it was customary to toss a pinch of tsampa in the air as an offering to the gods. The Communist leader did so, but then threw a second pinch to the ground, “with a mischievous expression” on h
is face. This bad impression was drastically reinforced when Mao escorted the Dalai Lama to his car. Having asked the Tibetan leader whether there was anyone in Lhasa who could send a telegram, and having spoken of the need for continual direct contact with him, he praised the Dalai Lama for his scientific cast of mind, adding conspiratorially that, really, “religion is poison.” It was at that moment when the young leader realized that Mao had completely misjudged him. He had mistaken the Dalai Lama’s scientific turn of mind for skepticism about spiritual matters. For his part, the Dalai Lama had wanted to believe Mao when he said that religion had nothing to fear from communism. Now he saw that the Chinese leader was “the destroyer of the Dharma after all.”

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  The Land of the Gods: India, November 1956–March 1957

  The Dalai Lama’s first important stopover on returning to Tibet was Kumbum Monastery, his temporary home in infancy. Having presided over several great ceremonies, albeit with a reduction in the number of monks in attendance, he traveled with his entourage from there to Taktser, his birthplace. To his mother’s dismay, as she recalled in later life, the place “had become wretched. We saw signs of poverty everywhere; peasants wore tattered clothes and lived in a scene of total destitution.” Worse, the local population was prevented from even seeing the Dalai Lama.

  Matters improved somewhat as the Dalai Lama traveled west, making a slow and prayerful progress from shrine to shrine and from monastery to monastery. But many people had shocking stories of Chinese brutality to tell. In the end these were so numerous, and so clearly evidence of bad faith on the part of the self-styled liberators, that what little of the Dalai Lama’s optimism had survived his final encounter with Chairman Mao had all but evaporated by the time he reached Lhasa on June 30, 1955, just one day short of a year since he’d left and a week before his twentieth birthday.

  And there were not only temporal but also spiritual portents of impending disaster. The Dalai Lama’s junior tutor, Trijang Rinpoché, who for the first part of the return journey had traveled separately via Kham, recounts how the contents of a magical box he encountered en route which had hitherto provided an inexhaustible supply of “miraculous iron pills” had recently dwindled to nothing. Then on the last leg from Chamdo, an event occurred that could only be interpreted as highly inauspicious. Hardly had the Dalai Lama and his two tutors crossed a bridge on foot—damaged by a wild torrent, it was deemed too dangerous to drive on—than it split in half and went crashing into the ravine, leaving all their luggage on the other side. Heavy rain also affected the Dalai Lama’s procession into the Norbulingka, forcing all who took part to wear protective clothing over their ceremonial attire, and “it occurred to many,” Trijang Rinpoché recalled, “that this was not a good omen.”

  Yet at a religious teaching he gave soon after, the Dalai Lama articulated a positive view of Sino-Tibetan relations. China had not come to be “lord” over Tibet, he explained, but had instead come as an equal partner to assist the Tibetans in the secular development of their country. Recognizing that the Communists’ claims to friendship and fraternal concern were the only weapons that could be used against them, he began—as he had clearly intended following his first meeting with Mao—pursuing a strategy of taking the word of the Chinese leader at face value. The autonomy for Tibet promised at the party conference and the religious freedom guaranteed in the constitution were both plainly stated. It was therefore a matter of holding the Chinese to their commitments.

  Almost no sooner had the Dalai Lama given his speech than news started to circulate of the arrest not only of several Khampa chieftains but also of a number of lamas in Kham for resisting Chinese interference. This was shocking. Even so, when he met Alan Winnington, the British communist writer and Beijing correspondent for the Daily Worker, the Dalai Lama was in an extremely cautious mood. When asked what had happened in Tibet since the signing of the Seventeen Point Agreement, the Dalai Lama replied dutifully that before “liberation, Tibet could see no way ahead. Since [then], Tibet has left the old way that led to darkness and has taken a new way leading to a bright future of development.” Here was a young man evidently resigned to economies of truth because he dared not tell the whole.

  In fact, on the way back from Beijing, the Dalai Lama had confided in Trijang Rinpoché his belief that, from his way of speaking, Mao “harboured a low opinion of Tibetans,” as well as “many other things that [Trijang Rinpoché] must keep secret within the innermost core of [his] heart.” The reality was that the Dalai Lama was keenly aware of the disastrous position he was in.

