by Iyer, Pico
Yet the main thing he’s keen to talk about, as always, is what he’s learned from his current tour, and particularly from his meetings with physicists in Tokyo. In old Tibet, he says, mandalas showed the sun and moon as being of equal size, as if equidistant from the earth. That is wrong, he declares, with the vigor that he increasingly often calls upon; nothing can be maintained once disproved by science. “The Four Noble Truths, shunyata”—the doctrine of emptiness, or interdependence—“those we Buddhists need.” Everything else, goes the implication, is autumn leaves.
I remember how he had lit up when challenged by the young Japanese philosopher around the conference table; Buddhism itself, he now says, can only gain from being debated, just as Hinduism did before it. Whole kingdoms used to be at stake, he declares, with evident excitement, when Buddhism debated its positions against Hinduism, and people watched the clash of ideas as later they watched the struggle of armed men.
And whole kingdoms are at stake now, I think, as I remember all the Tibetans who are urging the Dalai Lama to be more decisive in his opposition to Chinese oppression, to accept no compromise, to speak for action and full independence and not just the religious principles of forbearance and turning the other cheek.
This is, in fact, the most agonizing and mounting of all the conundrums he travels with. For even as he has charmed this small corner of Japan and begun to pass on some confidence, the country that he was born to rule is slipping ever closer to extinction. In the course of his life, and thanks in part to him, Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism have become a living and liberating part of the global neighborhood; and yet at the same time, on his watch, his own people have lost most of their contact with their leaders, their loved ones, and their culture, and one of the great centers of Buddhism, five times as large as Britain, has been all but wiped off the map. The leader of the Tibetans finds himself carrying an entire culture on his shoulders; and even as he’s trying to support six million people he hasn’t seen in half a century, he is obliged to create a new Tibet among those who have seldom or never seen Tibet.
One evening in Dharamsala, I notice clouds beginning to gather above the Kangra Valley below. The little town in northern India where the Dalai Lama and his government have made their home for more than forty years now is a bedraggled and makeshift place, but if you catch it at the right angle, as in the little guesthouse where I stay, it can give off something of the light of fairy tale. From the garden where I sit, all I can hear are the sounds of chants and gongs from the temple across the way, set next to the Dalai Lama’s home; if I sit on the sunlit terrace outside my room, all I can see are young monks racing along the whitewashed terraces of a monastery, their red robes laid out under the snowcaps to dry.
This little corner of the hill station is a perfect symbol of how Tibet is being rebuilt, in compact, more conscious form, outside the borders of Tibet. On this day, however, as I watch a storm building in the valley, it begins to rain furiously, and the wind starts to shake the solid three stories of the building, the trees outside beginning to shiver and crack. Then there is a crash from somewhere down below, and electricity across the settlement is gone.
Looking outside, I see nothing but dark. Shouts rise up from the road down below, and I can hear the people who live along the road scrambling for shelter. It seems madness to go out into the elements, but if Hiroko and I do not honor tonight’s engagement, I’m not sure when, or whether, it will come again.
We struggle out together into the rain, our umbrella tearing as we slip and slither down an unpaved slope, every attempt at respectability suitably mocked, and, after many minutes, find a minivan that is not taken. As it wends its way down the precipitous mountain road, we see occasional figures sheltering under trees, beggars huddled together under stoops.
When, finally, we arrive at our destination, our host comes up to us with a typically urbane, unflustered “Come. Are you sure you’re okay?” and we step into the shelter of Ngari Rinpoche’s home. The younger brother of the Dalai Lama—more than a decade younger—Ngari Rinpoche was discovered to be a rinpoche, or high incarnate lama, when he was a boy and trained as a monk, in charge of large numbers of monks in the Indian areas of Zanskar and Ladakh. Early on, however, he shed his robes and recast himself as something of the loyal opposition to institutional Tibet. Of course I was declared to be a rinpoche, he more or less said; I was the younger brother of the Dalai Lama. (In fact, their eldest brother had also been taken to be a high lama even before the Dalai Lama was born, but still the point remained: Tibet’s system of incarnations has always left room for manipulation.)
