The Dalai Lama

by Alexander Norman

  There was, however, an important development in the Indian government’s relationship with the Tibetan government in exile that came as a direct outcome of the debacle. In its wake, at the suggestion of hawks in the Foreign Ministry, Nehru consented to the founding of a secret military unit, Establishment 22. Under command of the Intelligence Bureau, and as such directly controlled by his own office, the Special Frontier Force (SFF), as it was also known, would be a specialist mountain warfare unit recruited, except for its senior-most officers, entirely from among the Tibetan refugee community. Though it was originally planned to have a strength of six thousand men under arms, its immediate success saw its numbers double within a short time. The chance to join what Gyalo Thondup, the unit’s chief recruiting officer, advertised as an army that would one day retake Tibet was irresistible to many young Tibetan men. Once more the Dalai Lama found himself in the invidious position of feeling admiration at the enthusiasm of the recruits, gratitude to the Indians (and, of course, the Americans) for supporting the venture, and dismay at the violation of the Gandhian commitment to nonviolence with which increasingly he identified. This did not prevent him from presiding over a ceremony at which protective talismans for the troops were consecrated. But it certainly did fuel Chinese mistrust of the Precious Protector’s subsequent identification as a leading figure in the world peace movement.

  A demeanor of “great calmness” in the eyes of some, “such a hard, expressionless face” in the eyes of others: the Great Thirteenth Dalai Lama, Calcutta, circa 1907.

  Courtesy of Dominic Winter Auctioneers

  “No different from our urchin friends”: one of the earliest known images of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, Kumbum Monastery, 1939.

  Courtesy of the Center for Asian Studies at Arizona State University

  Brother and sister (Gyalo Thondup and Jetsun Pema) with their mother and father, the gyalyum chenmo and the yabshi kung, 1939.

  Courtesy of the Center for Asian Studies at Arizona State University

  Lhasa’s western gate, photographed in 1938.

  Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)

  Fond of dogs and horses, the regent, Reting Rinpoché, in a serious mood following a reception at the British mission in Lhasa, 1940.

  © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford

  The Norbulingka Palace, 1938.

  Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)

  A “solid, solemn . . . very wide-awake boy, red-cheeked and closely shorn.” Lhasa, 1944.

  Courtesy of the Center for Asian Studies at Arizona State University

  Aged eighteen, photographed in Chamdo en route to Beijing, 1953.

  Jan Vanis

  View of the Potala Palace from Chakpori, Lhasa, 1936.

  © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford

  At an entertainment in Chamdo, 1953. Note the People’s Liberation Army personnel in the background.

  Jan Vanis

  Exchanging pleasantries at the Tibetan delegation’s farewell banquet in Beijing, 1955. From left to right: Zhou Enlai, the Panchen Lama, Mao, the Dalai Lama, Liu Shaoqi.

  Keystone-France/Getty Images

  Being received by the Chögyal of Sikkim while the Panchen Lama, seen here to the left of the Dalai Lama, looks on. Gangtok, 1956.

  Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama

  With the two tutors: Ling Rinpoché (left) and Trijang Rinpoché. India, 1956.

  Courtesy of the Office of H.E. Kyabje Ling Rinpoché

  Into exile: a moment of respite, 1959.

  Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama

  How the tradition sees him: detail from a fresco in the Potala Palace, 1956.

  Photo © by Thomas Laird, 2018, “Murals of Tibet, TASCHEN”

  With schoolchildren, Mussoorie, late 1959 or early 1960.

  © Tibet Documentation/Tibetan Children’s Village School

  With a local family in Dharamsala, 1960. The Dalai Lama is wearing the “well-pressed” trousers that he donned occasionally in the early days of exile.

  Courtesy of Tibet Documentation

  With Lhasa apsos. On the left is Tashi, a gift of Tenzing Norgay, the Everest mountaineer. On the right is Senge, noted for his huge appetite. Actually, though, the Dalai Lama prefers cats. Dharamsala, 1970s.

  Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama

  A cruel irony of history: inspecting the secret Tibetan troops of India’s Special Frontier Force, Establishment 22, in Chakrata, 1972. The photograph, rumored to have been taken by a Chinese spy, in fact originates from General Uban’s personal collection. He stands to the left of the Dalai Lama.

  © Ken Conboy

  Receiving the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo.

  Eystein Hanssen/Scanpix Norway/PA Images

  “Look, no hands!” Getting ideas for a future free Tibet. Santa Fe, 1991.

  Photo by Bob Shaw, courtesy of Project Tibet

  How the West sees the Dalai Lama, complete with badly photoshopped teeth, on the cover of Vogue, winter 1992–93.

  © Vogue Paris

  What a coincidence! “Interrupted” by President Bill Clinton at the White House, April 1994.

  Courtesy of the Clinton Presidential Library

  An “old ham,” or a genuine sense of fun? With students attending a Tibetan medicine course. Dharamsala, 2014.

  Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama

  Precious Protector, the Victor, Lion Among Men, Wish-Fulfilling Jewel, Ocean of Wisdom, earthly manifestation of Chenresig, Bodhisattva of Compassion. Dharamsala, 2018.

  Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama

  16

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  “We cannot compel you”: Cultural Revolution in Tibet, Harsh Realities in India

  The trickle of news coming out of Tibet during this period was, for the Dalai Lama, saddening in the extreme. As for himself, having been stripped of his position as head of the Preparatory Committee for the Autonomous Region of Tibet, he was now officially an outcast, a “villain,” a “liar,” a “murderer,” a “wolf in monk’s robes.” The worst of criminals, he had pretended loyalty to the Motherland while seeking its destruction all along. His duplicitous letters to General Tan Guansen were all the proof needed. It was pointless therefore to pray to him. More troubling still, the dharma itself was portrayed as nothing more than an elaborate system of exploitation created for the sole purpose of maintaining the power and status of an unproductive elite. If the protectors were real, would they not have protected? They were nothing more than idols made of clay. The reincarnation system was a hoax connived in by the powerful to enslave the ignorant poor. Such was the relentless message of the propaganda sessions to which the populace was subjected on a daily basis. In addition, thousands of monks and nuns were forcibly laicized. Paraded in front of large gatherings of the masses, they were issued with raffle tickets and deemed to have married the person found to have the corresponding ticket.

  As for prison life, the cruelty Tibetans encountered can scarcely be imagined. One former inmate explained how

  as the disparity between labour and sustenance widened, our physical strength weakened day by day, the quality of the materials worsened, the hardship increased, and by midday two or three members of each group would be laid out with exhaustion . . . But in spite of such grave hardship, at the nightly group or general meetings, many of the weaker workers were said to be “resisting about reform” and subjected to struggle. There were those who passed away the same night after undergoing the torture of struggle.

  Even for those not held prisoner, because of food shortages and lack of money, many of the better-off families were reduced to bartering their treasures for a minute fraction of their true value: priceless jewelry exchanged for a few pounds of butter or sacks of grain. As for the monasteries, their lands were requisitioned without compensation. By the time Stuart and Roma Gelder, two communist-sympathizing British journalists, visited Lhasa in late 1962, the Three Seats were near-empty shells, their populations reduced by 90
percent or more—a fact of which husband and wife wrote approvingly. These were “the last priests of the last and strangest theocracy in human history . . . In a few years, when they would all be dead, none would come here to take their places.”