  An early test of how genuine the Chinese commitment was to true autonomy for Tibet came with the formation of a new Tibetan People’s Association. Ostensibly a charitable organization founded to distribute alms for the poor of Lhasa (whose condition communism had manifestly not succeeded in abolishing), its first thought was to submit a petition to the Chinese requesting the withdrawal of all their troops from Tibet. On the advice of the Nechung oracle, this petition was put to the cabinet in advance of the first meeting of the Preparatory Committee of the Tibet Autonomous Region. Of course, no petition was ever going to make a positive impression on the Chinese, and the petitioners understood this. But at the time they hoped that submitting it would encourage the Kashag to cease appeasing the Chinese and take a firmer stand. Instead, the petition’s main effect was to give the Communists the opportunity to test the Dalai Lama’s loyalty to the Motherland.

  It took two months for the Kashag to respond. In the meantime, the Tibetan government was caught in an agony of indecision. The Chinese were adamant that the “fake Tibetan People’s Association” must be disbanded. The ministers, however, feared that if they went head-to-head with the TPA, there would be trouble.

  The outcome was inevitable. The Dalai Lama himself would have to step into the breach. Only he, not the Kashag, had the authority to take on the TPA. An edict, signed by the Precious Protector, was drawn up and published by tacking up a poster in several public places. It began by referring to the unhappiness of the people on account of the Five Poisons—ignorance, attachment, aversion, pride, and envy—as a result of which “even the insects living under the earth have not been happy.” It went on to remind the reader that in Tibet, “there is no custom of a few people from the masses calling a people’s meeting and interfering in the work of the government.” Such meetings were “a very serious error.” Research, it said, had shown how “most of the people in this Association had sincere thoughts,” but they “had been deceived by bad leaders” who “wanted to uproot the good laws of old Tibet” and “wanted to do bad deeds.” The TPA must be disbanded at once, and the leaders were to “confess their errors.” Concluding on a threatening note, it warned that “if there are some thoughtless people who don’t listen and continue to do this, we will apply strong punishments.”

  The Tibetan People’s Association duly disbanded, and its leader subsequently went into exile in India with a view to making contact with the Dalai Lama’s brother, Gyalo Thondup. For his part, GT, as he was known, had formed a small group of émigrés determined to do whatever they could from outside Tibet to resist the Chinese. This included renewing contact with the American embassy in Delhi and cultivating those members of the Indian government who were sympathetic to the plight of Tibet and nervous about China’s designs both on the disputed Northeast and on large swaths of territory in Kashmir to which the Communists laid claim. Despite the recent 1954 Panchsheel (Five Principles of Coexistence) Accord between India and China, there was still a significant number of Indian politicians who fell into this category.

  Among them was Apa Pant, the Oxford-educated prince turned Gandhian freedom fighter, by whom Gyalo Thondup was approached on behalf of the government about a possible invitation to the Dalai Lama to visit India. Jawaharlal Nehru, the Indian prime minister (who had briefly met the Tibetan leader in Beijing), sought the Dalai Lama’s attendance at the Buddhajyanti celebrations scheduled for the
end of 1956 to commemorate the 2,500th anniversary of the birth of the Buddha. Nehru’s purpose in this seems to have been mainly to test China’s commitment to the Sino-Indian accord. The Dalai Lama’s appearance would also lend prestige to the event and show India’s Buddhists that the government was mindful of their interests.

  News of the invitation was hugely exciting to the Precious Protector. Not only would it be the fulfillment of a religious aspiration—for Tibetans, India is arya bhumi, the land of the gods—but also it would give him the opportunity to speak with the heirs of Mahatma Gandhi, whose successful campaign to rid India of the all-powerful British was such an inspiration to him.

  The Dalai Lama was also clearly aware of the mounting opposition to the Chinese occupation in Kham and Amdo. Although Mao had promised gradual reform, and although he had agreed to autonomy for central Tibet, in the eastern provinces feudalism was being brought to an abrupt and bewildering end with the collectivization of farmland. This ought, perhaps, to have been expected, given Mao’s recent remark: “On this matter Marxism is indeed cruel and has little mercy.”