In the years that followed, the Dalai Lama’s youngest sibling became a paratrooper in the Indian army; he smoked and devoured steaks; and to this day he loves to shock those he meets with his equal-opportunity irreverence: say something positive about Tibet, and he’s likely to reply, “You’re just a susceptible Westerner, a groupie.” More and more, as the years go on, he asks me, when he meets me, if I’m preparing to be a monk by losing my hair.
He leads us now into his spare, elegant living room, which looks out over the huge valley below. Lightning breaks across the expanse, and the electricity flickers on again, then dies. On one table I see the new English translation of a three-volume Tibetan text from the fifteenth century that Ngari Rinpoche is studying in his evenings (his written English is in places more confident than his Tibetan, since he left Tibet when he was barely thirteen).
I have not seen Ngari Rinpoche—who now prefers to go by the secular name Tendzin Choegyal—for seven years, and the change in him is remarkable. He has always seemed to be the uncensored private side, the alter ego, of the Dalai Lama, having lived beside him in Dharamsala for more than forty years, working with him as translator, filter, even private secretary (their eldest brother moved to Bloomington, Indiana, to teach, in 1968; their second-eldest brother lives in Hong Kong and works as a businessman, going to and from Beijing as a kind of unofficial emissary; their sister oversees the Tibetan Children’s Village in Dharamsala; and their third-eldest brother, who had lived simply in New Jersey as a janitor called “Sam” until his cover was blown by the New York Times, died in his early fifties).
Tonight, however, I notice how much Ngari Rinpoche is coming to resemble his most celebrated sibling. The voice, low and deep, could be the Dalai Lama’s, especially on a night like this when the room is almost dark. The laugh, sudden and wildly accelerating—all conversation stops with it—is identical. And of course what he’s saying is often word for word what his brother would say, in part because they are brothers, but even more because they are both lifelong students of the same philosophy, and Ngari Rinpoche has spent his life studying under and talking to the Dalai Lama. When Hiroko begins telling a story of imagining she saw her estranged brother in a temple in Tibet, our host leans forward in the thin light, a single candle picking up his high cheekbones, his attentive eyes, the look of a doctor listening for symptoms, and it’s impossible not to think we’re up the hill in the Dalai Lama’s house, though unofficially.
“You should tell His Holiness when you see him,” he says to Hiroko, and a part of me bridles at the romanticism of imputing too much to this disrobed monk—Tibet lends itself too easily to such ideas—while a part of me notices that she is in fact looking a lot better.
We go to sit at the dinner table—lightning breaking across the valley again, and every syllable intimate in the near dark—and I remember how, the last time I had seen him, the unorthodox lama had told me about what he called the “Shangri-La syndrome,” whereby foreigners were much too ready to ascribe all kinds of wisdom to every Tibetan they met, and Tibetans much too ready to take advantage of that. Fluent in Chinese and English as well as Tibetan, having grown up for a year in Beijing and then in northern India as well as Lhasa, Ngari Rinpoche speaks for the part of Tibet that is both modern and global.
We retire, after dinner, to the living room for tea, and suddenly, with his characteristic directness, our ho
st turns to me in the near dark.
“Do you think I’ve done anything for Tibet?”
“Of course,” I say, stumbling a little, because taken aback.
“You’ve been an intermediary between Tibetans and the Western world.”
“You’re saying I’m just a Westerner.”
“No.” Less trained than he at ritual debating, I fumble for a second. “But you can take information to His Holiness that he wouldn’t hear otherwise.”
“He has other people who can do that for him. Take my word for it.”
I shuffle uneasily in my chair, hoping he’ll change direction.
“You’re being polite,” he goes on (and again I think of his brother’s impatience with mere formality). “Mine is a serious question. Do you think I’ve done anything to make Tibetan lives any better?”
“You have, by knowing the world outside Tibet.”