  For anyone fortunate enough to have grown up in a genuinely democratic country, the treatment meted out to the Tibetans in the weeks, months, and years following the Dalai Lama’s flight seems scarcely imaginable. Merely expressing doubt as to the efficacy of communist methods was enough to endanger one’s life. As for religion, any teaching was, of course, forbidden, and any perceived sympathy for the Dalai Lama was severely punished. But what made the Tibetan experience so pernicious was the vindictiveness with which “reform” was forced upon the people, to say nothing of the systematized attacks on their most deeply held convictions. Yet it must be remembered that what took place in Tibet during the early sixties was to a large degree simply a reflection of what was happening in China itself. The “Hundred Flowers” campaign of 1957, when, over the course of several weeks, Mao invited criticism of the party, was followed swiftly by the “Anti-Rightist” movement, when those “snakes” (Mao’s word) who had taken the bait were charged with crimes against the party. Soon anyone who was deemed merely to hold “rightist” opinions became a legitimate target. As a result, at least half a million people—many of them from minority groups—were imprisoned, transported to labor camps, or liquidated over the next three years. Among those imprisoned and brutally treated was Phunwang, the Dalai Lama’s Communist Party mentor during his 1954 trip to Beijing, convicted of politically incorrect thought. Held for two years in detention with frequent interrogations and humiliations during which, “because they knew I worried about my children, they sometimes let a baby cry outside my cell late at night,” he was eventually sentenced to solitary confinement for nine years, by the end of which he had lost the power of speech. This was succeeded by another nine years in the mental patients’ wing of Beijing’s notorious Qincheng Prison for political prisoners before he was finally released and rehabilitated in 1978.* It took him another two years before he could speak properly again.

  To make matters even worse, the Anti-Rightist movement coincided with Mao’s Great Leap Forward, an economic campaign designed to transform China from an agrarian society to an industrial society. This initiated a period of extreme hardship for the entire population of the Chinese empire during which tens of millions died through starvation. The inability, already manifest, of agricultural collectivism to deliver reliable food supplies was tragically underscored by three successive years of crop failure, exacerbating an already dire situation. The Great Leap was not, of course, a leap forward but a leap into darkness and despair.

  Inevitably, those who felt the effects of famine the most acutely were the inmates of the gulags. “During [those] three years [1960–1963],” recalls a Tibetan who lived through the ordeal, “thousands quickly starved to death. In every prison camp horse carts were constantly pulling out loads of dead bodies.” One former Tibetan government official recounted how, during those years,

  we began to look for . . . nourishment wherever we could find it. If we saw a worm all the prisoners would run for it and if you got it you immediately popped it in your mouth, otherwise it would be taken away . . . The livestock was also fed on grain, and in their excrement undigested grains of wheat would come out. We would pick these grains out of the manure pile and eat them . . . Sometimes, digging away in the fields, we would find bones. Human bones or animal bones. We would eat this too . . . Even if we knew it was human bone, still we would eat it.

  The failure of the Great Leap Forward greatly diminished Mao’s authority within the Communist Party, and for a time it looked as if he would lose control altogether. In what must surely rank as one of the most brazen acts of cynicism in history, the Great Helmsman responded in 1966 by unleashing the Cultural Revolution. This was characterized by a vicious hostility to the “Four Olds”: old customs, old culture, old habits, old ideas. By attacking tradition itself and going over the heads of the political establishment to appeal directly to the country’s youth, Mao, promoting a cult of himself, succeeded in bringing about a destructive furor that for almost a decade teetered on the verge of anarchy. Significantly, though, it secured his position as paramount leader. It is not clear how many died as a consequence of this tactic, but the toll is widely believed to be in the tens of millions. Yet, although it is sometimes alleged that the destruction of Tibet occurred as a result of the “excesses” of the Cultural Revolution, in fact its true destruction had occurred during the years immediately following the Dalai Lama’s exile. The main effect of the Cultural Revolution in Tibet was to make the lives of the people even less bearable. Compelled to work sixteen-hour days, anyone caught merely cooking at home would be severely punished. And now, not only was the Dalai Lama not to be prayed to; he was to be ritually denounced by the masses.