He laughs dismissively, as if I’ve hit an easy serve ten feet over the line. We go on talking for a while, and then Hiroko and I make our way back to our little room in the guesthouse up the hill. As we get there, I recall how I had heard almost exactly the same sentence fourteen years before, from the Dalai Lama, the day after his Nobel Prize had been announced. “I really wonder if my efforts are enough,” he had said, at the very moment when he was being most feted by the world. All we can do, he had told me, is try, even though it sometimes seems to be in vain.
At the end of the evening, I pick up my pen. Of all the many books and films that have brought the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and his people to the world, I’m not sure any of them has addressed that most central of questions.
I and my four cameramen were rendered speechless by the emptiness of the landscape, the invisible wind that swept across the barren land, the high boundless sky, and the utter silence. My heart and soul felt clean and empty. I lost any sense of where I was or of the need to talk.
—THE BEIJING JOURNALIST XINRAN XUE,
describing Tibet in her book Sky Burial
THE FAIRY TALE
When I was a little boy, barely old enough to know what the “news” meant (small children live in a different sense of time), my father began telling me a story every night before I went to sleep. The stories he told me were often of angels and demons and many-headed gods, drawn from the ancient myths of the India where he grew up, or spiked with the Shakespeare and Dickens of the England where we were living. Down the road, a five-minute walk away, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were gathering regularly at the Eagle and Child pub, and stories of magical wardrobes and hidden hollows, of minglings both evil and good, were developing. The story that my father told that especially transfixed me, though, was of a little boy born in a simple rural cowshed far from anywhere, and very high up, who was seen by some passing monks one day and declared to be a king.
The little boy, not much older than the wide-eyed kid listening to his father in Oxford, was taken to a faraway capital, after a long passage on horseback, and installed in a palace with a thousand rooms. He was instructed in all the philosophies and sciences of his ancient culture, by two strict tutors in red robes, while his family was sent to live in a summer palace, bright with flowers and animals and lakes. Only one elder brother kept him company in the cold, dark palace overlooking the city.
One day, the story went on, the boy, while still a teenager, was asked to be the full-fledged leader of many millions of people, as well as its ruling monk, and traveled in a caravan again and a yak-skin coracle to a far-off city of the Emperor, who intimated that he would overrun the little boy’s country—“liberate it,” in his terms—unless the boy could persuade him otherwise. He refused to do what the Emperor said, so the Emperor attacked. One night, with his mother, his younger brother, and a few trusted friends, just after he had finished his final exams, the boy stole out of his palace, dressed as a soldier, and undertook a long, hazardous journey across the highest mountains on earth.
At this point the story picked up. Our little transistor radio would crackle in the evenings, and when it was turned off, my father would turn to me, in the last days before television, and fill me in on the day’s events. The young king was fleeing, across cold, high mountains, and his pursuers were very close behind him. Sometimes the watch fires of the enemy could be seen at night, the tents of the soldiers only a few hundred yards away. The small group had disappeared into the mountains. A mysterious plane—friend or foe?—was circling overhead. Tonight the fugitive party was said to be a little closer to freedom at the border.
It was a story not so different from the ones I heard in class, at St. Philip and St. James school. It spoke of other flights, other precious jewels hustled across the border to safety before the enemy could get to them. What little boy could resist?
Would the boy and his little brother make it to safety? Would right win a terrific victory? The two-year-old in Oxford, in the simplicities of his excitement, spoke of “good Tibetans, bad Chinese.” At last one day—the Tibetans had risen up against the Chinese the very day the little boy’s father had turned twenty-nine—the news came through that the team had arrived, half-broken, and sick, in freedom. The site of that freedom, happily for the little boy, was his own hardly seen homeland, India (which meant the boy-king, as in a fairy tale, was returning to his master’s home). Right had not exactly won, but it had at least managed to keep one step ahead of wrong.