  As for the Dalai Lama himself, if, in the wake of Allen Ginsberg’s visit, there was a steady trickle of Beats and hippies who sought him out in Dharamsala throughout the 1960s, there were also increasing numbers of more serious seekers. One of these was Robert Thurman, then a student of the CIA’s translator monk Geshe Wangyal, but today doubtless most famous for being the father of the actress Uma Thurman. At the time, Thurman, recently divorced, was a young Harvard BA on a spiritual quest. Meeting the Dalai Lama at Sarnath in eastern India when both were attending a conference of the World Fellowship of Buddhists in November 1964, Thurman recalled how he sensed a certain “guardedness” about the Tibetan, while the speech the Dalai Lama gave “sounded strained and formal.” There was “a sense of him being from far away and high above and not quite relaxed in his surroundings.” Nonetheless, when Thurman expressed interest in monkhood, the Dalai Lama invited him to visit Dharamsala, where he assigned him to the care of Ling Rinpoché.

  The two young men (the Dalai Lama was not quite thirty, while the American was still in his early twenties) subsequently met on a regular basis at the Precious Protector’s house. It turned out that the Dalai Lama was as keen as ever to learn about the outside world. After discussing the dharma, “he would invariably begin asking me questions about the many things he was wondering about,” wrote Thurman, “Freud, Einstein and Thomas Jefferson, life in the Americas and Europe . . . the subconscious, relativity and natural selection.” Yet for all the evident pleasure the Dalai Lama took in their meetings, “though basically energetic and cheery . . . [h]e seemed slightly stressed, lonely, a little sad.”

  Thurman was subsequently ordained by the Dalai Lama, the first Westerner to attain that dignity, though to the Precious Protector’s “strong” disappointment (“which lasted quite a while”), the American went barely a year before disrobing and marrying model-turned-psychotherapist Nena von Schlebrügge, the ex-wife of countercultural luminary Timothy Leary, in 1967.

  Another important visitor at this time was Thomas Merton. The (by adoption) American Roman Catholic monk of the Cistercian Order of Strict Observance came to Dharamsala in November 1968, en route to Thailand, where he was to die, electrocuted as he stepped out of the shower, just a few weeks later.* His appearance among the Tibetan community seems almost providential, given the recent embassy of Trijang Rinpoché to the Vatican, where he obtained an audience with Pope Paul VI. This was evidently more of a diplomatic success than it was a meeting of minds, however. Neither thought it worthwhile to leave a written record of the event, although Trijang Rinpoché subsequently reported to the Dalai Lama his dismay at the lack of “spiritual depth” of the Europeans: “They are concerned with this life only and have a strong sense of grasping after permanence in all things . . . [T]hey are preoccupied with indulging the mere illusion of joy and happiness.”

  The Dalai Lama’s meeting with Merton took place at a moment remarkable both in the history of Buddhism in Tibet and in that of the Roman Catholic Church. The one faced the catastrophe of invasion by an external enemy committed to the ideo
logy of modern materialism. The other was itself fighting a spiritual war with the same enemy. In a way, therefore, both the Dalai Lama and the pope faced a similar dilemma.

  Because so many of the Tibetan rites were specific to particular shrines and temples in Tibet, and because most of the important festivals—especially those pertaining to the New Year—were peculiar to particular buildings and locations within Lhasa, rupture was unavoidable for the Tibetans. No longer would the cavalry assemble in their ancient chain mail in the courtyard of the Jokhang; no longer would the sound of the Old She-Demon, the Young She-Demon, and the Idiot boom to signal the immolation of the evils of the year past; no longer would the ministers in all their medieval finery prostrate themselves beneath the main temple at the close of the last day. All that would have to be let go. But what else could be safely consigned to the past, and what must be preserved at all costs? Together with his two tutors and other high ecclesiastics, the Dalai Lama was compelled to make many hard decisions. “We divided our culture into two types,” he explained. “In the first category, we placed that which, we determined, needed to be retained only in books as past history. The second category included whatever could bring actual benefit in the present . . . Therefore many of our old ceremonial traditions I discarded—no matter, I decided. Let them go.” Yet there was no attempt to modernize the liturgy itself. The wording and procedures of all the rituals went untouched, nor was there any move to bring the language or indeed the ceremonial—the vestments, the gestures, or the objects employed—up to date, no thought of aggiornamento, of making the faith less mysterious or more readily comprehensible.