The only trouble was, it wasn’t a fairy tale, except in the eyes of a two-year-old. It was a story, painfully real, that soon got complicated, with eighty thousand other Tibetans leaving the country in the following months, and hundreds of thousands more staying behind and fighting and losing their lives, and the CIA coming to whisk off some of the freedom fighters to an isolated area where they could learn guerrilla warfare (from those who were losing a guerrilla war at the time), while young Chinese boys were being sent by the battalion to their death or at least discomfort on the high plateau. The problem for Tibet, as for so many of its people throughout its history, has been that it has seemed to wear the contours of fairy tale. It feels—or we need to make it feel—more like Shangri-La than a place that could have a seat at the United Nations. We have plenty of exile leaders and men with exotic causes; we don’t need another. It’s transparent wise men with ready smiles and a boyish sense of humor that our myth calls for.
The Fourteenth Dalai Lama, in fact—this perhaps the most fairy-tale-like element of all—had come into the world at almost the very moment, in 1935, when the notion of Shangri-La was filtering into the Western imagination, James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon and then the Frank Capra movie of the book, telling us not just that there was a place where lamas lived for centuries and people could enter a magical world of gardens and Platonic learning but that there had to be such a place inside us whether there existed one on earth or not. The natural setting to locate it was the place we would never see (as of 1950, Tibet had been visited by fewer than two thousand Westerners, one thousand of whom had come in a single British military expedition in 1904).
My father, who had grown up on stories of Tibet told by H. P. Blavatsky, Nicholas Roerich, and other wandering mystics, went back to meet the Dalai Lama, months after our nightly broadcasts, because he was aware, as not so many people were then, that a great treasure had come out into the world for the first time, really, in history. (The Thirteenth Dalai Lama had been forced to flee Lhasa twice, as outside forces moved in, but he was never truly available to the world the way his successor would become in 1959, when, in a disquieting augury of what was to come, he appeared on the cover of Time magazine beside the legend “The Escape That Rocked the Reds.”) Full of a young man’s indignation, my father complained to the Dalai Lama that the Indian press concentrated only on the material treasure that was said to have come out with the Tibetans into exile; the young Dalai Lama, as he would now, counseled my father to be patient and said that understanding would come in time.
His only child, my father went on—a three-year-ol
d boy in England—had followed the story of the Tibetans’ flight with unusual intensity. The Dalai Lama, in response, sent a picture of himself, as a small boy on the Lion Throne in Lhasa, to me in faraway Oxford, and wherever I went in the years that followed, I kept it on my desk, like a talisman from fairy tale. It accompanied me to California when we moved there, and if ever I felt out of place or burdened, I could look at this photo of a four-year-old, taken from his home and family and set upon the throne of his country, and put things into perspective. Then a forest fire swept down from the hills nearby, and the photo, like everything I owned, was gone.
One spring in Dharamsala I got in the habit of waking early, just before the sun showed over the mountains, and going to the central compound, from which gongs sounded every morning. It was always a magical walk. Street people hadn’t appeared yet on the slope outside my guesthouse garden, and the cars hadn’t begun to congregate at the intersection. There would be the smell of early cooking fires from some of the houses nearby, a monk walking alone up one of the steep roads, or a woman gathering a pail of water on the rooftop of her house. Dogs barked constantly—packs of them ran wild along the gulleys and dusty mountain paths of Dharamsala—and the lights had not yet been put out in the houses across the valley below.
At the central temple, even at this early hour, were scores of Tibetans, walking and walking, telling their beads, pushing large bronze prayer wheels to make them spin, muttering chants or praying for the long life of their leader. Many were very, very old—women with healthy skin and pigtails and traditional chuba aprons around their waists, old men in cowboy hats, men with bowed legs or faces that suggested their minds were not quite right. Young local kids, too, who had never seen Tibet but upheld their Tibetan traditions even in sunglasses and lipstick, above San Francisco 49ers T-shirts. A great parade of them, while a monk or two swept the area clean, and in a little chamber next to the temple, lights were set in a sea of butter lamps to make a field of tiny candles.
